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Meredith Conti Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 1 Visit Journal Homepage Community Circles and Love Triangles: Gun Violence and Belonging in Oklahoma! and West Side Story Meredith Conti By Published on November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF As the national tour of Daniel Fish’s critically acclaimed Oklahoma! crisscrossed the United States in 2022, company members found themselves in unfamiliar territory. Instead of the stunned silences and standing ovations that typified the production’s reception at Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theatre, the national tour’s audiences offered an unexpectedly prickly bouquet of responses, including walkouts, boos, taunts, “thumbs down” gestures, refund demands, social media rants, and in one case, “vomiting in the balcony.” ( [1] ) Of course, Oklahoma! had its share of detractors since the production’s pre-Broadway days at St. Ann’s Warehouse, just as the national tour’s hostile reception was neither comprehensive or invariable; still, in cities across the country, the revival inspired tonally different audience responses to its New York City run. In a 2023 HowlRound article, Jud Fry actor Christopher Barrow suggests some likely triggers in Fish’s Oklahoma! for the tour’s audiences, including its aesthetic boldness, its identity-conscious casting, and its refusal to treat its source material as canonical, precious, and unchanging. ( [2] ) (It is worth noting, too, that the production’s original deep thrust staging was flattened to fit the US’s network of proscenium theatres). While I, like many non-coastal Americans, bristle at generalized depictions of our theatregoers as less open-minded or equipped to handle experimental or challenging performances, I do suspect that Bannow missed a potential trigger for heartland audiences: the revival takes direct aim at the nation’s ever-hungry gun culture and those who continually nourish it through word and action. ( [3] ) A buoyant, nostalgic, and unproblematically patriotic musical Fish’s Oklahoma! is not. But was Oklahoma! ever? The theatre of post-Newtown America (or post-UVA, post-Pulse Nightclub, post-Las Vegas, post-Tops Market….) has yet to fully reckon with a discomfiting, perhaps inconvenient reality: the industry and its artists have long been active, direct participants in the country’s gun culture. Indeed, many of the theatre’s cumulative products, from anti-gun docudramas and Annie Get Your Gun revivals to vaudevillian William Tell tricks and Wild West Show battle reenactments, are not just embodied responses to gun culture, they are gun culture. While the term itself has become something of a partisan battleground, “gun culture” is an omnipresent, self-reinforcing system of beliefs, values, and feelings about firearms and their usage, as well as the behavioral actions and socioeconomic, cultural, and political transactions that inspire or sustain them. Gun cultures exist anywhere guns circulate, and therefore “gun culture” as a term lacks specificity until contextualized by the society in which it functions. In what follows, I treat the phrase “US-American gun culture” as neither neutral nor strictly pejorative or celebratory, though I favor Pamela Haag’s assertion that gun companies have long exerted a behemothic and tactical influence on how Americans regard guns. ( [4] ) Despite the relative youth of the nation’s gun culture, it is a maddeningly complex, enduring, and variform organism. It whispers in myths; it shouts at the gun range. It operates simultaneously on the personal and institutional levels and engages manifold publics. It is animated by patrolling border militias and simulated gunfights at the OK Corral, and it is embodied by gun control activists and the twelve-year-old girl cradling her first shotgun in the glow of the Christmas tree. It meticulously sutures guns to American identity, and American life to guns. And whether or not we like it, the theatre regularly supplies the thread. Onstage gunplay not only disturbs audiences by surrogating actual gun violence or reenacting trauma, however; it also delights, astounds, amuses, and disarms. Nowhere is this capacious narrative and affective flexibility more apparent than in the American musical canon, where firearms serve a startling variety of functions while sliding easily along spectrums of genre, style, and tone. They are the go-to props of musicals set or staged in wartime, symbolic of hostile environments, courageous heroes, and desperate aggressors. They are the accoutrement of comedy and the drivers of tragedy. And, of course, they persist as ambivalent, malleable, and unpredictable indexers of political schisms, social inequities, and the empire-building violence required by Western patriarchy, colonization, and capitalism. As a vehicle for propelling questions of US-American gun culture(s) into the popular consciousness, the musical is a uniquely equipped performance form. Mounted to the notes of soaring harmonies, transported on the limbs of undulating, often virtuosic bodies, or underscored by elaborate landscapes and soundscapes, gun narratives intensify, stretch, transmute, and become unsettled in the musical medium. Despite their thematic and aesthetic heterogeneity, however, American gun musicals tend to press guns into service as potent indicators of belonging or marginality—often by distinguishing natural or paradigmatic Americanness through authoritative gun use or by harnessing guns as tools that induct characters into or expulse them from meaningful relationships, identity groups, or communities. ( [5] ) Indeed, with few exceptions, a gun musical’s firearms help compose, fortify, alter, and/or destroy human connections, be they romantic couples, love triangles, family units, friend circles, or communities organized by place, politics, religion, race, and other social or material conditions. To trace the guns in Hamilton (2015), for example, is to see guns violently regulate American identity/ies. ( [6] ) The mainspring of 2000’s The Wild Party ’s climactic gunfire, to cite another, is a love triangle that materializes and dematerializes in a single evening. And while The Wild Party is fictional and Hamilton fictional ized , intimate partner and intra/inter-community gun violence in the US is real, persistent, and documented. According to the John Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, over half of all intimate partner homicides in the US are committed with firearms, and “a woman is five times more likely to be murdered when her abuser has access to a gun.” ( [7] ) In addition, the Deputy Police Commissioner of Buffalo, New York argued in 2021 that an “overwhelming number of shootings and murders in Buffalo stem from revenge, retaliation and escalating beefs,” many of them now fueled by social media. ( [8] ) American gun violence carves up communities along and across categories of identity and culture: Black Americans are ten times more likely to die by gun homicide than white Americans;( [9] ) 4.5 million US women alive today report being threatened with a gun;( [10] ) firearms were used in 73% of trans American homicides between 2017 and 2021;( [11] ) current or former members of the US military make up a disproportionately high number of gun suicides;( [12] ) and “gun deaths recently surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for American children,” making the US an “extreme outlier” in gun fatalities in minors. ( [13] ) Still the country’s gun culture continues to thrive, buoyed by a formidable supply of ideologies, narratives, factoids, slogans, and figureheads that operate both within and far beyond gun-positive spaces. Germane to this essay is the recurring deployment of gun industry propaganda that reinforces an insider/outsider binary of American life. This includes mythic depictions of gun ownership that imply gun-handling is an endower of true, unassailable Americanness, and that personal firearms enable US-Americans to safeguard their loved ones and communities from external threats (despite data that concludes that guns in homes increase the risk of gun injury and death). ( [14] ) In this essay, I analyze how guns and the people who carry them shape and reshape two of the American musical’s classic human groupings: the community circle and the love triangle. I engage in close readings of two Golden Age musicals, Oklahoma! (1943) and West Side Story (1957), as well as their recent, gun-heavy Broadway revivals, in order to illuminate how firearms arbitrate or exacerbate race- and class-based conflicts within the depicted communities and “solve” the musicals’ imbalanced love triangles¾either facilitating a community-sustaining union or preventing a community-conjoining union from occurring. Indeed, in assessing these musicals and their twenty-first-century revivals as gun musicals, distinctive patterns in the gendering, racializing, and classing of American guns and gun violence become evident. These patterns, not surprisingly, are directly tethered to and expressive of the gun cultures and the wider sociopolitical landscapes in which the productions were created. As I argue, the original musicals reified conventional notions of the appropriate US-American gun handler as the white, Christian, cishet man, presenting their gun possessions as uncomplicated, necessary, and intuitive within the plays’ white supremacist patriarchies. The revivals, however, attempt to adapt the musicals’ guns to the country’s hyper-violent present, both by amplifying the gun’s role in catalyzing domestic and community violence and inculcating more participants into gun culture systems, including through the increased representation of skillful women, Black, and Latine gun handlers. In manifesting this provocative transferring of power, the revivals variously challenge and fortify the mythic triangulation of firearms, white masculinity, and Americanness. Shotgun Weddings and Handgun Honeymoons: The Guns of Oklahoma! (1943) and West Side Story (1957) Oklahoma! premiered on Broadway two years before World War II’s Allies and Axis powers laid down their arms. West Side Story ’s Broadway opening occurred one day after the Little Rock Nine, surrounded by heavily armed National Guardsmen, integrated Arkansas’s Central High School. While mapping both musicals onto a timeline of US gun events is a useful task, it is more meaningful to determine how Golden Age gun musicals reflected and upheld prevailing firearm discourses and representations. Following a brief primer on the material and metaphorical contours of midcentury America’s gun culture, I will assess Oklahoma! and West Side Story ’s guns—and, more importantly, gun handlers—as chief arbitrators of belonging or marginality within the musicals’ imagined communities. By the 1940s and 50s, US-American gun culture bore only a partial resemblance to its nineteenth-century predecessor(s). As homegrown demand for firearms dried up following the American Civil War, the US gun industry attempted to stem the tide by pursuing foreign military contracts, especially in Europe, and by popularizing civilian gun ownership and use in North America. Late-1800s ads from Winchester, Ithaca Gun Company, and other manufacturers increasingly appealed to modern women and family men, recommending shooting sports—hunting, target shooting, and trapshooting—as healthful, safe, character building, suitable for women and children, and implicitly American (despite the sports’ much longer history in Europe). ( [15] ) Meanwhile, the newly founded National Rifle Association (NRA) promoted the creation of rifle clubs, training courses, and competitive shooting matches with an eye toward advancing marksmanship in the general public and, by extension, deepening the country’s reserve of skilled shooters. ( [16] ) In the twentieth century’s early decades, increasing numbers of white middle-class women took up shooting sports, while gun manufacturers and conservative commentators intensified their use of fear-based rhetoric to present personal gun ownership as the effective defense against home invasions and violent assaults. The latter exploited white Americans’ anxieties around race, immigration, and the specter of “urban crime” and reified whiteness as a prerequisite for proper gun ownership in the United States. Such rhetoric persisted through the mid-twentieth century as the civil rights movement re-enlivened debates about which Americans had (or should have) uncontestable gun rights. Some civil rights leaders, for example, proclaimed the right to bear arms as essential both to protecting Black communities from violent white mobs and to fully enfranchising African Americans as US citizens. As historian Nicholas Johnson notes, Rosa Parks, T.R.M. Howard, Daisy Bates, and other Black activists whose families were terrorized by firebombs and burning crosses “embraced private [armed] self-defense and political nonviolence without any sense of contradiction.” ( [17] ) As a weary but victorious America emerged from two World Wars, flush with good-guys-with-guns narratives, the gun industry endeavored to amend US history by inserting firearms at every page turn. According to Haag, midcentury ads “retroactively fetishized” guns and boasted “[c]asual assertions…that Americans had ‘always’ loved guns, or that they had a ‘timeless’ tradition of gun fluency, a ‘priceless tradition’ in firearms, or had ‘long known how to shoot,’ with ‘every boy’ trained as a marksman.” ( [18] ) Of especial importance in this historical re-envisioning was the mythologizing of the Wild West. Colt’s ads “rehabilitated the cowboy” into a “steely-eyed” and courageous icon of white American masculinity, while Winchester marketed its Model 1873 rifle as The Gun that Won the West. ( [19] ) Mythic depictions of the American West swept through 1940s and 50s popular culture like wildfire. Taking a page from the dime novels, frontier melodramas, and Wild West Shows of the nineteenth century, midcentury movies, magazines, and television series invited American audiences to visit an Old West of unparalleled danger, bravery, and beauty, with expert gun handling serving as the coin of the realm. ( [20] ) It was within this gun culture that Oklahoma! and West Side Story ’s original productions operated. In an essay illogically asserting that politics are “absent” in American theatre, political theorist and theatre writer Benjamin Barber concedes that “on second inspection” the dual love plots in Oklahoma! “emerge as emblems of a powerful social context”: No less than Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle , whose social context is a struggle between goatherds and vintners over the right to use a contested valley, Oklahoma! puts the question of whether the territory can unite as a state around a common civic faith and a common political identity, or will be allowed to fracture and disintegrate along the fissures opened up by the competition of its economic factions. ( [21] ) These adversarial populations—farmers and cowmen, settlers and nomads—coalesce (if only outwardly) as the Indian and Oklahoman territories become one state. ( [22] ) As Bruce Kirle explains, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! “historicizes the isolationist/ interventionist conflict that preceded and shadowed America’s participation in World War II” and argues for unity in the face of a common enemy: the spread of fascism. ( [23] ) Yet national belonging in Oklahoma! is determined not just politically or geographically, but also socioeconomically and racially, as Andrea Most and Warren Hoffman have ably illustrated. ( [24] ) Furthermore, the musical’s male characters employ violence (or the threat of violence) as a way of formalizing the community’s boundaries, with firearms often accelerating the admissions process or keeping outsiders at bay. Indeed, the firearm’s vital role in US settler colonialism is plainly wrought in the musical. Though the original libretto contains no staged or referenced gun deaths, it also notably contains no Indigenous characters, suggesting that the settlers’ rifles have already succeeded in ejecting Native communities from their lands (“Oklahoma” comes from the Chocktaw “okla humma,” meaning “Red People”) and denying their identities as US-Americans. ( [25] ) Because Rodgers and Hammerstein “erased [the] indigenous complexity” of the musical’s source material, Lynn Riggs’s 1930 play Green Grow the Lilacs , and whitewashed its frontier community, Oklahoma! ’s guns persist as the designated material and symbolic deliverers of Manifest Destiny. ( [26] ) In more recent productions—at DC’s Arena Stage (2010), the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (2018), and Broadway’s Circle in the Square (2019)—multiracial casts reconstitute Oklahoma! ’s typically homogeneous community, “unsettl[ing] preconceptions of the frontier as white,” as Donatella Galella argues. ( [27] ) However, in Oklahoma! ’s first Broadway run guns appeared predominantly in the hands of white men, though some scholars read farmhand Jud Fry’s sexual savagery as representative of a stereotyped class- and race-based Otherness that “cannot be whitened.” ( [28] ) (Curly’s description of Jud as “bullet-colored, growly man,” indicating, perhaps, a tanned, dirty laborer’s bronzy skin tone, nevertheless leaves open the possibility that Jud is not white). ( [29] ) The only woman to touch a gun is Aunt Eller, Oklahoma! ’s no-nonsense matriarch; in the spontaneous brawl between farmers and cowboys at the top of Act Two, Aunt Eller “ grabs a gun from some man’s holster and fires it, ” putting an abrupt halt to the fighting. She then points the gun at groups of men, coercing them to rejoin the singing. They do. Within Oklahoma! ’s strict gender binary, Aunt Eller is unique. “She is an uncommonly public woman who mediates between male and female culture,” notes musicologist Susan C. Cook, but “[h]er public power comes at a cost; widowed, she is a desexualized crone, who stands apart from the other women[.]” ( [30] ) Gun handling, then, is a mark of Aunt Eller’s singularity. If Oklahoma! ’s guns exclusively belong to white men, what do they signal about the men’s belonging within the musical’s real and aspirational American communities? Two scenes offer clues: cowboy Curly McClain and antisocial farmhand Jud Fry’s private meeting in Act One, and Act Two’s box social. In the first, Curly and Jud converge in Jud’s lodgings, the farm’s defunct smokehouse, where Curly goads Jud into imagining killing himself (the better to live on in the memories of his mourners). On the smokehouse’s walls, Rodgers and Hammerstein specify, hang the accoutrements of manual farm labor and images of nearly naked women. Below them sit limited furnishings: a “grimy” and unmade bed, a spittoon, and a table and chairs. ( [31] ) Within this hypermasculine space, a remote and decommissioned site of work that now hosts the community pariah, each of Jud and Curly’s gun acts—for they are acts in the theatrical sense—exteriorize the men’s identical objectives: to triumph over their competitor, win Laurey and her farmland, and through these conjoined possessions achieve a level of community integration and security that presently evades them both. The acts escalate in intensity as the scene progresses. Jud seizes his pistol as Curly approaches the smokehouse and begins to methodically clean it; following a spate of Curly’s insults, Jud “reflex[ively]” pulls its trigger and blasts a bullet into the ceiling; Curly demonstrates his shooting skill by firing a bullet through knothole in the smokehouse wall. Due to their solitude and emotional intimacy, Jud and Curly’s forced displays of heteronormative frontier masculinity reverberate with both violent and homoerotic potential. But rather than the smokehouse containing the men’s armed antagonism, the guns audibly broadcast it, drawing Aunt Eller, Ali Hakim, and several others to their spot. “’S all right!” Aunt Eller assures those who have gathered. “Nobody hurt, just a pair of fools swapping’ noises.” ( [32] ) The box social is a community-sanctioned pageant of territorial masculinity masquerading as a charity auction. Like the display behaviors of male peacocks and harbor seals, Oklahoma! ’s men flaunt their authority, capital, and sexual devotion, but unlike the female peacocks and harbor seals in the market for a mate, the eligible women whose lunch hampers (and selves) are up for auction lack the agency to choose or refuse bidders. “ Oklahoma! thus embodies what Erin Addison calls an ‘American secular ideology’ of individualism and freedom for men and romance/marriage for women,” offers Cook. ( [33] ) Within this frontier thunderdome of cishet male competition, guns are enlisted as valuable commodities and tools of intimidation. In negotiations as part of the box social’s transactional politics are Oklahoma!’ s two love triangles. Curly and Jud are in pursuit of Laurey, who understands she must choose a man to help manage the farm she has inherited. The flirtatious Ado Annie, meanwhile, is torn between sweet but featherbrained cowboy Will Parker and the “Persian peddler / Lothario” Ali Hakim, the latter of whom is an ethnoracial outsider “typically played broadly and theatrically—for laughs—via the conventions of vaudeville,” writes Kirle. ( [34] ) Given that Ali’s interest in Ado Annie is carnal rather than marital, Will and Ali’s battle over Ado Annie’s hamper is an asymmetrical affair. Its lopsidedness is also engendered by violence, as Ado Annie’s father Carnes forces Ali to participate at gunpoint, prodding the peddler in the back with the tip of his gun to ratchet up the bidding. Though Will loses the hamper to Ali, he “gets” Ado Annie by satisfying Carnes’s demand that his daughter’s husband-to-be be financially solvent. Later, Ali marries the universally irritating Gertie Cummings in a shotgun wedding, consequently abandoning his nomadic lifestyle and assimilating into the territory folks’ white Christian community, his amorous ways and his Otherness curbed by the promise of gun violence. In Oklahoma! , the fathers’ firearms orchestrate unions that are advantageous for the community’s survival but not necessarily for marital harmony. Sung by the musical’s bachelors with Ali singing lead, Act One’s “It’s a Scandal! It’s a Outrage!” lampoons the men’s “entrapment” by armed fathers and their supposedly eager daughters: MEN: It’s gotten’ so you cain’t have any fun! Every daughter has a father with a gun! It’s a scandal, it’s a outrage! How a gal gets a husband today!( [35] ) Winning Laurey’s hamper (and presumably her hand in marriage) also requires considerable capital. In an effort to best Jud—who eventually bids “all I got in the world,” two years of savings from farm work—Curly sells off the vital assets of a cowboy: first his saddle, then his horse, and finally his gun. As the coup de grâce of the men’s acrimonious bidding, Curly drawing his gun is read first as a physical threat, frightening the crowd and inspiring Jud to retreat. For Scott McMillin, Curly’s capacity with a gun appeals to Laurey because it keeps Jud’s violence in check: “The cowboy-hero handles a gun so well that even the hired hand has to worry about him—that is one of the hero’s desirable attributes.” ( [36] ) Even after his gun sells, Curly secures Laurey’s hamper, her hand, and newfound respectability as a chosen caretaker of colonized Oklahoman land. Of the three guns in Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, and Stephen Sondheim’s West Side Story , the famed musical that transports Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to a hot and claustrophobic Manhattan neighborhood in the 1950s, two tellingly belong to law enforcement officials. Lieutenant Schrank and Officer Krupke are white supremacist authority figures who enforce an inequitable set of rules for rival street gangs, the Puerto Rican Sharks and the (traditionally) white ethnic Jets. The officers never draw their guns, at least according to the Broadway libretto. Schrank is a plainclothes cop whose weapon is presumably concealed by his suit jacket; Krupke’s sidearm, however, is always a visible part of his police uniform, indexing his simultaneous, conflated roles as neighborhood protector and aggressor. The third gun, and the only one that discharges within the course of the musical, is extracted from its apartment hiding place in Act Two, Scene One by Chino, a young Shark desperate to avenge the death of the gang’s leader, Bernardo. Chino unwraps the gun, which the stage directions specify has been stored in a cloth “the same color as BERNARDO’s shirt,” and jams it into his pocket before exiting, affiliating West Side Story ’s sole civilian firearm with two Puerto Rican immigrant men. ( [37] ) At the musical’s climax Chino finds his target, former Jet member Tony, and fatally shoots him as he runs into the arms of his lover Maria, Bernardo’s sister and Chino’s intended wife. As “CHINO stands very still, bewildered by the gun limp in his hand,” the lovers sing fragments of “Somewhere,” the musical’s utopic ballad of freedom and inclusion, before Tony succumbs to his gunshot wound. In the action that follows, Maria silently beckons for Chino’s gun and then turns it on Sharks and Jets alike, who at the report of the gunshot have amassed in a “ritual assembly” around Tony’s body. “How many bullets are left, Chino? Enough for you? And you? All of you? WE ALL KILLED HIM; and my brother and Riff. I, too. I CAN KILL NOW BECAUSE I HATE NOW. How many can I kill, Chino? How many – and still have one bullet left for me?” Unable to pull the trigger, Maria throws the gun away and collapses on the ground, sobbing. In the musical’s final moments, Tony’s body is carried away by Jet and Shark boys, a procession forms, and Maria follows in its wake, “lift[ing] her head proudly and triumphantly.” The neighborhood’s adults, including Schrank and Krupke, remain onstage, “bowed, alone, useless” as the curtain falls. ( [38] ) The importance of this gun, as a material node in which the musical’s themes of racialized violence, urban youth culture, and generational discord seem to converge, has largely gone unacknowledged in the existing literature, likely because the gun is introduced relatively late in the play, after Bernardo and Jet leader Riff die by knife-wounds in the gangs’ late-night rumble. However, even in the pre-van Hove world of West Side Story , a world that Brian Herrera describes as “characterized by the constant threat of incipient violence,” guns are conspicuous. ( [39] ) Consider the Jets’ first conversation about rumbling with the Sharks. Riff suggests that the Sharks “might ask for bottles or knives or zip guns,” inspiring a worried “Zip guns…Gee!” from Baby John, the youngest of the group. ( [40] ) Guns are named again at the gangs’ war council, not by Riff or Bernardo but by Tony, who attempts to mitigate mounting tensions by urging the leaders to agree to a fair fight, sans weapons. “Bottles, knives, guns! What a coop full of chickens!” he baits. ( [41] ) In both conversations, the Jets are depicted as reluctant to arm themselves with guns as a way of holding their turf: “I wanna hold it like we always held it, with skin!” Riff assures his gang in Act One. ( [42] ) And yet, in Jerome Robbins’ choreography the Jets habitually map onto their bodies gestures of guns and gun violence. Jets wannabe Anybodys responds to A-Rab’s insults about her appearance by shooting him with her finger, prompting Baby John to ask about the maiming power of zip guns. No one answers. Similarly in “Cool,” a frenetic dance in which the Jets attempt to regulate their volatile, pre-rumble energies, A-Rab shapes his hand into a gun, pantomimes firing it, and shouts “pow!,” a close mirroring of Anybodys’ finger shot. In a choreographic replication of cycles of violence, A-Rab is now no longer the victim but the shooter. Ying Zhu and Daniel Belgrad note in their study of dance in West Side Story ’s 1961 film adaptation that “Over the course of the dance, this [gun] gesture is not eliminated, but is disciplined and integrated into the emotional fabric of coolness, so that Action, at the dance’s end, can control it and use it.” ( [43] ) The Jets’ pretend gunplay, Zhu and Belgrad argue, can be situated within the musical’s larger motif of subversive “play [as] the bodily assertion of vitality in the face of adult regulation.” ( [44] ) Of course, this simulated battleground of finger pistols and vocalized “pows” —itself a reflection of popular mid-century children’s games pitting cops against robbers, cowboys against Indians—fails to prevent real gun violence from materializing. As Herrera, David Román, Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez, and Frances Negrón-Muntaner have all forcefully argued, West Side Story ’s message of racial tolerance comes at an ironic cost: the perpetuation of Latine stereotypes and the faulty association of urban US-American crime to rising rates of immigration. ( [45] ) In the original lyrics to “America,” Shark girl Anita paints an unseemly picture of her native island, depicting Puerto Rico’s inhabitants as disease-ridden, oversexed, poor, and prone to unrestrained bursts of gun violence: “Always the hurricanes blowing, / Always the population growing, / And the money owing, / And the babies crying, / And the bullets flying.” ( [46] ) The fact that the only gun that takes a life in West Side Story is owned by one Shark and fired by another is neither inconsequential nor unrelated to Bernardo and Chino’s Puerto-Ricanness and their shared status as racialized outsiders who, if Anita’s lyrical tirade is at all based on reality, brought the problems of their homeland with them. The lie Anita tells Tony after being sexually assaulted at Doc’s store—that Chino has fatally shot Maria—is not only plausible, given Chino’s armed state; it also accords with the feud’s escalating violence and anticipates the ballistic trauma to come. In contrast to the white police officers’ holstered weapons, Bernardo’s gun was unsecured in the home and becomes uncontainable on the streets. With Maria’s seizure of the gun, its relationship to the Latine community is solidified. Though she is clearly unaccustomed to handling the gun, its scriptive thingness immediately instructs her how to channel what the libretto terms her “savage” rage. ( [47] ) America Reloaded: Gun-Centric Revivals of Oklahoma! (2019) and West Side Story (2020) In the midst of its direct transfer from St. Ann’s Warehouse to Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theatre, Daniel Fish’s revival of Oklahoma! grabbed headings in early 2019 by announcing it would be Broadway’s first “Gun Neutral” production. For every visible gun onstage, Oklahoma! ’s producers donated to “organizations working to destroy illegal guns” as well as to those providing arts and STEM programming to communities disproportionately impacted by US-American gun violence. Speaking on the production’s partnership with the non-partisan Gun Neutral Initiative, lead producer Eva Price remarked: “[j]ust because a particular story calls for the presence of a particular weapon, that doesn’t mean that we have to remain complacent in America’s gun-violence epidemic. Helping to destroy firearms that shouldn’t be in circulation is both a privilege and a responsibility.” ( [48] ) Implicit in this gun neutral pledge is an acknowledgement that even prop firearms cannot claim neutrality in 2019 (if indeed they ever could). Furthermore, monetary pledges concede that gun cultures and politics are inextricably bound up in economic transactions and therefore tend to capacitate the financially privileged. Much like carbon offsetting, a gun neutral pledge operates from an assumption that even simulated gunplay has the potential to cause harm; it attempts to mitigate possible negative effects, even as it admits the perceived inevitability of theatrical and mediatized guns in popular culture. Shortly after the news went viral, the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action characterized the production’s move as “‘smack[ing] of antigun political pandering.’” ( [49] ) There is much to attend to in Fish’s Oklahoma! and Belgian auteur Ivo van Hove’s revival of West Side Story (not the least of which are van Hove’s casting of a sexual predator in the role of Bernardo and staging of Anita’s assault as a penetrative rape). ( [50] ) But rather than comprehensively review the productions or summarize their critical receptions—the latter no small task, given the strikingly polarized opinions of Fish’s and van Hove’s work—I wish to compare the productions’ transformative treatments of guns with those advanced by their source productions. ( [51] ) Historically, the guns of Oklahoma! and West Side Story have operated as connotatively ambiguous objects until they are lifted into service by their handlers. That is, Curly, Jud, and Carnes’s guns are expected accessories for “territory folks” that become threatening with use. Fish and van Hove’s guns, by contrast, persistently and independently menace, from the racks of guns hanging on Oklahoma! ’s auditorium walls, always in view and materially and spatially inculcating theatregoers into the production’s culture of guns, to the pistol tattoo above Chino’s hip, a symbol of his early indoctrination into a gun-saturated world (he is now forever “armed”) and a foreshadowing of West Side Story ’s tragic climax. The revivals’ guns not only consummate the violent impulses of their operators, they engender personal and systemic violence. Of Fish’s Oklahoma! Soraya Nadia McDonald asserts, “social order is enforced and maintained by guns,” a description easily transferrable to van Hove’s New York. ( [52] ) In a conspicuous extension of the original musicals’ gun narratives, the revivals’ community circles and love triangles are contoured or irrevocably broken by armed characters and gun violence. Fish and van Hove take different tacks in mining and reframing their source material. Fish retains Hammerstein’s book almost in its entirety, embedding his major interventions interstitially or via bespoke stagings of scenes and songs. In its most dramatic departure from the libretto, Fish’s Oklahoma! reconceptualizes Jud’s killing as a deliberate gun death. On Curly and Laurey’s wedding day, Jud kisses the bride and presents the couple with a gift: his gun, and an opportunity to end his life. It is an earnest plea with a subtle “gotcha” undertone, for if granted, Jud’s slaughter will forever haunt their wedding day memories. Curly, with Laurey’s wordless blessing, accepts Jud’s offer and shoots him. Husband and wife are sprayed by blood as Jud crumples to the ground. ( [53] ) By replacing Jud’s accidental stabbing with the close-range gunning down of an unarmed man (however consensual the victim), Fish renders the impromptu trial that exonerates Curly of criminal culpability distressingly perfunctory. Curly’s acquittal, writes The Atlantic ’s Todd S. Purdum, “feels less like justice and more like rough complicity in vigilantism.” ( [54] ) West Side Story ’s single, fatal gunshot remains as scripted, though van Hove’s fixation on US-American gun violence is manifest throughout the production. Moreover, with a compressed run-time of 105 minutes and no intermission, the revival hastens toward Tony’s gun death without West Side Story ’s customary flashes of levity: “I Feel Pretty” has been cut and “Gee, Officer Krupke” refashioned. Though Fish began developing Oklahoma! in 2007 at Bard College, its 2019 Broadway iteration and the 2020 West Side Story revival hum with unmistakable nowness, dialoguing directly with US-American gun politics in the Trumpian age. Both stories are set in an unspecified present and feature multiracial casts, with gender expansive ( West Side Story ) and disabled actors ( Oklahoma! ) further diversifying the depicted communities. ( [55] ) Fish’s reimagined frontier boasts an interracial love triangle (Rebecca Naomi Jones’s Laurey, Damon Daunno’s Curly, and Patrick Vaill’s Jud) and a Black federal marshal (Anthony Cason as Cord Elam), the latter’s powerlessness during the murder trial suggestive not just of the community’s fervor to exonerate Curly but the precariousness of Cord’s endowed authority, even when armed. The antagonistic outsider Jud Fry is no longer a brutish farmhand, but a brooding, wiry, plaid-and-hoodie-wearing blonde, “a repository of loneliness and disconnection” who seeks community belonging and validation through Laurey. ( [56] ) Developed by Vaill and Fish over years of collaboration, this Jud oozes a despondent vulnerability that adheres his villainous acts¾including sexually assaulting Laurey and attempting to kill Curly with a switchblade masquerading as a kaleidoscope¾to his ‘victimization’ by an insular, cliquish community. “[It is t]he act of someone who feels pushed into a corner,” Vaill claims of Jud’s foiled murder plot. “This is someone who feels he does not have control, which is scary.” Of Jud’s role as the story’s villain, Vaill is quick to qualify: “He’s cast as the villain …. At the end of the day, he’s guilty of being in love with someone that people don’t think he should be in love with.” ( [57] ) Fish and Vaill’s apologist approach to Jud sets the character, and his assisted gun suicide, adrift in murky cultural waters. “Sympathy for the Incel?” wonders Catherine M. Young from the title of her HowlRound essay on Oklahoma!. In it, Young records a handful of the disparate public responses: Journalist Alison Stewart couldn’t tell if Jud was more like a fragile, vulnerable “Kurt Cobain type” or a school shooter. Sarah Holdren and Elisabeth Vincentelli both describe him as an incel, the involuntarily celibate men who resent (and occasionally kill) women who won’t sleep with them. Frank Rich was enthralled by Jud’s anguish. Such ambiguity has political implications. ( [58] ) Ambiguities there may be, but for Fish and Vaill, Jud is a distinctly American product: a seething, unstable concoction of “virulent misogyny,” toxic (white) masculinity, and lone-wolf reclusiveness that finds affirmation through the nation’s gun culture. ( [59] ) But here another troubling narrative metastases. If Jud represents “the role of the outsider that the community can create,” as Fish indicates (emphasis added), then the blame for Jud’s ostracism lies not with him, but with those charged with nurturing and binding communities together: the play’s women. ( [60] ) In van Hove’s New York, the Jets encompasses white and Black “native” Americans who together rail against the immigrant Puerto Rican Sharks, transforming the Jets’ racial animus from blatant white supremacism to a sort of qualified nativism with irreconcilable outcomes. “Mr. van Hove’s casting misrepresents the real solidarities that form at the margins of U.S. citizenship,” notes writer and translator Carina del Valle Schorske of the blended Jets. “‘Inclusion’ here is code for willful colorblindness.” ( [61] ) The gang’s new composition enables van Hove to broach stereotypes of African American gun use , as well as more fully confront the injustices of race-based police brutality. Baby John’s fear of the zip-gun’s ballistic power, for example, is now voiced by a Black teenager (Matthew Johnson). Later, after a brief squabble with the Jets, Officer Krupke (Danny Wolohan) draws his weapon and aggressively pushes it into the temple of one of its Black members, prompting several Jets to draw their smartphones and film the altercation. Krupke backs off, but the event propels the gang into a revamped rendition of “Gee, Officer Krupke.” Once a vaudevillian take-down of domineering and inept authority figures, the song is now a humorless “indictment of the carceral state,” with white and Black Jets striking ‘don’t shoot’ poses in front of “a bleak video montage of young men being humiliated and abused by the police.” ( [62] ) Branded “harrowing” by Los Angeles Times ’s Charles McNulty, an “overreach” by Newsday ’s Rafer Guzmán, and “pandering” by The New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz, “Gee, Officer Krupke” (with choreography by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker) functions as an embodied condemnation of systemic racism, police violence, and the prison-industrial complex—and one of the revival’s most overt bids for political relevance. ( [63] ) Audiences consume the productions’ gun acts via unmediated and mediated witnessing. Van Hove’s imagistic theatre routinely includes the use of video to bring the “characters closer to the audience” and “create subjective worlds on stage,” the director himself explains. ( [64] ) In West Side Story, the characters’ smartphones, pre-filmed footage, and live video from handheld cameras¾all projected onto a mammoth, stage-spanning screen¾together constitute an omnipresent surveillance apparatus that is in turns covert and intrusive. At intervals, the films decelerate into slow motion as the stage action unfolds at regular speed, a techno-theatrical “time warp” (to use Sarah Taylor Ellis’s term) that often prolongs the audience’s encounter with violence, as in Tony (Isaac Powell) fleeing from the rumble in a blood-soaked shirt. ( [65] ) Of one on-location shot that moves through a dead-end street, Schwartz remarks, “The camera advances in a slow dolly shot, producing the weightless, gliding momentum of a first-person shooter game.” ( [66] ) Indeed, the footage collectively documents a story of interchangeable hunters and prey. Cameras invade enclosed spaces—several interiors are pocketed behind the projection screen, including Doc’s store—and capture private and imagined interactions. ( [67] ) In one of the video design’s most unsettling interventions, Tony’s mental picture of Maria’s gun death fills the screen, her head blasted open by Chino’s close-range shot. Tony’s own death, however, is left unmediated. Chino approaches, fires his pistol, and Tony’s body registers the bullet’s impact; no extreme closeups linger on his bloodied torso or Chino’s inscrutable expression. Fish’s Oklahoma! employs live video and projections far more sparingly, notably when handheld video cameras penetrate the cramped environs of Jud’s smokehouse. At first, Jud and Curly’s tête-à-tête is plunged into total darkness, a drastic shift from the “aggressive brightness” employed elsewhere in the production’s lighting design. ( [68] ) The blackout, which amplifies the dramaturgical work of the scene’s soundscape, is later softened by live video tightly trained on Jud’s face—tormented, longing for connection—projected onto the stage’s backdrop. The scene vacillates in tone between a hushed, erotic intimacy (the men, faces mere inches from each other, whisper their lines into handheld microphones) and the unrelenting menace of cyberbullying, as Curly’s disembodied voice calmly extols the virtues of suicide. ( [69] ) Notes Ben Brantley of the smokehouse scene, “the lines of sex and violence…blu[r] in this gun-toting universe[.]” ( [70] ) When, after singing “Pore Jud Is Daid” and still blanketed by darkness, the men fire their guns at a knothole, the loud reports startle and unnerve. Sound and sight decoupled, the invisible weapons index their presence sonically. Though only men suffer gun deaths in Oklahoma! and West Side Story , the stories’ women together absorb much of the gun-related violence and trauma. Armed men (fathers, law enforcers, lovers, and stalkers) perambulate the playing space in Oklahoma! , pistols holstered and rifles clutched under armpits; Aunt Eller, by contrast, is accoutered with a wooden spoon for stirring cornbread. But if we simply track Oklahoma! ’s guns as they pass through men’s hands, we risk losing sight of Jones’s Laurey and Ali Stroker’s Ado Annie, outspoken women of intelligence and agency who must nevertheless navigate the complexities of a materially and psychically hostile landscape. Ado Annie’s life choices are under near-constant monitoring by her armed father, while landowning woman of color Laurey “resolute[ly] refus[es] to be thought of as someone’s possession” even as she’s caught in the crosshairs of rival suitors. ( [71] ) The production’s dream ballet and wedding scene lay bare Laurey’s conscious negotiations with Oklahoma! ’s gun culture¾and the men that drive it. In choreographer John Heginbotham’s postmodern dream ballet, Laurey’s avatar (Gabrielle Hamilton) moves with within a growing minefield of cowboy boots that are dropped one by one from the rafters. “[T]he sound they make as they hit the stage is as explosive as . . . gunshots,” pronounced The New Yorker ’s Sarah Larson in her 2018 review of the Off-Broadway production. ( [72] ) Less abstract is Laurey’s endorsing of Jud’s murder/suicide. In an extended moment of silent contemplation, Laurey spatially maps her inner conflict. She leaves Curly’s side to peer searchingly into Jud’s face, and then slowly returns to Curly. ( [73] ) We can only speculate on why Laurey sanctions “prairie justice,” Jud’s violent and permanent excision from the community, but as a Black woman and a survivor of sexual assault and stalking, Laurey is all too aware of how violence operates at the margins. ( [74] ) West Side Story ’s gun culture is likewise androcentric and hierarchical, but the women exhibit manifest signs of inculcation. Whereas Jerome Robbins’ choreography restricted the use of gun gestures to his male dancers and Anybodys, De Keersmaeker democratizes the movement by setting it onto the Sharks girls’ bodies in “America.” The aggressive gesture¾fingers shaped into a gun, straight arm tracing an arc from low to high like a protractor¾runs counter the women’s buoyant lyrics (“I like to be in America! / O.K. by me in America! / Everything free in America”). Violence continues to reach West Side Story ’s Black, white, and brown women in ways unprescribed by Robbins, Laurents, Sondheim, and Bernstein, including Anita’s attempted gang rape, Maria’s graphic head wound, and the rain-soaked rumble, where several feminine-presenting Jets and Sharks fight. ( [75] ) One need only witness the distraught Maria’s actions after Tony’s shooting to comprehend how versant the women are in West Side Story ’s microcosmic culture of violence. Silently, Maria (Shereen Pimentel) gestures for Chino’s gun. Unlike Marias past, who handle the gun with trepidation and difficulty, Pimentel’s Maria racks the handgun’s slide with speed and skill, advancing the next round of ammunition as she asks, “How do you fire this gun, Chino? Just by pulling this little trigger?” It’s a rhetorical question. She is well-acquainted with guns, even if this is the first she’s handled, and the Jets and Sharks take her threats seriously. The gun changes hands several more times: a Jet gently disarms Maria as she faces the audience and holds the pistol to her head; later, she reclaims the gun and passes it to Anita. In entrusting the gun to Anita, Maria effectively bars Jets and Sharks alike from accessing it, effectively removing the weapon from circulation¾at least temporarily. Guns are instruments of revolution and disruption, but they are also instruments of a sort of brutal petrification, of holding in abeyance those who might act counterculturally and preventing new, transformative associations from solidifying. The Golden Age Oklahoma! and West Side Story ’s firearms police the perimeters of homogenous human groups, simultaneously restricting access into and thwarting departures from them. In reinforcing the community circle’s curved boundaries and transforming a love triangle with three vertices into a straight line with two points, guns and their handlers are bold, convenient catalysts for the American musical’s conservative endings. They help the boy get the girl; forestall any integrative or conciliatory pacts between rival street gangs; and fortify the settler-colonialist claims on stolen lands. In their twenty-first-century adaptations of Oklahoma! and West Side Story, Fish and van Hove present guns as the most responsive, convenient deliverers of modern violence, but their contemporary anti-gun, pro-diversity messages strain uncomfortably beneath the musicals’ constrictive Golden Age fabric, fabric that engages firearms in ways that unequivocally benefit white heteronormative America. After seeing Fish’s reimagined Oklahoma! , Johnny Oleksinksi of the right-leaning New York Post sardonically declared: “everything you cherish about this classic has been taken out behind the bar and shot, replace by an auteur’s bag of tricks and a thesis on gun control and westward expansion. Here, the West was won by a culture of violence and toxic masculinity— what fun! ” ( [76] ) In all his rhetorical outrage, Oleksinski fails to recognize that Oklahoma! has always told this story. What he is detecting, however, are the heightened political stakes of the contemporary gun musical. Staged in the midst of partisan debates over Second Amendment gun rights and alarming rates of US gun injuries and deaths, the majority of twenty-first-century gun musicals, including Fish’s Oklahoma! and van Hove’s West Side Story , proceed from three assumptions. First, they regard gun violence as a public health crisis in the United States. Second, they implicate all Americans as active perpetrators or passive abettors in the country’s gun violence epidemic. Third, rather than depict gun handling as a prime signifier of national belonging, they suggest that merely persisting within the country’s omnipresent gun culture is a uniquely American act. Oleksinski’s “auteur” jab is likewise somewhat founded. In their searing critiques of US-American gun violence and its impact on disenfranchised communities, Daniel Fish and Ivo van Hove undertake crucial (if imperfect) work. And yet, as progressive white men of privilege, they perhaps cannot help but ventriloquize rather than possess the perspectives voiced by frontline populations. References 1. Christopher Bannow, “Surviving in the States: Audience Rejection on the Road with Oklahoma!,” 3 April 2023, https://howlround.com/surviving-states-audience-rejection-road-oklahoma . 2. Ibid. 3. According to musical theatre scholar Bryan M. Vandevender, the touring production featured less visible guns in its scene design than its Broadway counterpart. 4. See Pamela Haag’s analysis of gun companies’ influential tactics in The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2016). 5. As I theorize, a “gun musical” focalizes firearms—and their provocative meaning-making—as essential objects in the musical’s dramaturgy and physical world. Put another way, just as a perfect Aristotelian plot would unravel with the removal of any scene, a gun musical could not function without their signature weaponry and the human conditions they engender. 6. For a fuller examination of Hamilton’s guns, which contextualizes the production’s weaponless Tony Awards performance, see my article “‘What if This Bullet is My Legacy?’: The Guns of Hamilton,” Studies in Musical Theatre 12, no. 2 (June 2018): 251-56. 7. Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, “Domestic Violence and Firearms,” https://efsgv.org/learn/type-of-gun-violence/domestic-violence-and-firearms/ . 8. Kimberly King, “Gun Violence Crisis: With Revenge and Retaliation on the Rise, How Police Are Responding,” 17 February 2021, https://wlos.com/news/local/gun-violence-crisis-with-revenge- retaliation-on-the-rise-how-asheville-police-are-responding. 9. Marissa Edmund, “Gun Violence Disproportionately and Overwhelmingly Hurts Communities of Color,” Center for American Progress, 30 June 2022, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/gun- violence-disproportionately-and-overwhelmingly-hurts-communities-of-color/. 10. Ibid. 11. Nicole Moeder, “Number of Trans Homicides Doubled over 4 Years, with Gun Killings Fueling Increase: Advocates,” ABC News, 12 October 2022, https://abcnews.go.com/US/homicide-rate-trans- people-doubled-gun-killings-fueling/story?id=91348274. 12. Eugenio Weigend Vargas and Marissa Edmund, “Gun Suicides Among Former and Current Military Members,” Center for American Progress, 3 March 2022, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/gun- suicides-among-former-and-current-military-members/. 13. Robert Gebeloff, Danielle Ivory, Bill Marsh, Allison McCann, and Albert Sun, “Childhood’s Greatest Danger: The Data on Kids and Gun Violence,” New York Times, 14 December 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/14/magazine/gun-violence-children-data-statistics.html . 14. Beth Duff-Brown, “Californians Living with Handgun Owners More Than Twice as Likely to Die by Homicide, Study Finds,” 4 April 2022, https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/04/handguns- homicide-risk.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CDespite%20widespread%20perceptions%20that%20a,of%20health%20p olicy%20at%20the 15. For histories of the gun industry’s attempt to domesticate US firearms through white women consumers, see Laura Browder, Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Meredith Conti, “Hired Guns: Whiteness, Womanhood, and Progressive-era Shooting Promoters,” Theatre Journal 73, no. 4 (Dec. 2021): 511-532; and Andrea L. Smalley, “‘Our Lady Sportsmen’: Gender, Class, and Conservation in Sport Hunting Magazines, 1873–1920,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 4, no. 4 (October 2005): 355–80. 16. The NRA was founded in 1871 in New York. 17. Nicholas Johnson, Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms (New York: Prometheus Books, 2014), 13. While magistrates and legislators banned or significantly curtailed Black and Indigenous gun ownership from the colonial period onward, marginalized communities of color had their own traditions of arms that variously conformed to and resolutely rejected governmental interference. 18. Haag, The Gunning of America, 357 and 356. 19. Ibid, 354. 20. Ibid. 21. Benjamin Barber, “Oklahoma! — How Political Is Broadway?” Salmagundi 137/138 (2003): 3-11, 9. 22. To be more specific, the Oklahoma Enabling Act of 1906 permitted “the Oklahoma Territory and the Indian Territory to enter the union under a single-state constitution.” Michael Schulman, “Two Broadway Shows Dismantle the American Myth,” The New Yorker, April 16, 2019. 23. Bruce Kirle, “Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of ‘Oklahoma!’ in American Consciousness,” Theatre Journal 55, no 2 (May 2003): 251-274, 251. 24. See Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) and Warren Hoffman, The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014). 25. As Warren Hoffman notes, the show’s refrain, in which the company repeatedly chants “Oklahoma!,” can ironically be translated to them shouting “Red People!” Hoffman, The Great White Way, 66. 26. Donatella Galella, America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington DC’s Arena Stage (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019), 202. 27. Galella, America in the Round, 197. Galella describes three modes of understanding multiracial Oklahoma! casts that both producers and spectators could adopt: multiracial-conscious, whitened, and postracial (200). 28. Kirle, “Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of ‘Oklahoma!,’” 262. 29. The Theatre Guild Presents Oklahoma!: A Musical Play Based on the Play ‘Green Grow the Lilacs’ by Lynn Riggs, music by Richard Rodgers, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein (New York: Williamson Music, 1943). 30. Susan C. Cook, “Pretty like the Girl: Gender, Race and Oklahoma!” Contemporary Theatre Review 19, no. 1 (2009), 35-47, 43. 31. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma!. 32. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma!. 33. Cook, “Pretty like the Girl,” 37. 34. Kirle, “Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of ‘Oklahoma!,’” 251-274, 259 and 261. 35. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma! 36. Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions Behind Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 27. 37. West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, based on a conception of Jerome Robbins, book by Arthur Laurents, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (New York: Musical Theatre International, 1960), 86. 38. West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 119-120. 39. Brian Eugenio Herrera, “Compiling West Side Story’s Parahistories, 1949-2009,” Theatre Journal 64 (2012), 231-247: 236. 40. West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 6. 41. West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 56. 42. West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 7. 43. Zhu and Belgrad, “This Cockeyed City,” 86. 44. Ibid, 90. 45. Herrera, “Compiling West Side Story’s Parahistories, 1949-2009” and Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015); David Román, “Comment — Theatre Journals,” Theatre Journal 54, no. 3 (Oct. 2002), https://www.jstor.org/stable/25069090 ; David Román, Paula Court, and Richard Termine, Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture in the Performing Arts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez, José, Can You See? Latinos on and off Broadway (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999); and Frances Negrón-Muntaner, “Feeling Pretty: West Side Story and Puerto Rican Identity Discourses,” Social Text 63, vol. 18, no. 2 (2000), 83-106. 46. West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 43. 47. Robin Bernstein, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Social Text 24, no. 7 (2009), 67-94. 48. Greg Evans, “‘Oklahoma!’ to be Broadway’s First ‘Gun Neutral’ Production: Lauded Musical Joins Hollywood Initiative: Sundance, Deadline, January 28, 2019, https://deadline.com/2019/01/oklahoma- broadway-musical-gun-neutral-sundance-daniel-fish-1202543741/. 49. Qtd. in Charles Passy, “‘Oklahoma!’ Takes Aim at Gun Issue,” Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2019. 50. Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai have edited the first essay collection on van Hove’s work entitled Ivo van Hove: From Shakespeare to David Bowie (London: Methuen Drama, 2018). For coverage of the protests of Amar Ramasar’s casting, see Julia Jacobs, “‘West Side Story’ Stalemate: Bernardo’s Staying. So Are Protestors,” New York Times, February 19, 2020, and Adrian Horton, “‘We can’t stand by this any more’: Inside the West Side Story Premiere Protest,” The Guardian, February 21, 2020. 51. An inventory of West Side Story’s reviews was created by Playbill’s Dan Meyer on February 20, 2020. http://www.playbill.com/article/read-reviews-for-the-west-side-story-revival-on-broadway . 52. Soraya Nadia McDonald, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Oklahoma!” The Undefeated, September 16, 2019. https://theundefeated.com/features/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-oklahoma-on-broadway/ . 53. A cleverly installed blood cannon delivers the graphic stage effect. 54. Todd S. Purdue, “Culture: Oklahoma! Gets a Dark, Brilliant Remake,” The Atlantic, April 8, 2019. 55. Of van Hove’s “austere aesthetic” Helen Shaw wryly observes: “he automatically modernizes everything he touches, from Shakespeare to O’Neill.” Helen Shaw, “In the New West Side Story, When You’re Onstage You’re Onscreen All the Way,” New York Magazine/vulture.com, February 20, 2020. https://www.vulture.com/2020/02/theater-review-a-new-west-side-story-onscreen-all-the-way.html . 56. Tim Teeman, “‘Oklahoma!’ on Broadway: Creator and Cast Reveal How to Reimagine a Classic,” The Daily Beast, thedailybeast.com , April 15, 2019. https://www.thedailybeast.com/oklahoma-on-broadway-creator-and-cast-reveal-how-to-reimagine-a-classic . 57. Laura Collins-Hughes, “For 13 Years, He has Humanized the Villain of Oklahoma!,” New York Times, January 20, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/theater/patrick-vaill-oklahoma-broadway.html . 58. Catherine M. Young, “Sympathy for the Incel? On Oklahoma! and Jud Fry in the #MeToo Era.” Howlround.com , June 26, 2019. https://howlround.com/sympathy-incel . 59. McDonald, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Oklahoma!” Bryan M. Vandevender queered Vaill’s portrayal of Jud in a compelling paper delivered at the 2022 Mid-America Theatre Conference. 60. Qtd. in Teeman, “Oklahoma! on Broadway.” 61. Carina de Valle Schorske, “Opinion: Let ‘West Side Story’ and Its Stereotypes Die,” New York Times, February 24, 2020. 62. Alexandra Schwartz, “Theatre: A Grim Take on ‘West Side Story,’” The New Yorker, February 21, 2020. 63. Charles McNulty, “Review: ‘West Side Story’ Blasts Back to Broadway – Kinetic, Bloody and Modern to the Core,” Los Angeles Times, February 20, 2020; Schwartz, “A Grim Take”; and Rafer Guzmán, “Review: ‘West Side Story’ on Broadway Gets a Dark Update, Loses Some of its Cool,’ Newsday, February 21, 2020. 64. “Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai, “Ivo van Hove: An Introduction,” in Ivo van Hove: From Shakespeare to David Bowie, edited by Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai (London: Methuen, 2018), 1-16, 7. 65. See Sarah Taylor Ellis‘s Doing the Time Warp: Queer Temporalities and Musical Theatre (London: Methuen Drama, 2022). 66. Schwartz, “A Grim Take.” 67. Jan Versweyveld designed West Side Story’s sets and lights, and Luke Hall designed the video; Laura Jellinek designed Oklahoma!’s set and Joshua Thorson designed projections. 68. McDonald, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Oklahoma!.” Scott Zielinksi was the production’s lighting designer. 69. “When the camera turns and shows us both Daunno’s and Vaill’s profiles,” notes Sara Holdren, “stretched out huge across a wall where a black-and-white vista of fields and ranch houses is painted, we get a nasty jolt: Here is the country inside of these men, and here are their brutalities laying the foundations for the country.” Sara Holdren, “Theatre Review: An Oklahoma! Where the Storm Clouds Loom Above the Plain,” New York Magazine/Vulture.com, October 8, 2018. 70. Ben Brantley, “Review: A Smashing ‘Oklahoma!’ Is Reborn in the Land of Id,” New York Times, April 7, 2019. 71. Teeman, “‘Oklahoma!’ on Broadway.” 72. Sarah Larson, ”Daniel Fish’s Dark Take on ’Oklahoma!’” Ariel Nereson analyzed the choreographic work of the re-envisioned dream ballet in a 2022 Mid-America Theatre Conference presentation. 73. Laurey is effectively muzzled by Hammerstein’s book, which provides no dialogue during Curly and Jud’s struggle and Jud’s accidental stabbing. 74. Jesse Green and Ben Brantley, “Review: There’s a Dark Golden Haze in This Reclaimed ‘Oklahoma!,’ New York Times, October 7, 2018. Green and Brantley’s joint review is responding to the 2018 Off- Broadway production. 75. Of watching Anita’s attempted gang-rape (and its replication on the enormous projection screen) as a Puerto Rican woman, Carina del Valle Schorske surmises, “[Mr. van Hove] may not feel the oppressive repetitions of the history of violence against brown women bearing down on his body. But for many of us, it’s the umpteenth time we’ve seen Anita assaulted for dramatic effect, each time under the guise of greater authenticity.” De Valle Schorske, “Opinion: Let ‘West Side Story’ and Its Stereotypes Die.” 76. Johnny Oleksinski, “‘Oklahoma!’ Review: Anti-gun Revival of Classic Shot to Hell,” New York Post, April 7, 2019. Footnotes (1) Christopher Bannow, “Surviving in the States: Audience Rejection on the Road with Oklahoma!,” 3 April 2023, https://howlround.com/surviving-states-audience-rejection-road-oklahoma . (2) Ibid. (3) According to musical theatre scholar Bryan M. Vandevender, the touring production featured less visible guns in its scene design than its Broadway counterpart. (4) See Pamela Haag’s analysis of gun companies’ influential tactics in The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2016). (5) As I theorize, a “gun musical” focalizes firearms—and their provocative meaning-making—as essential objects in the musical’s dramaturgy and physical world. Put another way, just as a perfect Aristotelian plot would unravel with the removal of any scene, a gun musical could not function without their signature weaponry and the human conditions they engender. (6) For a fuller examination of Hamilton’s guns, which contextualizes the production’s weaponless Tony Awards performance, see my article “‘What if This Bullet is My Legacy?’: The Guns of Hamilton,” Studies in Musical Theatre 12, no. 2 (June 2018): 251-56. (7) Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, “Domestic Violence and Firearms,” https://efsgv.org/learn/type-of-gun-violence/domestic-violence-and-firearms/ . (8) Kimberly King, “Gun Violence Crisis: With Revenge and Retaliation on the Rise, How Police Are Responding,” 17 February 2021, https://wlos.com/news/local/gun-violence-crisis-with-revenge- retaliation-on-the-rise-how-asheville-police-are-responding. (9) Marissa Edmund, “Gun Violence Disproportionately and Overwhelmingly Hurts Communities of Color,” Center for American Progress, 30 June 2022, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/gun- violence-disproportionately-and-overwhelmingly-hurts-communities-of-color/. (10) Ibid. (11) Nicole Moeder, “Number of Trans Homicides Doubled over 4 Years, with Gun Killings Fueling Increase: Advocates,” ABC News, 12 October 2022, https://abcnews.go.com/US/homicide-rate-trans- people-doubled-gun-killings-fueling/story?id=91348274. (12) Eugenio Weigend Vargas and Marissa Edmund, “Gun Suicides Among Former and Current Military Members,” Center for American Progress, 3 March 2022, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/gun- suicides-among-former-and-current-military-members/. (13) Robert Gebeloff, Danielle Ivory, Bill Marsh, Allison McCann, and Albert Sun, “Childhood’s Greatest Danger: The Data on Kids and Gun Violence,” New York Times, 14 December 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/14/magazine/gun-violence-children-data-statistics.html . (14) Beth Duff-Brown, “Californians Living with Handgun Owners More Than Twice as Likely to Die by Homicide, Study Finds,” 4 April 2022, https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/04/handguns- homicide- risk.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CDespite%20widespread%20perceptions%20that%20a,of%20health%20p olicy%20at%20the (15) For histories of the gun industry’s attempt to domesticate US firearms through white women consumers, see Laura Browder, Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Meredith Conti, “Hired Guns: Whiteness, Womanhood, and Progressive-era Shooting Promoters,” Theatre Journal 73, no. 4 (Dec. 2021): 511-532; and Andrea L. Smalley, “‘Our Lady Sportsmen’: Gender, Class, and Conservation in Sport Hunting Magazines, 1873–1920,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 4, no. 4 (October 2005): 355–80. (16) The NRA was founded in 1871 in New York. (17) Nicholas Johnson, Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms (New York: Prometheus Books, 2014), 13. While magistrates and legislators banned or significantly curtailed Black and Indigenous gun ownership from the colonial period onward, marginalized communities of color had their own traditions of arms that variously conformed to and resolutely rejected governmental interference. (18) Haag, The Gunning of America, 357 and 356. (19) Ibid 354. (20) Ibid. (21) Benjamin Barber, “Oklahoma! — How Political Is Broadway?” Salmagundi 137/138 (2003): 3-11, 9. (22) To be more specific, the Oklahoma Enabling Act of 1906 permitted “the Oklahoma Territory and the Indian Territory to enter the union under a single-state constitution.” Michael Schulman, “Two Broadway Shows Dismantle the American Myth,” The New Yorker, April 16, 2019. (23) Bruce Kirle, “Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of ‘Oklahoma!’ in American Consciousness,” Theatre Journal 55, no 2 (May 2003): 251-274, 251. (24) See Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) and Warren Hoffman, The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014). (25) As Warren Hoffman notes, the show’s refrain, in which the company repeatedly chants “Oklahoma!,” can ironically be translated to them shouting “Red People!” Hoffman, The Great White Way, 66. (26) Donatella Galella, America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington DC’s Arena Stage (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019), 202. (27) Galella, America in the Round, 197. Galella describes three modes of understanding multiracial Oklahoma! casts that both producers and spectators could adopt: multiracial-conscious, whitened, and postracial (200). (28) Kirle, “Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of ‘Oklahoma!,’” 262. (29) The Theatre Guild Presents Oklahoma!: A Musical Play Based on the Play ‘Green Grow the Lilacs’ by Lynn Riggs, music by Richard Rodgers, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein (New York: Williamson Music, 1943). (30) Susan C. Cook, “Pretty like the Girl: Gender, Race and Oklahoma!” Contemporary Theatre Review 19, no. 1 (2009), 35-47, 43. (31) Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma!. (32) Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma!. (33) Cook, “Pretty like the Girl,” 37. (34) Kirle, “Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of ‘Oklahoma!,’” 251-274, 259 and 261. (35) Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma! (36) Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions Behind Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 27. (37) West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, based on a conception of Jerome Robbins, book by Arthur Laurents, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (New York: Musical Theatre International, 1960), 86. (38) West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 119-120. (39) Brian Eugenio Herrera, “Compiling West Side Story’s Parahistories, 1949-2009,” Theatre Journal 64 (2012), 231-247: 236. (40) West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 6. (41) West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 56. (42) West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 7. (43) Zhu and Belgrad, “This Cockeyed City,” 86. (44) Ibid 90. (45) Herrera, “Compiling West Side Story’s Parahistories, 1949-2009” and Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015); David Román, “Comment — Theatre Journals,” Theatre Journal 54, no. 3 (Oct. 2002), https://www.jstor.org/stable/25069090 ; David Román, Paula Court, and Richard Termine, Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture in the Performing Arts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez, José, Can You See? Latinos on and off Broadway (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999); and Frances Negrón-Muntaner, “Feeling Pretty: West Side Story and Puerto Rican Identity Discourses,” Social Text 63, vol. 18, no. 2 (2000), 83-106. (46) West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 43. (47) Robin Bernstein, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Social Text 24, no. 7 (2009), 67-94. (48) Greg Evans, “‘Oklahoma!’ to be Broadway’s First ‘Gun Neutral’ Production: Lauded Musical Joins Hollywood Initiative: Sundance, Deadline, January 28, 2019, https://deadline.com/2019/01/oklahoma- broadway-musical-gun-neutral-sundance-daniel-fish-1202543741/. (49) Qtd. in Charles Passy, “‘Oklahoma!’ Takes Aim at Gun Issue,” Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2019. (50) Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai have edited the first essay collection on van Hove’s work entitled Ivo van Hove: From Shakespeare to David Bowie (London: Methuen Drama, 2018). For coverage of the protests of Amar Ramasar’s casting, see Julia Jacobs, “‘West Side Story’ Stalemate: Bernardo’s Staying. So Are Protestors,” New York Times, February 19, 2020, and Adrian Horton, “‘We can’t stand by this any more’: Inside the West Side Story Premiere Protest,” The Guardian, February 21, 2020. (51) An inventory of West Side Story’s reviews was created by Playbill’s Dan Meyer on February 20, 2020. http://www.playbill.com/article/read-reviews-for-the-west-side-story-revival-on-broadway . (52) Soraya Nadia McDonald, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Oklahoma!” The Undefeated, September 16, 2019. https://theundefeated.com/features/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-oklahoma-on-broadway/ . (53) A cleverly installed blood cannon delivers the graphic stage effect. (54) Todd S. Purdue, “Culture: Oklahoma! Gets a Dark, Brilliant Remake,” The Atlantic, April 8, 2019. (55) Of van Hove’s “austere aesthetic” Helen Shaw wryly observes: “he automatically modernizes everything he touches, from Shakespeare to O’Neill.” Helen Shaw, “In the New West Side Story, When You’re Onstage You’re Onscreen All the Way,” New York Magazine/vulture.com, February 20, 2020. https://www.vulture.com/2020/02/theater-review-a-new-west-side-story-onscreen-all-the-way.html . (56) Tim Teeman, “‘Oklahoma!’ on Broadway: Creator and Cast Reveal How to Reimagine a Classic,” The Daily Beast, thedailybeast.com , April 15, 2019. https://www.thedailybeast.com/oklahoma-on-broadway- creator-and-cast-reveal-how-to-reimagine-a-classic. (57) Laura Collins-Hughes, “For 13 Years, He has Humanized the Villain of Oklahoma!,” New York Times, January 20, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/theater/patrick-vaill-oklahoma-broadway.html . (58) Catherine M. Young, “Sympathy for the Incel? On Oklahoma! and Jud Fry in the #MeToo Era.” Howlround.com , June 26, 2019. https://howlround.com/sympathy-incel . (59) McDonald, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Oklahoma!” Bryan M. Vandevender queered Vaill’s portrayal of Jud in a compelling paper delivered at the 2022 Mid-America Theatre Conference. (60) Qtd. in Teeman, “Oklahoma! on Broadway.” (61) Carina de Valle Schorske, “Opinion: Let ‘West Side Story’ and Its Stereotypes Die,” New York Times, February 24, 2020. (62) Alexandra Schwartz, “Theatre: A Grim Take on ‘West Side Story,’” The New Yorker, February 21, 2020. (63) Charles McNulty, “Review: ‘West Side Story’ Blasts Back to Broadway – Kinetic, Bloody and Modern to the Core,” Los Angeles Times, February 20, 2020; Schwartz, “A Grim Take”; and Rafer Guzmán, “Review: ‘West Side Story’ on Broadway Gets a Dark Update, Loses Some of its Cool,’ Newsday, February 21, 2020. (64) “Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai, “Ivo van Hove: An Introduction,” in Ivo van Hove: From Shakespeare to David Bowie, edited by Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai (London: Methuen, 2018), 1-16, 7. (65) See Sarah Taylor Ellis‘s Doing the Time Warp: Queer Temporalities and Musical Theatre (London: Methuen Drama, 2022). (66) Schwartz, “A Grim Take.” (67) Jan Versweyveld designed West Side Story’s sets and lights, and Luke Hall designed the video; Laura Jellinek designed Oklahoma!’s set and Joshua Thorson designed projections. (68) McDonald, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Oklahoma!.” Scott Zielinksi was the production’s lighting designer. (69) “When the camera turns and shows us both Daunno’s and Vaill’s profiles,” notes Sara Holdren, “stretched out huge across a wall where a black-and-white vista of fields and ranch houses is painted, we get a nasty jolt: Here is the country inside of these men, and here are their brutalities laying the foundations for the country.” Sara Holdren, “Theatre Review: An Oklahoma! Where the Storm Clouds Loom Above the Plain,” New York Magazine/Vulture.com, October 8, 2018. (70) Ben Brantley, “Review: A Smashing ‘Oklahoma!’ Is Reborn in the Land of Id,” New York Times, April 7, 2019. (71) Teeman, “‘Oklahoma!’ on Broadway.” (72) Sarah Larson, ”Daniel Fish’s Dark Take on ’Oklahoma!’” Ariel Nereson analyzed the choreographic work of the re-envisioned dream ballet in a 2022 Mid-America Theatre Conference presentation. (73) Laurey is effectively muzzled by Hammerstein’s book, which provides no dialogue during Curly and Jud’s struggle and Jud’s accidental stabbing. (74) Jesse Green and Ben Brantley, “Review: There’s a Dark Golden Haze in This Reclaimed ‘Oklahoma!,’ New York Times, October 7, 2018. Green and Brantley’s joint review is responding to the 2018 Off- Broadway production. (75) Of watching Anita’s attempted gang-rape (and its replication on the enormous projection screen) as a Puerto Rican woman, Carina del Valle Schorske surmises, “[Mr. van Hove] may not feel the oppressive repetitions of the history of violence against brown women bearing down on his body. But for many of us, it’s the umpteenth time we’ve seen Anita assaulted for dramatic effect, each time under the guise of greater authenticity.” De Valle Schorske, “Opinion: Let ‘West Side Story’ and Its Stereotypes Die.” (76) Johnny Oleksinski, “‘Oklahoma!’ Review: Anti-gun Revival of Classic Shot to Hell,” New York Post, April 7, 2019. About The Author(s) Meredith Conti is Associate Professor of Theatre at the University at Buffalo, SUNY (UB) and a historian of nineteenth-century theatre and popular culture in the United States and Britain. Her research variously explores the intersections of theatre and medicine; nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular entertainment forms (including world fairs, vaudeville, Wild West shows, and fancy shooting exhibitions); gender and race in the Victorian period; and guns and gun violence in theatre. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Community Circles and Love Triangles: Gun Violence and Belonging in Oklahoma! and West Side Story Decommissioning the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field and Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline More than a Props List: Redefining Material Culture as Survival and Pleasure in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined The Politics of Trance: Victoria Woodhull and the Radical Reform of Platform Mediumship Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900 Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theatre Made Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era Performance in the Zócalo: Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Lisa Jackson-Schebetta 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 Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine Lisa Jackson-Schebetta By Published on May 14, 2017 Download Article as PDF ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. In fall 1680, the newly appointed viceroy of New Spain, Tomás de la Cerda, the Marqués de la Laguna and Conde de Paredes, made his entrance into Mexico City, passing through two triumphal arches, one municipal and one ecclesiastic. In New Spain, as in Europe, viceregal arches depicted mythical, iconic and emblematic figures and stories. Through the arches, the city and church of Mexico City (standing in for New Spain) communicated to the incoming ruler their hopes for his governance, while extolling the qualities he presumably already possessed. The two arches under which Laguna passed are perhaps the most written about of all arches in New Spain, as much for their criollo designers as for their content. Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, intellectual luminary of Mexico City, designed the municipal arch. Rather than adhere to the conventional European custom of using classical mythology and symbolic iconography, he populated his arch with images of past Mexica rulers, and a single, powerful, indigenous god, Huitzilopochtli, patron of Tenochtitlan. [1] Rising literary talent Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz designed the ecclesiastic arch. In contrast to Sigüenza y Góngora, she opted to utilize the motif of Neptune. Sor Juana made local references, as well: the unfinished cathedral and the flooding that plagued the city. The arches have been well examined, at times together and often alone, across the fields of history, literature, and cultural studies, including within discourses of the Latin American Baroque and developing criollo consciousness.[2] They have also been situated within the larger mise en scène of the preceding months’ viceregal re-enactment of the trajectory of Hernán Cortéz from Veracruz.[3] Despite both arches’ multiple references to water, however, and both Mexico City’s and Tenochtitlan’s long and complicated relationship to the lacustrine environs of the basin of Mexico, the arches have yet to be examined in relation to the conflicted, and ongoing Desagüe (drainage) project in the northeast quadrant of the basin of Mexico, a massive project which the viceroy likely made an obligatory tour of in the first days of his reign. In this article, I examine the two arches not as performing (nor as a performance of) imperialism, anti-imperialism, Baroque communication, or criolloismo, a priori. Rather, I situate the arches within both the human and the natural history of the city and its basin (or, rather, the basin and its city), in an attempt to both follow and build upon charges laid out by Dipesh Chakrabarty in relation to the Anthropocene. Chakrabarty argues that to think of the human as geological we must “scale up our imagination.”[4] In order to respond to the Anthropocene’s collapse of human and geological chronologies, we must, as historians, work against what Chakrabarty characterizes as the “conscious tendency” of “philosophers and students of history” to (falsely) “separate” human history from natural history.[5] I build on Chakrabarty’s examination of the Anthropocene by situating the 1680 viceregal arches volumetrically, through a focus on water and its contingent subterranean environs, rather than on the earth’s surface and its atmosphere (Chakrabarty’s focus). My application of the volumetric is adapted from Mark Anderson’s work on contemporary Mexico City.[6] There are two larger conversations that I hope this article engages. First, I ask how the Anthropocene can move performance history towards a merging of human and natural history.[7] How does the Anthropocene re-orient the ways in which a performance historian conceptualizes evidence and interprets the meaning-making (and history-producing) processes of images, actions, and human-built structures in relation to histories of water and land? Simultaneously, I hope to demonstrate how performance histories situated within the geographical and temporal margins of established discourses of the Anthropocene might offer means through which to scale up our imagination of the Anthropocene itself. Volumetric Methodology and the Anthropocene In “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Dipesh Chakrabarty writes that the Anthropocene has repositioned humans. Humans are no longer biological actors (beings that effect their natural environs through, for example, agriculture, pollution, urbanization) but, rather, geological agents, beings whose actions irrevocably change the earth. For historians, Chakrabarty argues, the Anthropocene offers a number of challenges. Historians must imagine (and contend with) deep time: both a future in which humans may become extinct and a deep past in which the human appears as but one quite recent species. While Chakrabarty centers his attentions on the implications of the Anthropocene for the historical imagination (and the merging of deep time with modern time), his provocations focus on the surface of the earth and its atmosphere.[8] Though the planet’s waters and stratigraphy may be understood as implicitly included in Chakrabarty’s analysis, he does not explicitly engage with either, enacting, arguably, a certain human-centered analysis of history even as he attempts to destabilize such analyses. That is, human life is largely lived on the terranean level of the earth. When humans in cities travel underground and/or explore the deep sea, it is through human-made apparatuses, dependent on air that circulates through human lungs. Geological history, in contrast, must move through sedimentary layers and along with currents of ocean, river, lake. Mark Anderson, in his study of contemporary Mexico City, critiques “the ‘flattening’ effects of modern planning, which may have originated in European cartographic traditions but which continue to feature prominently in data based and satellite representations of the world such as Google Earth.” [9] Anderson extends his argument to dismantle the “notion of the ecological footprint as a conceptual tool.” The “footprint,” he holds, despite its utility, is born of and beholden to the flatness and flattening enacted by geopolitics. Its emphasis, intended or not, on surface-centric engagement “both exposes and reproduces [ . . . ] cartographic territorializations, showing that cities are not contained by their cartographic borders, but still flattening them into schematic representations that fail to evoke the full volume of urban ecologies.”[10] While a volumetric perspective, inclusive of water as well as the subterranean, addresses a gap in Chakrabarty’s “Four Theses” for historians, Nigel Clark cautions that the volumetric is not simply a matter of moving up to the clouds or down to the magma. Rather, Clark calls for bringing “politics into an intensive engagement with the planet’s own dynamics: its process of sedimentation and mobilization, its layering and folding, its periodicities and singularities.”[11] In this, Clark and Chakrabarty share a contention: a collapse of human history and geological history, a charge Anderson prioritizes in his analysis of the subterranean transport systems and waterways of contemporary Mexico City. Anderson issues a challenge to the urban historian and planner alike to think in geological depth, as much as geographical surface, in order to enable “one to imagine a livable, sustainable future” in opposition to certain neoliberal, environmental, and Anthropocene-based narratives of an unavoidable apocalypse of ever increasing ecological degradation in Mexico City.[12] Anderson argues that waterways and subways testify not only to a sinking city (up to, perhaps, eight inches a year, and over 42 feet in the last 100 years), but also represent intuitive and imaginative (present and potential) ways of relating to implacabilities of environment. The “intense, entangled and” (literal and metaphoric) “fluid geographies” of Anderson’s contemporary Mexico City move through and contextualize the historical site of Mexico City 1680, as well.[13] Anderson reads waterways and subways. I also use waterways and human made constructions, but in tandem with human made images. The spatial and temporal dramaturgy of water and imagery in the 1680 viceregal arches enacts and evokes if not a collapse than a co-ordination of human and natural history. That is, the 1680 viceregal arches are not only imperial display, representative of iterative confrontations and negotiations between human histories. Rather, the arches invite a concurrent inclusion of the subterranean levels of Nahua cosmology as well as the lacustrine environment within/from which the city of Tenochtitlan was forged. The Basin of Mexico before and after Human Settlement (1700-1100 BCE) Viceregal entrances to Mexico City had been taking place since the 1500s to mark, celebrate and ritualistically enact the installment of the Spanish king’s proxy government in the New World.[14] Though arch-bishops likewise received celebratory entries, it was the viceroy that was considered the king’s “living image.”[15] As such, the viceregal entrance was the largest celebration of Mexico City’s many, elaborate festivals. Like viceroys before him, Laguna’s entrance into Mexico City was the culmination of a two to three month long itinerary across the territory of New Spain, from Veracruz through Jalapa, Tlaxcala, Cholula and Huejotzingo. His penultimate entrance took place at Otumba, the site of the decisive battle of Cortéz and the Tlaxcalans against Cuauhetemoc—notably, as Castro reminds us, a battle lost and won, given the environment of Tenochtitlan, via water. Cortéz, Castro writes, secured victory in “an odd naval war at about 2000 meters above sea level.” His “success relied largely on the water expertise of the city’s Indian enemies.” [16] Cortéz’s victory over the Nahua is but one event in a much longer history of the environs that ultimately hosted Tenochtitlan and then Mexico City. The natural history and human histories of the basin of Mexico, in tandem, provide particular insight into the dramaturgy of the 1680 arches. The basin of Mexico is a closed “hydrological watershed” (now artificially drained) of 7000 km. The basin’s lowest plane is a lacustrine environment approximately 2250m above sea level. The basin is surrounded by imposing volcanic ranges on its south, east, and west. Many peaks reach over 4000m; the highest is 5465m. The north of the basin is a series of hills. The entire area “lies in a Transversal Volcanic Axis, a late tertiary formation, 30-70km wide.” As such, “earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tectonic instability” have long been key features of the region.[17] Preceding human settlement, the basin hosted five shallow lakes, of which four existed at a higher elevation than the fifth, Lake Texacoco. Lake Texacoco not only received runoff from the other four lakes but also from the surrounding mountains, as well. In an open system, that runoff and its salt and mineral deposits would have flowed to the ocean. In the closed system, Lake Texacoco held the water, and hence, formed a briny body of water connected to bodies of fresh water. The basin hosted nine major environmental zones, all rich in flora and fauna diversity, including aquatic and subaquatic life.[18] Archaeologists assert that the “hydrological cycle of the basin” followed a seasonal pattern in which rain and snow “percolated into the soil,” to replenish “the aquifers and natural springs, or flowed into the lakes in the central plateau where most of it evaporated.”[19] The first humans settled in the basin between 1700 and 1100 BCE (well before the establishment of Tenochtitlan in 1345 CE and the height of Mexica rule in the 15th century CE). The human population increased until, by the 7th century BCE, the first evidence of human-built dams—attempts to control the unique characteristics of the basin— appeared. As the human population continued to grow in the basin, so did human intervention. Human concerns of fresh drinking water, waste water disposal, agricultural irrigation, and navigable waterways drove construction projects to protect against floods and isolate the salty waters of Lake Texacoco. Because all the lakes were connected, however, such projects involved masterful balancing acts. A dam in one lake necessarily affected another lake as well as the basin’s natural hydrological cycle which, in turn, “exacerbated the impact of drought and flood events,” effectively driving additional human intervention.[20] By the late fifteenth century CE, the population of the basin had likely reached 1.5 million. The region might well have been the “largest and most densely settled area in the world” at the time.[21] The vastness of its two major cities-- Tenochtitlan, the seat of the Mexica empire, together with Tlatelolco, ruled by Tenochtitlan at this time --is all the more impressive for having been forged into land, from whence there was so little. Tenochtitlan, as Mundy writes, had been no less than “reclaimed” from “shallow swamps around an island in Lake Texacoco.” Mundy continues to explain that “controlling the excesses of that environment was a constant battle, one likened to warfare both in representations of the city and in practice.”[22] Basin inhabitants had long navigated and negotiated the challenges of their environment. As the empire grew, Nahua rulers and their people faced the same challenges (fresh water, waste water, navigable waterways), but in an ever expanding scale. As Ezcurra et al point out, though the basin of Mexico was rich in species diversity, that diversity was not sufficiently abundant to sustain such a large human population. Water, necessarily, presented a key challenge and opportunity. Human inhabitants of the basin had learned to farm on land that regularly flooded, garnering sustenance from both the crops of dry farm land and the plants, insects, and small aquatic creatures of the seasonal wetland. The Nahua agricultural system, chinampas, first appeared between 700 and 900 CE.[23]Chinampas were a “succession of raised fields within a network of canals dredged on the lake bed.” The rich sediment of the canals could be spread across the fields, leading to “abundant harvests.”[24] Still, the Mexica could not sustain their city. Records demonstrate the massive import practices of the city at its height: 7000 tons of grain, 5000 tons of beans, 40 tons of dried chilis, 20 tons of cocoa seeds, and many other foodstuffs and goods, as well.[25] The resources, whether trade or, very often, tribute, had to travel through water ways, efficiently and regularly. Simultaneously, the city had to be able to be defended via waterways, and waterways had to be used to launch military offenses. The lives of Mexica rulers and their people, thus, were intimately, and exigently, bound to building and maintaining dams and canals, as well as aqueducts, desalination, and drainage projects. Both Ezcurra et al and Candiani caution that it would be a mistake to “interpret the success of Tenochtitlan and the Aztec empire as resulting from sustainable use of the basin’s natural resources.”[26] The Mexica and other inhabitants of the basin related to water in ways conceptually different from those of the Europeans who would arrive. Mundy explains how the Nahua “understood the surrounding environment to be filled with divine presences that made themselves manifest in the fall of rain and the sweep of the tides.” [27]Still, the Nahua absolutely and forcibly altered their watery world. The 600 years preceding the arrival of the Spanish attests to the most intense period of human construction in the basin. Humans built massive and numerous “dams, causeways, aqueducts, canals, irrigation systems, terraces.”[28] This construction, in conjunction with urban expansion, brought with it deforestation, desiccation, pollution, and overexploitation of the natural environment. Human innovation both succeeded and failed, spectacularly. In the mid 15th century, Mexica rulers built a 16 km dyke made of soil and stone “to prevent floods and protect freshwater from saline water,” which introduced “substantive changes to the lacustrine system.”[29] In the late 15th century Ahuitzotl (a ruler included in Sigüenza y Góngora’s arch) built a massive aqueduct to control waters newly possessed by military force from Coyoacán. The aqueduct collapsed in 1499, “destroying dwellings, places, orchards.”[30] I offer this not to discount the validity of Nahua cosmologies or technology, but to demonstrate against the oft-simplified platitudes that position indigenous peoples as ever in harmony with nature. Living with the lacustrine basin was, for the Nahua, akin to warfare, and just as brutal. For, as the natural history of the basin tells us, the environment was unstable, and, despite human efforts, continued to flood, overflow, and shift. Water, Conquest, Colonization The Spanish took advantage of water (both in terms of indigenous knowledge of water and the cutting off of fresh water from the city) to win Tenochtitlan in August 1521. Though the Spaniards capitalized upon indigenous water expertise, they also feared it, facts that the indigenous elite and non-elite utilized. Almost immediately after the final fall of the city, the indigenous “began to reorganize and repair their water networks.” [31] Some could gain favor by doing so with or for the Spanish. But, just as the Mexica rulers had known, the Spanish saw that control of the water equaled control of the city. The Spanish occupiers utilized indigenous expertise, but were not eager to cede rights to the water. In return, indigenous inhabitants, upon losing access to water infrastructure, sabotaged the system. By 1524, viceregal authorities employed water guards to protect Spanish rule. In the process of colonization, Spaniards imposed ideological, political and cultural rule of their empire by remaking the spatiality of conquered cities to reflect European aesthetics and use. In Tenochtitlan, Spaniards tore down indigenous structures (such as the Mexicas’ sacred temple), and rebuilt their own (the Templo Mayor) on the destroyed sites. They also erected new structures, while simultaneously re-routing main travel ways, re-patterning human dwelling space, and claiming new or repurposed land for European livestock and agriculture. As SilverMoon and Ennis detail, the Nahua altepetl (roughly translated as, but not equivalent to, city-state) of Tenochtitlan carried within its philosophical and geographical structure the political, historiographical, and cosmological convictions of its pre-Colombian inhabitants. Each unit of the altepetl was composed of smaller units (calpolli or tlaxillacalli) which formed “distinct regions or ‘neighborhoods’ consisting of extended kinship groups.” The “spatial organization” of the calpolli “structurally contain[ed]” the history and governance of the calipolli and the altepetl:” a “rotational pattern” reflecting the arrival of each calpolli and according to which “communal tasks and functions” were assigned and carried out for and within the altepetl.[32] The “Nahua cosmos” consists of layers above and below the ground, joined by the terrestrial plane—the altepetl—which, in turn, enables the joining of the earth (tlalticpac) “to the rest of the universe.”[33] The Spaniards destroyed the architecture of Tenochtitlan, but they also rearranged the city, enacting a material erasure of the altepetl and, effectively, Nahua cosmology with it. “The disruption of the continuity of altepetl structure,” write SilverMoon and Ennis, “constitutes one of the most severe and fundamental ruptures wrought by colonialism.”[34] “One might assume,” Mundy writes, “that the rupture of the Conquest and the diminishment of indigenous power in the city would have led to the erosion of technological knowledge, but there is abundant evidence of the continuing role that indigenous experts played in managing the valley’s water system.”[35] Such evidence, as Mundy documents, resided throughout the city, including the Desagüe.[36] Through the 16th century, it became increasingly apparent that the designs of the Spanish for their imperial city could not develop with the Nahuas’ conceptualization, usage, and engineering of water. The Spaniards’ European crops, livestock, city, and bodies needed water to be managed differently: no seasonal flooding, more freshwater, more effective flood protection. Moreover, the tension between indigenous and Spanish management of water had additionally resulted in the lakes “filling with eroded soil and frequently overflowing” the city.[37] Finally, the Spaniards, as Candiani simply and elegantly puts it, dreamed of dry land.[38] Viceregal authorities embarked on an ambitious plan: artificial desiccation of the basin. The Desagüe was begun in 1607. In its first year alone, the project required the labor of over 60,000 indigenous workers to dig tunnels and canals, Construction and labor demands, as Candiani details, rose and fell, peaking again in the decade after the 1629 flood, and again in 1760s and 1790s.[39] The project lasted nearly 200 years, progressing in fits and starts of failure and success. The closed system of the basin was opened, canals were made into roads, and lakes were drained; aqueducts, sewage systems, and dams were built, razed, and rebuilt, each major undertaking a performance of inter-cultural negotiation. At times indigenous or criollo engineers helmed the project; at other times, they were ousted. Spanish (at times drawing on Muslim or Roman technology), German, Dutch, indigenous, and criollo convictions and theories vied for primacy. Urban dwellers and rural inhabitants, as well as municipal and religious leaders, clashed over expectations and needs. And, still, the natural history of the basin, hydrological and stratigraphic, continued to challenge and defeat human needs for fresh water, waste water disposal, dry land, and travel. The Desagüe constituted a major feature of governance for each new viceroy (installed every 6-7 years, generally). Human histories continued to be brokered, and human efforts broken, by the natural, a context through which the viceregal arches of 1680 take on additional meanings. Human Histories brokered by the Hydrological Histories Viceregal arches in Mexico City, though temporary, were imposing structures. The viceregal entrance into Mexico City was the most expensive festival of all the many festivals and events to take place in the capital. Each entrance cost an “average of 23,000 pesos in gold (more than a Native American worker could earn in a lifetime).”[40] The triumphal arches featured as the centerpieces of the event. In 1680, the municipal arch, temporary and free standing in the Plaza Santo Domingo, was over five stories tall, reaching beyond the tallest permanent building in the city. It cost “approximately 2000 pesos in gold” and boasted gilding, bronze statues, and enormous painted canvases.[41] The viceroy halted his progress and heard an aural description of the arch. In the municipal arch, Sigüenza y Góngora presented twelve paintings of Nahua imagery: eleven rulers and Huitzilopochtli, the god who had led the Nahua to Tenochtitlan, and who served as patron of the city, god of war and god of sun. Anna More argues that though Sigüenza y Góngora’s arch clearly spoke the syntax of European statesmanship, he also “[broke with] the convention of spectacle” through his use of “local figures” in order to create both a “bridge” between Spain and New Spain and to affirm creole stewardship of indigenous history.[42] Though Sigüenza y Góngora may well have been crafting a bridge between Spain and new Spain, while asserting certain criollo priorities and prowess, his arch documents not only the collision of human histories, but the collisions of the human with the natural, processes begun before both Spanish and Nahua rule. The Mexica were led to the basin of Mexico by Huitzilopochtli; the god displayed the site of their capital to them, in the southwest area of Lake Texacoco. It is he, then, who might be seen as the fulcrum upon which the most intense period of human intervention into the lacustrine environment of the basin began. Though Sigüenza y Góngora may have intended the figure of Huitzilopochtli as a beginning point of (human, Tenochtitlan, and Mexico City) history, the god nonetheless also represents a transition, a before and after. Also: he is not a god of rain, but of war. By situating the Mexica within a lake, as well as blessing them in war, he representationally connects war with water, a theme repeated throughout the arch’s panels. Acamapichtli, who ruled from 1372 to 1392, and considered the first king of the Mexica, is rendered with reeds in his hands, expanding the city over lakes. His image is followed by Huitzilihuitl, who, Sigüenza y Góngora explained, governed with clemency even as he consolidated massive military victories.[43] Chimalpopocatzin, renowned for aqueduct building, follows. He not only contributed to major hydrological projects, he also sacrificed his life to protect the city and his descendants (its rulers). He is painted breaking open his chest, defending his children. Itzcohuatl, Motecohcuma Ilhuicaminan, Axayacatzin, Ticoctzin each represent territorial expansion for the Mexica empire, and, with it, water projects. Ahuitzotl, as noted above, appears as well. Sigüenza y Góngora renders Ahuitzotl drowning in water surrounding the city. Within the waves are numbers of old men, representing his counselors. Ahuitzotl constructed the ill-fated Acuecuexco aqueduct. Under Ahuitzotl, Tenochtitlan benefited greatly from the Chapultepec aqueduct, which brought fresh river water to the city, but the dry season regularly sapped the resource of its robustness. Ahuitzotl embarked upon building another aqueduct, that would “tap the five springs” near the city of Huitzilopochtli, governed by the city of Coyoacán. Coyoacán’s ruler, Tzutzumatin, as well as Tenochtitlan counselors, warned Ahuitzotl that his plan was ill-fated. He would not be able to control the waters.[44] Ahuitzotl ignored the advice and built the aqueduct in 1499. In 1502 it did indeed devastatingly flood the city. The lesson for the viceroy is to listen to advice with more prudence. Such a lesson could have been interpreted generally. It could also have been flattering to the viceroy: a critique of Ahuitzotl and a compliment to the better judgment of Laguna. Additionally, however, the floods had not stopped. The image resonates with the Desagüe, as well, resurrecting feats of indigenous engineering, capitalized upon and compromised by the Spanish colonists. The final image of the arch presented Motecohcuma Xocoyotzin. He is rendered in imperial grab, rather than in death. In the image, of course, we can read the survivance of pre-Colombia Tenochtitlan, as well as a hoped for amicable relationship between New Spain and the viceroy, first embodied by Motecohcuma’s welcome of Cortéz. Sigüenza y Góngora does not include the death of Motecohcuma, nor the deaths and defeats of his two successors and the resultant fall of Tenochtitlan. Though Motecohcuma is not represented in defeat, defeated he and his city indeed had been: through water. After receiving the presentation of the municipal arch, Laguna swore his intent to govern wisely and received keys to the city. City councilmen accompanied Laguna to the ecclesiastic arch, constructed over the façade of the Cathedral. The arch was seventy-five feet high and forty-four feet wide. It was comprised of eight major paintings, two between the columns, and four on the bases.[45] Again, the viceroy halted to hear the arch’s description. Sor Juana used Neptune to allegorize the viceroy. Historians have noted Sor Juana’s cleverness in playing on the Laguna (lake) of the viceroy’s name by choosing the water-bound Neptune.[46] I would add that, given the lacustrine environment of the basin the allegory of Laguna as Neptune enacts a more violent, and final, transposition of space and time as well. That is, though Sor Juana used Neptune to praise and direct the viceroy, the ecclesiastic arch also effectively transplanted three European figures (Neptune, Laguna, and the King of Spain) from the open waters of the ocean into a closed, and enclosed, water system: that of the basin of Mexico City. In the central painting of the arch, Laguna and his wife are depicted as Neptune and Amphitrite, ensconced in a chariot pulled by four seahorses. Each of the four winds (East, West, North, South) are rendered at the four corners of the canvas, surrounding the viceroy’s watery chariot, not unlike the mountains of hills that contained Mexico City. In the second painting of the arch, Sor Juana depicted the city of Inachus, flooded, and Neptune parting the waters with his trident. Sor Juana explained the image as a plea for the Marqúes to fund the drainage project of frequently flooded Mexico City. The theme is repeated in the next image, wherein Neptune steadies the island of Delos with his trident. Both images, born of mythology, nonetheless directly reference the environment of the city within the basin of Mexico. Neptune continued to appear throughout the images of the arch, accumulating meanings, yet carrying the first three paintings with him. When the presentation of the arch concluded, Laguna swore his allegiance to the Catholic Church. His procession continued into the viceregal palace and its chambers to enact the transfer of power. At some point in the initial days of his rule, Laguna must have toured and contended with the Desagüe, a continuation of the dramaturgy of the arches. Conclusion The given circumstances of the Anthropocene remain contested. The when of its beginning functions as a key fulcrum in debates over its usage. Does it date, as is often put forth, from the Industrial Revolution and its attendant increase in pollution and carbon emissions? Or, would it more appropriately eclipse the Holocene altogether, dating its origin back to the agricultural revolution, a human engineered event facilitated by the Earth’s own warming? In the Americas, European conquest and colonialism wrought profound environmental changes for both natural and human history. In March 2015, Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin asserted 1610 and 1964 as two plausible dates for the beginning of the Anthropocene, the former due to a spike in what could be characterized as a globalization of disease (initially set in motion by the collisions of cultures in the New World in 1492), and the latter due to nuclear weapons fallout.[47] They write, “The arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean in 1492, and subsequent annexing of the Americas, led to the largest human population replacement in the past 13,000 years, the first global trade networks linking Europe, China, Africa and the Americas” and the “mixing of previously separate biotas.” [48] As Crosby described in his well-known The Columbian Exchange, “the fact that Kentucky bluegrass, daisies and dandelions, to name only three out of hundreds, are Old World in origin gives one a hint of the magnitude of the change that began in 1492.”[49] Europeans also brought pigs, sheep, cows, horses, and dogs. As their numbers increased, enormous tracts of land—and animal, plant, and human life—were transformed irrevocably throughout the Americas.[50] The implications of “1492,” for humanity, has been well documented, historicized, and theorized. While I am not discounting the real devastation wrought by European colonialism in the Americas, the Anthropocene demands, as Chakrabarty points out, that we reconsider the primacy of our focus on the colonial project and process. In the basin of Mexico, as elsewhere, the collision of natural and human history predates 1492, and it is the much deeper natural history (tectonic plates, closed water system) that quite explicitly and profoundly shaped, and continues to shape, the human in that geography. Performance and theatre historians must confront the politics of a decentered human, while simultaneously writing the human in collision (aiming towards collapse) with the natural. A certain queasiness ensues, given the quite real inequalities, based on categorizations and locations of humans, of the contemporary world. As we continue to build methodologies, I suggest we bear in mind Mark Anderson’s characterization of the subterranean waterways of Mexico City: evidence of degradation and devastation, but also of innovation and imagination. I also suggest that the Anthropocene itself must be scaled up in our imaginations. Discourses of the Anthropocene prioritize conceptualizations of progress, coalescing around geographically and temporally bound ideas of development, industrialization, and modernization. Definitions of the Anthropocene must contend with massive, global, human interaction with the environment; such interactions are the very foundation of the conceptualization of the term. But by focusing on the primarily western and northern geographical and the post-1700 temporal, orientation of, for example, the Industrial Revolution, we set limits upon the deep history the term calls for, replicating, in effect, certain patterns of priorities that have contributed to the current moment.[51] In 1680, Spain and New Spain, including Mexico City, were not marginal within the mise en scène of global power. In terms of industrialization, however, both Spain and the Spanish Americas have been marginalized in relation to Western and Northern Europe and the United States. And, yet, such sites, as I hope I have demonstrated, can prove powerfully effective in moving towards a synthesis of natural and human history. The when of the origin of the Anthropocene is a red herring for our field. Likewise, a focus on the 1700s forward, I suggest, enacts a paralysis of the ways in which the Anthropocene can mobilize us, as historians and citizens. Lisa Jackson-Schebetta is an assistant professor and director of graduate studies in Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on the hemispheric Americas and Iberian performance and theatre. Her first monograph, Traveler, there is no road: Theatre, the Spanish Civil War and the Decolonial Imagination in the Americas is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press. She earned her PhD from the University of Washington. [1] I use Mexica, in place of Aztec, following contemporary scholarship. The Mexica are one tribe of the Nahua. I maintain the usage of “Aztec” if in a direct quote. I also use Nahua when appropriate. [2] See, for example, Alejandro Cañeque, The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico (New York: Routledge, 2004); Francisco de la Maza, La Mitología Clásica en el Arte Colonial de México (Mexico DF: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1968); JR Mulryne, Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly and Margaret Shewing, editors, Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe: Volume II (Aldershot and London: Ashgate and MHRA, 2004); Kathleen Ross, The Baroque Narrative of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Antonio Rubial García, Historia de la Vida Cotidiana en Mexico: Tomo III, La Ciudad Barroca (México DF: El Colegio de México, 2005); Georgina Sabat-Rivers, “El Neptuno de Sor Juana: Fiesta Barroca y Programa Político,” University of Dayton Review 16.2 (Spring, 1983); Michael Schreffler, The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). [3] See Cañeque, The King’s Living Image. [4] Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009), 206. [5] Chakrabarty, 201. [6] Mark Anderson, “The Grounds of Crisis and the Geopolitics of Depth: Mexico City in the Anthropocene” in Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical Perspectives on Art, Film, and Literature, edited by Mark Anderson and Zelia Bora (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 105. The basin of Mexico continues to be a site in which the meeting of the human and the natural remains both legible and exigent. [7] I write move towards because, though I will situate human history alongside natural history, a total collapse of the two is beyond my discipline: I have but an introductory knowledge of geology. While I will draw upon and mobilize that knowledge, I do so with respect for experts in the sciences. I suspect a complete merging of human and natural history would demand the collaboration of humanists and scientists, not as in one field borrowing from another, but in terms of conceptualization of method, argument, and site. On a related note, I am intentionally eschewing object and thing studies within the humanities. In choosing not to work with, for example, Bill Brown, Nigel Thrift or Jane Bennet, or others, it is not for disregard of their work, but rather as a challenge to myself to be wary of substituting humanist readings of the non-human for natural history. [8] Chakrabarty, for emphasizing geology throughout the essay, demonstrates a preoccupation with the surface referencing, for example, the footprint (198), “accumulation in atmosphere of greenhouse gases” through “burning of fossil fuel and industrialized use of livestock” (198), biodiversity and the Sumatran rhino (210). [9] Anderson, 101-103; 105. [10] Anderson, 105. [11] Nigel Clark, “Geo-politics and the disaster of the Anthropocene,” The Sociological Review 62 (2014), 31. [12] Anderson, 105. [13] Ibid. [14] In 1528, triumphal arches hailed the Audiencia, or governing court. In 1611, arches were incorporated into the viceroy’s welcome. The office of the viceroy was created in 1535. [15] I take this phrase from Cañeque. [16] José Esteban Castro, Water, Power, and Citizenship: Social Struggle in the Basin of Mexico (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 45. [17] Exequiel Ezcurra, Marisa Mazari-Hiriart, Irene Pisanty, and Adrián Guillermo Aguilar, The Basin of Mexico: Critical Environmental Issues and Sustainability (New York, NY: United Nations University Press, 1999), 10. [18] Ezcurra, 11-12. [19] Castro, 43. [20] Ibid. [21] Ezcurra, 34. [22] Barbara E. Mundy, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 210. [23] Castro, 44. [24] Ezcurra, 7. [25] Ezcurra, 34. [26] Ibid. The idea recurs throughout Candiani’s book, as well. Its first explicit mention appears on page xxvi. Vera S. Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). [27] Mundy, 210. [28] Castro, 44. [29] Ibid. [30] Castro 45. [31] Castro 47. [32] SilverMoon and Michael Ennis, “The View of the Empire from the Altepetl: Nahua Historical and Global Imagination,” in Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Racial and Religious Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 153. [33] SilverMoon and Ennis, 155. I intentionally use present tense, here, as such cosmologies continue to survive in indigenous communities. [34] SilverMoon and Ennis, 153. [35] Mundy, 199. [36] We might situate such survivals alongside those already well documented in performance and theatre studies, particularly in regards to religious performance and mock combat. See Max Harris, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000); James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1992); Louise M. Burkhart, Barry D. Sell, and Miguel Leon-Portilla, Nahuatl Theatre Volume 1: Life and Death in Colonial Mexico (University of Oklahoma Press, 2004); Louise Burkhart, ed, Aztecs on Stage: Religious Theatre in Colonial Mexico (Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011). [37] Vera S. Candiani, “The Desagüe Reconsidered: Environmental Dimensions of Class Conflict in Colonial Mexico,” Hispanic American Historical Review 92, no 1 (2014), 6. [38] See Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land. [39] Candiani, “The Desagüe Reconsidered,” 15. [40] Linda Curcio-Nagy, “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the 1680 Viceregal Entry of the Marquis de la Laguna into Mexico City” Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe: Volume II, edited by J.R. Mulryne, Helen Watanbe-O’Kelly, and Margaret Shewring (Hampshire, England: MHRA and Ashgate, 2004), 353. [41] Curcio-Nagy, “Sor Juana” 353. [42] Anna More, Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 114-115. As Cañeque and others point out, though the use of Nahua imagery in such a public, diplomatic ceremony was indeed unheralded, the arch’s aesthetic and literary frame placed the figures firmly within European convention. Mixing of European and indigenous figures was not completely anathema in New Spain. The 1680 pageant of Querétaro, which Sigüenza y Góngora published a description of, included large parade figures of indigenous gods and the King of Spain. Indigenous arches, too, mixed imagery. In 1593, for example, Curcio -Nagy notes that an indigenous arch at the Chapel of Saint Joseph “depicted the Nahua eagle on a cactus being ridden by Saint Francis.” Chapel decorations included “pre-Conquest scenes and the ancient rulers of Tenochtitlan.” Linda A. Curcio-Nagy, The Great Festivals of Mexico City: Performing Power and Identity (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), 173, n19. [43] My summaries of the paintings are drawn from Sigüenza y Góngora’s published description of his work. See Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Teatro de Virtudes Políticas que constituyen a un principio. . . Mexico: Por la Biuda de Bernardo Calderon, 1680. Reprinted in Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Obras Históricas, edited by Jose Rojas Garciduenas, (Mexico DF: Editorial Porrua, 1960), 229-361.. [44] Mundy, 64. [45] Curcio-Nagy, “Sor Juana” 366. [46] See Curcio-Nagy, “Sor Juana,” and Sabat-Rivers, for example. The depiction of Laguna as Neptune was repeated in 1683, with the arrival of the new archbishop and his entry into Mexico City. See Maza, 121-134. [47] Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature vol. 519 (March 2015), 171. [48] Lewis and Maslin, 174. [49] Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1972), 73. Chakrabarty, in “Four Theses,” critiques Crosby. [50] See, for example, Elinor G.K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). [51] Wendt makes a similar case: “studies of the historical evolution of the Anthropocene can offer a new interpretation of the histories of Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires, as long as it avoids falling into conventional narratives of industrialization and modernization.” Helge Wendt, “Epilogue: The Iberian Way into the Anthropocene” in The Globalization of Knowledge in the Iberian Colonial World, edited by Helge Wendt (Berlin: Max Planck Institute Open Access Edition, 2016), 298. “Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine" by Lisa Jackson-Schebetta ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 2 (Spring 2017) ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Curtis Russell Editorial Assistant: Christine Snyder Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy in the AnthropoScene” by Theresa J. May “Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene" by Shelby Brewster “Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine” by Lisa Jackson-Schebetta “The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon" by Milton Loayza “Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity" by Clara Jean Wilch www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Acting in the Academy The Theatre of David Henry Hwang Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines Directing Shakespeare in America Writing, Acting, and Directing Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Ira S. Murfin 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 Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances Ira S. Murfin By Published on May 30, 2018 Download Article as PDF Spalding Gray’s autobiographical monologues exemplified the affective immediacy of virtuosic first-person storytelling during the 1980s and 1990s, and helped establish a distinct theatrical genre of autobiographical performance. Even though they were most frequently encountered in their film or video adaptations, Gray’s performances suggested the apparent authenticity with which an authorial voice speaking directly to an audience, free of technological or even representational apparatus, can be imbued. Although he was a key figure among a cohort of downtown solo performers in New York who were gaining widespread media exposure at the time, Gray’s reputation eventually reached beyond even the mainstream marketing of the avant-garde. [1] Retroactively recast in the popular imagination as simply an author and actor, without the avant-garde asterisk, Gray went on to play the role of quintessential New York theatre world hyphenate as a mainstream character actor, offbeat celebrity raconteur, and hip comic memoirist. However, despite the traditional literary and theatrical associations attached to Gray’s monologue genre, which I include in the category of extemporaneous live works that I call “talk performance,” I find that it was entwined with media forms and formats at its very roots. [2] Gray’s earliest talk performances were dependent on media technologies not only for composition and circulation, but they also made use of the physical presence of media to generate the performances in the moment and, counterintuitively, to resist the pull of mediation. My argument developed from research in Gray’s professional archive, in particular audio and video documentation of his works at various points in their processes of development. [3] These resources provide evidence that media presences occasioned and influenced Gray’s talk performance practice from the start, and that as Gray shifted the media relationships that generated his performances and the media venues within which they circulated, the nature of the performances themselves changed as well. In order to understand the processes of media interaction that defined Gray’s work over time, and to connect those processes to other, seemingly remote, media phenomena, I draw on theories and terminology related to media from several fields. In particular, I have found more recent scholarship on the problems and possibilities of performance and other cross-media relationships in the context of the cultural saturation with digital and internet technologies surprisingly applicable to Gray’s integration of analogue and print media formats within his extemporaneous performances. The term I use to describe the dependence of Gray’s performances on his live interactions with fixed media sources, “intermedial contingency,” recycles Fluxus artist Dick Higgins’s 1965 “intermedia,” which he coined to speak productively about work that belongs to no single established art category, but emerges at points of overlap between existing categories. [4] I find that this usage is also informed by the way the term has more recently been taken up in theatre and performance scholarship concerned with digital media and performance. In the 2006 collection Intermediality in Theatre and Performance , editors Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt ground their understanding of theatrical intermediality in the “presence of other media within theatre productions,” writing that “…intermediality is associated with the blurring of generic boundaries … and a self-conscious reflexivity that displays the devices of performance.” [5] Kattenbelt later writes that theatre offers a “performative situation” (a term he attributes to Umberto Eco) “… in which the other media are not just recordings on their own, but at the same time and above all theatrical signs.” [6] Similarly, in their 2012 book Multimedia Performance , Rosemary Klich and Edward Scheer define intermedial performance in terms of the interaction between media components: “Intermedial theatre subsumes media, uniting both live and mediated elements within the frame of performance … In intermedial performance, the realms of the live and the mediated develop reciprocity and are framed as complementary and symbiotic elements of the performance whole.” [7] I argue that Gray’s extemporaneity was triggered by, responsive to, and dependent upon his interaction with another media presence on stage, both procedurally for himself as a performer and as a means of making the spontaneity and variability of his performances legible to his audiences. This argument depends on recent media theory to explain how new media have impacted the communication ecology through the concepts of remediation and mediatization. The former, closely associated with the work of Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, describes the processes by which media reproduce, obscure, and define one another, while the latter identifies communicative structures’ saturation and constitution by media and processes of mediation even before other media enter the picture. [8] Further, I draw on terminology developed by linguistic anthropologists Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs to generically describe the processes by which the meanings of verbal performances are actively produced through the interaction between a performance and its circumstance — “contextualization,” in their terms. They then label the process by which a performance can be prepared for removal to another, more stable, context in order to be studied, replicated, circulated and, tellingly, read as text, while still remaining reasonably intact and coherent, as a process of “entextualization.” [9] This article recuperates early performances of Gray’s that have not circulated widely in order to offer an account of the development of his signature autobiographical monologues that turns out to be quite different from the one supported by his late-career and posthumous reputation as a masterful, if troubled, comic raconteur. I track Gray’s monologue format from its beginnings as an element of Three Places in Rhode Island , the trilogy of performances that became the foundational work of the renowned experimental theatre company The Wooster Group (TWG). I then turn to the generative strategies he used in two pivotal, though not widely known, early pieces, India and After (America) (1979) and The Great Crossing (1980), to show that they were developed in relation to the physical presence of fixed media objects, specifically non-dramatic texts and technologies for audio playback, with which Gray interacted and to which he responded extemporaneously in performance. In this, I build on theatre scholar Teemu Paavolainen’s argument for labeling onstage objects as such, rather than as “props” or “sets,” in order to free them from the inert and purely representational connotations the theatrical terms have accrued, and instead to emphasize the material presence and practical functions of the objects in question. [10] As physical mechanisms for accessing linear, unchanging content, Gray’s media objects differentiate themselves from and subject themselves to the instability of live performance. Rather than memorizing and reciting a composed text as in traditional theatrical performance, in which the actor becomes the playback mechanism, Gray emphasized the contingency of his live presence through his spontaneous interactions with media objects that stored, and from which he could retrieve, the fixed content of his performances. Gray structured his performances through these acts of retrieval: playing and stopping the record, reading (or listening to another performer read) a text that he brought onstage. In this way he kept his performances always contingent upon the occasion and demonstrably different from the media objects to which he related. Gray’s eventual celebrity was based on his apparent virtuosity as a storyteller, but his earliest experiments with extemporaneous talk were rooted in the intermedial contingency described above. While his explicitly intermedial works emphasized the shifting and negotiated nature of his live performances, the better known adaptations of his later monologues to film and book formats were made possible by their increasingly streamlined, repeatable, and narratively unified source performances. Over time, Gray’s monologues became less procedurally tied to the occasion of performance by excising their reliance upon his interactions with external media. Though he eventually gained a significant measure of fame and professional success for these entertaining and influential later works, this article looks at Gray’s original approach in his early talk performances. Though he newly generated and (re)constructed his performances for his audience each night in such a way that his “personal history would disappear on a breath,” I found that media played a surprising role in that process. [11] It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the film version of Swimming to Cambodia , directed by Jonathan Demme in 1987, to a popular understanding of Gray and his performance practice. The monologue was the direct result of a small role Gray played in the 1984 Roland Joffé film The Killing Fields , about the American bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War and the subsequent genocide perpetrated there by the Khmer Rouge. The film used Thailand as a stand-in for Cambodia, and Gray’s monologue centered on his experiences there while making the film and, in the original version, the aftermath of those experiences once filming had concluded. Gray initially presented Swimming to Cambodia in two parts, which premiered in early 1984, and required audiences to see the entire work over the course of two nights. The first part portrayed Gray’s awakening, during the shoot, to American military imperialism, and suggested an uneasy corollary between the war in Southeast Asia and adventure-seeking Western artists returning to the region to make a film about that war. However, the second part presented a more complex and less morally satisfying picture of Gray’s struggle to integrate his new political awareness into his life at home. It focused on the tension he felt between his newfound social conscience, which urged him toward a life of service advocating for the Cambodian refugee community, and his professional ambitions to take advantage of the career opportunities his first major film role offered and move toward the comfortable life he imagined a Hollywood career could provide. The two-part version of the monologue ultimately ended with Gray in LA, driving between auditions, while still wrestling with his indecision about whether he should return to the East Coast and devote himself to humanitarian work, or accept that the situation of humanity is beyond repair, that there was nothing he could do about it, and so might as well stay in Hollywood to enjoy the decadent end of civilization as best he could. [12] Three years later, Jonathan Demme’s 85-minute film adaptation of the live monologue offered a much more streamlined version, focusing almost exclusively on Gray’s political and personal awakening in the first half of the original. This more narratively unified, less ambiguous revision circulated widely and established the elements of Gray’s signature style for a new mass audience, including other artists who took up the autobiographical monologue form. These include the personal disclosure found in documentary theatre pieces and staged memoirs ranging from David Hare’s Via Dolorosa (1998) to Elaine Stritch at Liberty (2001), which have collectively come to be known in more traditional theatre circles as “one-person shows,” the self-reflexive reportage heard on public radio programs such as This American Life , the extemporaneous delivery of The Moth and other live storytelling shows, and especially the wholesale uptake of Gray’s table, microphone, water glass, and notebook in the theatrical monologues of his most apparent stylistic progeny, the monologist Mike Daisey, not to mention the surprisingly robust roster of solo performances about Gray that have emerged since his death. [13] Even Gray’s own subsequent monologues adhered closely to the template of Demme’s Swimming to Cambodia film, maintaining a stable authorial voice, satisfyingly coherent narratives, and trim running times in line with the movie, making them more easily available to publication and film adaptations. [14] Figure 1. Gray in the film version of Swimming to Cambodia , dir. Jonathan Demme, Cinecom Pictures, 1987. In contrast, Gray’s use of fixed media objects to emphasize the contingency of live performance and trigger extemporaneous fragmentation in some of his earliest works designated and emphasized the performance event as something other than either authored text or recorded media. Gray was developing a means of generating a performance through live, real time interactions between himself and the onstage media object – a record player, a book, or a personal journal in the cases discussed below. Each unique performance iteration relied upon Gray interacting with, and responding to, the object and its inscribed or recorded contents by reading a fragment of text aloud or dropping the turntable’s needle on the record, for example, and then building on his own personal associations with that bit of content as he encountered it. In time, this process would consolidate into a genre of autobiographical solo performances that has become associated with the very impulses Gray’s early performances seemed to criticize or sublimate: privileging the recalled past over present experience, constructing an apparently authentic authorial voice, and shaping memory into linear narrative. I argue that in making use of the difference between what he was doing onstage and the recorded or inscribed objects with which he interacted, Gray was dealing with the media environment in which his work developed by both introducing and holding off the possibility of the mediated circulation to which it would eventually succumb. His later monologues, while still showcasing his newly polished virtuosic extemporaneity, were able to scrub the material presence of media from his performances in order to arrive at a more set and settled product, primed for media adaptation. The more media interference in the work, in other words, the more tied to the original idiosyncratic performance event it would be. And the more seamlessly extemporaneous, the more available to media reproduction and circulation the work became. The eventual availability of Gray’s talk performances for adaptation to other media fundamentally relies upon a process by which the situational dependence that defined the early performances discussed here and that knit them to their occasion could be removed from the performance situation with enough contextual material intact to make his monologue legible both in terms of the narrative content it sought to deliver, and in terms of its origins in live performance. Linguistic anthropologists Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, seeking to self-reflexively examine how ethnographic researchers like themselves approach cross-cultural verbal performances (storytelling and other forms of marked public address), articulated a taxonomy to define the stages of this process. Bauman and Briggs identify performance as a negotiated and relational process that provides a situationally dependent “special interpretive frame within which the act of speaking is to be understood.” [15] They refer to the process by which a talk performance and its situational support structure can be understood in terms of their mutually constitutive interrelationship as a process of “contextualization,” that is the active integration of the ongoing participatory exchange between audience and performer with the linguistic content of the performance. In order to subject performances to analysis and comparative study, though, and by extension in the case of Gray, in order to enable circulation and the accrual of value within a wider political economy, Bauman and Briggs contend that the contextualized performance must be decontextualized, or made portable, and then recontextualized elsewhere under more stable conditions controlled by the researcher, the book publisher, the film producer, etc. They refer to the process that prepares a talk performance, which they call discourse, for re- and de-contextualization as, simply, entextualization: “the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit – a text – that can be lifted out of its interactional setting.” [16] They argue that this extraction becomes the first step in a process that transforms a fundamentally responsive and changeable contextualized performance into a fixed, authoritative text, decentered from the occasion of its original utterance, and recentered in a standardized, replicable, and circulatable format. “Control over decentering and recentering is … one of the processes by which texts are endowed with authority, which in turn places formal and functional constraints on how they may be further recentered: An authoritative text, by definition, is one that is maximally protected from compromising transformation.” [17] Certainly this could be a description of Gray’s transition from intermedial talk performer, dialogically generating and sequencing his performances in front of a new audience each night, to the authorial figure he became, for whom spoken words and authored text became more or less interchangeable methods of delivering set content across multiple media platforms. This meant that he moved, in the course of his career, from his initial experiments with what media theorists J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin have called “hypermediacy,” in which a medium draws attention to itself in order to distinguish its processes of mediation from other media, to an ultimately successful example of what they term “transparent immediacy,” or the apparent disappearance of a medium through its own total integration within another medium. Both are examples, situated at either end of a spectrum, of the now inevitable processes of entwinement between and across media that Bolter and Grusin labeled “remediation.” [18] This capacity for media to distinguish themselves and disappear within, against, and in relation to one another is a product of a more total cultural mediatization , which media scholar Andreas Hepp identifies as the sustained and ongoing environmental presence of media and processes of mediation that structures cultural formations, logics, and interactions even in absence of any specific instance of mediation. Hepp writes: While mediation is suited to describing the general characteristics of any process of media communication, mediatization describes and theorizes something rather different, something that is based on the mediation of media communication: mediatization seeks to capture the nature of the interrelationship between historical changes in media communication and other transformational processes. [19] Hence the presence of media became a structuring logic in Gray’s work even before the possibility of the work’s mediation had been introduced, while media presences also functioned as the force in resistance to which his iconoclastic performance format initially defined itself. By meeting Gray at an early and foundational moment, this article positions him quite differently than do understandings of his persona and his career primarily based on the media adaptations of his later performances that circulated widely following the film adaptation of Swimming to Cambodia . Scholarly considerations of Gray’s career tend to either focus approvingly on him as a deceptively strategic performer who used the persona of a self-involved neurotic to uncover “universal” truths about the human condition, or else they critique what the authors see as Gray’s narcissistic privileging of his own experience in contrast to his shallow or facile treatment of the complex dynamics of power and representation in his monologues. The two most sustained studies of Gray’s work occupy these poles, with William W. Demastes’s posthumous celebration of Gray’s work, Spalding Gray’s America (2008), evincing the former, and Michael Peterson’s earlier Straight White Male: Performance Art Monologues (1997) consolidating the latter attitude around Gray as one of the chief representatives of monologic solo performance in the 1980s and 1990s. The cross-media adaptations of his monologues to film, video, and text, and the new performances that followed those media adaptations came to rely on a spectacularized sense of Gray’s masterful skills as storyteller. Peterson commented that “the table, notebook, and water glass of most of Spalding Gray’s performances … constitute[s] and legitimate[s] the presence of the solo performer in a manner more subtle than but perhaps as effective as more obvious design elements. Such physical elements of the monologic apparatus can emphasize the heroic aspect of the performance…” [20] This presentation of his work as heroically authoritative authenticated the assumption that it had been strategically planned out, highly structured, and probably fully written out in advance of his performance, an assumption that became more and more true over time. According to the alternate narrative I emphasize here, however, Gray actually first employed carefully arranged circumstances to newly generate his material in an ever-shifting performative present to which he subjected himself, rather than controlled. As he took more ownership of the media he used to structure his performances, he began to strip away the depersonalized intervening media that kept those performances anchored to the present in favor of material more closely enmeshed with the content of his monologues. In the examples discussed below, for instance, he moved from using random dictionary entries to structure India and After to a linear reading of his own travel diary in The Great Crossing . I argue that this would ultimately lead to the ostensibly immediate form for which he became known, in which no external media presence was apparent, while also leading him away from the extemporaneous contingency his early use of media sources enabled. The implications of the apparent paradox that the recontextualization of his performances in other media depended on the removal of contextualizing media from the performances themselves would eventually come to a pivotal head for Gray in the middle of a performance of his little-known monologue, The Great Crossing . The Wooster Group and Three Places in Rhode Island Gray came to his performance work via Richard Schechner’s influential experimental theatre company, The Performance Group (TPG), which he joined in 1971 along with his on-again-off-again partner Elizabeth LeCompte. LeCompte quickly became Schechner’s assistant director and was frequently put in charge of rehearsals in his absence. Taking advantage of the access to TPG’s theatre, The Performing Garage, granted by such an absence , LeCompte and Gray formed a small sub-cadre of TPG members and began experimenting with structured improvisations. These improvisations came to obliquely focus on Gray’s childhood memories and associations, which LeCompte as director shaped into an impressionistic, mostly movement-based performance called Sakonnet Point (1975), after a place where Gray’s family spent their summers in his home state of Rhode Island. This formed the first of a trio of works they would go on to make together over the next four years, all based in Gray’s memory and personal history, which came to be known as Three Places in Rhode Island , or the Rhode Island Trilogy . These performances are now understood as the inaugural work of what became The Wooster Group, the successor to TPG, which continues its work in The Performing Garage under LeCompte’s direction and is often considered the most influential contemporary experimental theatre company in the U.S. [21] The shared origins, and surprising similarities, of what became Gray’s and LeCompte’s signature styles can be identified in two structuring forces that emerged in TWG’s early work. The first was the use of physical objects and furniture, the table in particular, as structural through lines with scriptive powers of their own around which performances could be built and connected to one another. [22] The second shared strategy involved integrating external fixed media presences — written text, recorded audio, or video — into performances as dramatic content and intermedial counterbalance to theatre as a live and ephemeral medium. As early in the Trilogy as the imagistic, mostly wordless Sakonnet Point , the physical objects Gray and LeCompte introduced substituted for the usual textual foundation upon which performances are built. The process of creation involved the company responding improvisationally to objects Gray found in the garbage or in The Performing Garage , and the work grew out of the material possibilities and limitations which that space and those objects introduced, without a script or pre-conceived form. The set pieces and found objects became the raw material out of which the performance was built through the associational responses of Gray and his fellow performers. Actions and objects and the relationship between them were woven together into a structure that drew on individual identity and memory, but represented no reality but the present and no people but those in the room. [23] Gray and LeCompte made similar use of live citation in the present of material imprinted in the past for the second segment of the Trilogy, Rumstick Road (1977), which was built around audio Gray had recorded of interviews he had conducted with members of his family about his mother’s suicide a decade earlier. The historical anecdotes and documentary materials that made up Rumstick Road were not dramatically unified or psychologically resolved within the frame of the performance. Instead, they were “gone through,” as one might go through old letters or photographs, generating a fragmented and entirely new experience for audience and performers. The recordings of Gray’s past interviews with his family members took the place of a dramatic text, on the basis of which Gray and his colleagues transmuted personal associations into performed actions developed over the course of their rehearsal process, treating the recordings as “found” material often in spite of its personal significance for Gray. Having gained some distance on his personal material through mediation, Gray was able to privilege his role as a responsive performer. In 1978’s Nayatt School , recorded material was again onstage, but even more distant from Gray’s present than the familial tapes of Rumstick Road . In this case, the performance employed an LP recording of the original New York production of T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party , which Gray used to illustrate and notate his own history with the play. In particular, he associated the play’s main character, Celia Coplestone, who suffers a psychological crisis, seeks salvation in religion, and ultimately martyrs herself, with his mentally ill, religious mother and her suicide. Though ostensibly autobiographical, his material relationship to the play in the piece was equally temporal and kinesthetic. It was to the recording, and even more to the physical record, that he related. Gray responded in the moment to chance intersections with the fixed object as he dropped the needle at different points on the record, commenting dialogically while the snippets played for the audience. After introducing the record itself as a physical object, he reviewed Elliot’s background and biography and his own history with the play, which he had once performed in a Catholic convent in upstate New York, while spinning off childhood memories of his mother whose connection to the play was not initially clear. Skipping around to different scenes on the record, he summarized what had happened, what was happening, and what was going to happen in the play, while also isolating idiosyncratic aspects of the recording: the sound of laughter, the inflection of certain lines’ delivery, the play’s subtly surreal cyclical construction, declaring that “the more I listen to it, the more it starts to break down in terms of meaning.” [24] Figure 2. Spalding Gray in The Wooster Group’s Nayatt School (1978). Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte. Photo: © Clem Fiori. Courtesy of The Wooster Group. As Gray began to work out his relationship to onstage recorded media, he also relied upon offstage media capture and playback for the development of his approach, and on media metaphors in order to conceptualize and articulate what he was trying to do. In a 1997 conversation with Richard Schechner, he recalled his first attempts at monologuing in rehearsal, “Elizabeth LeCompte would tape them, transcribe them, and say, ‘Here let’s do it again like this.’ And that’s when I began to realize that what I was speaking was text, and could be used as a text.” [25] A February 1978 recording provides a glimpse into his performance technique emerging in rehearsal through improvisational interactions with the record, interspersed with dialogic interactions with LeCompte. Gray grew frustrated with trying to listen to, summarize, and speak over the record all at once, and bristled at LeCompte’s suggestion that he should be able to respond immediately to each drop of the needle. He compared the difficulty in finding something generative every time he dropped the needle to the well-honed skills jazz improvisation requires: “…jazz musicians do that and they play all night before they get warm, we’re talking about a very short space of time, that’s the problem….” [26] However, by the time they were performing the piece on tour in Amsterdam that fall, Gray had become capable of skipping through the record with alacrity and coordinating his summary with bits of information about his own life, weaving together a unique performance at the intersection of the recorded and the live. [27] Despite his own use of jazz improvisation as a musical corollary for what he was attempting, it is perhaps more relevant to note that at the same time in 1978 as Gray was stopping and starting a turntable to play snippets of The Cocktail Party in Soho, early hip-hop artists dozens of blocks north in the Bronx were similarly using turntables to cue up and repeat break beats at house parties and block parties, creating contingent, responsive, unchoreographed performances out of the material intersection between DJ, vinyl albums, and audience. [28] Whether the source was a dance record or modernist drama, the live events in both cases emerged from the interaction between the fixed media object and the responsive, improvisatory present of performance. India and After (America) Eventually, the mediated separation between past experiences and the performative present that Gray had developed in the Trilogy made it possible for him to detach a new set of independent talk performances from the larger theatrical apparatus of TWG, substituting a dialogic relationship with media for LeCompte’s direction and the TWG company. He later told theatre scholar David Savran: “…the monologues never would have come into being had not the Group been my first supportive audience, at the table, in Nayatt. And then it was a matter of shrinking the table down to a desk.” [29] In the post-Wooster Group solo performances he began presenting in the spring of 1979, Gray established the working process he would employ some version of for the rest of his career: reliance on memory rather than memorization, and on the conditions of the present moment to call up the past. Building on the use of pre-recorded audio in Rumstick Road and Nayatt School , his early talk pieces extended the fixed media presence to include onstage texts to which he could respond extemporaneously in performance, often using those sources to prompt or sequence a unique arrangement of narrative units. In particular, two of the most idiosyncratic of these early independent works, India and After (America) (1979) and The Great Crossing (1980), integrally relied upon the physical co-presence of pre-existing text within the piece. These texts – journal entries, newspaper articles, book passages, dictionary definitions – served to structure the everyday content of Gray’s experiences from outside of his authorial position, and to present each performance as a unique, collaborative experience shared by Gray and his audience. In February of 1976, LeCompte and Gray had traveled to India as actors in the Performance Group’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children . Traveling with LeCompte and on his own in India after the tour had ended, Gray had a very hard time psychologically, succumbing to self-doubt, anxiety, and an unquenchable longing for idealized experiences. [30] What he called his “lost will” would continue for more than a year after his return to America, manifesting in various illnesses and depressive episodes. Gray responded by seeking out a range of therapies and self-improvement strategies, both in New York and on a cross-country retreat to Santa Cruz. He also made some impulsive and risky choices, including signing up to perform in pornographic films for a time, and refusing to give his name to the police after walking out on a check at a Las Vegas steakhouse, which landed him in jail for a week. Three years later, he returned to that year for one of his first post-Wooster Group performances, which he came to call India and After (America) . Dealing for the first time with his recent life rather than his childhood and young adult years, Gray turned again to external media as a way to both fragment and knit together his still-fresh memories in performance. The presence of fixed media served to distinguish the action of remembering and relating his recent experiences from a textually stabilized recounting of the same events. Though Gray’s talk performance, in his own estimation and in popular reception, would eventually come to seem merely an entertaining way to deliver autobiographical material, there is much evidence that Gray was initially at least as concerned with the performance event as a delimited site where a performance could be constructed and disseminated all at once as he was with spinning a good yarn. In an early notebook entry he wrote of his idea for what he was then calling “Speaking Memory”: “I want to put myself in a meditative non rehearsal state and try to allow the presence of the audience to influence the quality and subject matter of my memory… set up a space for myself and be there[,] work out a memory structure in which I begin with one memory….” [31] Gray began relating the memories that would become India and After in much the way he had imagined “Speaking Memory.” At home in his loft with only a few others present and the tape recorder running, he began with one memory, of the plane from New York to Amsterdam on the way to India. [32] However, he found himself dissatisfied with what turned out to be a mostly linear account of such recent experiences and he became interested in resisting the drift toward narrative unity. He told Savran some years later that it was the fidelity of his account that he wanted to try to interrupt: “I was too close to the material. It came out like a travelogue. I didn’t know how to fragment it by chance. All the other pieces had been fragmented by memory.” [33] He cast around for a structural device that would help create the distance he felt he needed between his psychological source material and the instance of performance, as the “found” recordings in Rumstick Road and Nayatt School had done . The solution he hit on was to employ a de-personalized intervening text to structure the piece from outside of his authorial consciousness. His first attempt at introducing an external fixed element against which the action of remembering and telling could be defined came that summer of 1979, while he was in residence at Connecticut College. Gray performed his new, then untitled, work about his travels in India as an in-progress presentation for students at the college. He identified the genesis of the piece as a period when he was traveling in Kashmir after the end of The Performance Group’s tour of Mother Courage . In later performances, he would refer to this as the critical moment when he “lost his will.” He explained, I found myself in Kashmir with only one book and that was, by accident, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse , which I had read before. And this book, because I was in an isolated mountain village, I was able to give a lot of concentration to it automatically. There was no work, there was a relationship suddenly with Virginia Woolf, which saved me from some of this terrific culture shock and somehow touched me down with some of my own culture and past. So what I’ve done is that I’ve cut out some sections from this book and I’m going to experiment with reading them in and out of my talk, so that there will also be some readings from passages of that book. [34] Gray’s intention seems to have been to use Woolf’s book much as he had the recording of The Cocktail Party in Nayatt School , as a source of mediated cultural fragments through which he could explain his own experience. In this case, Woolf’s introspective, quasi-autobiographical novel, focused on parental relationships and problems of memory and perception, was to create a parallel mental plane that Gray could treat as a kind of home base as he recounted the foreign-seeming settings and circumstances through which he traveled. However, in the end, To the Lighthouse does not appear to have offered Gray the structural counterpoint he was after. His use of the passages dropped away after he read just two selections early on, leaving him to complete the narrative in the same linear fashion he had previously. In this telling, Gray found himself increasingly alienated by his foreign surroundings in India during the tour and unable to make sense of his experiences as he continued to travel afterward. Eventually he found himself far off the usual tourist path in Ladakh, at the Tibetan border, where he was troubled to find that he felt so anxious and conflicted in the midst of what seemed to him an entirely harmonious culture. At this point Gray fled, apparently toward the comfortingly familiar angst of the West, but he found that his indecision, disorientation, and profound sense of alienation only persisted once back in familiar surroundings. To the Lighthouse turned out to be too enmeshed with the piece’s narrative content to mimic the strange displacement he experienced both at home and abroad. Gray instead cast around for a structuring device that would remain outside of the work, aesthetically and thematically indifferent, and would act upon his telling to constrain its structure and estrange its contents in a way that would actually reflect the seeming randomness of the experiences themselves. The reconfigured final template for India and After , which he would continue performing for a number of years , included a second onstage performer (usually Meghan Ellenberger) who read prompt words and their definitions at random from a large dictionary and then arbitrarily assigned time limits to Gray’s anecdotes. In response to each word, Gray would call up some part of an incident from his time in India and the year after, and try to tell it before Ellenberger rang a bell indicating the end of his allotted time, whether he had finished the story or not. Figure 3. Screenshot of Gray and Meghan Ellenberger in a 1980 archival video documenting India and After (America) in performance. A far cry from both the iconic staging and the media aesthetics of the 1987 Swimming to Cambodia film. VHS, Spalding Gray Papers, GRS071, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. [35] Drawing on an extensive, though still limited, palate of anecdotes, not all of which he got to every night, Gray’s associations could be direct or oblique. Some connections seemed obvious, like a memory of disciples of the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh at his ashram in India rushing to the spot where his chair had just been in response to the word “unseat,” or “co-signer” triggering the story of LeCompte bonding him out of the Las Vegas jail. Other responses were humorously counterintuitive; in one performance, “Protestantism” triggered an explicit story from a pornographic film shoot. At times Gray even resisted storytelling in favor of literal-minded enactment: the word “dumb,” with the definition “without speech,” prompted him to stammer and then go silent for a full minute, an action with no apparent relation to the past. Some of his associations and memories proved more poetic than personal: “ivory white” caused him to recall a Hindu religious story about the god Krishna revealing his divinity to his mother; “mitten” made him think of Kashmiri shepherds he had met who claimed they had never heard of New York or even Delhi, while on another night this same story was called up by the word “triangulate.” [36] Reflecting the dictionary’s rigid order and stability in the face of its non-linear uses, Gray actually told the snippets of his stories in more or less the same way every time, down to the phrasing of individual sentences. But the structure of the performance broke up the sequence and flow of the narrative, creating odd juxtapositions and points of entry, cutting off or starting stories at what would ordinarily be a mid-point, and often altogether eliding narrative segments that might otherwise be of import. This structure served to highlight the act of remembering in order to materialize the performative instance as distinct from the narrative content of the memories themselves. The usual understanding of this approach, affirmed by Gray and his observers both, is that the fragmentation produced by the random structure reflected the fragmentation of his psychological breakdown. [37] However, Gray had also inadvertently hit on a way to complicate the Westerner-transformed-by-travel-in-the-non-Western-world narrative that the linear telling invited. By procedurally scrambling the sequence of events he also scrambled the too-easy causal or metaphorical links by which he otherwise connected his mental disturbance to his travels in India, or even one incident to the next. By giving up structural control, Gray was able to displace the task of making sense of his experiences from an all-knowing authorial position onto a shared process in the performative present. And by privileging his idiosyncratic telling over an imperative to accurately communicate what happened, Gray thwarted the narrative expectations of both literary and dramatic form. This foregrounded the mental labor involved in extemporaneously calling up narrative fragments rather than assuming the authorial responsibility to curate and organize the work in advance. Though Gray still drew on personal memory, structurally India and After more closely mirrored burgeoning experiments with sampling and other media collage techniques occurring elsewhere at that same time, including The Wooster Group’s continued intermedial experimentation in Gray’s absence. Rather than obscuring his presence in the live performance, though, Gray’s use of the logic of recorded media to structure the piece emphasized what he was doing in the moment: responding, relating, strategically recounting. Ironically, it was the use of these contingent intermedial strategies that made this work particularly unavailable to the kind of wholesale mediatization that would be key in popularizing his later performances. The Great Crossing While Gray used apparently neutral external media to distinguish the recalled past from the moment of performance in India and After (America) , he employed a more personal textual source in order to deal with an even more immediate past in his little-known monologue The Great Crossing (1980). In its earliest versions, much of the performance consisted of verbatim readings from his private journal, detailing a trip across the country he took with his new girlfriend Renee in order to tour his monologues on the West Coast. This was in fact the very tour on which he began performing The Great Crossing , so the journal entries were just weeks old. At the same time, he also used public textual detritus collected along the way (newspaper articles, a new age magazine) to approximate the physical and cultural environments he passed through. And in at least some instances, he brought the piece’s narrative up to the very moment of performance, as if challenging himself to do away entirely with the traditional division between authoring the work and presenting it publicly. Like nearly all of Gray’s work, The Great Crossing depended on some deliberate separation of his past experience from his telling in the present. But no other work brought the two into such close, even overlapping, proximity. As he read his travel diary, he verbally footnoted what he had written, explaining and commenting on his ostensibly private thoughts. In this way, the raw material of his daily jottings were structured by his extemporaneous comments on that material in the moment of performance, a hybrid perhaps of the “found” personal media in Rumstick Road and the intermedial improvisation with The Cocktail Party in Nayatt School. As archival recordings of his West Coast tour suggest, Gray was caught between two creative strategies and what they might mean for his artistic future. The more narratively coherent strategy he found himself moving toward held the promise of positioning his still-new talk performance format, which was just beginning to gain traction on tour outside of New York City, into something repeatable and commodifiable that could serve his popularity and provide financial support. The strategy of media contingency generating extemporaneous discovery in performance that that he had been using meant that on some level he was re-making the work each night, keeping him nimbly responsive and present in the moment, but deliberately leaving no trace. Gray prefaced the reading from his diary with a straightforward reading of a different, very public source text: two newspaper articles he had encountered on his trip. The first described a shift in nuclear policy under President Carter from a strategy of mutually assured destruction to the capability for sustained, low-level nuclear war to act as a deterrent throughout an engagement. This was followed immediately by an article about a woman in Phoenix who had seen the face of Jesus in a tortilla. Gray delivered both in the same calm and measured tone, as if setting a baseline for the presence of performed text in the piece, no matter the source. After the newspaper readings had introduced the disparate and seemingly random sources he would draw on, Gray began his own story by emphasizing the incidental composition of his performance, explaining that, “It could start anywhere, but I’m choosing June 24 th at Schiphol Airport, a place of great anxiety for me…” He then launched into three stories of fraught departures from Amsterdam – the first cribbed from India and After and the most recent immediately preceding his “Great Crossing” in late June of 1980.[38]. Back in New York, Gray and his girlfriend Renee set off on a cross-country trip. As their journey began, Gray introduced the other, more personal, textual source around which the performance would be structured – his diary entries from the road. He explained the conceptual motivation for this in terms of building in a space between a past actor who had experienced the things described, but had no control over their presentation, and the present performer who could narrate and comment upon, but would not be held responsible for, that past actor’s deeds: [39] The thing that I’ve been working from is this diary here, now the idea was that I was trying to find at least two of the – at least two Spalding Grays – and trick him, the perverse Spalding Gray who is here in front of you tonight would trick the private Spalding Gray who kept a diary not thinking he was going to read it but thought that he would speak openly about the situation and therefore be able to censor things … [40] (Gray, “ The Great Crossing ; S.F …”) Figure 4. Gray’s journal entries for July 12-13, 1980. The passages he read onstage during The Great Crossing can be found starting on July 9th and running through the month of July, 1980. He did not always confine his reading to his own writing, he sometimes also read the information printed in the journal itself, such as “New Moon, Orangemen’s Day” on the 12 th . Journal: 1980, Spalding Gray Papers, C35.4, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. The diary represented both the most immediate record of these past experiences and the earliest impulse toward transforming them into narrative material. Rather than the random needle drops of Nayatt School or the rules-based structure of India and After , here Gray was moving in a linear fashion with pre-determined material, relying on his own impulses to determine when he would switch registers from text to extemporaneous talk. When he felt the impulse to reflect or comment, he would stop and verbally footnote what he read in the moment, before returning to the structured text. As there is no video document of The Great Crossing available, I cannot say if that switch was visible, but it was certainly audible in the shift from his perfunctory, seemingly disinterested delivery of the diary entries, undifferentiated from his reading of the newspaper articles and other found texts, to the enlivened, engaged commentary that reflected the voice, by turns ironic, curious, and anxious, which would come to be identified with Gray’s onstage persona. Paradoxically, it was Gray’s inscribed past consciousness that he posited as uncontrollably confessional, and his extemporaneous presence as a performer that could stabilize and edit what the journal’s text revealed. Here the media presence served mostly to distinguish his “private” past self from the “perverse” self in the present who commented upon the past self’s actions, bonding him in his physical presence more to the performance event than the often problematic adventures the diary revealed. Indeed, the entries proved truly personal: petty, ponderous, emotional, graphically sexual, and mundane. The journal showed Gray to be motivated, and hindered, by both selfishness and self-consciousness, and to be much more immediately concerned with his own creature comforts and internal monologue than his later ironic travelogues would usually suggest, preoccupied as they were with the unusual characters he met along the way. It became clear that Gray was wrestling with his form, wondering if he could continue performing monologues in the way he had been over the previous year or so, as contingent intermedial procedures, or if he would eventually have to commit to a more conventional dramatic literary model. The contradiction between the ambition and economic necessity to reach a larger engaged audience and the personal and creative impetus to process his experiences almost as they occurred, came to a head in an apparently authentic moment of mid-performance crisis on the Seattle stop of his tour. Caught between his extemporaneous impulses and the apparent pressure to present something entertaining and replicable, he stumbled over the very premise of his monologue format, and where he should take it next, telling his audience: You can only tell the same stories so many times; I can’t stand it anymore. Tonight’s stories are all new, I haven’t dealt with them at all, I feel they are best at their freshest, and I am really at the point where I really don’t know what to do with that problem, since I am in the position where I am trying to make a living from doing what I do and I think I can’t do it. Because it means setting them, and making them into routines and acting and being a stand-up comedian or what have you. [41] In this moment of crisis, he saw clearly that in beginning to make his talk performances more available to repetition and wider circulation, he was also letting go of some of the extemporaneity and discovery that keeping his performances anchored in the present had enabled. The loss that Gray recognized was the slipping away of an idiosyncratic format that resisted easy distinctions between inscription and enaction. Without a media presence to intervene in the flow of his narrative and differentiate Gray in the present from Gray in the past, Gray himself became more like one of his media sources as a performer, capable of starting at the beginning and playing through to the end in more or less the same way every time. While Gray’s crisis during the Seattle performance was a petulant complaint about having to dramatically reenact an experience no longer personally useful to him, it was also an expression of deep frustration that the unique character of his talk pieces as contingent, situational, intermedial, emergent phenomena might be lost in the course of his creative and professional development. In light of his eventual success, it is easy to dismiss this early dilemma as an independent artist merely anxious about “selling out,” but focusing on this early work also complicates the status he acquired in subsequent years as a popular storyteller situated within established genres: part comic raconteur, part literary author. Since his death in 2004, publication and archival projects have only further cemented his literary status; meanwhile, the genre of autobiographical monologue the mass media adaptations of his performances helped establish is now so common it no longer registers as procedurally or conceptually audacious by any measure. [42] The Great Crossing did not go forward in its original form following the West Coast performances and Gray’s crisis in Seattle. [43] Instead, a new, more replicable approach emerged in its aftermath. Gray premiered a new monologue at Dance Theatre Workshop in New York later that year called Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk , which re-configured the events of The Great Crossing as unbroken past tense narration, without the presence of the diary entries. [44] This transition from the ephemeral, contingent, and intermedial format of The Great Crossing to the set narrative of Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk , which was eventually published in Gray’s first monologue collection, best represents the change in Gray’s approach from the extemporaneously generated, conceptual and situational early performances to the replicable and circulatable, recognizably dramatic form that his monologues would ultimately take. [45] Later versions of the monologue presented an even more tightly controlled narrative, with elements added to the physical setting that came very close to what would become the official-looking set of Swimming to Cambodia : his habitual table and chair, with a map hung behind it, and a pointer on his desk. That monologue would follow a few years after this one, enabled by a mainstream film role and leading to opportunities for publication and film adaptations. Even later on, text and other external media still remained an occasional part of his monologues. Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk retained the twin newspaper articles that opened the piece and even continued to add printed media found on the trip — a placemat from a steak house in South Dakota, a news clipping about end times survivalists in Oregon, an article from the new age Good Times newspaper about UFOs on Mount Shasta. [46] Early versions of Swimming to Cambodia , too, ended with an extended reading from a stack of philosophical books Gray had turned to for guidance after a difficult return from Thailand. [47] But the intermedial contingency that had initially defined his talk performance practice no longer obtained. Although he was able to preserve the spectacularity of his skills as an extemporaneous performer across media, his performances were no longer tethered to the collective present of the performance event. Despite the wide circulation that Gray’s mediated work in film, video, and text enabled, the possibilities it had originally presented for a formally, procedurally, and conceptually daring alternative to the familiar tropes of literary and dramatic narrative and authorship were sidelined in favor of the artistic success and formal influence he ultimately achieved. References [1] During the 1980s, Gray was often associated with a number of iconic artists also making solo performances in downtown Manhattan, many of them crossing paths at the venue PS 122, including Laurie Anderson, Holly Hughes, Karen Finley, and Eric Bogosian. All were known for using the minimal material of their bodies and voices (and, in Anderson’s case, even more pronounced live interactions with media technologies than Gray’s) to create work that could be aesthetically challenging and politically provocative, but that also became quite popular and circulated widely on tour, in publications, and as audio and video recordings or broadcasts. [2] I use the term “talk performance” as a critical category by which I identify uses of extemporaneous talk as a material and a process, rather than simply a tool to convey narrative content. By framing talk, and not artistic discipline, as the defining aspect of Gray’s performances in my broader, ongoing research, I connect them to the performance work of other artists from different disciplinary backgrounds who I identify with the category by their use of extemporaneous talk as a central part of their practices, in particular the poet David Antin and the dance artist and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer. [3] My research was enabled by a Dissertation Research Fellowship I received from the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) at the University of Texas at Austin, where Gray’s archive is held, and benefitted from the aid of the Theatre and Performance Curator, Helen Baer, during my initial visit to the HRC, and later Eric Colleary on a follow-up visit, both generously responding to several inquiries. [4] In his 1965 essay (reprinted in 2001 with a further commentary he added in 1981 and an appendix by his daughter, the art historian Hannah Higgins), Higgins proposed that intermedia does not just mean the inclusion of more than one media, but that something new emerges between existing categories, with its own set of rules. For Higgins, it is not enough to merely remove a disciplinary element that appears particularly stultifying, like a play’s script, because the unscripted play will just default to imitating a scripted one in the absence of further disruption. Another element must be introduced to ensure the intermedial object or event remains in-between. Dick Higgins and Hannah Higgins, “Intermedia,” Leonardo 34, no. 1 (February 1, 2001): 49–54. [5] Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, eds., Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (New York: Rodopi, 2006), 11. [6] Chiel Kattenbelt, “Theatre as the Art of the Performer and the Stage Of Intermediality,” Chapple and Kattenbelt, 37. [7] Rosemary Klich and Edward Scheer, Multimedia Performance, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 71. [8] J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media , (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Andreas Hepp, Cultures of Mediatization, trans . Keith Tribe (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012.) [9] Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life,” Annual Review of Anthropology , no. 19 (1990): 59-88. [10] In his study of performer-object interaction, Theatre/Ecology/Cognition , Paavolainen uses the broad term “object,” rather than the more specialized terms “props” or “set,” to speak about non-human or animal presences in theatrical performance. This leaves open questions of agency in the interactions between onstage performers and objects, which he sees as mutually constitutive through the object’s “affordances” (a term he borrows from psychologist James J. Gibson,) or intended interfaces, on the one hand, and the actions of the performer on the other. Teemu Paavolainen, Theatre/Ecology/Cognition: Theorizing Performer-Object Interaction in Grotowski, Kantor, and Meyerhold. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 13-16. [11] Spalding Gray, Sex and Death to the Age 14 . (New York: Vintage, 1986), xii. [12] Spalding Gray, “ Swimming to Cambodia ; Part 1; 1/31/84,” audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C4766, Harry Ransom Center. [13] These include Blues for a Gray Sun (Nilaja Sun, 2004) , A Spalding Gray Matter (Michael Brandt, 2005), Swimming to Spalding (Lian Amaris, 2009), and Who Killed Spalding Gray? (Daniel MacIvor, 2017) to cite only examples that include his name in their titles. [14] All four of the monologues Gray made after Swimming to Cambodia were published in mass-market editions intended for literary consumption, not theatrical production: Monster in a Box (1992), Gray’s Anatomy (1993), It’s a Slippery Slope (1997), and Morning, Noon and Night (2000). Two of these were also adapted to film themselves: Monster in a Box (1992) was directed by Nick Broomfield, and Gray’s Anatomy (1997) by Steven Soderbergh. [15] Bauman and Briggs, 73. [16] Bauman and Briggs, 73, original emphasis. [17] Bauman and Briggs, 77. [18] Bolter and Grusin, 54. [19] Hepp, 38, original emphasis. [20] Michael Peterson, Straight White Male: Performance Art Monologues (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 5. [21] David Savran, Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988), 3-5. [22] Gray’s table, which, along with his habitual notebook, water glass, and flannel shirt, defined his post-Wooster Group performances, persists to this day in TWG’s work as a long, forward-facing table, often installed at the same level as the floor of the stage, where actors sit when not “acting” and from which text is often read aloud. [23] Savran, Breaking the Rules , 57-59. [24] Spalding Gray, “BSE II Oct. 23 (Mickery 1978); Intro and Celia (Mickery 1978); Nayatt Oct. 1978,” audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C5155, Harry Ransom Center. [25] Richard Schechner, “My Art in Life: Interviewing Spalding Gray,” TDR: The Drama Review 46, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 162. [26] Spalding Gray, “Intro CP – Spalding’s Improv Feb. 8 ‘78; Nayatt; Cocktail Party II; Nayatt 1978,” audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C5198 Harry Ransom Center. [27] Gray, “BSE II Oct. 23 (Mickery 1978); Intro and Celia (Mickery 1978); Nayatt Oct. 1978.” [28] In his history of hip-hop, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, Jeff Chang offers an account of DJ Kool Herc discovering this method through audience observation at rent parties in the Bronx in the mid-1970s. Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: St. Martins Press, 2005), 77-85. [29] Savran, Breaking the Rule, 106. [30] He would, in fact, become particularly associated with what he eventually termed, in Swimming to Cambodia, his search for the “perfect moment” while traveling. A version of this search is described in preliminary terms in this work, along with the crippling indecision and self-doubt that accompanied it. [31] Spalding Gray, Journal: 1978-1979, Spalding Gray Papers, Series I, Subseries C: Notebooks, 1964-2003, undated, C35.1, Harry Ransom Center. [32] Spalding Gray, “India and After,” audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C4927, Harry Ransom Center. [33] Savran, Breaking the Rules , 73. [34] Spalding Gray, “ India and After (Ct. College)” 1979, audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C4929, Harry Ransom Center. [35] My thanks to Kathleen Russo, Gray’s widow, for permission to use images of items in the Spalding Gray collection at the HRC on behalf of Gray’s estate. [36] Gray, “ India and After ,” 1980. [37] Gray told Savran that he sought out the new structure because the linear telling “didn’t work the way my mind was working at the time I was going through it.” And Savran said the final format “puts the spectator in a position similar to that of the monologue’s distressed subject.” Savran, 73. Similarly, William Demastes wrote that India and After “duplicated on stage what was going on in Gray’s head during his breakdown in India and after.” Spalding Gray’s America (Milwaukee: Limelight Editions, 2008), 69. [38] Spalding Gray, “ The Great Crossing ; S.F.; Last Performance; September 13,” 1980, audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C5007, Harry Ransom Center. [39] In many ways this anticipates an argument that David P. Terry would make about the split between the past actor and the confessional performer in Gray’s much later monologues. “Once Blind, Now Seeing: Problematics of Confessional Performance,” Text and Performance Quarterly , 26, no. 3 (July 2006): 209–28. [40] Gray, “ The Great Crossing ; S.F.; Last Performance; September 13.” [41] Gray, “ The Great Crossing ; S.F.; Last Performance; September 13.” [42] It is tempting to wonder if the crisis in Seattle about the necessity of setting his monologues in order to succeed professionally might provide some insight into whether pressures to continue producing and performing monologues even after the process was no longer useful to him could have contributed to Gray’s suicide in 2004, especially given his ongoing obsession with his mother’s suicide and his anxiety about replicating it himself. However, I hesitate to see Gray’s death in fatalistic terms despite the theme of suicide that ran through his life. For one, I think it is a stretch to imagine that because Gray talked about fear of suicide as a topic in 1977, or balked publically at professional pressures in 1980, that his despair and evident decision to take his own life in 2004 was somehow inevitable, or that his personal and professional successes in the intervening years are somehow rendered irrelevant. But also, as neurologist Oliver Sacks suggested in his 2015 New Yorker article about his evaluations of Gray before his death, the various circumstances of Gray’s life and death — the long shadow cast by his mother’s suicide, his reliance on his monologues as quasi-therapeutic processes, and the head injury he suffered in a car accident that made it difficult to write or perform and contributed to a debilitating depression in the last few years of his life — seem too intertwined with one another to draw out any conclusive causal links. (“The Catastrophe: Spalding Gray’s Brain Injury,” The New Yorker, 27 April, 2015.) Instead, I am interested in continuing to track Gray’s posthumous circulation as a media phenomenon. I argue that Gray’s estate has tended to frame Gray’s legacy in literary terms, instigating several posthumous publishing projects, including an edited volume of his journals and what exists of his unfinished last monologue, Life Interrupted . ( The Journals of Spalding Gray [New York: Knopf, 2011]; Life Interrupted: The Unfinished Monologue [New York: Crown, 2005].) On the other hand, as mentioned earlier, performing artists influenced and impacted by Gray’s work have created an entire genre of autobiographical solo performances that make use of his physical setting and his stylistic approach, as well as a more idiosyncratic, small but significant subgenre of performance works that deal explicitly with Gray’s life, death, and work as their main topic. (See note 13.) [43] My understanding of the transition from The Great Crossing to Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk is based on my archival research at the Harry Ransom Center, where Gray’s papers are held. However, in his survey of alternative theatre, Beyond the Boundaries , theatre scholar Theodore Shank makes a brief reference to this same work being performed in San Francisco under the title Points of Interest (America) . I have not seen other evidence that Gray used that title, which would suggest an interesting serialized relationship with India and After (America) , but it is possible he used it at some point before or after he was calling it The Great Crossing. Theodore Shank, Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 178. [44] Spalding Gray, “ Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk ; DTW 11/22/80,” audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C5093, Harry Ransom Center. [45] Gray, Sex and Death… , 117-149. [46] Spalding Gray, “ Nobody Wanted To Sit Behind A Desk ,” 1982, Betamax, Spalding Gray Papers, GRS103-104, Harry Ransom Center. [47] Spalding Gray, “ Swimming to Cambodia ; Part 1; 1/31/84,” audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C4766, Harry Ransom Center. Footnotes About The Author(s) Ira S. Murfin is a Chicago-based independent scholar, artist, and arts programmer. His research investigates the relationship between extemporaneity, artistic discipline, and media technologies in late 20th Century artistic vanguards. In his creative practice he primarily works with talk as a performance material. His article “Talking Text and Writing Extemporaneity: Aligning David Antin’s talk performance and editorial practices” will be published in Performance Research issue 23.2 in May 2018. More information can be found at www.IraSMurfin.com Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue 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.

Shauna Vey Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 1 Visit Journal Homepage Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses Shauna Vey By Published on November 6, 2019 Download Article as PDF Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses. Nan Mullenneaux. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018; Pp. 400. In Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses, Nan Mullenneaux looks at significant figures of American theatre in a new way. From actresses active on the US stage in the mid-nineteenth century, she has selected those whose words remain in published memoirs, press interviews, or private correspondence. A comparison of their extant writings to the known facts of their lives reveals numerous deceptions, both large and small, by the actress-authors. What were they trying to hide? Mullenneaux organizes her interdisciplinary study around themes that emerge in the writings including motherhood, beginning a career, theatre work, family, moral refinement, marriage, mobility, and patriotism. Although each women’s experience is idiosyncratic, their tales coalesce into a fascinating picture of one cohort’s experience of, and reaction to, being a working woman of the American stage between 1830 and 1870. Virtually every aspect of these actresses’ lives put them at odds with nineteenth-century ideals, as the book argues. They worked, conducting business and exercising agency, while an “ideal” woman was dependent and docile. They continually traveled when it was generally accepted that a woman’s proper sphere was the home, and they sought acclaim when motherhood was considered a woman’s highest calling. In other words, their careers and life choices “threatened … the prescriptive gender roles” of the day (292). What Mullenneaux exposes in these proto-feminists is an unwillingness to claim their heterodox identities. Instead, in writings that adopt a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do approach, the actress-authors strove to disguise themselves as non-ambitious, patriotic homebodies. According to their self-reports, as Mullenneaux notes, none of these actresses entered the theatre ambitious for fame. Of course not. Only an urgent calling to rescue destitute fathers (or other kin) forced these dutiful women from the warmth of the hearth to the glow of the footlights. As we read multiple versions of this tale — from Fanny Kemble, Anna Cora Mowatt, Charlotte Cushman, Olive Logan, Mrs. Charles Calvert, Clara Morris, Kitty Blanchard, and others — the constructed nature of the actress persona becomes self-evident. Mullenneaux contrasts this assemblage of female testimony with that of contemporaneous male actors who readily claimed talent and ambition as their motivation. Mullenneaux seals her argument by introducing contradictory facts from the biographies of her female subjects. A particularly compelling instance is the collision between Laura Keene’s personal life and the nine-year legal battle she waged over intellectual property rights to Our American Cousin . Mullenneaux argues that Keene ultimately withdrew the suit for fear that testimony would “unmask her domestic deception” (290). Never having divorced her first husband, Keene had presented their children as orphaned nieces while covertly cohabitating with her business manager. Mullenneaux’s insightful analysis of the barely-averted scandal illuminates a larger history. While the pre-copyright entertainment industry was being modernized by the long-running single-play format, legal restrictions still prevented a woman, even a savvy business manager, from testifying in court. In addition to presenting themselves as ideal mothers and wives, this nineteenth-century cohort needed to appear all-American. Hence, they masked their origins and international travels with an aggressive patriotism that fit the age of nation-building and celebrated refined whiteness. Olive Logan supported the “looming genocide against the Native Americans” (158); Fanny Kemble described the black population of New York as “beyond description, grotesques” (156); and in Egypt, Rose Eytinge contrasted the subjugation of women in that “heathen territory” with the American woman “born and reared in freedom,” blithely glossing over millions of enslaved women in the US (156-7). Mullenneaux allows that “conformity to white supremacist views” may have been sincere, but might also have enacted a strategy for social acceptance (156-8). The book briefly discusses the African Grove actresses and some touring singers, highlighting that few non-white women had opportunities for acting careers in this era; Mullenneaux notes that no members of her cohort evidenced concern over this racial exclusion. By the mid-nineteenth century, actresses were often using photography for publicity and Mullenneaux’s astute analysis of their poses and costuming (and the commonalities among them) enhances the book. Another useful asset is an appendix with short biographies of sixty-five actresses mentioned in the text. The author’s choices of actresses give her work both focus and limitations. The women discussed do not represent a cross-section in any scientific sense, but rather the availability of documentation. Thus, the more verbose ladies-in-print, notably Clara Morris, Rose Eytinge and Olive Logan, dominate the conversation. We cannot guess how representative they were, but Mullenneaux is resourceful in seeking evidence and expands her cohort when she can. Furthermore, while she notes the difference between a memoir published at career’s launch and one written after decades in the public eye, she doesn’t adequately factor their differences into her analysis. The plays written by these actresses are also missed opportunities for additional insights. A closer focus on the women’s’ chronological relation to one another would be useful, and the book index should include entries for patriotism, photography, slavery, and each actress discussed. However, the book’s critical strategy is also its major strength. By examining the actresses’ own verbal and visual choices, Mullenneaux restores to them a degree of the agency they sought to obscure. Their biographies attest to their talent and courage; the accumulated evidence of their deceptions convincingly reveals the absolute and unforgiving nature of the gender-based strictures under which they labored. Each woman seems to have independently reached the same conclusion: violating the code would end career and livelihood. How they maneuvered is appropriate reading for an age when working women still face a constellation of questions about when, where, and if to compromise in order to persevere. Staging Family’s dense, panoramic depiction of the era is a treat for theatre historians and nineteenth-century scholars. The focal actresses are situated within the web of familial and professional interconnections that constituted the period’s theatre industry. Over the course of this book, we repeatedly cross paths with individuals as they might have crossed paths with each other. Ultimately, Mullenneaux paints a latitudinal picture, thoroughly contextualized and packed with detail. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Shauna Vey New York City College of Technology 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 Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Erin Rachel Kaplan 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 Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Erin Rachel Kaplan By Published on May 27, 2018 Download Article as PDF Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s . Chrystyna Dail. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016; Pp. 194. In Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s , Chrystyna Dail reveals a significant piece of theatre history and asserts its rightful place in the canon of American drama. Dail begins the book by arguing that the claim often made by theatre historians such as John Gassner that social activist theatre died in the 1930s, only to resurface in the 1960s is a false one. Engaging with Douglas McDermott’s political performance continuum, Dail contends that the group Stage for Action (SFA) created a new kind of socially conscious theatre that served as a propaganda machine for the progressive left, as well as a megaphone for civil rights, workers’ rights, the fight against fascism, and more. For Dail, SFA did more than raise awareness about these issues; it was “diligently involved in theatrical praxis,” demanding and proposing solutions to social justice problems of the day (22). Dail breaks down her historical study of SFA clearly and concisely containing just enough cultural, political, and economic history to contextualize fully the work of SFA. Dail first offers a chronicle of its creation, arguing that SFA became a “reimagining of progressive performance, both during the War and after, and as an underappreciated model for social activist theatre in the United States” (15). Founded by four young women—Perry Miller, Donna Keath, Berilla Kerr, and Peggy Clark—SFA began as a tool to support the War effort in Europe and to bring attention to the “menace of native fascism” (33). In its brief three years, SFA amplified the voices of the some of the most radically anti-racist, anti-fascist, and pro-union thinkers of the era; was one of the earliest racially integrated theatre groups in the US; and became an integral part of Henry A. Wallace’s failed 1948 presidential campaign. Dail argues that what started as a small New York-based volunteer theatre group became the breeding ground for a multitude of progressive causes nationwide. To buttress this argument throughout the book, Dail highlights particular plays within the SFA canon that exemplify the progressive politics of the group. For the second chapter, Dail “explicates the relationship between Stage for Action and labor unions during and following World War II ” (45). Dail argues that Arthur Miller’s That They May Win put SFA in the spotlight. Eleanor Roosevelt discussed the play in her nationally syndicated “My Day” column, and it played to sold-out audiences in New York and around the country. For Dail, Miller’s “missing years” (1945-1946) were spent pouring “himself into revolutionary work and leftist theatrical criticism” (47). He ultimately became the playwright in residence of the SFA. That They May Win existed in multiple versions and called for better military wages, state-sponsored childcare, and the political activism of everyday Americans. Dail also critically analyzes Les Pine and Anita Short’s satirical musical Joseph McGinnical, Cynical Pinnacle, Opus II . Dail claims that “August 1946 through November 1948 saw SFA producing work that substantiated its position as the premier social activist theatre group of the late 1940s” (69). Chapter three examines specific SFA plays that adopted progressive views on racial politics including Charles Polacheck’s Skin Deep . The play was written to advocate for racial equality and address the anti-black violence and race riots making their way across the nation. In addition, Dail includes a detailed analysis of Ben Bengal’s 1946 play All Aboard , which dealt with transportation segregation, as well as Dream Job by Arnold Perl and Talk in Darkness by Malvin Wald. Performed as a part of the Wallace campaign, which fiercely advocated for full civil rights, universal healthcare and childcare, a robust social safety net, federal minimum wage laws, and equality for women in the workplace, among other policies, these SFA productions forced Truman to take up the cause of civil rights (though not as fervently as Wallace did) in order for him to win the 1948 presidential election. In her fourth chapter, Dail looks at yet another project of the SFA—its fight against the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Based on close readings, she argues that Miller wrote The Crucible after Sidney Alexander’s Salem Story , noting that “the plays share the same basic plotline and major characters” (112) and that “too many parallels exist between these two artists for the overlap in their plays to be mere coincidence” (116). Finally, she chronicles the red-baiting that several members of SFA suffered. She observes that “during the decade of 1946-1956 informants ‘named’ 40 percent of Stage for Action membership as Communists or subversives” (139) and that several SFA members were called to testify in front of HUAC. Due to the outcomes of these hearings, some lost their careers and even their lives. In her final chapter, Dail somewhat undercuts her argument that HUAC brought an end to SFA. While the group formally disbanded, several socially activist theatres and productions rose in its place. She offers in-depth readings of the post-SFA plays Open Secret by Robert Adler, who addressed the horrors of the atomic bomb, as well as We Who Are the Weavers by Joseph Shore and Scott Graham Williamson, who strongly critiqued the colonization of Puerto Rico. Dail closes her analysis and argument by making the point that the professionalism and dedication to social justice found in the SFA directly links the workers’ theatres of the 1930s with the companies founded after its disbandment such as the Free Southern Theater and El Teatro Campesino. Stage for Action serves as a fascinating and incredibly well-researched and well-written exploration into an important and oft-forgotten piece of theatre history. Given SFA’s commitment to the notion that “entertainment should have a purpose…and that purpose must be exerted to prevent war, stamp out race hatreds, combat poverty” (151) and more, I cannot think of a more appropriate time to revisit and revive their works. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Erin Rachel Kaplan University of Colorado Boulder 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.

Shilarna Stokes 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 Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Shilarna Stokes By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. by Shilarna Stokes The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Over the course of five evenings in May 1914, more than eight thousand St. Louisans dressed up as Indians, Pioneers, and a host of allegorical figures—Gold, Poverty, and Imagination among them—to perform two versions of their city’s history before over a half million spectators. Hailed by George Pierce Baker as the crowning achievement of the early twentieth-century pageantry movement in the United States, The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis proved “what this drama of the masses may do for the masses.”[1] As the most prominent Symbolist dramatist in the U.S., the Masque’s creator, Percy MacKaye, enjoyed a well-established reputation for plays in which “time is a dream” and in which “the real and the ideal, the substance and the show, the actor and the audience, the poet and the figment of the poet’s imagination” are all interchangeable.[2] A friend and advocate of modernist theatre pioneer Edward Gordon Craig, he echoed Craig’s attack on realism in his own writings and advocated instead for the use of emblematic design elements, allegorical plots, and figurative choreographies.[3] In his view, these were essential to what he called “rituals of democracy,” mass masques cultivating “the half-desire of the people not merely to remain receptive to a popular art created by specialists but to take part themselves in creating it.”[4] By enjoining his fellow theatre artists “to illumine and body forth the life of the people in perennial symbols of power and beauty,” MacKaye pointed to a convergence of Symbolist aesthetics and nationalist sentiment that distinguished his unique contributions to the pageant movement in the United States.[5] The Masque was an elaborate work of verse drama, written in an erudite style and meant to be heard as well as seen. Nonetheless, like other pageants of its time, its narrative and its visual impact depended on the collective movement of large numbers of performers. Mass dances, pantomimes, and gestures allowed Masque performers to communicate its complex story to vast audiences that included spectators hundreds of yards from the stage. In U.S. pageantry, all scenes were, in some sense, crowd scenes. Due to their scale—with hundreds or thousands of citizens performing local histories for hundreds or thousands of their fellow citizens—mass pageants claimed an unambiguous correspondence between the actors and characters onstage, and the spectators in the audience. In doing so they were able to generate performative arguments about civic engagement, citizenship, and democracy on a grand scale, to promote certain kinds of collectivities over others, to incorporate communities seen as vital to the development of the social body, and to exclude communities that were regarded as dangerous to its integrity. To date, David Glassberg’s American Pageantry (1990) is the only published work to offer a substantive discussion of The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis.[6] Though he notes the Masque’s significance as a work of theatre, he is mainly interested in how it reflects Progressive Era conceptions of public history. As such, he steers clear of performance-based analytical approaches. By contrast, I offer here a close analysis of the Masque as a multi-layered performance that sought to shape St. Louisans’ conceptions of collectivity through embodied practices of dance, gesture, and pantomime, as well as the embodying practices of casting and puppetry. In what follows, I discuss how MacKaye’s Masque performed processes of civilization and Americanization that were designed to influence the newly expanded white population of the city. I draw on archival materials, MacKaye’s published works, contemporary secondary sources, and the text of the Masque to demonstrate how its three distinct choreographic modes sustained these processes. Its first and second modes of “playing Indian”—the ritualized and the savage—demonstrated for audiences the difference between rational forms of collective self-organization and wild expressions of collective fervor. The third mode, “Playing Pioneer,” gave shape to an ideal civic body that was consistent with the political and economic vision of city officials. The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis and its audience, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. Reaching its peak of influence in 1914, the American Pageantry movement, as it was called by its supporters, sought to achieve the complete transformation of society through the nationwide production of large-scale pageants: vast open-air historical dramas in which hundreds or thousands of local amateur performers participated.[7] Pageants could be fitted to almost any purpose, though they were nearly always associated with Progressive Era causes and themes. Whereas some reformers saw pageants as civic rituals that would, in time, give shape to a genuine democratic social order, others saw them as an efficient means of achieving immediate political reforms and modernization schemes. Given the wide range of aesthetic and social ideals to which pageants aspired, and the variety of communities that created them, it is not surprising that current scholarship concerned with the American Pageantry movement is similarly varied, tending to ground itself in matters specific to locality and history, and to organize itself around discrete social problems.[8] For MacKaye, pageantry was an antidote to the problem of commercialized leisure and its effect on the white urban working classes. In The Civic Theatre in Relation to the Redemption of Leisure (1911), MacKaye’s sweeping proposal to reform theatre in the United States, he writes that “The use of a nation’s leisure is the test of its civilization. How then does [this gigantic producer America] organize his night leisure? Into what hands of public trust does he commit this most precious engine of national influence? Ignored by the indifference of public spirit, [it] has been left to be organized by private speculation—the amusement business.”[9] For MacKaye, only the symbolist theatre’s refusal to reproduce reality, its utopian insistence on transformation, and its emphasis on universality were powerful enough to redirect the gaze of spectators past motion-pictures, vaudeville, and burlesque shows, and towards a “nobler theatre” existing “not primarily for the boards” but “in the mind of man.”[10] It is on that imaginary stage, MacKaye believed, that human beings may play their proper roles and begin to envision better forms of social organization. The St. Louis Pageant Drama Association (SLPDA), organizers of The Pageant and Masque, had two interrelated aims: to inspire a sense of civic unity in a city with a rapidly growing and increasingly heterogeneous population, and to use this sense of civic engagement to convince voters to pass a new city charter calling for the construction of a downtown plaza and bridge. Three years earlier, Civic League members who had led the charter campaign represented it as a boon to business owners and real estate developers. When the campaign failed they blamed ethnic divisions that, from their perspective, kept residents focused on the growth of their own neighborhoods rather than on projects benefitting St. Louis as a whole. Reinvented as the SLPDA in 1914, former Civic League members argued that The Pageant and Masque would “influence and control the emotions of the masses that their civic activity will be along proper lines,” thereby convincing voters to pass the charter.[11] Whereas MacKaye drew on the language of art, spirituality, and the social good to explain the purpose of his masques and pageants, the SLPDA expressed its aims in terms of progress, efficiency, and the social order. Both, however, operated on the same collective subject: white St. Louisans whose collective mind needed redirection and cultivation, and whose collective body needed redefinition and reorganization. By 1914 St. Louis had already been the site of several monumental celebrations including the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition and Olympic Games, the 1904 Democratic National Convention, and the 1909 Centennial of the city’s incorporation. Whether to surpass its own recent history of mass performances or to outdo other U.S. cities that had recently hosted mass pageants, the SLPDA made a bold decision when it agreed to MacKaye’s plan for a colossal double-feature. Thomas Wood Stevens’s naturalistic pageant would present historical episodes performed during daylight hours. Beginning at nightfall, MacKaye’s masque would reinterpret Stevens’s play in the mode of symbolism, employing allegorical mass characters, abstract design, and sequences of symbolic mass movement. MacKaye’s frequent collaborator, Joseph Lindon Smith, would direct and choreograph the Masque, which in the end took more than five hours to perform.[12] The American Pageant Association defined the masque as a subgenre of pageantry in which the balance between realism and symbolism favored the latter.[13] The differences were more significant, however, for MacKaye. Whereas the function of a pageant is to reenact the past, the aim of a masque, according to MacKaye, is to point to the future progress of civilization. Unlike other pageants of the period, which MacKaye regarded as “tending [too much] toward the static,” his Masque sought to represent the dynamic energies of modern life with its crowded cities and its seemingly endless flows of people by means of “large rhythmic mass-movements of onward urge, opposition, recoil and again the sweep onward”—crowd movements that were part of the script and integral to the plot.[14] The plan to produce both a pageant and a masque solved what MacKaye described as “a special problem in crowd psychology.”[15] Because “a huge, half-socialized, modern multitude [is] unused by experience to imagining,” the unique function of the Masque was to “lead the attention of [the] large masses” from the realistic images presented in the earlier Pageant towards symbolic forms representing the theme of the Masque: “the fall and rise of social civilization.”[16] The idea that civilizations, like organic species, must evolve or suffer extinction, was one to which MacKaye subscribed. Like many among the intellectual elite, he believed that European civilization was in a state of irreversible moral and physical decline because of increasing political unrest and urban overcrowding, plagues that threatened to reach U.S. shores via the mass migration of Europe’s working classes. The Masque took place at the height of the “Great Departure,” historian Tara Zahra’s term for the period between 1846 and 1940 when more than fifty million Europeans moved to the Americas, the majority from Italy, Russia, and Austria-Hungary.[17] Between 1900 and 1910, St. Louis’s foreign-born white population increased nearly 35%, leading to an overall population increase of nearly 20%. Because St. Louis’s rapid growth was directly attributable to recent immigration, city officials recognized the need to communicate with a greater variety of immigrant communities than the city had seen in its history. The SLPDA claimed The Pageant and Masque would break down divisions between the city’s ethnically diverse communities. However, the eventual result of the six-month long casting process was to expand the definition of who counted as a St. Louisan by implicitly establishing whiteness, rather than duration of residency, as the only essential criterion. Although black St. Louisans outnumbered all but the city’s German and Irish populations, and although the overall percentage of black residents was increasing at a much higher rate than that of white residents, only one Black St. Louisan appeared in MacKaye’s Masque—in the allegorical role of Africa. St. Louis’s Indigenous community was small by comparison with other ethnic groups. Nonetheless, when a Chippewa group proposed to perform in an exhibition baseball game for a fee the SLPDA declined their offer.[18] Not one Indigenous person appeared in MacKaye’s Masque. As one example of the “rituals of race” described by Alessandra Lorini, the Masque of St. Louis proposed to gather as many as possible under the sheltering canopy of whiteness in order to answer the question of how to create cohesive civic bodies in an age of racial and ethnic conflict.[19] Although the SLPDA’s refusal to allow the Chippewa to participate was only one of many acts of exclusion from the pageant’s history, the number and variety of Indigenous communities represented in the Pageant by white performers (Mississippians, Osage, Missouri, and more), in contrast to the total invisibility of black communities, invites questions concerning why “Indians” were so heavily represented in the Masque. For the majority of its performers, participation in the city’s largest civic spectacle meant covering one’s face and body with copper greasepaint and “playing Indian,” a concept Philip Deloria has used to describe performances of nativeness by non-native peoples that serve to negotiate contradictory models of U.S. national identity.[20] In the Masque, the symbolic value of Indian bodies is so great that actual Indigenous bodies, as persistent reminders of colonial violence, are rendered invisible. MacKaye himself blamed the “reverted social state” of “the Indian race” on the invasion of the hordes of the bison.[21] Building on Deloria’s work, Shari Huhndorf provides additional context for an interpretation of the Masque through her focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century examples of “going native” that contributed to “the regeneration of racial whiteness and Euro-American society,” particularly during “moments of social crisis that [gave] rise to collective doubts about the nature of progress.”[22] In keeping with Huhndorf’s assessment of the kinds of social malaise that “going native” has habitually addressed, representations of Indians in the Masque in fact bore little resemblance to other contemporary attempts to portray Indigenous peoples, such as those that took place in Wild West shows or World’s Fairs. Rather, “playing Indian” in the Masque was a way to engage and represent white urban workers to themselves—the same leisure-seekers who MacKaye’s Civic Theatre plan proposed to re-educate. That pageants often linked the bodies of Indians to those of white urban workers can be seen in countless images that represent workers and Indians mirroring one another in costume or in gestures of submission. In cartoons like one from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Masque participants perform gestures involved in Indian work and ritual on a mound “built by Moundbuilders Local no. 6,” and discuss “working class” themes such as baseball, lumbago, and the need for tobacco. The Masque’s representation of Indians was both a continuation of and an exception to the modes of “playing Indian” that took place in Wild West shows or in World’s Fairs, both of which had begun to attract massive audiences well before the pageant movement began. Like the Wild West shows in which Indigenous performers “[observed] traditional spiritual and cultural practices, [and] simulated hunting, shooting, and fighting back,” the Masque’s red-face performers engaged in similar activities for an audience.[23] Like the 1904 World’s Fair that took place in St. Louis, in which a model Indian school operated alongside a model ethnological village, the Masque aimed to articulate differences between “progressive Indians” and “primitive Indians.”[24] Unlike both the Wild West shows and the World’s Fairs, however, no Indigenous performers appeared in the Masque. As such, the Masque’s Indians did not aim at authenticity and were not subjects of an anthropological gaze. Rather, they offered an example of red-face performance that wholly consumed and expelled the bodies of Indigenous persons in order to re-present them as a collective symbol of a vanished past. Mass masques like MacKaye’s were spectacles that claimed to be anti-spectacle, and commercial enterprises that claimed to be anti-commercial. Defined as gatherings of the people and as events performed by the people (rather than as entertainments performed by paid professionals) the exclusion of Indigenous performers in pageants and masques was consistent with the contradictions inherent in an art form that sought to give shape to ideas of “the people” by excluding so many of them. To participate in a pageant not only meant “going native” but “becoming native,” in the sense of performing one’s affective belonging to a place in which one was not born. Indigenous peoples stood apart from the structures of belonging that the pageants and masques offered to others because, being neither white nor able to become white, they could only ever be foreign. Poster for A Pageant of Progress in Lawrence, Massachusetts (1911), courtesy of Dartmouth College Library, and “Sidelights on the Pageant.” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 29, 1914. The Prelude to the Masque depicted an invented lamentation ritual of the Mississippian or “moundbuilding” peoples, the eleventh-century inhabitants of the middle Mississippi river valley known for their creation of colossal earthwork mounds. In MacKaye’s mass pantomime, the Moundbuilders performed ceremonial dances, acrobatic feats, and prayers in honor of a deceased leader. Employing a ritualized mode of “playing Indian,” the Masque offered spectators a demonstration of a self-governing civic body that supported both MacKaye’s theatrical vision and the SLPDA’s economic vision, a body that achieved physical excellence through ritual dances imitating the geometrical forms of the city’s sacred architecture. Although few St. Louisans were familiar with them, MacKaye was so enchanted by his visit to the “Mounds” in nearby Cahokia, Illinois that he decided to recreate them in St. Louis’s Forest Park. The densely populated urban center of Mississippian culture, also called Cahokia, was composed of a vast central plaza, surrounded by mounds of differing geometrical shapes that may have corresponded to different civic functions.[25] The plan of this ancient city, with its monumental buildings, vast causeways, and interconnected plazas, correlated well with the city-of-the-future envisioned by the SLPDA. It also suited MacKaye’s goal, which was to imbue his Masque with classical values of form, beauty, and serenity. Despite the depiction of Moundbuilder rituals in the Globe-Democrat cartoon, the participants in the Prelude were not middle-aged men, but Boy Scouts and girls from local athletics clubs as well as young leaders of these organizations. Baker described the choreography of the scene: “Slowly and exquisitely, figures walking, swaying, dancing, filled the great stage [with] right arm extended before them and right knee raised high like figures in Assyrian bas-reliefs, [. . .] their bodies stained a yellow-brown.”[26] Ernest Harold Baynes added, “They represent the race at the very height of its civilization—a people beautiful of form and dress, lithe and graceful of movement, rejoicing in the strength and skill of their bodies which have been brought to a wonderful state of perfection.”[27] As described by Baker and Baynes, the athletic bodies of the Masque’s young performers provided the model material from which great civilizations may be built; moreover, their callisthenic acts confirmed that bodies can be “brought to perfection” through the performance of civic rituals such as the Masque. The Moundbuilders’ tightly choreographed ritual, designed by Joseph Lindon Smith, demonstrated their ability to create complex patterns without the instruction of a visible leader.[28] Instead, their movements were directed by the geometrical motifs of the emblematic setting: the cubic altar, the circular shrine, and the pyramidal mounds. Photographs taken during rehearsal and in performance indicate that although both male and female Moundbuilders entered in winding lines imitating the shape of a river, the boys soon began to dance in a rectangular pattern around the center altar while the girls danced towards them, eventually forming circles on stage left and right. The men playing older priests arranged themselves symmetrically at the edges of the largest central mound, creating a triangle while younger boys imitated their elders by making human pyramids on top of the two smaller mounds at stage left and stage right. In Smith’s choreography, the Moundbuilders were represented as a people who have so thoroughly incorporated the architectural shapes surrounding them that they need no leader to guide their movements. They performed as a self-governing civic body, whose rational and efficient movements corresponded in every detail to the design of their city. Moundbuilders rehearsing the Prelude, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. As the Moundbuilders’ ritual faded from the audience’s view, an enormous puppet called Cahokia was revealed sitting on the center mound. Waking from a long sleep, he explained to the audience that the preceding Prelude enacted his dreaming memory of the glorious city in which he was once a revered priest. Now, Cahokia lamented, his people have vanished. MacKaye lovingly called Cahokia “my Über-marionette.”[29] Although the convention of beginning a pageant with a soliloquy delivered by an Indian was already well-established, MacKaye’s decision to use a giant puppet was unusual. Cahokia’s majestic presence not only underscored the extent of Edward Gordon Craig’s influence upon MacKaye’s ideas for reforming US theatre, it provided an aesthetic form through which MacKaye communicated his understanding of the relationship between the creative artist and the people in the socio-aesthetic work of pageantry. MacKaye’s profound reverence for Cahokia is unmistakable in numerous photographs that show him gazing up at the puppet and holding his hand. Conversely, photographs showing MacKaye rehearsing with actors tend to betray the posture of a stern disciplinarian. The different attitudes displayed in these photographs suggest that, for MacKaye, as for Craig, the human body was less suitable material for art than the Über-marionette. Unlike the “half-formed” people of St. Louis, who “provide[d] in themselves [the] creative material” for the poet-dramatist to shape and control, Cahokia’s puppet-body was an already complete work of art exemplifying MacKaye’s ideal civic body—his limbs, head, and hands moving in harmony with each other and with the music of the hidden orchestra.[30] MacKaye professed disagreement with Craig’s idea to banish from the theatre all “the personal elements implied in the work of the actor.”[31] However, his repeated descriptions of Masque participants as materials to be harmonized through performance suggest that MacKaye relished the opportunity to transform the individual bodies of St. Louisans as well as the civic body of St. Louis into works of art that might move with as much grace and precision as a puppet. MacKaye holds Cahokia’s hand. MacKaye directs Raymond Koch. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. Although the Moundbuilders, like Cahokia, embodied physical perfection, they did not speak. Consequently, it was left to Cahokia to speak as the last member of his once-civilized tribe: [. . .] Ai-ya, my people! Where are the tribes of Cahokia? Lo, where the trails of twilight Hide them, naked and scattered, Luring them backward—backward Deeper in primal darkness, Masking with brutes, and mating In lairs of the jungle.[32] With these lines Cahokia bewailed the de-evolution of his people into the beast-like Wild Nature Forces, a group of characters that allegorized all the allegedly savage Indigenous communities descended from the Moundbuilders. A brief glance at the text of Stevens’s Pageant helps makes this clear for its opening scenes trace the de-evolution of the Indian from a supposedly single, distinct culture (that of the Moundbuilders) to a passel of nomadic hordes whose degenerate habits are easily repelled, then reeducated through the heroic efforts of European colonists. In Stevens’s Pageant the Osage and the Missouri are represented as homeless, cowardly thieves who survive by means of begging and stealing. Those St. Louisans who played Osage and Missouri in Pageant scenes were double-cast as Wild Nature Forces in the Masque.[33] MacKaye’s stage directions indicate what has become of them: “Below [Cahokia], mysterious, half-seen, at the foot of the mound—crouched on its sides and lurking in the dark background--brute-headed forms of the “Wild Nature Forces” move and mingle with glimmering limbs of savages.”[34] Recognizing the Masque’s Indians as a representation of the city’s rapidly expanding white working-class population, it becomes apparent that the transition from “playing Moundbuilders” to “playing Wild Nature Forces” signified a descent from civilization into savagery, and from culture into nature, that was resonant with contemporary fears about urban overcrowding and the corrupting influence of urban life. Like the denizens of modern cities, which sociologist E.A. Ross described as scenes of “mingling without fellowship and [. . .] contact without intercourse,” of “wolfish struggle, crimes, frauds, exploitations and parasitism,” the tribes of Cahokia, the puppet-priest explained, were lured away from their ancestral grounds.[35] No longer heeding Cahokia’s prayers, the Wild Nature Forces began to obey gods of Chaos who urged them to give into their basest animal instincts towards lust, greed, and violence. In all their aspects, the Wild Nature Forces illustrated the savagery of the modern city. Their movements consisted of lurking, crouching, crawling, mingling, mating, leaping, rushing and, unsurprisingly, crowding. Unlike the Moundbuilders, the Wild Nature Forces exhibited only groping, half-formed motions or rowdy, uncontrolled dancing. They gestured in multiple, arbitrary directions, all at the same time. They remained close to the ground where it was darkest and their shapes, which are described in the text of Masque as “half-seen” or “half-hidden,” were indistinguishable from one another. When the allegorical character named Saint Louis first entered the Masque, he appeared as a four-year-old boy, dragging behind him an immense sword that was too heavy for him to lift. Sensing his weakness, the Wild Nature Forces attacked the child, attempting to kidnap him. At the moment Saint Louis miraculously heaved the sword high above his head, the Wild Nature Forces suddenly froze, stunned into stasis and silence, “the beast faces [. . .] startled, glowering, murmurous.”[36] Then, all at once, they “swarm[ed] down the mound sides, rush[ed] into the darkness and vanish[ed].”[37] Saint Louis’s first victory in the Masque was one in which the mere appearance of a symbol of European conquest possessed the power to bring savage bodies to order and banish them from the stage. Having cleared the stage of actual Indigenous persons, stage Indians, and allegorical Indian figures by the end of the first act, the remainder of MacKaye’s Masque followed the actions of an equally complex representation of the urban masses: the Pioneer. Like the Indian, the Pioneer was familiar from earlier public celebrations. Scenes of pioneers marching with the tools of their various trades or symbolically clearing the land in front of them with axes had been a staple of US civic parades since the eighteenth century.[38] Participants in such performances embodied the nation’s pursuit of manifest destiny and the conquest of the frontier. In the Masque of St. Louis, however, the Pioneer was adapted to reflect twentieth-century concerns. Whereas the Masque’s Moundbuilders illustrated a vanished preindustrial and proto-national collective subject, the Pioneers of the second act represented an emerging national and progressive collective subject, one that must repeatedly confront the problems of participatory democracy in an age of industrialization and mass immigration. The first of the Masque’s Pioneers entered a theatrical space from which the ritual center, the sacred altar fire of the Moundbuilders, had been removed. The only remaining light on stage emanated from the small shrine at the apex of the center mound. “Marching [forward] in widespread numbers” with spades, scythes, axes, and rifles, the Masque’s Pioneers were unlike their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forebears.[39] Carrying useless tools that clear no land, they presented themselves as lost and leaderless bands of men, desperately in search of a place to make camp or a direction in which to move. As if suddenly recognizing the urgent need for guidance, one Pioneer cried out: “Our trails blaze with desire and danger and hope born of to-day. For tomorrow is dim and yesterday–dead. Now lead us to-day! Lead us, St. Louis!” In unison the others echoed: “Lead us, St. Louis!” Emerging from a nearby shrine, Saint Louis suddenly appeared as a young knight clad in white armor with a brilliant white sword. The sword, as tall as the actor, animated the immense spaces of the pageant stage, directing the Pioneers onstage and the spectators’ attention. From this scene onward, the Pioneers did not move or act unless directed to do so by Saint Louis and his sword. As the Masque’s promptbook reveals, the leaders of each of the three Pioneer groups were given typewritten sheets that explained where their groups should assemble and provided precise instructions for movement and choral speech. When read together, and in conjunction with the text of the Masque, they demonstrate the degree to which the Pioneers functioned as an automatic onstage audience, one formed by a reflexive, nearly involuntary instinct to applaud the actions of civic leaders.[40] Though the Pioneers were unable to move forward on their own, they were able to pledge their obedience to new leadership without hesitation. By performing spontaneous consensus and by demonstrating their willingness to be guided by familiar symbols of Anglo-European culture, the Pioneers provided an onstage model of the kind of civic responsiveness SLPDA members hoped St. Louisans would emulate offstage. Throughout the Masque’s Second Act, the Pioneers displayed their boundless energy. The prompt sheets instructed them to move swiftly from mound to mound and between various parts of the stage, often for no reason connected to the action of the scene.[41] Though their movement rarely indicated any achievement, it nevertheless performed the dynamism of modernity MacKaye sought to represent. Whereas the measured, ritualized group movement of the Moundbuilders expressed the rhythms of ancient, civilized collectivities, the velocity and urgency of the Pioneers’ numerous flights across the stage expressed the rhythms of the modern city. Though they did not represent a self-organizing collective body on the model of the Moundbuilders, the Pioneers were no less attuned to the necessity of precision, repetition, and rhythm in their collective movements. Once they arrived at their appointed positions on the stage, their vocabulary of gestures was even more restricted than that of the Moundbuilders. Confined to gestures of deference and supplication, the prompt sheets instructed them to stand, half-kneel or kneel, to extend their arms up or out, and to point towards symbols as they appear on stage. Perhaps one of the only opportunities for creative self-expression came in the form of a repeated request, appearing in almost every prompt sheet, for the Pioneers to “make a great show of interest” through audible noises and visible gestures whenever any astonishing action occurred onstage. The Pioneers provided an onstage audience for the allegorical Saint Louis that was intended to serve as an exemplary model for the Masque’s actual audiences. Their prescribed range of movement suggests that in the Masque’s view, being an active participant in modern civic life meant being an appreciative and impressionable spectator. It meant performing one’s patriotism by recognizing symbols, manifesting visible and audible signs of reverence for them, and agreeing to be led by those who employ them. Saint Louis and the Sword, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. If MacKaye hoped that audiences would concentrate on the mass symbols and choreographies performed by their fellow citizens, the St. Louis press was more focused on the masses of spectators themselves. Local newspapers attempted to give readers an experience of the Masque’s scale by printing panoramic photographs of its audiences, which by the end of its run comprised more than a half-million individuals. Many more saw the Pageant and Masque during its week of rehearsals prior to opening day. The test of any pageant’s success was the degree to which it could hold the attention of its vast crowds. As such, newspaper accounts remarked on the degree to which St. Louisans paid attention to an event that so many had presumed they could not understand. Spectators reportedly sat silent through sizzling summer days just to watch rehearsals, stood in the rain for many hours to gain access to the pageant grounds, and climbed dangerously high into trees to get the best viewing spots. Sitting amongst the minority of spectators who paid for their seats, Baker described several of his co-spectators chattering through the Prelude. From his perspective, they chatter because they are leisure-seekers, unaware that they are participating in a civic ritual. Eventually, however, the Masque worked its magic; the group became quiet and still as the performance continued. Before they left, he explained, they turned back to look at the stage once more before silently walking away. For Baker, this transformation proved that the Masque had succeeded in sparking a moment of collective attention that might be mobilized for social purposes if repeated often enough.[42] Despite Baker’s insistence on its singular social and cultural significance, MacKaye’s Masque, like so many previous civic entertainments, was absorbed into the urban spectacle it promised to transcend. Local papers reported everything from women overcome by heat, children lost in crowds, horses run astray, and water boys mobbed by thirsty spectators. Far from the ideal of civic enlightenment MacKaye describes in The Civic Theatre, spectators at one performance broke through seating barriers and caused a brawl. Rather than diverting attention away from the city’s commercial entertainments, some members of the Pageant and Masque’s chorus performed onstage at one of the city’s vaudeville houses immediately after an evening performance of the Masque. Although the Masque’s critical and popular success was unsurpassed by any previous or subsequent event to emerge from the American Pageantry movement, its legacy remains fraught. On the one hand, the Masque’s success directly contributed to the passing of the charter, which in addition to its construction projects ensured stronger concentration of authority in the mayor’s office, fewer elected and more appointed positions, and rezoning provisions that narrowed participation in the political process. On the other hand, it also led to the establishment of the St. Louis Municipal Opera Company, the expansion of St. Louis’s public arts programs, and the construction of a permanent outdoor amphitheater in Forest Park. Despite MacKaye’s belief that large-scale participation in the Masque would encourage St. Louisans to work together for reforms that grew out of their own desires and imaginations, he misunderstood the extent to which the SLPDA’s interpretation of the Masque as well as its definition of popular participation predetermined its potential social meanings. Luther Ely Smith, who saw the Masque as evidence of “the [same] civic spirit which will build our bridge, pass our charter, [and] stretch a plaza from 12th Street to Grand Avenue” was but one of many voices echoing the official interpretation.[43] In the end, MacKaye’s Masque may have taught St. Louisans more about collectively performing towards the aspirations of its leaders, than about collective action or even collective dreaming. It stands as an unusual cultural experiment, and as a reminder that greater participation by citizens in the social and cultural work of performance neither equates nor necessarily leads to greater participation in official political processes. The work of coalition-building requires more sustainable performance practices than pageant-makers like MacKaye tended to have in mind. Acts of inclusion, when performed on a monumental scale, have the power to make a positive impact on communities, and even to instantiate processes of engagement, but their long-term efficacy depends on how they cultivate the meaning and the practice of collective participation before, during, and after the crowds go home. Shilarna Stokes is a Lecturer in Theater Studies at Yale University. Her research centers on how mass theatrical events give shape to ideas about public space, collectivity, and political life. [1] George Pierce Baker, “The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis.” World’s Work, vol. 28 (Aug 1914), 389. Though known primarily for pioneering the study of playwriting in the United States, Baker was a prominent advocate of pageantry as well as a pageant writer and director. [2] Thomas Dickinson, Playwrights of the New American Theater (New York: McMillan, 1925), 19. Despite his lack of popular success, Dickinson and others considered MacKaye one of the most important playwrights of his day. His most well-known plays are The Canterbury Pilgrims (1903), Jeanne d’Arc (1906), Sappho and Phaon (1907), The Scarecrow (1911), and Yankee Fantasies (1912). [3] Directly quoting Craig’s On the Art of the Theatre (1912) in his own book, MacKaye described realism as “the blunt statement of life, something everybody misunderstands while recognizing,” (Percy MacKaye, The Civic Theatre in Relation to the Redemption of Leisure. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912: 28). Despite their occasional disagreements, MacKaye and Craig were lifelong friends and correspondents. On their relationship, see Susan Valeria Harris Smith, Masks in Modern Drama (Berkeley: UC Press, 1984): 49-84. [4] Percy MacKaye, quoted in Joyce Kilmer, Literature in the Making, By Some of its Makers (New York: Harper, 1917), 314. [5] Letter from Percy MacKaye to Grenville Vernon, March 12, 1907, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. MacKaye’s work in the masque genre predated the rise of the pageantry movement. The Saint-Gaudens Masque, performed at the Cornish Art Colony in 1905, was MacKaye’s first critical success. His first pageant was performed at Gloucester, Massachusetts in August 1909 and, though it never materialized, he developed a pageant for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1910. After The Masque of St. Louis MacKaye created his most well-known and most often studied masque, Caliban by the Yellow Sands, based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It was produced both in New York and Boston in 1916. MacKaye remained a member of the American Pageantry Association’s Board of Directors until its dissolution in 1930. [6] David Glassberg’s American Pageantry: the Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990) currently serves as the starting point for scholarship on MacKaye’s Masque. Two dissertations also consider the event in some detail from different perspectives: Kenneth Graeme Bryant, “Percy MacKaye and the Drama of Democracy,” (PhD diss., Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln, 1991), ProQuest AAT 9200131, and Michael Peter Mehler, “Percy MacKaye: Spatial Formations of a National Character,” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2010), ProQuest AAT 3417299. [7] A bibliography of contemporary works on American pageantry can be found in Caroline Hill Davis, Pageants in Great Britain and the United States: a List of References (New York: New York Public Library Association, 1916). The American Pageant Association (APA), founded in 1913, was organized for the purposes of protecting the new genre from commercialization, disorganization, and low aesthetic standards. Its founding and development is discussed in Naima Prevots, American Pageantry: a Movement for Art and Democracy (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990). [8] For examples of the variety of forms that current pageant scholarship takes, see the following: Karen Blair, “Pageantry for Women’s Rights: The Career of Hazel MacKaye, 1913-1923, Theatre Survey, Vol. 31, no. 1: 23-46; Brook Davis, “Let the children speak: The ‘Pageant of Sunshine and Shadow,’ a child labor pageant by Constance D’Arcy Mackay,” Theatre Studies, 1997, Vol. 4: 33-44; Brian Hallstoos, “Pageant and Passion: Willa Saunders Jones and Early Black Sacred Drama in Chicago,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre, 2007, Vol. 19, no. 2: 77-97; Hannah Hammond, “A Masque on Behalf of the Birds,” New England Theatre Journal, Vol. 27: 41-62; Jenna L. Kubly, “Staging the Great War in the National Red Cross Pageant,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre, 2012, Vol. 24, no. 2: 49-66. [9] Percy MacKaye, The Civic Theatre in Relation to the Redemption of Leisure, 30-31. In the Civic Theatre MacKaye draws heavily on Jane Addams’s Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909) and Michael D. Davis’ Exploitation of Pleasure (1911) for support for his ideas. See also, George Elliott Howard, “Social Psychology of the Spectator,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 18, No. 1 (July 1912): 37-41. [10] Percy MacKaye, “On the Need of Imagination in the Drama of To-day,” Harvard Advocate, vol. 63, no. 10 (June 30, 1897): 140. [11] Luther Gulick, quoted in Glassberg, American Pageantry, 199. [12] Percy MacKaye, Saint Louis: A Civic Masque (New York: Doubleday, 1914), xi-xii. [13] Anne Throop Craig, “Pageantry,” Encyclopedia Americana (Encyclopedia Americana Co., 1919): 101. [14] Percy MacKaye, “Worcester Address on Pageantry,” February 26, 1912, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library; MacKaye, Saint Louis, xiv. [15] MacKaye, Saint Louis, x. [16] Ibid., xvi-xix. [17] Tara Zahra, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), 4. For demographic data see The Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910: Statistics for Missouri, 602-622. [18] My description of the casting process is based on Glassberg, 178-181, and upon documents in the Dartmouth College Library. [19] Alessandra Lorini, Rituals of Race: American Public Culture and the Search for Racial Democracy (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1999), 236-243. [20] Glassberg, American Pageantry, 178; Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 5. [21] MacKaye, Saint Louis, xix. [22] Shari Huhndorf, Going Native (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001): 3, 14. [23] Rosemarie K. Bank, “Show Indians/Showing Indians: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and American Anthropology,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, vol. 26 (Fall 2011): 152. [24] L.G. Moses, “Indians on the Midway: Wild West Shows and the Indian Bureau at the World’s Fairs, 1893-1904,” South Dakota History, vol. 21 (Fall 1991): 24. [25] Sally A. Kitt Chapel, Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 142-145. [26] Baker, 391. [27] Ernest Harold Baynes, “The Biggest Show Ever Staged,” Boston Evening Transcript, undated, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. [28] Joseph Lindon Smith was a painter known primarily for the skill with which he recreated ancient artifacts discovered on archaeological expeditions in Egypt. My description of his choreography for the Prelude is based on more than fifty rehearsal and performance photographs in the Dartmouth College Library, as well as dozens of newspaper accounts from MacKaye’s scrapbook on the Masque, also in the Dartmouth College Library. [29] MacKaye wrote this on the back of a photograph of Cahokia in the PMK Papers. Edward Gordon Craig explains his theory of the Über-marionette in On the Art of the Theatre (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2008), 54-94. Both Robert Edmond Jones and Thomas Dickinson regarded the Masque as the only theatrical work to successfully explore the possibilities of the Über-marionette on the US stage. [30] MacKaye, Saint Louis, x. [31] MacKaye, The Civic Theatre (fn.), 27. [32] MacKaye, Saint Louis, 7-8. [33] Program of the Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, PMK Papers. [34] MacKaye, Saint Louis, 5. [35] Edward Alsworth Ross, Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order (New York: MacMillan, 1901), 19. Highly influential during his lifetime (1866-1951), Ross wrote twenty-seven books and over 300 articles on social psychology, history, and urban reform. [36] MacKaye, Saint Louis, 22. [37] Ibid. [38] See, for examples, Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theater in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1986), David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: the Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1997), and Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). [39] MacKaye, Saint Louis, 42. [40] Promptbook of The Masque of St. Louis, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. [41] Ibid. [42] Baker, 391. [43] Luther Ely Smith, “Pageant to Make City Better Place to Live In,” Bulletin of the Pageant and Masque of Saint Louis, No. 2: 7. "Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis" by Shilarna Stokes ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: "Introduction: Embodied Arts" by Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson "'Must Be Heavyset': Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies" by Ryan Donovan "Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville" by Jennifer Schmidt "Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis" by Shilarna Stokes "Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis 'Tightrope' Dance" by Dana Venerable www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical Introduction: Embodied Arts "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance History, Musicals, and the Americas Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 2 Visit Journal Homepage The New Humor in the Progressive Era By Published on May 25, 2016 Download Article as PDF The New Humor in the Progressive Era: Americanization and the Vaudeville Comedian. By Rick DesRochers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. 187. Rick DesRochers’s exploration of vaudeville comedians and comediennes during vaudeville’s heyday is richly contextualized within a particular sociocultural moment, a crucial moment of rapid change in the history of the United States, when new technologies hurled the nation into the modern age, and a wave of immigration, primarily from Southern and Eastern Europe, alarmed native-born Americans with roots in Northern and Western Europe. It was a time when future President Woodrow Wilson warned Americans that “the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population” (quoted by DesRochers, xiii). It is also an era that seems profoundly familiar to our present moment. DesRochers looks critically at this nominally “progressive” era (circa 1880s-1920s) and the concerted efforts of primarily white, middle class Protestant reformers, who instituted a plethora of educational and social programs to solve the “problems” of the new immigrant and urban poor through assimilation/“Americanization.” Along with political and religious practices that the native population found Un-American, the new immigrants popularized a “New Humor,” first identified as such by vaudeville historian Albert McLean Jr., who defined it as “a humor that was more excited, more aggressive, and less sympathetic than that to which the middle classes of the nineteenth century had been accustomed” (quoted by DesRochers, 30). This new, satirical humor was attributed at the time to the “great influx of Latins and Slavs” who dared to laugh at, rather than with, the dominant culture (xiv). DesRochers’s purpose is to illustrate how this new and subversive sense of humor, which would be particularly, and gleefully, manifest in vaudeville, disrupted the Progressive agenda of assimilation. In addition to undermining the aforementioned attempts to “Americanize” a new generation of immigrants from “unfavorable” (3) foreign cultures, DesRochers argues, the new humor in vaudeville contributed to the making of a new America by blurring artistic distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, as well as blurring distinctions between cultural identities based on race, religion, gender, age, and class. The new humor confronted sensitive, volatile issues and situations head on and challenged authority on every level. It shocked the middle class bourgeoisie but ultimately, for its most talented practitioners, found a large and appreciative audience. DesRochers organizes the study in five chapters and an epilogue. His first two chapters provide an overview of the socio-historical context and explicate the nature and origins of the “New Humor.” Chapters Three and Four analyze three major and overlapping genres of vaudeville comic acts, each subverting the cultural status quo in its own way: ethnic acts challenged the stability of racial identity, family acts challenged patriarchal authority, and school acts challenged the educational system. A fifth chapter on female performers explores how they subverted conventional gender expectations by being wild, unruly, sexual, and most of all, funny. As one critic remarked of May Elinore: “she is one of those marvels Heaven seldom sends us - a truly funny woman who doesn’t mind making herself look ugly or ridiculous in order to make her audience laugh” (quoted by DesRochers, 71). The range of performers profiled include those who became legendary, like Buster Keaton, the Marx brothers, and Marie Dressler, those who are known to vaudeville aficionados, including Weber and Fields, Eva Tanguay and May Irwin, and those who are virtually unknown, like the Elinore sisters. The performance of ethnic and racial identities permeates all three genres; the Marx brothers, who were first generation Eastern European Jews, performed German, Irish, and Italian identities, among others. Weber and Fields lampooned German and Jewish identities in their “Double Dutch” act. May Irwin won fame as a “coon shouter” crossing both gender and racial identities with her imitation of African American male singers. Eva Tanguay created a sensation as the Sambo girl in an act that included her signature song, “I don’t care” (“what people may think of me”). Cringe-worthy terms like coons, micks, wops, and krauts appear in the titles of ethnic acts. Although the degree to which such performances may have sustained, rather than challenged, racist attitudes, is a vexing question, DesRochers argues that “no vaudevillian, whether in blackface, yellow face, or any of the myriad ethnic disguises ever entirely disappeared behind those masks, making it clear that ethnicity was performed and not to be taken literally” (55-56). For me, the absurd and self-aware ethnic impersonations of the Marx brothers, as described herein, seem to have more subversive potential than others. For example, in a scene in which a Russian-accented Groucho, threatened with a coconut pie by an Italian-accented Chico, drops character (and accent) to say to the audience: “There’s my argument. Restrict immigration” (1). This book links vaudeville, both aesthetically and ideologically, to modernism through its challenges to aesthetic and cultural as well as moral, categories, its speed and vitality, its irreverence and irony, and its self awareness. In his epilogue, DesRochers also highlights contemporary correspondence between Progressive era “New Humorists” and “current new humorists” Dave Chappell, Assif Mandvi, Key and Peele, Tina Fey, Larry David, and Sarah Silverman, arguing that their humor still responds to cultural shifts by “confronting and satirizing these irrational anxieties caused by the decline of Anglo-Christian hegemony in the United States” (141-42). In sum, The New Humor in the Progressive Era vividly illuminates a critical era in America’s social and cultural history that might also shed light on our own. DesRochers writes in clear, accessible prose, and this book will be of interest to those interested in America’s social and cultural history, as well as specialists in theatre history and popular entertainment. Cheryl Black University of Missouri The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 2 (Spring 2016) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Blue-Collar Broadway The New Humor in the Progressive Era Stages of Engagement Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jennifer Goodlander Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band Jennifer Goodlander By Published on May 23, 2022 Download Article as PDF For many, Cambodia and Cambodian American identities remain “unrepresentable.” [1] Jonathan H. X. Lee troubles the relationships between Southeast Asian, American, and specific national identities to suggest a rethinking of identity that might “arise from calibrating subjectivities and internal-alchemies of memories, histories, and visions.” [2] For people from Cambodia, questions of citizenship or status further come into play when considering how the United States shares responsibility for genocide because its policy of bombing the Cambodian-Vietnamese border instigated the political situation that allowed Pol Pot to come to power. Additionally, recent US immigration policy has resulted in the deportation of hundreds of Cambodian Americans to Cambodia, even though many of them have no memory of their “home” land. How then does Lauren Yee in her new play Cambodian Rock Band ( CRB ) craft a moving story of a father and daughter in Cambodia while complicating discourses about Cambodian and Cambodian American identities and responsibility? One of the top ten most-produced plays in 2019 in US professional theatres, CRB will go on a highly anticipated national tour in 2022. The play tells the story of Neery, who is working in Cambodia to help bring the top villains of the Khmer Rouge to justice, and her father, whom she discovers is one of the few survivors of the regime’s infamous prison, S-21. Although physical violence is not completely absent from the play, it is not the focus of emotional or narrative impact. [3] Music moves the play from family drama into larger discussions of truth and healing, memory and politics. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials names this complicated relationship “Cambodian Syndrome,” “a transnational set of amnesiac politics revealed through hegemonic modes of public policy and memory.” [4] The often illusionistic play destabilizes truth through music. Jill Dolan describes the limits of illusionism and focuses on primarily the visual and textual apparatus of representation that might be used to destabilize hegemonic readings. [5] I am proposing using music outside the limits of Brechtian tactics; it is music, not the bodies onstage, that offers the dramaturgical means for representation. Musical dramaturgy examines the way music functions, beyond invoking emotion or creating atmosphere, within a theatrical production; “what music does , rather than what is .” [6] Often, within musical dramaturgy, the focus is primarily, or even solely, on how music lives within or creates the dramatic text. [7] I expand this notion, because music, like the stage itself, is “haunted,” to borrow Marvin Carlson’s term. [8] In CBR , lyric, melody/harmony, cultures, and histories inform what we hear and what that sound means. The play opens with a live band on stage playing two songs before the house lights dim and the dialogue begins. The bouncy, joyful sound of “Cyclo” (both the name of the song and of the band) begins in the diatonic scale commonly used by American rock bands. This is in contrast to the opening refrain of the next song “Uku,” which features a pentatonic scale, the five-note scale that often suggests an “Asian” sound to the listener. A haunting flute dances lightly against the rhythm of the guitar and is complemented by percussion that invokes sounds of distant thunder or gunfire. A female singer adds another level of sound, as her voice invokes a feeling of longing. The words are in Khmer, but the sound suggests the meaning, even without translation: The windy season makes me think of my villageI think of the old people, young people, aunts and unclesWe used to run and play, hide and seekBut now we are far apart [9] This pair of songs challenges and supports various misconceptions of Asian identities as Other and complicates global connections between Asia and the United States. Music serves as a backbone for the play and a significant element of the story; the songs are a mix of Cambodian and American radio-hits from the past and new compositions by the California-based group Dengue Fever. The audience experiences the music in the immediate present, but the music invokes the past and another culture through language and sound. Just as the music jumps across time and locale, the story of Cambodian-born Chum reconciling his relationship with his American daughter Neery explores different cultural values and intertwined histories. Yee’s deep obsession with the music of Dengue Fever inspired her to write the play, but as the play developed, the music also became central to the play’s dramaturgy. The songs do not always propel the action forward, as it would in a musical, but director Chay Yew explains, “the music is actually another character in Lauren’s play.” [10] Discussions of the play often mention that the music makes the play accessible because rock music would be familiar to an audience generally unfamiliar with Cambodia—“music is universal and defies borders.” [11] I argue that the music does more than make the play accessible. In this essay, I use CRB as a case to explore how musical dramaturgies might articulate complex Asian identities that complicate the limits of visuality. Similarly, recent scholarship on Asian and Asian American identities also focuses on the aural. [12] I use music, as Daphne Lei describes, to move identity from a binary of Asian/Asian American to a neither/nor state where “the past is ‘forgotten’ but the future is not yet reached,” and ends with the hope that “interlinked Asian and American ethnicities can be created, negotiated, and performed.” [13] I argue that the music within the play offers an alternative means to engage some of the complex relationships between Southeast Asia and the United States and mirrors a similar need for engagement within scholarship between Asian performance and Asian American performance. From the beginning, the play establishes the limits between visual versus aural regimes of knowledge. As the opening music concludes, everyone is seated and the house lights dim. A man appears onstage to thank and introduce the band. He says, “From their first, last, ONLY album, recorded in Phnom Penh, April 1974. A tape that—like so much of Cambodia’s music of the time—no longer exists,” then he changes his tone, “but that’s not what you think of when you think of Cambodia, is it? YOU think of something a little more like this.” [14] The man clicks through several slides of Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge that the stage directions describe as “Black and white. Gruesome.” [15] The images are from Cambodia in 1975-1979, when the Khmer Rouge, the name commonly given to Cambodia’s Communist Party, attempted to turn the country back to Year Zero. They emptied the cities, abolished the currency, dismantled education, and sought to eliminate any reference to the past or foreign influence. More than two million Cambodians died, some from starvation or illness, but many were also killed for petty crimes, such as stealing food. The country’s elite prisoners, including artists and intellectuals, were held at detention centers where they were tortured, forced to confess their “crimes,” and driven out of town to dig a shallow grave before they were killed. More than 20,000 people are thought to have been tortured and executed at Tuol Sleng (commonly called S-21), a former high school in Phnom Penh. When the Vietnamese liberated the city, only seven people were left alive in the prison. [16] Now a museum, Tuol Sleng represents both the power and limits of visual representation. This site of both horror and later attempts at reconciliation is one of the most popular tourist sites in Cambodia. When I visited in 2016, I was overwhelmed by the hundreds of photos hanging on the walls—mug shots of victims and documentation of the torture they endured. Scholar and Khmer Rouge survivor Boreth Ly describes how “the Khmer Rouge was very visually focused. It was a scopic regime that enforced visual surveillance on its victim and deliberately traumatized and destroyed their vision.” [17] When he was twelve years old, he and his grandmother finally returned to their home after four years of forced labor. The house was empty, and they searched for any photographs of their relatives, but they were all gone. He contrasts this loss with the multitude of photos at Tuol Sleng, documenting the prisoners who were executed. [18] These photographs have circulated globally in museums, books, and online as the primary representation of the genocide. Michelle Caswall, describes how, “a complex layering of silencing is revealed” [19] and “Because of both the transformative power of the creation of these mug shots and the complete oppressiveness of Tuol Sleng as a total institution within a totalitarian state, there are no whispers of the victims in these records; the photographs, like the dead they depict, remain frustratingly silent.” [20] The problem is that the images confound the viewer and render the victim silent. Yee engages the problem of visual representation through the many overt mentions of photographs and seeing in the play. The man in the opening is Kaing Guek Eav, or Comrade Duch as he was known, the head officer of S-21. [21] He taunts the gruesome images of the genocide—“boring,” “tragique,” “genocide, genocide, genocide, boo,” and threatens that he is always “watching watching always watching.” [22] Later, Neary realizes that her father, Chum, is likely the eighth survivor featured in a photograph. She confronts him; he confirms his identity but refuses to testify. Chum argues that the truth cannot be found in a photograph, and that if Duch is guilty, so is he. In a flashback, Yee suggests that the photographs that really matter are the ones that never existed. Chum delayed his family’s escape so his band could record the last song on their album. They want to take a photograph, but they forgot to bring a camera; there was no photo and there was no escape. These examples illustrate the complicated ways that visual evidence is threatening, unreliable, and incomplete. Another method is required to sort through the various relationships between Cambodia and American identities in the play and music offers that means. Two songs played within the prison space towards the end of the play are especially effective at dramatizing this history. Chum is eventually arrested and brought to S-21. He tries to hide his identity by claiming he is a banana seller, but he eventually ends up in a room with Duch himself. Duch asks about some words that Chum wrote and learns that they are the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” Duch orders Chum to play the song, but Chum requires a guitar because, “I just want you to hear how it’s supposed to be played. So you know the absolute truth,” and for the first time in months, the sound of music calms Duch and allows him to sleep. [23] Chum’s words echo Dylan’s own feelings that a song is more than its lyrics; “they’re meant to be sung, not read.” [24] Dramaturgically the insertion of this quintessential American anti-war song echoes perceptions about the futility of the American effort in Southeast Asia, and especially Cambodia. Even though Dylan conceived of this song as a big statement to unite the civils rights movement and folk music, many critics dismissed it as an “empty gesture” with “little political relevance.” [25] Perhaps Duch is lulled to sleep by this reminder that likewise America has little relevance and is unlikely to come save the suffering people in Cambodia. While in prison, Chum writes, and on the night of his scheduled execution, he plays one last song, “Hammer and Nail,” the first half of which is in English: Something old Something new Something borrowed And something blue Couldn’t keep me from trying and fighting Doing everything I can To somehow end up with you again. You can call me a fool And I know that I am Won’t let you slip through my fingers Just like sand [26] On the surface, the song is about a pending wedding and a possible break-up, but the singer promises to fight for his love. Musically it bridges the sound of American folk and Cambodian surfer rock. From the first line, “Something Old,” until “just like sand,” the chord progression moves slowly up the scale, and structurally is not unlike the Dylan song. The second part repeats the lyrics in Khmer, but this time with back-up singers adding an angelic, otherworldly quality. In the context of the scene, it is about fighting for life, about fighting for something bigger than oneself. The play ends with Chum and his daughter playing “I’m Sixteen,” originally by Ros Serey Sothea, together in the prison/museum. Sothea was one of the most beloved singers of Cambodian rock before the Khmer Rouge, and “I’m Sixteen” functions as an anthem connecting Cambodians to the past. Also, this mesmerizing anthem both inspired and is featured on Dengue Fever’s first album. [27] The song and the moment onstage combine to create a kind of, to borrow Sean Metzger’s term, “temporal folding,” where “subjects emerge in a relation of figures through one another, through actions in the present associated with those in the past” that allows for a simultaneous representation of past/present and Asian/Asian American. [28] The staging reinforces the power of music, as the stage lights shift to indicate that the sun is coming up and the stage directions read “behind them, the sun rises higher and higher, blinding us. We see the bandmates’ silhouettes as they rock out to one last song.” [29] Sight is obliterated, and representation happens in the music alone. Postscript Since the world premiere of CRB in 2018, the context of the show and even this article has changed, making the play’s message even more imperative, and music continues to be the crux of representation. On July 20, 2020, in response to cancelled productions due to Covid–19 shutdowns and the growing Black Lives Matter protests after the death of George Floyd, Lauren Yee and Joe Ngo [30] announced the #CRBChallenge . Ngo articulated a debt to the Black civil rights movement and the intertwined histories of rock music: “Who hasn’t borrowed Afro-Caribbean beats?” [31] The challenge called for singers around the world to recreate songs from the show or Cambodia more generally in order to raise awareness about and to fundraise for organizations working for both Black and Cambodian American communities. The resulting videos, with #CRBChallenge , demonstrate a multi-faceted connection to the play, its story and music, and the depth of talent among Asians and Asian Americans. References [1] Ashley Thompson, “Forgetting to Remember, Again: On Curatorial Practice and ‘Cambodian Art’ in the Wake of Genocide,” diacritics 41 no. 2 (2013): 82-109. [2] Jonathan H. X. Lee, “Southeast Asian Americans: Memories, Visions, and Subjectivities,” in Southeast Asian Diaspora in the United States: Memories and Visions, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow , ed. Jonathan H. X. Lee, Cambridge Scholars Publisher (Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom: 2014), 1. [3] The script calls for several scenes of torture and violence, however, I have read hundreds of reviews and these scenes are not the focus and rarely mentioned. [4] Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 13. [5] Jill Dolan, Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 1-3. [6] Kim Baston, “Not Just ‘Evocative’: The Function of Music in Theatre,” Australasian Drama Studies 67 (2015), 5. Emphasis in original. [7] Carl Dahlhaus and Mary Whittal, “What is a Musical Drama?” Cambridge Opera Journal 1, no. 2 (1989): 95-96. [8] Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). [9] Lauren Yee, “Cambodian Rock Band,” American Theatre 35, no. 6 (July/August 2018), 49. The songs used in the production are written by Dengue Fever. In my descriptions of the music, I am relying on my memory of the 2019 production at the Victory Gardens, Chicago, IL, directed by Marti Lyons, and the cast album that was released in May 2020. [10] Donatella Galella, “Listening to Cambodian Rock Band: An Interview with Lauren Yee and Chay Yew,” Performance Matters 6, no. 2 (2020), 127. [11] Ibid., 130. [12] For more on Asian American identities and accents see Shilpa Davé, “Racial Accents, Hollywood Casting, and Asian American Studies,” Cinema Journal 56 no. 3 (2017): 142-147. Also for insight on performing race and the music of Dengue Fever see Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), especially chapter 5. Spoken word as music, which playwright Chay Yew calls the “nonmusical musical,” is also key to identity in Stephen Hong Sohn, “Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew’s Wonderland ,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 29, vol. 1 (2016). [13] Daphne Lei, “Staging the Binary: Asian American Theatre in the Late Twentieth Century,” A Companion to Twentieth Century American Drama , ed. David Krasner (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 301-317. [14] Yee, CRB , 49. [15] Ibid. [16] David P. Chandler, Voices From S-21: Terror and History In Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). [17] Boreth Ly, “Of Performance and the Persistent Temporality of Trauma: Memory, Art, and Visions,” positions: east asia cultures critique 16, no. 11 (2008), 118. [18] Ibid., 115-116. [19] Michelle Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 7. [20] Ibid., 158. [21] For a history about Duch and his trial, see Alexander Laban Hinton, Man Or Monster?: The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). [22] Yee, CRB , 50. [23] Music as a tool of survival is perhaps taken from the real-life story of Arn-Chorn-Pond whose life was saved because he played music for the Khmer Rouge. This story is retold by Patricia McCormick in the novel Never Fall Down (New York: Balzer + Bray, 2012). [24] Dylan quoted in Larry Starr, Listening to Bob Dylan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021), 1. [25] Starr, Listening , 34. [26] Yee, CRB , 65. [27] Nic Cohn, “A Voice from the Killing Fields,” The Guardian , 19 May 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/may/20/worldmusic.features (accessed 25 January 2022). [28] Sean Metzger, “At the Vanishing Point: Theater and Asian/American Critique,” American Quarterly 63, no. 2 (2011), 279. [29] Yee, CRB , 69. [30] Ngo, whose parents are Chinese Cambodian and survived the Khmer Rouge, played the original Chum in CRB and has recreated the role for numerous productions. [31] “Welcome to the CRB Challenge! #CRBChallenge ,” Facebook, 5 July 2020, https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=282008519582298 (accessed 20 January 2022). Footnotes About The Author(s) Jennifer Goodlander is an Associate Professor at Indiana University in the Department of Comparative Literature. Jennifer has published numerous articles and two books: Women in the Shadows: Gender, Puppets, and the Power of Tradition in Bali (Ohio University Press, 2016) and Puppets and Cities: Articulating Identities in Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018). Her current research looks at transnational Southeast Asian identities as expressed in performance, literature, and art. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Donatella Galella Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 1 Visit Journal Homepage Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity Donatella Galella By Published on November 6, 2019 Download Article as PDF Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity . Dorinne Kondo. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018; Pp. 376. Using dramaturgy, autoethnography, psychoanalysis, and critical race theory, Dorinne Kondo argues that performance shapes race in Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity . She stakes a claim to creativity as work that can imagine new ways of existing, but also reify the status quo and drain minoritarian life force. She builds on her previous book, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater , by theorizing racialized reception; restructuring the normative form of academic manuscripts; and examining plays by Anna Deavere Smith, David Henry Hwang, and herself. Kondo critiques how liberal humanism evacuates the uneven power dynamics of theatre, yet she ultimately insists on possibilities for progressive change. Worldmaking resembles a drama that demystifies theatrical and academic labor. In the Acknowledgements, Kondo considers the embodied, emotional conditions of writing this book. She shows the work. She organizes her theoretical interventions, dramaturgical analyses, and personal stories into an overture, chapters within three acts, and three entr’actes, culminating in her own original play, Seamless . Early on, Kondo defines an array of key terms. Taking seriously Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s understanding of racism as group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, Kondo theorizes “ racial affect , which enlivens some and diminishes others, and affective violence , especially in sites assumed to be far from racial violence,” like the theatre (11, italics in original). The unequal distribution of emotions accords with racial hierarchies. For instance, white spectators might laugh uproariously at Clybourne Park , Bruce Norris’s white reframing of A Raisin in the Sun , while spectators of color might shudder. Kondo cites psychoanalytical thinkers like Melanie Klein and Hanna Segal to theorize reparative mirroring, reparative criticism, and reparative creativity. In the first case, audience members of color can feel invigorated seeing representations of themselves on stage. Dramaturgs and other artists can enact reparative criticism and creativity by making plays more progressive and composing their own feminist, anti-racist artworks. Stressing collaboration, Kondo further offers the terms politics of affiliation and politics of agonistics to convey solidarity and struggle toward a more equitable world in and beyond the theatre. As Kondo lays out the field of theatrical production, she does not presume that readers already know details like how little playwrights earn for playwriting as opposed to screenwriting. She provides statistics and interview excerpts to demonstrate how resources go disproportionately to white men. Kondo speaks to scholars from a wide range of fields—Theatre and Performance Studies, Anthropology, Ethnic Studies—as well as practicing artists and students. In Act Two, Kondo applies her terms to her case studies, primarily Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993) and Yellow Face (2007). She contextualizes Anna Deavere Smith’s and David Henry Hwang’s careers as well as her relationships with them; she served as dramaturg for three of Smith’s plays— Twilight , House Arrest (1997), and Let Me Down Easy (2008)—and she has dialogued with Hwang in person and in her scholarship. Kondo devotes one chapter to Smith’s artistic process and political project. Smith interviews and performs as subjects involved with a particular event or theme, in this case, the Los Angeles uprisings after police assaulted Rodney King and were mostly exonerated for their anti-black violence. By embodying subjects across various identities, Smith grounds their experiences, demonstrates their relationality, and represents minoritized voices too often silenced in the theatre. Because Twilight presents different perspectives and no easy solutions to systemic oppression, the play models a nuanced history. At the same time, Kondo recognizes that some critics praised Twilight due to their interpretation of the play as celebrating power-free, individual-based common humanity. A highpoint of Worldmaking is when Kondo details her experiences as one of four dramaturgs for Twilight . Her behind-the-scenes account distinguishes various versions of the text, from the premiere at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, to the transfer to Broadway, to the adaptation for television; she also explains how dramaturgs gave feedback on Smith’s performances of the interviews. For example, she discusses how they switched the play’s last monologue to avoid letting audiences presume racial equity to be inevitable. Exemplifying a politics of affiliation and politics of agonistics, Kondo describes how she fought for the inclusion of Asian Americans to disrupt the black-white binary, represent Korean Americans, and challenge stereotypes. She even brought Smith to tears. But what she greatly admires about Smith is her willingness to be challenged. Another distinct pleasure of Worldmaking is Kondo’s style of storytelling. She recalls unexpectedly seeing Smith perform as herself (Kondo) and voluntarily handing dramaturg-director-producer Oskar Eustis five single-spaced pages of notes on Yellow Face . And the book reproduces these notes! The book underscores the major contributions of dramaturgs. For Kondo, “Dramaturgical critique deploys research, theory, and scholarship for reparative ends” (197). In her chapter on Yellow Face , Kondo articulates how David Henry Hwang makes and unmakes race, and she suggests that she might have influenced the final script for the Public Theater. Set against the 1990s Miss Saigon protests and U.S. yellow peril, the comedic docudrama follows playwright DHH dealing with his immigrant father, who longs for the American dream, and his own accidental casting of a white man to play an Asian American character. In the original East West Players staging, the play ended with a melding of the Chinese father and white actor, evoking an ethereal racial equality. After Kondo offered critiques of this power-evasive liberal fantasy, the revised Yellow Face underlined that fantasy as such and firmly connected anti-Chinese persecution with the father’s death. Kondo concludes the book with reparative creativity: her play Seamless and a chapter covering her journey with the play, including the racialized challenges of trying to persuade a professional theatre to produce it. The play centers on Diane Kubota, a lawyer grappling with the extent to which she can know her parents and their experiences of Japanese American internment, and, too, how gendered generational traumas affect her. Combining realism, direct address, fantasy sequences, and flashbacks, Seamless draws from Kondo’s life and raises questions about Asian American epistemology and ontology. Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity joins new, necessary scholarship reflecting on the work of minoritarian art such as After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, and the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization by Judith Hamera. In reading this book, I felt the reparative mirroring that Kondo theorizes, from her experiences of spectatorial affective violence to her centering of an Asian American woman in her play. Like DHH at the end of Yellow Face , Kondo reminds us, “And I go back to work, searching for my own face.” References Footnotes About The Author(s) Donatella Galella University of California, Riverside Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Raimondo Genna Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 1 Visit Journal Homepage Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law Raimondo Genna By Published on December 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness. By Gad Guterman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; Pp. 236. Written in 2014, Performance, Identity, and Immigration is a timely addition to the intersecting discourses of performance studies and immigration identity formations, particularly given the rhetoric of the 2016 presidential race in the United States. Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, launched his presidential campaign by claiming that immigrants from Mexico (as well as Central and South America, and the Middle East) were drug smugglers, rapists, and generic criminals. While Trump’s speech was criticized by many across the political spectrum, he was able to secure the Republican nomination—in part—by reiterating the long-dominant narrative that promotes the criminality of "illegal aliens." Gad Guterman’s work serves as a valuable intervention against such rhetoric through his critical analysis of the interwoven fields of performance studies and immigration law, and his introduction of "undocumentedness." For Guterman, "undocumentedness" moves the discourse away from the dehumanizing and highly contentious term of "illegal alien," which serves as a performative descriptive, and focuses on the structural circumstances under which undocumented immigrants must live (2). But Guterman continues to strategically rely on terms such as "illegal" and "alien" to "remind us that law constructs categories that contribute to the building of identities" (3). This serves as his thesis as he studies the intersection of performance, immigration law, and identity. Through this critical lens, Guterman examines the performances and plays of Culture Clash, Carlo Albán, Genny Lim, Josefina López, Lisa Loomer, Milcha Sánchez-Scott, Guillermo Reyes, Janet Noble, Ntare Mwine, and Yussef El Guindi, among others, and explores how the power of the law shapes identity and "the practice of belonging" as "undocumentedness forges ways of being, seeing, and existing" (9). The plays discussed and Guterman’s analyses offer inroads to examining our own legal consciousness by positioning us to examine our understanding and use of the law in our everyday lives. Guterman organizes his analysis following the framework of the Immigration and Nationality Act in an attempt to better reflect the ways the US immigration laws operate to "define and constrain both individual and collective identity" (10). Chapter 1, which serves as his introduction, is entitled Act § 237 (a)(1)(B)—Present in Violation of the Law" and focuses on the impossible subject and the performative act of self-erasure by the undocumented as a strategy for inclusion and invisibility. In chapter 2, entitled "Act § 275(a)—Improper Entry by Alien," Guterman examines what he terms "border scenarios" (after Diana Taylor) as embodied asymmetrical power exchanges between the entrant and border monitor that perform and construct the very borders being policed. Chapter 3, "Act § 274A—Unlawful Employment of Aliens," interrogates the inseparable dyad of the undocumented domestic worker and the privileged employer while examining legal nonexistence’s impact on exploitation and worker rights. In chapter 4’s "Act §212(a)(9)(B)(iii)(III)—Family Unity," Guterman explores the legal construction of the family unit through heteronormative paradigms that simultaneously patrol "counterhegemonic lifestyles" (101). Guterman investigates the heightened criminality of undocumentedness (and also documentedness of color) in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terror attacks and the implementation of the USA PATRIOT Act in chapter 5, labeled, "Act § 331—Alien Enemies." In his final chapter, entitled "Act § 505—Appeals," Guterman challenges his own assessment concerning how US law shapes individual and communal identities through self-erasure and redirects the flow of how "illegal" identities contribute to the shaping of the US through the hyper-visible performances of the Disney- and Sesame Street-inspired characters in Times Square. In each chapter, Guterman uses dramatic works and performances to assist in his analysis of the various statutes and laws, submitting that these performances —and performative practices represented within the theatre pieces—demonstrate how immigration laws shape individual and communal identities. Each chapter offers cogent and clear examinations of the theatre pieces and the various laws the plays are in communication with (whether consciously or not). For Guterman, theatre offers opportunities to shape and change the perceptions of undocumentedness by making visible what is often rendered invisible. In doing so, it helps to reshape the legal consciousness of the nation towards the undocumented. Although celebratory in the promise that theatre can serve as a space for constructive and meaningful change, Guterman challenges theatre companies who inadvertently practice invisibility even as they perform visibility. Guterman draws attention to the fact that plays such as Sánchez-Scott’s Latina, Loomer’s Living Out, and Solis’s Lydia highlight the plight of the domestic workers and their lack of rights, but are played to dominantly white, privileged audiences. Dubbing it "undocumentedface," theatre practitioners participate in the continuing exclusion and rendering invisible the very people that are represented on stage by not reaching out and making theatre available to them. Dehumanization is not simply an attribute that works on the surface, but rather is internalized by the undocumented through the external forces of law and power. Having undocumentedness made visible for general audiences allows for empathetic connections, but for the undocumented it allows for a sense of empowerment and humanization. Guterman recognizes that it is not feasible or practical for the undocumented, who rely on invisibility to escape incarceration and deportation, to perform their stories on stage themselves, but to see their narratives performed before them works towards those forced to live in the shadows to recognize themselves—and their humanity—under the lights. Gad Guterman’s Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness is a valuable contribution to the field of performance studies and legal practices on identity formation. Examinations of performance and the law have long informed sexual and race identity discourses, but Guterman’s project delves into the under-examined area of the undocumented. While many of the examples within Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law focus on Latina/o theatre, it is by no means the only section of the undocumentedness explored in the book. Although the impact of the law on bodies differs in various communities based on race and gender, Guterman effectively demonstrates how the law dehumanizes and criminalizes immigrants, turning them into impossible subjects. Raimondo Genna University of South Dakota The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 1 (Fall 2016/Winter 2017) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle Affective Performance and Cognitive Science Kitchen Sink Realisms Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience Everything Plus the Kitchen Sink Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Beck Holden Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Captive Stage Beck Holden By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North . By Douglas A. Jones, Jr. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance series. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2014. Pp. 218. In common American parlance, the word “slavery” tends to be inseparable from the specific institution of chattel slavery in the antebellum South. Astute scholars and critics have, however, worked to draw attention to the ways in which different, less overtly brutal systems may also deserve the name of “slavery” for the ways in which they limit the access people of color have to political agency while relying heavily upon the ongoing presence of minority groups within that system. In The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North , Douglas A. Jones, Jr. reveals how a variety of white northern antebellum performances, ranging from the respectable (lectures and portraiture) to the popular (minstrelsy, plays, broadsides, and sideshows), served to undermine black claims to American citizenship. In doing so, he deftly traces the intensifying white insistence upon black subjugation that drove the northern black intelligentsia from advocating full integration in the 1790s to calls for insurrection and emigration by the 1840s and 1850s. Jones grounds his conception of the northern proslavery imagination in one of Frederick Douglass’s speeches from 1848, in which Douglass discusses the systemic oppression faced by blacks in the North, making them, in his words, “in many respects… slaves of the community” (1). It is this idea of community slavery that shapes Jones’s book; noting that northerners generally abhorred chattel slavery but also considered blacks inferior, he explains: A complex series of assumptions, ideals, and logics . . . deemed African Americans . . . unfit for equal participation in the polity, while . . . ideally suited to serve the personal and collective interests of their white counterparts. In other words, northerners cultivated a proslavery imagination with which to maintain and, over time, widen the gulf between black freedom and full black inclusion. (1-2) He makes a convincing case that this insistence upon black subordination and subjugation points to an essentially proslavery northern psyche. This premise provides a firm base for Jones’s exploration of black antebellum political performances and the white performances that tried to eclipse them. Each chapter of The Captive Stage demonstrates a thorough understanding of its specific historical moment and careful archival research, and Jones’s arguments are consistently clear and convincing. He also demonstrates great breadth in his theoretical influences, smoothly drawing on writers ranging from Plato to Charles S. Pierce to Daphne Brooks over the course of the book; his foremost influence, however, may be Saidiya Hartman, to whom he turns repeatedly in several chapters. Jones’s first chapter shows how the deferential stage negroes in John Murdock’s plays and the mangled dialect of the popular “Bobalition” broadsides sought to render the politically active northern black laughable, at a time when black organizations were using parades and elegant oration to assert their claims to political integration and American citizenship. Next, Jones contests the recent scholarly trend of seeking progressive potential in early minstrelsy, directly challenging W.T. Lhamon, David Cockrell, and other scholars who claim that early minstrelsy privileged class over race and created a working-class alliance across the color line. Jones points out that early minstrels such as Thomas “Daddy” Rice gave openly proslavery speeches after performances and argues that the popular rhetoric regarding the struggles of the white working class in fact hinges heavily upon white supremacy. Jones’s entry into the scholarly debate over minstrelsy is skillfully wrought and highly convincing. Chapter three examines several ways in which George Washington, the slave-owning father of the nation, functioned to justify the continuation of slavery in the northern imagination; this is the chapter in which Jones offers the widest range of examples, including reverent interactions between slaves and images of Washington in popular plays, depictions of slaves in portraits of Washington, and P.T. Barnum’s exhibition of Joice Heth as Washington’s 161-year-old former wetnurse. Jones’s research on Heth in particular breaks intriguing ground, as he focuses upon Barnum’s increasing emphasis upon his ownership of Heth as a slave as the years went on, arguing compellingly that this points to a desire by Barnum’s northern patrons to join him and Washington in wielding the dominating gaze of the slaveholder. Jones’s next chapter looks at a trend he dubs “romantic racialism,” where a branch of white northerners insisted that blacks were simply different from whites, but not necessarily wholesale inferior. Jones reveals, however, how the traits that romantic racialists focused upon, such as docility and innocence, served to shape an imagined society in which blacks required the guidance of whites and still took subordinate roles to whites, buttressing his argument by examining the resistance of white Garrisonian abolitionists to the rise in black insurrectionist rhetoric in the 1840s and by analyzing the black characters from the popular temperance drama Aunt Dinah’s Pledge . His final chapter examines black abolitionist lecturer William Wells Brown and his escape-from-slavery melodrama The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom . After first charting the relationships among Brown’s earlier narration of his own escape, melodrama as a genre, and the expectations of white audiences, Jones argues that Brown’s play was shaped by the northern proslavery imagination such that it prevented him from imagining a life in the north for his protagonists after their flight from slavery. Although fans of Brown may find this position unpalatable, Jones’s argument is subtle and expertly-woven, a useful contribution to scholarship on Brown that must be taken seriously. Jones’s book is a skillful blend of historical context and performance analysis that serves to complicate our understanding of political performance culture in the antebellum North. By excavating and examining the ways in which northerners imagined black subjugation as a necessity, he both invites America to examine some of its oft-overlooked past sins and helps to reveal some of the history that underpins the systemic racial iniquities that persist today. This book offers a useful methodological model for early-career scholars, while its contents promise to prove highly valuable to scholars wrestling with questions of race and political performance, whether on stage or off. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Beck Holden 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 American Tragedian Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Performing Anti-slavery The Captive Stage Musical Theatre Studies Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Murder Most Queer New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Karina Gutiérrez 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 Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina Karina Gutiérrez By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina. Noe Montez. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017; Pp. 239 + xi. The precarious era of Argentina’s dictatorship (1976-1982) stifled political resistance and artistic expression. However, the years following the administrative regimes of Jorge Rafael Videla, Emilio Massera, and Leopoldo Galtieri prompted many people in the newly democratic Argentina to reflect upon and recoup their national identities. Noe Montez’s Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina considers (re)emerging individual and collective memory narratives and their effects on judicial policies in Argentina’s transitional postdictatorship period. Drawing on contemporary research in memory studies and theatre history, Montez recounts the momentous artistic reactions to policies implemented by the administrations of Carlos Menem, Néstor Carlos Kirchner Jr., and Cristina Kirchner. In so doing, Montez’s text contributes to a growing repertoire of Argentine works in the field of performance studies. As Montez himself rightly notes, the vast majority of scholarship on theatrical responses to the dictatorship tends to focus on the oeuvres of more internationally renowned playwrights such as Ricardo Bartis, Griselda Gambaro, and Eduardo Pavlovsky, whose works were staged during or directly following the dictatorship. Instead, Montez charts the trajectory of emerging directors, playwrights, actors, designers, and companies that flourished in Buenos Aires during this transitional era. Montez divides his book into four chapters, arranged chronologically to highlight theatrical productions that reacted to each administration’s approach to transitional justice and contributed to collective memory. Chapter one explores “disconstructive resistances,” a term that is never fully unpacked but appears to refer to the disjuncture between collective memory narratives and state-sanctioned memory narratives constructed and propagated by the Menem administration’s Truth and Reconciliation hearings held from 1989 to 1999. Each of the four plays that Montez examines in this chapter considers the limitations of state-sanctioned narratives of impunity, to say nothing of clemency and amnesty policies, directed toward those in office accused of human rights violations. Montez devotes a substantial amount of space to key performance groups and playwrights including El Periférico de Objetos, Javier Daulte, Marcelo Bertuccio, and Luis Cano. He describes their use of multimedia and avant-garde artistic practices to advance their political agendas; by exposing the artifice of authorized modes of remembrance, these artists resisted the Menem administration’s politics of erasure. The second chapter centers on how Teatroxlaindentidad, a long-running Buenos Aires-based theatre festival created to raise awareness about the hundreds of children kidnapped during the dictatorship, collaborated with artists to promote public access to declassified archives. Montez notes that works by Patricia Zangaro, Hector Levy-Daniel, and Mariana Eva Perez demonstrate the value of historical archives for the construction of personal and national identities. However, Montez adds a further dimension: he studies how institutional support from non-theatrical entities impacts an organization’s overall creative output and longevity. He offers as an example Teatroxlaindentidad’s partnership with the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The partnership is notable because the goals of the latter imposed significant restraints on the artistic visions of the former, specifically in the earliest years of this alliance. Indeed, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and other stakeholders limited commissioned work in the festival’s line-up to those who spoke directly to reuniting kidnapped children with their next of kin through genetic testing. In the second half of the book, Montez attempts to capture the ideological dissonance of various agents staking claims to history. Chapter three, “Reparation, Commemoration, and Memory Construction in the Postdictatorship Generation,” looks at the importance of self-archiving or self-reflexive personal testimony as a means of talking back to state-appointed sites of memory. Of particular interest are those testimonies that “talk back” to sites established during the Néstor and Cristina Kirchner administrations (2003-2007 and 2007-2015, respectively). Montez delineates the social divide between those who favored the Kirchner administrations’ memorialization efforts and those who did not. Meanwhile, in the final chapter, Montez explores four theatrical performances produced alongside Christina Kirchner’s rebranding of the Malvinas War (also known as the Falklands War). Montez describes how the Kirchner administration sought to recast this national defeat as a point of nationalistic remembrance, shaping memory narratives of the war and the people of Malvinas. While works by Patricio Adadi, Mariana Mazover, and Lisandro Fiks critiqued Kirchner’s commemoration, Julio Cardoso’s vision fell in line with the administration’s memorialization efforts as he opted to honor veterans as heroes. The differing reactions to the Malvinas War demonstrate how acts of remembrance can be linked to acts of erasure in a variety of contradictory ways. Though Montez does not explicitly make this point, one can surmise that the opposing artistic treatments of the Falkland Islands mirror the contradictory socio-political views of these territories today. Montez’s illustration of performance and social engagement in postdictatorship Argentina highlights the nation’s vibrant and tenacious theatre scene. More importantly, his book draws attention to Argentina’s artistic agents—long neglected by U.S. scholars and theatre audiences—who are determined to grapple with identity, social justice, and individual/collective memory. Montez weaves pertinent historical content with play descriptions for what is, overall, an assessment of current artistic measures that seek to reify or contest dominant memory narratives. Scholars of Latinx theatre and performance, specifically those who concentrate on politics, will value Montez’s timely study of artistic mobilization in postdictatorship Argentina. I would, however, recommend this book be read in conjunction with texts by Diana Taylor and Jean Graham-Jones; though often cited, reading their respective theories on performance and activism firsthand may deepen understanding of Montez’s argument. Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina contributes to the growing archive of memory studies and, more importantly, to nuancing the fledgling U.S. awareness of Latin American performance and performance studies scholarship in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Karina Gutiérrez Stanford University The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical Introduction: Embodied Arts "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance History, Musicals, and the Americas Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Paul Gagliardi Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Illusion of Work: The Con Artist Plays of the Federal Theatre Project Paul Gagliardi By Published on December 11, 2017 Download Article as PDF In a chapter of her memoir on her tenure as leader of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), Hallie Flanagan details the trials and tribulations of staging plays in New York City. While much of the chapter explores the controversies over certain plays and the successes of others, Flanagan dedicates a portion of that chapter to recalling some of the more outlandish plays produced by her unit in New York (and elsewhere). In between praise for the “insane moments” of a production of Dance of Death and for “the inspired lunacy” of Horse Eats Hat, Flanagan describes another play which she appears to consider outrageous: the confidence artist play Help Yourself by Paul Vulpius which “created comedy from its situation of the unemployed young man brightly hanging up his hat in a bank where he had no job and becoming the leading expert in a land deal that never existed in fact.” [1] The fact that the FTP staged a play featuring a man swindling a bank seems curious given that the con has historically been condemned by commentators and that, at least outwardly, the con does not seem to bear the hallmarks of work, especially given, as David Kennedy notes, the prevailing principle for Franklin Roosevelt’s programs “was work.” [2] While a play featuring a man swindling a bank may have contradicted the prevailing ideology of the New Deal, plays that featured confidence artists—defined as any person who defrauds or outwits another person or group by gaining their confidence—were hardly unusual in the FTP. [3] In addition to Help Yourself , the FTP staged John Murray and Allen Boertz’s Room Service , which was the basis for a Marx Brothers film of the same name, wherein a Broadway producer named Gordon Miller engages in a series of ruses to prevent his theatrical company from being thrown out of a hotel by management while he attempts to secure funding for their latest production. Similarly, in John Brownell’s The Nut Farm, an aspiring film director named Willie Barton outwits a shady film producer by taking control of the project and outwits the producer by selling the film to a Hollywood studio. [4] And, in Lynn Root and Harry Clork’s The Milky Way , a promoter fixes a series of boxing matches in which a scrawny milkman wins the middleweight championship. While Flanagan often promoted popular fare like the con artist plays (she frequently mentions various productions of Help Yourself in her memoir and was eager to praise similar plays during her tenure), popular plays like these have not garnered the attention of critics or scholars. For then-contemporary reviewers, the FTP con artist plays were often dismissed, in part, because they considered the plays farces, or cheap commercial fare, and they were often more inclined to write about the more controversial socially-minded theatre the FTP was producing. Meanwhile, scholars have rarely analyzed these plays; Help Yourself is dismissed as “a very mild comedy” by Malcolm Goldstein, [5] while Barry Witham employs the audience reports of the Seattle Unit’s Help Yourself as a way to gauge the socio-economic makeup of that theater’s audience. [6] Indeed scholars like Witham, Loren Kruger, and Rena Fraden have focused their efforts on the more radical and avant-garde plays performed by the agency—such as the Living Newspaper plays or Orson Welles’s productions—that were a small percentage of the overall number of productions. Recent studies such as Elizabeth Osborne’s Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre Project and Leslie Elaine Frost’s Dreaming America: Popular Front Ideals and Aesthetics in Children’s Plays of the Federal Theatre Project have contributed to FTP scholarship by examining how under-analyzed plays fit into the agency’s complicated history, but overall, comic plays are deemphasized in these works. Yet while discussions of these plays are rare, the con artist plays of the FTP were some of the agency’s most complex works and, as I hope to demonstrate in this essay, are worthy of continued study. To accomplish this, I will focus on two of the more popular con artist plays, The Milky Wa y and Help Yourself. While the plays do promote the importance of employment and hard work, they also invite their audiences to act as participants in the con of the stage, providing agency to Depression-era audiences. At the same time, these plays also reminded audiences of the problematic nature of both the American Dream in the 1930s and the dangers that tolerance of confidence artists by institutions like the banking industry still held for Americans. The Con Artist and the Federal Theatre Project: Yet despite the ideological problems presented by the con artist, one can also see the appeal of these plays for the FTP. First, Flanagan’s belief that the FTP should embrace the “geography, language origins, history, tradition, custom, occupations of the people” in its theatre aligns with regional, historical, and cultural ubiquity of the confidence artist narrative. [7] Tales of confidence men and women in American culture can be traced back to the founding of the Republic and writers, playwrights, and producers frequently centered their works on the exploits of swindlers of all types. The con artist plays were also primarily written by then-contemporary American playwrights (except for Help Yourself ) and helped fulfill Flanagan’s aim of promoting new voices in the theatre. Yet another reason why these plays likely appealed to the FTP was that they could be used to temper criticism of the agency. In one sense, producers could illustrate a collective sense of humor on the agency’s behalf by staging plays like Room Service and The Nut Farm with their less-than-flattering portrayals of actors. Additionally, given long standing connections between the confidence scheme and theatre in American culture, the theme embedded in these plays that actors and con artists were not that dissimilar may have resonated with audiences. [8] The con artist plays were also more conservative in nature than many of the radical plays the agency was known for producing. Throughout its run, the FTP was accused of promoting leftist productions by critics in the press and the Republican Party; while the agency did produce a relatively small number of Living Newspaper plays and other shows that did contain radical themes, Flanagan and her producers continually had to deal with accusations from their critics that they were promoting leftist or communist plays. As such, the agency could have staged con artist plays to deflect some of these criticisms because these works could be read by audiences and critics as promoting a safe version of the con. For starters, the plays often feature swindles that are, as Flanagan said, “outlandish”: from outfoxing a nation of boxing fans to declaring one just works at a bank, the plots of this plays border on the absurd and appear to lack any realism. Moreover, there are no real victims in the plays: in contrast to real-life swindles such as Ponzi schemes, the marks of the con artists benefit from the deception (the bankers and employees of the brick factory in Help Yourself , the hotel manager and the acting troupe in Room Service ), or are implicit in the con (boxing fans in The Milky Way ). But perhaps most importantly, the plays feature characters whose goal is employment; for them, the confidence game is a means to an end. For example, in both The Milky Way and Help Yourself , the plays conclude with the the swindler characters getting full-time work in a dairy and a bank respectively. In addition to promoting the importance of employment, the plays also feature characters who dedicate themselves fully to their labors, reinforcing work ethic norms. The connection between swindling and traditional work is not unusual, as both scholars and confidence artists have understood the con as another form of work. As Joseph Maurer asserts, many confidence artists find they must dedicate themselves fully to their con, such as being versed in “business and financial matters, have a glib knowledge of society gossip, and enough of an acquaintance with art, literature, and music to give an illusion of culture.” [9] Similarly, the con artists in these plays have to dedicate an often impressive amount of effort to maintain their illusions, from toiling to complete a film ( The Nut Farm ), to studying the performances of a banker ( Help Yourself ). While the appeal of con artist plays to the FTP may have been in their outward approval of more conservative ideals, members of agency also likely understood the more subversive nature of the plays. In one sense, it seems that FTP workers sought to restore the character of the con artist to its more heroic status, similar to how Flanagan aimed to restore theatre to its cultural status of the late nineteenth century. Indeed, there existed an interesting parallel between the character of the confidence artist and theatre during the 1930s, as modernity had changed how Americans viewed both. Whereas the rise of cinema and radio as popular entertainments had helped diminish the importance of theatre in the minds of Americans, the lingering effects of the First World War and the Great Depression altered how the American public viewed confidence artists. While the con artists in nineteenth-century culture were emblematic of an optimistic country, the confidence artists that appear in American culture after 1920, like Jay Gatsby, Miss Lonelyhearts, and Elmer Gantry, are “painful victims betrayed by a vision of the new country that retains only the power to delude rather than to fulfill.” [10] And for the most part, the con artists in these plays swindle heroically, trying to protect their associates or families, or attempting to outwit institutions that were unpopular during the Depression. These plays provided the FTP the opportunity to give a measure of agency to its audiences. As Elizabeth Osborne notes, Flanagan believed that her agency should provide “economic, physical, and psychological relief” to both actors and audiences. [11] And the confidence plays could have afforded audiences the opportunity to have their spirits “uplifted,” as Flanagan often noted. This effect partially came from the confidence tales themselves, as historically Americans have long admired the confidence artist’s daring and risk—especially through the reading of literature and in the retelling of tall tales or other stories—while celebrating the plodding determination of the self-made man in ceremony. [12] However, the confidence artist plays of the FTP seem to have reversed that dynamic, as the plays invited their audiences to participate in the art of deception by enjoying their complicity as “shills” who are enjoying seeing richer, less unaware marks being deceived on-stage. In his essay on the production history of Room Service , Sebastian Trainor draws on the work of Raymond Williams and Mark Fearnow to assert that the play’s long term success (it was frequently staged through the 1950s and saw revivals in the 1990s) may have resulted “from an audience’s failure to realize that the tale portrayed the artful manipulation of the American capitalist system by the agents of an emergent ideology.” Yet Depression audiences “likely derived considerable ‘Freudian pleasure’ from witnessing the abuse of authority figures on stage” and the farcical con artist plays gave audiences the agency to engage in such fantasies. [13] Yet perhaps the most significant reason why the FTP staged so many con artist plays was because they provided the FTP another opportunity to comment upon the socio-economic issues of the Depression. In part, this is because the character has long afforded artists and writers to note, as Gary Lindberg argues, that “the boundaries [of the social structure] are already fluid, [and] that there is ample space between society’s official rules and its actual tolerances.” [14] In particular, Help Yourself and The Milky Way illustrate the long standing intersection between the con and capitalism, investigating economic themes similar to those of the Living Newspaper plays like One Third a Nation , Power , or Triple-A Plowed Under . Scholars have often noted that there is often little to no difference between the labor of the con artist and the work of “the self-made man” that is praised in American rhetoric. For example, Stephen Mihm asserts that conning and finance are “to a certain extent,” interlocked, as “the story of one is the story of the other.” [15] He argues that it is a testament to the mythology of the work ethic that it has persisted in society when dishonest swindling has been favored by Americans rather than the “plodding, methodical, gradual pursuit of wealth.” [16] Instead, Mihm argues that the true American financial ethos “captures the get-rich-quick scheme, the confidence game, and the mania for speculation” that obsessed not just antebellum America, but that continues to grip American society into this day. [17] With their representation of socio-economic issues, the con, and the intersections between them, plays like Help Yourself and The Milky Way afforded the FTP another opportunity to challenge audiences; while not as overt in addressing the audience as the Living Newspaper plays, The Milky Way and Help Yourself still offered their audiences complex themes that also implicated all levels of society and forced audience members to reevaluate the myths they believed in and their complicity in the dangerous cons. [18] The Milky Way While its popularity has fluctuated since its inception in the late nineteenth-century, professional wrestling in the United States (and elsewhere) remains one of the most popular confidence games. As Susan Maurer explains in her analysis of wrestling, professional wrestlers relish their participation as members of an elaborate confidence game, selling audiences their roles, personas, and the narratives in an environment that generally preaches the concept of “kaybabe” (the illusion that the performances and actions in and around the ring are real). [19] As Roland Barthes writes in his seminal essay on professional wrestling, the spectator of a wrestling match must attach meaning to the outcome of a match not based on the science of who won or lost, but on the match’s moment within a grander narrative. Barthes writes, “The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, this is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees.” [20] The observations of Mazar and Barthes on professional wrestling help explain the significance of the FTP productions of The Milky Way . Like other plays of its type, the play centers on an outrageous swindle (in this case in the world of boxing), but the believability of the con is not an issue here. Like the professional wrestling audience, the fictional and real audiences in and of the play are shills of the confidence artists of The Milky Way and enjoy taking part in the con. This provided Great Depression audiences a form of agency in times when many Americans questioned their own power. And while the play appears to reinforce traditional norms of work and success, The Milky Way subtly challenges the continued validity of myths like the American Dream. The Milky Way centers on a seemingly ludicrous con in the boxing world. At the beginning of the play, a middleweight boxer, Speed McFarland, is accidently knocked out by his drunken trainer during an argument. However, newspapers report that a meek and mild-mannered milkman named Burleigh Sullivan who happened to be near McFarland and his trainer knocked out McFarland. To protect his boxer’s reputation, McFarland’s manager, Gabby Sloan, decides to send Sullivan on a whirlwind tour of the United States where the milkman will appear in a series of staged fights (even Sullivan is unaware the fights are fake) in which he “knocks out” his opponents in the first round. With each succeeding fight, Sullivan’s fame grows, and Sloan decides to have McFarland and Sullivan fight in a staged bout in which Sloan and his cronies can bet heavily in favor of McFarland. However, Sullivan accidently knocks-out McFarland with an elbow to the head during the match. Having bet their life savings on the fight, the manager and his cohorts believe they will end up destitute, until Sullivan announces that he bet on himself and will buy a milk dairy with his winnings and happily give his friends jobs. Originally staged on Broadway in 1936, Root and Clork’s play was performed nine times by the FTP in 1938: Holyoke and Salem, Massachusetts; New York City; Los Angeles; Portland, Oregon; San Diego; Denver; and two productions in Manchester, New Hampshire. While the FTP staged the play rather frequently, press coverage of these productions is limited. [21] In many respects, the FTP productions of The Milky Way appear to have suffered from the competition of a major Hollywood adaptation, as The Milky Way was adapted for the screen by Paramount in 1936. Directed by Leo McCarey, the film starred the famous silent comedian Harold Lloyd, and many reviewers of the FTP production appear to have preferred Lloyd’s version. According to a review from the Los Angeles Evening News , the film was far superior to any stage production. The reviewer writes, “At best, the Lynn Root and Harry Clork comedy, which made a choice film vehicle for Harold Lloyd, would seem pretty flat in any stage production.” [22] In places like Manchester and Salem, productions garnered little attention from the press while reviewers of other productions found the play to be not worthy of serious attention. A member of the audience for the Portland production found the play to be trivial. The unnamed reviewer believed that “regular audiences, accustomed to serious theatre, were apathetic to this show” and some “individuals were critical of our doing a ‘trivial’ show, contrasted the bill unfavorably with Prologue to Glory, One Third a Nation , etc.” [23] Meanwhile, an unnamed reviewer for the San Diego Union noted in his or her 1938 review that the play’s authors had written a text that, while humorous and representative of the boxing world was simply entertainment. The reviewer notes, “We are ready to believe the funniest possible stories about the fighting ring promoters, champions and their trainers, but Lynn Root and Harry Clork have written a three act play that . . . is merely something to be enjoyed.” [24] One of the interesting elements of this “trivial” show was how problematic the con scheme is in The Milky Way . Boxing has long fostered the con as fixed matches have long dogged the sport. However, Sloan’s con is complicated by the fact that the key member of his scheme, Burleigh Sullivan is a terrible shill for the majority of the play, especially in terms of his performances. In his autobiography, the boxer Jake LaMotta, the inspiration for the film Raging Bull , explains that the most important aspect of throwing a fight was selling it in the ring. Recounting his infamous thrown fight with Billy Fox in 1947, LaMotta explains a successful fixed fight must, like other cons, be predicated on a near-flawless performance: I’ll also tell you something else about throwing a fight. The guy you’re throwing to has to be at least moderately good. . . . I thought the air from my punches was affecting him, but we made it to the fourth round. By then if there was anybody in the Garden who didn’t know what was happening he must have been dead drunk. There were yells and boos all over the place. Dan Parker, the Mirror guy, said the next day that my performance was so bad he was surprised the actors Equity didn’t picket the joint. [25] While Sloan is an experienced con man who is skilled at flattering boxers, promoters, and fans, Sullivan is depicted as too naïve and honest to be fully in on the con. Not only does Sullivan consistently bemoan the dishonesty of the scheme, but also he is woefully underprepared for his role. When a reporter asks Sullivan about his possible connection to the famous boxer John L. Sullivan, Sullivan responds that he has never heard of the man, which makes Sloan claim that the milkman is just joking. He exclaims, “That’s a good one! Quote that—‘The contender, with a sardonic smile and a twinkle in his eye.’ . . . He’ll clown like that with you all day.” [26] Additionally, the playwrights portray Sullivan as someone who does not even resemble a professional boxer in either appearance or performance. In his character description in the play and in FTP performance stills, Sullivan is a wiry, un-toned, and bespectacled figure who does not look like a professional athlete. In particular, the Los Angeles production of the play frequently dressed the actor in Sullivan’s role in loose sleeveless t-shirts that emphasized the character’s lack of muscle mass. Moreover, Sullivan’s in-ring performances are even weaker. During his first fight, Sullivan begins the bout with his bathrobe on. Later, in his fight with McFarland, Sullivan needs to be “boosted into the ring” like a child because he has trouble with the ropes and becomes entangled in them and his boxing style consists of incredibly awkward jabs and ducking of punches. [27] Yet while both fans and the press covering his bout condemned LaMotta’s fight, the obviously staged fights in The Milky Way do not garner such criticism from fans or media within the play, a fact made all that more complicated given Sullivan’s lack of strength and ability. In particular, the media covering Sullivan’s fights seem to be fully deceived by the bouts. One newspaper article declares that the milkman was born for the role: “Sullivan’s a natural. A born fighter. Cheered as he left the stadium.” [28] Nor is it just the press that is taken by the act: boxing patrons are completely taken with Sullivan’s performance. Audiences seem especially enamored with Sullivan’s ability to hop and duck around the ring and his knockout punch, which is a “right you can see comin’ from the dollar seats.” [29] Even during Sullivan’s title bout with McFarland (which ends in roughly sixteen seconds after McFarland knocks himself out by falling into Sullivan’s elbow) the radio announcers describe a crowd that does not boo or jeer the sudden outcome. Such a reaction seems muted in contrast to typical reactions to real boxing dives from journalists and fans. As noted earlier in this section, many of the fans, reporters, referees, and officials in attendance at some of boxing’s most infamous thrown fights were aware that they were seeing a fix, including Jake La Motta’s fight, during which calls of “fix” and “scam” rained down from the angry crowd at Madison Square Garden. However, there is a broader implication of Sullivan’s performances and of the audience’s acceptance of them. In particular, The Milky Way shows a con perpetrated on institutions. The con artists of the play symbolically subvert the power structures of the era. Not only does the complicit audience of Sullivan’s fights read his bouts as a triumph over adversity, but also as counter-con of the boxing establishment. After having been treated to a litany of fixed matches, the audiences (and perhaps even the press) within the play are celebrating their own complicity in a con that literally subverts the boxing industry and the media and metaphorically outwits other social institutions. While the believability of the play might be suspect, the theme of a fictional audience performing and participating in a confidence scheme against an institution likely would have resonated with Depression audiences. For workers and audience members used to the swindles of capitalism, the staged narrative of workers flaunting their own cons to industries and institutions that had been swindling them for ages must have been a pleasurable experience. Yet if the reactions of the boxing fans in The Milky Way are read in terms of the performances of professional wrestling, the fans’ embrace of Sullivan speaks to their need to find meaning in his bouts. The fans’ embrace of the obvious swindling in front of them signals that they read these performances not as an athletic competition, but as a staged narrative like professional wrestling that holds mythological implications. And the myth that The Milky Way is wrestling with is the American Dream. Like other con artist plays as well as many plays produced by the Children’s Theatre Unit of the FTP that Leslie Elaine Frost argues balanced ideals of model citizenry with an increasing apprehension over declining American fortunes, The Milky Way illustrates both the idealized and problematic American Dream through its portrayal of Sullivan. [30] In one sense, his story is a near-perfect representation of the American Dream, as Sullivan achieves fame and fortune and uses his winnings to purchase a dairy and provide jobs to his former con artists. Yet the model actions of Sullivan, as well as his procurement of the American Dream, is undercut by the play. Despite his pluck and hard work as a milkman, the play provides us no sense that Sullivan would have been able to maintain his station in life by working for the dairy; indeed, given the nature of many other FTP plays that addressed economic issues, it is likely that audiences would have understood Sullivan’s hold on his employment as tenuous at best. Moreover, Sullivan is only able to achieve the American Dream through a confidence scheme that not only requires the assistance of trainers, boxers, media members, and complicit national audience, but also his willingness to gamble on a staged fight rather than working hard and saving his winnings. While the play outwardly showcases a model American who achieves the American Dream, The Milky Way also illustrates the public’s fear over “viability of the American . . . economic system” and the American Dream itself. [31] Help Yourself Intellectuals in the United States have long privileged the plodding, diligent worker. For example, in his autobiography, Ben Franklin celebrates the accumulation of his wealth and the ability of a man to retire from business. But as Gary Lindberg suggests, Franklin wanted work to be treated as pleasurable because while gaining wealth has its benefits, for Franklin, the greater joy is the game of business. Lindberg explains: The model self feels exhilarated less by final rewards than by the immediate sense of competition and play . . . living for and in the amusement of the present performance. . . . The skillful player can move easily from one game to another, say from business to politics, as he senses more invigorating play or more interesting or satisfying competition. [32] While Lindberg makes clear that Franklin does not openly advocate diddling or conning, he hypothesizes that Franklin would have understood the thrill of swindling. In particular, Lindberg argues that Franklin believes one should only adopt new roles in business or in life once “the game” has lost its appeal, just as many con artists felt the need to change their roles when their work was done. The play Help Yourself shows a kind of Franklin-esque hero who manages to play at work and business by adopting and playing the role of a banker. Yet this play is not simply about workers adopting a more playful approach to their labor. In the context of the 1930s, the play is both a satirical examination of the banking industry and the tendency of Americans in any number of fields to act as confidence artists. More significantly, the play demonstrates the prevalence of the confidence scheme in American society and warns its audience about their complicity in ignoring the more dangerous confidence schemes such as the games played by the bankers in the play and in real life. Help Yourself centers on an unemployed man named Chris Stringer who wanders into a bank where his college friend Frank is a clerk. Much to Fred’s chagrin, Stringer sits at a desk and begins to work without holding a position in the company. When Fred accurately asserts that Stringer has no business training, Stringer writes up a false business memo regarding a defunct brick factory project, which leads to a meeting between his bank and a competing bank. While no one can remember the specifics of the proposal, Stringer convinces the trustees of the banks to move ahead with the project. As the project progresses, Stringer endears himself to the other employees of the bank by telling jokes, going to lunches, and dating the boss’s daughter, even though they cannot remember working with him. As the new brick factory nears completion—with additional support from the federal government—Stringer panics when he realizes that he has no employment record and will be fired, but a last-minute forgery by Fred and his girlfriend permits Stringer to stay on at the bank. At the play’s conclusion, Stringer earns a promotion to the vice presidency of the bank. [33] Given that it was produced by the FTP twenty-one times, Help Yourself left an extensive record of audience reception. [34] In its report to the FTP, the Omaha production stated the audience reaction was “very favorable,” [35] while the Des Moines report notes that many audience members left the theater repeating Stringer’s refrain of “up she goes!” [36] Meanwhile, a writer for the Boston Herald declares Help Yourself to be a “featherweight variation of the fairy tale about the Emperor’s new clothes” and “that only the most reactionary of audiences would see the political element in a harmless farce.” [37] Similarly, audience members of the Los Angeles production found the play to have provided some relief from the economic climate of the Depression, but demonstrated the limitations of theatre. As one reviewer noted, “This is an amusing way of presenting a social problem. But I don’t see the trials of the new generation being solved in this way except in the theatre.” [38] Commenting on the production of the play of by FTP Seattle, a writer for the University of Washington newspaper finds the play to be highly enjoyable, but imbued with a very serious message. She writes, “The spirit of 1929 is on the way back. The catch line of the play is ‘up she goes.’ . . . The play was not produced in the same era was Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing . A new spirit is on the march.” [39] The varied responses to Help Yourself can be explained by the play’s complicated portrayal of work and banking. Like other con artist plays produced by the FTP, the play represents more conservative ideals about employment and working. For example, not only does the play reinforce the importance of employment by having its main character procure a job, the play undermines the normal labor contract with Stringer happily working for free. When his friend asks him why he’s working without compensation, Stringer retorts that if he is not on the payroll, then he cannot get fired. If they try to cut his job, he will “keep right on working.” [40] From the perspective of employers, Stringer is the perfect employee, given that he is willing to work for free. Additionally, Stringer espouses a hyper-individualistic attitude toward work throughout the play. Stringer declares that he “changed from the unemployed to the employed not because I asked for work, but because I took it.” [41] Taking work, he reasons, was preferable to sitting idly by and waiting for work to come to him. At such moments, Stringer embodies the mythology of the self-made man. Stringer echoes these traditional views of work when he implores the bankers to proceed with the Kublinski account. He says, “We must go on working, as life goes on working. Not figure and ponder, but work. You must pick up the first packing-case you see with a shout of up she goes! ” [42] Yet despite its promotion of more business-friendly ideals, Help Yourself is far more critical of the banking system. And for audiences who likely would have suffered as the result of real-life banking policies, seeing such a representation would have given them both enjoyment and a semblance of agency. One such moment is when the bankers are swayed by Stringer’s rhetoric about work, in which the play satirizes the promotion of traditional work norms by nineteenth and twentieth-century capitalists. In the meeting between banks to discuss his business proposal, the bankers struggle to comprehend (or remember) the details of Stringer’s plan. Since he is able to detail some vague references about the fictional proposal, Stringer wins over the bankers by urging them to approve the plan through a speech that arouses the interests of the assembled businessmen. He says: Yes, gentlemen, that’s how we must begin today—“Up she goes.” This happy cry of the simple workman should be our slogan. Workers and employers, bakers and carpenters—“Up she goes!” Statesmen and politicians—Europe and America—“Up she goes!” In the mountains where the coal lies buried, in the ground where the treasures are hidden—up she goes—Out there, machines lying cold—“Up she goes.” Rusty shovels lie in the engine rooms—“Up she goes!” Damn it gentlemen, bang on the table—Forget about your positions—put aside your official expressions. [43] Stringer first heard the phrase “up she goes” while watching movers attempting to hoist a piano through a window. Stringer felt a physical reaction to watching the movers, and he says that “with much spirit my muscles began to itch to work” and he decided to just pick up a suitcase and help them carry items upstairs in the townhouse. [44] While the sight and sound of the laborers inspires Stringer to work, his evoking of the phrase “up she goes” compels the bankers to do the same. As the scene ends, the bankers dance out of the conference room shouting “up she goes” in unison. There is an irony to the fact that the actions of manual laborers compel the bankers (as well as Stringer) to act, and the play satirizes how proponents of traditional work ethics promoted the idea that work could provide workers with upward mobility when, ultimately, many workers would never achieve such aims. As such, the bankers are convinced to work by Stringer’s usage of language that parodies traditional work ethic rhetoric. In addition, Help Yourself satirizes the nature of business performance, portraying the bankers of the play who are easily duped through vague language and action. Throughout the play, Stringer is able to convince his colleagues of his legitimacy as a banker through a series of superficial gestures. While the line between the business realm and the con realm were often vague, the publication of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1935 signaled a new emphasis on the performance of business. Karen Hatthunen argues that Carnegie’s manual, is a de facto guidebook to swindling one’s professional colleagues. According to Halttunen, “Carnegie’s purpose was to train men in a very special type of corporate salesmanship, ‘the salesmanship of the system selling itself to itself.’” [45] While Carnegie’s manual demonstrated how businessmen should perform to other businessmen, it also taught its readers how to convince themselves that they were performing their roles properly. In other words, Carnegie was also selling to his readers the spectacle of selling themselves to themselves, as if a reader were both the mark and the confidence man at the same time. This insincere performance is essential to Stringer’s con of the bank. By studying the “bank inside and out,” he has learned how to craft business proposals so ensconced in vague rhetoric that the bankers reading the proposal are inclined to accept it as is. In addition, Stringer manipulates his coworkers by evoking workplace rhetoric that persuades the other worker to react per the norms of the business world. [46] When someone asks Stringer if he is a new employee, Stringer replies that he has been at the bank for years, but had been working in another department. Stringer also provides vague details about himself, such as “I was the guy in the corner” or “I always ate ham and cheese sandwiches.” [47] Invariably, the other bank employees, after a brief pause, acknowledge that they remember Stringer. At points, Stringer is even able to tell “inside jokes” that his colleagues laugh at not because they understand, but because they are supposed to laugh at such jokes per the performance norms of the business world. While Help Yourself critiques banking culture, it also suggests that these performative elements in work extend beyond the banking industry. In stating part of his rationale for engaging in his con, Stringer claims that adopting a false persona is a game that everyone plays at. When his friend asks him why he is undertaking this scam, Stringer explains, “Just the illusion of working does something for you. Everyone plays at something—children play at being policemen—politicians at being statesmen. . . . Why shouldn’t I play at working?” [48] In one sense, Stringer’s statement echoes the Franklin’s belief that one must adopt new roles once their particular game has lost its appeal; Stringer also suggests through his words and actions that the solution to one’s working ills is to play your role and others will presume you are working. [49] Yet Stringer’s declaration that “everyone plays at something” seems to have be a signal for audiences to consider not only the importance of one’s sociological role, but also how prevalent false personas (and cons) such as politicians attempting to be statesmen are in society. And yet this play, like The Milky Way , offers readers a more complex and perhaps accusatory message in its conclusion. While the play seems to suggest that understanding a role gives you believability, Help Yourself also appears to assert that this form of conning is endemic in all institutions—not just banking or other businesses. Echoing the ideological stances of some of the Living Newspaper plays, Help Yourself suggests to audiences that they need to be aware of the dangers of the con Stringer pulled. While Stringer may have demonstrated daring in swindling the banks and procured jobs for other unemployed people, he nevertheless operated a far more dangerous confidence scheme than seen in The Milky Way : while Sullivan and his cohorts engage in a scheme in the entertainment world (although they do risk their own savings and the money of gamblers), Stringer’s swindle involves two separate banks and their respective investors as well as the government, and failure of this scheme would have likely endangered the money and jobs of other people. The danger of Stringer’s con is reinforced to the audience by how the play utilizes them. Whereas the real and fictional audiences of The Milky Way are (for the most part) in on the con, the bankers in Help Yourself are mainly unaware of how Stringer operates, while FTP audience members would have understood how little he knows about the banking industry and how his con succeeds through a considerable amount of chance. As such, when Stringer is promoted to vice president of the bank at the conclusion of the play, audiences are, on the one hand, encouraged to enjoy his success, but on another, unnerved by the bank’s inability to engage in due diligence with a powerful employee and the sense that Stringer will likely try another risky proposal in the future. Just as The Milky Way questioned the stability of the American Dream, Help Yourself presented to its working class and poor audiences a rather terrifying idea: that bankers—despite New Deal reforms—would engage in the same careless and risky practices that occurred in “the spirit of 1929.” Conclusion Hallie Flanagan believed that one of the aims of the FTP was to produce theatre that should be “socially and politically, aware of the new frontier in America, a frontier not narrowly political or sectional, but universal, a frontier along which tremendous battles are being fought against ignorance, disease, unemployment, poverty and injustice.” [50] Her ideal has often influenced critics and scholars to examine overtly radical plays like the Living Newspaper plays, the national production of It Can’t Happen Here , or the works of Orson Welles while downplaying farces, comedies, or other broad entertainments. And given that plays like The Milky Way and Help Yourself were in part farcical, outlandish tales that outwardly reinforced some traditional values, downplayed the appeal of the confidence scheme, or promoted the importance of employment, it is easy to see why researchers of the FTP have focused their efforts on other plays. However, plays like The Milky Way and Help Yourself were far more representative of the goals of the FTP than many critics have observed in the past. While the plays certainly featured more heroic con artists than other elements of American culture in the first half of the twentieth century, the performances of these plays permitted audiences to “get in on the con” as the characters on stage outwitted their foes. While granting their unemployed and lower-class audiences some necessary (if temporary) agency during the Depression, the plays also illustrated how endemic the confidence scheme was in American society, as actors, boxers, bankers, and most workers engaged in swindling of some form. But more importantly, these plays also addressed their audiences’ increasing anxiety over the decline of socio-economic status in the United States, as well as the dangers posed by unregulated institutions and workers. In this sense, the con artist plays of the FTP not only afforded audiences another opportunity to consider “the new frontier in America,” but did so under the guise of entertainment. Audiences may have been singing “up she goes!” as they left productions of con artist plays, but they were very likely also contemplating the meaning and their roles in the cons. References [1] Hallie Flanagan, Arena: The Story of the Federal Theatre (1940; New York: Limelight, 1985, 77. [2] David A. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 176. [3] I use the terms “swindler,” “con artist,” “confidence artist,” as well as “confidence scheme,” “con,” and “con game” interchangeably throughout this essay. Rather than “con man,” I mainly rely on the gender-neutral term confidence artist in these pages. [4] I provide an overview of the production history of The Milky Way and Help Yourself in their respective sections, but as an example of its popularity, despite competing with a major Hollywood film adaptation, Room Service was produced seven times in three years: Wilmington, North Carolina (1938), San Francisco (1938), San Diego (1938), New Orleans (1939), Denver (1936 & 1939), and Miami, Florida (1939). See George Mason University, The Federal Theatre Project: A Catalog-Calendar of Productions (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 135. The Nut Farm was less popular. On the FTP stage, the play was only performed twice in Manchester, New Hampshire, and Springfield, Illinois (neither of which appears to have attracted much, if any, press coverage). George Mason, The Federal Theatre Project , 113. [5] Malcolm Goldstein, The Political Stage: American Drama and Theatre of the Great Depressio n (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 268. [6] Barry Witham, The Federal Theatre Project: A Case Study (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4. [7] Flanagan, Arena , 22-23. [8] For a discussion of the overlap between theatre and the con artists of medicine shows, see James Harvey Young, The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). [9] David Maurer, The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man (New York: Merril, 1940), 158. [10] William E. Lenz, Fast Talk & Flush Times: The Confidence Man as a Literary Convention (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), 199. [11] Elizabeth Osborne, Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre Project (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 6. [12] Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Penguin, 2003), 100. [13] Sebastian Trainor, “It Sounds Too Much Like Comrade”: The Preservation of American Ideals in Room Service ,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 20, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 29-49, 31. [14] Gary Lindberg, The Confidence Artist in American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 9. [15] Stephen, Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 13. [16] Ibid., 13. [17] Ibid. [18] I use Elizabeth Osborne’s reading of the Living Newspaper play Spirochete as a model to thinking about the effect of The Milky Way and Help Yourself on their respective audiences. Osborne, Staging the People , 47. [19] Sharon Mazar, Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle (Oxford, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1998). [20] Roland Barthes, Mythologies. trans. Annette Lewis (1952; repr., New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 15. [21] George Mason University, The Federal Theatre Project: A Catalog-Calendar of Productions (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 103. [22] “Review of The Milky Way .” Los Angeles Evening News, August 5, 1938. Box 1040, Los Angeles The Milky Way Folder, Federal Theatre Project Collection, Library of Congress, Washington DC). Hereby referred to as FTP LC. [23] “Audience Survey.” Ibid., Portland The Milky Way Folder. [24] Review of The Milky Way . San Diego Union , August 26, 1938. Ibid.,San Diego The Milky Way Folder. [25] Jake LaMotta, Raging Bull (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1970), 162. [26] Lynn Root and Harry Clork, The Milky Way (New York: Samuel French, 1936), 84. [27] Ibid., 98. [28] Ibid., 60. [29] Ibid., 64. [30] Leslie Ann Frost, Dreaming America: Popular Front Ideals and Aesthetics in Children’s Plays of the Federal Theatre Project (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013). See also Amy Brady, “Staging the Depression: The Federal Theatre Project’s Dramas of Poverty, 1935-1939” (PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 2013). Brady details how “poverty dramas” of the FTP also represented lingering anxieties over the stability of the American Dream. [31] Frost, Dreaming America , 5. [32] Lindberg, The Confidence Artist in American Literature , 88. [33] Help Yourself was originally written after the First World War by the Austrian playwright Paul Vulpius. Vulpius was a somewhat popular playwright in Germany and Austria during the inter-war period, and was responsible for a popular play entitled Hau-rack ( Heave Ho!). According to Anselm Heinrich, a theatre group sympathetic to the Nazi Party wrote the Prussian Theatre Council in 1933 and inquired as to whether Vulpius was Jewish. Initially, the Theatre Council informed the group that Vulpius’ lawyer had informed them that Vulpius was Aryan. However, in 1934, the Prussian Theatre Council declared Vulpius to be a “non-Aryan,” quoted in Anselm Henrich, Entertainment, Propaganda, Education: Regional Theatre in Germany and Britain Between 1918 and 1945 (Herefordshire: University of Herefordshire Press, 2007), 121-22.Vulpius appears to have relocated to England at some point during the 1930s where his play Youth at the Helm was adapted into a 1936 British film entitled Jack of All Trades which centers on a con man who fakes his way through a series of jobs in order to help his sick mother. Vulpius is credited as a writer on a 1950 BBC version of Youth at the Helm which, according to the BFI, is nearly identical to the plot of Help Yourself . [34] Help Yourself was performed twenty-one times by the FTP: New York City, Syracuse, and White Plains, New York (1936); San Bernardino, California (1936); Peoria, Illinois (1936); Los Angeles (1937); Springfield, Massachusetts (1937); Denver (1937); Omaha, Nebraska(1937); Cincinnati (1937); San Francisco (1937), Wilmington, Delaware (1937); Des Moines, Iowa (1937); New York City (1937); Salem, Massachusetts (1937); Boston (1937), Bridgeport, Connecticut (1937); Philadelphia (1937); Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania (1937); Seattle (1937), and Atlanta (1938), quoted George Mason University, The Federal Theatre Project: A Catalog-Calendar of Productions (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 71-72. [35] “Audience Reaction Report.” (Box 1016, Omaha Help Yourself Folder, FTP LC). [36] “Audience Reaction Report.” Ibid., Des Moines Help Yourself Folder . [37] Review of Help Yourself.” Boston Herald . 27 Jan.1937. Ibid., Boston Help Yourself Folder. [38] “Audience Reaction Report.” (Box 1015, Los Angeles Help Yourself Folder, FTP LC). [39] Mary Sayler, “ Help Yourself. ” University of Washington Daily , November 6, 1937 (Box 1016, Help Yourself Seattle Folder, FTP LC). [40] Paul Vulpius, Help Yourself . trans. John J. Coman (New York: Samuel French, 1936), 22. [41] Ibid., 18. [42] Ibid., 63, emphasis in original. [43] Ibid., 63. [44] Ibid., 12. [45] Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture In America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1982), 185. [46] Ibid., 19. [47] Ibid., 16. [48] Ibid., 22-23. [49] In several respects, Help Yourself foreshadows How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and, as several colleagues have told me, many episodes of Seinfeld . [50] Flanagan, Arena , 372. Footnotes About The Author(s) Paul Gagliardi is currently a lecturer of American Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has written for the online journal Howlround, and will have another essay appearing in the journal LATCH this winter. His research centers on portrayals of work in American theatre and literature, and he is working on a manuscript on work-comedies of the Federal Theatre Project. He earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue May Irwin American Musical Theater Musical Theatre Books New York's Yiddish Theater Chinese Looks Reclaiming Four Child Actors through Seven Plays in US Theatre, 1794-1800 The Illusion of Work: The Con Artist Plays of the Federal Theatre Project On Bow and Exit Music Legitimate: Jerry Douglas's Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

James M. Cherry Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 1 Visit Journal Homepage August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle James M. Cherry By Published on December 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays. Edited by Sandra G. Shannon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016; Pp. 211. The principal undertaking of August Wilson’s playwriting career—the “Pittsburgh Cycle”—is a singular accomplishment in American theater. A series of ten plays highlighting the cultural shifts and stresses of African-American experience throughout the 20th century, the Cycle was written and staged over the course of three decades and completed shortly before Wilson’s death in 2005. Wilson situated his opus largely in the Hill District of Pittsburgh where he spent his childhood, a once-vibrant African-American community that fell into decay following failed urban development schemes and resultant poverty. Throughout the Cycle, Wilson connects the Hill District’s transformations to the larger history of African-Americans—slavery, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, persistent institutional racism—and the ways in which these realities reveal themselves on stage in micro-histories of Black lives. Wilson also foregrounds the historical linkages of music, ritual, ceremony, and oral culture as critical dramaturgical elements. As their descendants replace characters on Wilson’s stage, these are the ties that bind still. The restoration of a fragmented ancestry is personified in the reoccurring figure of Aunt Ester, the wise woman who physically embodies the link across time to Africa. Taken together, the plays of Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle can be seen as the work of playwright tethering a community to an obscured past. As Sandra G. Shannon rightly notes in her introduction to a new collection of essays, August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays, the narratives that fill Wilson’s plays are not simply representations of African-American life, but are also intensely personal, “reflect[ing] the playwright’s own fragmented life exacerbated by a complete disconnect with his biological father, by his flight from a racist Pittsburgh’s school system, and by his discovery or “reunion” with the blues, Africa, Amiri Baraka, and by his newfound regard for the vernacular of fellow Pittsburgh natives” (5). For Shannon, as well as many authors in this excellent collection, Wilson’s dual roles as an “autoethnographer of the black experience,” and as “the wounded healer” (6) who confronts his own personal history as a way to make sense of the larger historical narrative, are essential to understanding Wilson’s great accomplishment; they are also essential to comprehending what Wilson’s vision of the twentieth century means in our twenty-first. Since August Wilson’s death, there have been many attempts to examine and reconcile Wilson’s completed project, and recent scholarly treatments of the complete Cycle resonate throughout the volume under review here. Shannon’s text joins an already active critical conversation, including Harry Elam’s touchstone work The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), a recent Cambridge Companion collection, and the frequent stagings of the plays across the country. Appropriately enough, Shannon’s collection ranges widely in subjects and inventive theoretical perspectives. Sarah Saddler and Paul Bryant-Jackson’s piece on Two Trains Running brings together Manning Marable’s advocacy of a multidisciplinary “living history” to reclaim the lost narratives of people of color, and Diana Taylor’s argument to consider the “embodied behaviors that serve to e/affect the outcome of the social drama, and thus “ history” itself” (53). Saddler and Bryant-Jackson conclude that Wilson creates a document of living history in which the political struggles of the 1960s are played out on a personal and spiritual level on stage. In another essay, Psyche Williams-Forson probes the Wilson’s frequent use of food as way to depict communal and gender relationships, citing Wilson’s own interest in cultural anthropology. These arguments reframe August Wilson not just as a significant “realist” playwright, but as a writer whose works respond to various theoretical frameworks. Wilson deploys African ritual in his plays, often as a way to reconnect with a lost heritage, and several essays in this collection tease out the various dramaturgical and symbolic meanings of this connection. Artisa Green’s analysis of the “Òrìșà archetypes, sacred objects, and spaces” (10) and the Yoruban week calendar “which comprises a seven day cycle characterized by daily attributes that resulted from events which occurred in Yoruba creation stories” (156), facilitates a significant new understanding of the spiritual architecture of Gem of the Ocean. In the case of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Connie Rapoo looks at Loomis’ “acts of sacrifice” (177) as ways to “remember the spiritual African past in order to restore cosmic order” and to reclaim a forgotten cultural identity. More significantly, this collection often shows how Wilson’s work uses history to reflect upon contemporary concerns. Isaiah Matthew Wooden’s piece on the fraught relationship between the American justice system and the African-Americans subject to it in Gem of the Ocean is deeply relevant to the America of Black Lives Matter and police action captured on cell phone video. The concluding essay by Susan C. W. Abbottson deploys the work of theorists Alan Wilde, John McGowan, and Linda Hutcheon to investigate the optimistic, inclusive humanism in Wilson’s work. For Abbottson, “what Wilson is modeling through this cycle are lessons of responsibility, connection, history, and identity, which combine to create a final vision of what contemporary society most needs: active democracy” (200). In illuminating the experience of Black people in America, Wilson’s “self-defining American chronicle for the ages” (199) also sheds light on the desires, anxieties, and possibilities of all human beings. The main utility of the August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle is as a companion to, and an expansion of, previous Wilson scholarship. While it is inevitable for any collection to focus on some works more than others, Jitney (1982), Fences (1985), and Radio Golf (2005) are seldom addressed in this volume, though they are certainly topics of examination elsewhere. The inclusion of a production history of the Cycle would have made the text more user-friendly. Yet, the multiplicity of theoretical perspectives here acts as a provocation for other scholars to look at August Wilson’s work in new, inventive ways. Just as Wilson himself sought to forge links between the present and past, readers of his work should be encouraged to connect it with our present and future. James M. Cherry Wabash College The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 1 (Fall 2016/Winter 2017) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle Affective Performance and Cognitive Science Kitchen Sink Realisms Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience Everything Plus the Kitchen Sink Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Vivian Appler Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 2 Visit Journal Homepage Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' Vivian Appler By Published on May 26, 2016 Download Article as PDF [T]aking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all our parts. -Donna Haraway [1] Imagination and Representation: Laurie Anderson and the Performance of Science Science, a liberal cultural domain, carries certain gendered expectations with it. [2] Science disciplines such as physics, astronomy, and engineering tend to be the most heavily laden with prejudices that continue to manifest in unequal hiring practices and disparities in wages within those fields. [3] In this special issue of JADT dedicated to “Scientific Research and Inquiry in American Theatre,” it is important to recognize how theatre and other representational modes of performance impact a cultural imaginary that contains both the sciences and the arts, and that gender bias exists at all points of our social spectrum. This interdisciplinary perspective reveals that problems of inequality apply to the domain of science as well as other cultural and economic domains such as art, business, and education. Theatrical performance has long been a popular mode of social critique, and when science is understood as a part of culture, not apart from it, the potential arises for theatre’s critical pen to address science issues as social. Representation of women as contributors to knowledge production within the domain of science is an important part of the critical power of theatrical performance. The use of the theatre as a laboratory to extend and create new knowledge about science is an exceptional quality of Laurie Anderson’s performance of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in The End of the Moon (2004). In this article, I offer an explicitly feminist analysis of one high-profile piece of science-integrative performance art that is implicitly feminist in its deconstruction of science practices and transparent representation of science ideas within the community of a general theatre audience. This article contributes to a body of scholarship that is growing to match an increasing amount of science-integrative theater on the twenty-first century stage. Laurie Anderson’s performance art tends to be critiqued within a non-representational framework. Moon is no exception: she embodies her own experience as a NASA resident-artist while performing science within the experiential context of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). However, the unfamiliar and unavoidably removed nature of the science objects central to her story must be considered within a somewhat representational context. The representational quality of her female body stepping into the domain of science onstage is a critical step towards expanding liberal notions of who has access to physics and astronomy careers. Her artist’s body is equally significant because it blurs the cultural boundaries that separate science discourse and practice from other cultural realms. Anderson’s embodied intervention into the arts-science divide suggests that science should be a part of a holistic cultural conversation, one that is equally accessible to all curious participants. Interdisciplinarity is central to the realization of feminist scientific discourse. Twentieth century science writer C.P. Snow infamously observed a “two cultures” divide that has long defined interdisciplinary discourse as antagonistic. Snow’s philosophical intervention into this cultural schism often (although perhaps not intentionally) situates scientists as better culturally read than their literary and artistic peers. [4] Snow’s binary question of “arts versus science” oversimplifies a much larger issue of empathy among cultural domains which have unequal levels of inclusivity and access. Interdisciplinary performance research can disrupt this biased cultural scenario by examining science-oriented performance artists who work from a feminist perspective. Artists such as Laurie Anderson, Lauren Gunderson, and Critical Art Ensemble are informed by feminist theory even when their science-integrative performances explicitly address other socio-scientific issues. Overtly feminist analyses of such arts-science hybrid performances expose a cultural imbalance in access to fields such as astronomy and physics even as they suggest alternative pathways to these apparently elite jobs. Science-integrative performance can reveal practical and theoretical interdisciplinary commonalities among diverse cultural domains. NASA Art Program Curator Bertram Ulrich observes of Anderson’s process, “her mind works very much the same way a scientist’s would. They’re both reaching out to try to understand what’s unknown.” [5] Moon was created as an outcome of Anderson’s arts residency at NASA; in it she uses performance art to invite the average theatre-goer into the space agency’s relatively closed ranks that she, an artist, has tenuously joined. Anderson shares her research with her audience, whom she imagines to be “a woman who would be sitting in Row K. I am trying to make her laugh.” [6] Randy Gener praises Anderson’s “faux-naif mutability, her techno-artist reputation and cross-wiring of art modes [that] are part of her idiosyncratic appeal—the reason she was selected by NASA’s Art Program.” [7] It may come as a surprise that NASA even has an art program, but artistic interpretation of the space agency has existed since its inception. The NASA Art Program was founded in 1962 as an attempt to make NASA’s enterprises more available to a popular American audience. The Program’s original director, James Webb, “wanted to convey to future generations the hope and sense of wonder that characterized the early days of space exploration.” [8] While many of the artists funded by NASA have been visual artists—alumni include Annie Leibovitz, Robert Rauschenberg, Terry Riley, and Norman Rockwell—Anderson was the first performance artist invited for a residency. [9] The selection of Anderson to participate in the Art Program reveals the agency’s desire for a more inclusive performance of science within traditional scientific spaces and an understanding that a theatrical performance artist is qualified to ease access to this elite domain in ways that other science outreach activities have been unable to do. Yet, Moon , the second in a trilogy of performance pieces that Anderson has devised in response to the post-9/11 cultural climate in the U.S., is not uncritical of NASA. [10] Anderson endeavors to instill in her audiences a sense of wonder at the world while also encouraging active participation in the larger culture in which the domain of astronomy is embedded. She gives the audience glimpses into elements of the monolithic science institution through sparse verbal narration, lyrical soundscapes, and iconic images. Anderson fills the space between wonder at scientific achievement and an active engagement with the socio-political criticism of those achievements through embodied and technologically transductive performance techniques. Her position as a woman artist engaging with science issues models a culture in which all citizens are empowered to participate in disciplines that have historically, and habitually, been restricted to professional scientists that physically resemble hegemonic figures of scientific authority: white, able-bodied, Euro-American men. Anderson’s Moon intervenes into this perennial limitation of American imagination with regard to inclusive practices in astronomy. Her storytelling is a proposal for citizen engagement with the process of exploratory and experiential astronomy as it was being practiced by NASA in the mid-2000s. Anderson’s combination of the human, the technological, and the animal—represented onstage physically, imagistically, and textually—constitutes a cyborg system intent on subverting culturally accepted notions of science that have come to be, she implies, accessible only to those agents performing almost exclusively within the secret domain of the military. [11] Anderson’s citizen-scientist performance opens with a pastiche of iconic twentieth century images that have come to define an American idea of the night sky. These images’ ubiquity in American pop culture contributes to an atmosphere of familiarity that enables an empathetic relationship between general audiences and science-oriented performance to transpire. The tableau is reminiscent of Clement Hurd’s illustration of the children’s book Goodnight Moon , by Margaret Wise Brown. Anderson is seated in the downstage right chair (where Wise’s mother bunny sits), surrounded by stars—tea candles—scattered across the stage, and the moon in its upstage left corner. Anderson’s moon is a fragment, indicative of the partial relationship that a human has with any piece of the universe. This synecdochal moon is a reproduction of the well-known photograph of Neil Armstrong’s lunar footprint. Taken in 1969 and projected onto a classroom-sized screen, Anderson’s deconstructed moon is nonetheless familiar to a general American audience in 2004. Anderson transduces NASA into a familiar object by isolating a sound that is a piece of a human: a voice. The tale begins with a description of a typical day in her studio in the company of her dog. The telephone rings. She describes the NASA representative on the other end of the line not as a person, but as a voice. “The voice said, ‘this is so and so and I’m from NASA and we’d like you to be the first artist-in-residence here.’ ‘You’re not from NASA,’ and I hung up the phone.” [12] Anderson continues to recount how the voice from NASA called back, and so her astronomy-integrative performance research began. Anderson’s choice to depict NASA as a voice renders the giant organization manageable. One voice can have a conversation with another voice on the telephone, but an individual might not as easily encounter a high-profile science institution such as NASA in its entirety. Feminism and The End of The Moon In this article, I draw primarily upon theories of the posthuman, performatics, and the cyborg in order to tease out the feminist aspects of Anderson’s performance of astronomy. N. Katherine Hayles’s [13] and Rosi Braidotti’s [14] approaches to posthuman theory help to articulate a line of thought that is at once socially aware and embodied. Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” playfully addresses the shifting roles of feminism, informatics, and hybridity within the domain of science even as she argues against notions of cultural boundaries. Diana Taylor’s use of performatics is also rooted in a desire to transcend geo-political borders. Taylor suggests the term “performatic” rather than “performative” when critiquing embodied performance, “to denote the adjectival form of the nondiscursive realm of performance… [b]ecause it is vital to signal the performatic, digital, and visual fields as separate from, though always embroiled with, the discursive one so privileged by Western logocentrism.” [15] Here, I extend Taylor’s term from its original “Americas” context and apply it to the analysis of performances that deliberately blend technics, politics, and informatics in order to disrupt liberal disciplinary boundaries. Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, whose performance theory in Cyborg Theatre is deeply inspired by Braidotti’s cultural criticism, asserts that, “arguments for alternate subjectivities—nomadic, non-unitary, hybrid, cyborgean—permeate a theoretical technological landscape reflecting a need for radical rethinking about human positioning in the world.” [16] Anderson’s performatic intervention into the problem of inclusive science access alters the positionality of critique—from without—that is vital if change in a cultural imagination of science and scientists is to transpire. Anderson’s narrative is overtly cosmopolitan and science-driven, but feminist principles are implicit to the science-integrative framework that makes her global critique possible. A feminist approach to the performance of science might include the identification of the following qualities: Transparency. As hybrid technologies make more of the universe detectable to the human, so the social machine that makes these new technologies possible must maintain open and inclusive environments. Hybridity. Feminist performances of science might acknowledge the networks over which the knowledge-productive elements of socio-scientific labor are distributed. Alignment with post-colonialist and post-human “insights about the importance of the politics of location and careful grounding in geo-political terms.” [17] Cultural position in relationship to access and authority within the domain of science is directly related to the liberal, humanist social contract of the West that post-colonialist and post-human theories seek to dismantle. Performances of science that transparently enact hybrid and inclusive knowledge production practices are a step towards the realization of an equitable culture across multiple disciplinary domains. Analyses that elucidate these qualities go hand-in-hand with the realization of theory as practice. Transduction—the communication of information across different media—is caught up in the feminist analysis of the performance of science because of its potential to equalize access to disciplinary-specific information. Citing James Berkley’s analysis of Edgar Allan Poe, Hayles invokes the power of mimesis to communicate data while also providing a framework for the transfer of power from one performing agent to another through mediated interactions: “Mimesis, in [Berkley’s] account, becomes a transducer transferring the power to evoke wonder and terror from one site to another, while the sublime sets up the transfer by presupposing that a connection exists between environment and system, stimulus and affect, externalized object and internalized subject.” [18] In a broad theatrical context, the performance process begins with information found in the world and that information is transduced through the dynamic body of a performing agent. Mimetic transduction moves information from one medium (the page) to another (the stage, screen, or other performance venue) so that audiences might understand that information differently than they would were they to encounter the same information via a different medium. Embodied transduction that occurs in a science-oriented theatrical context can empower audience members to participate in science concepts even when liberal social norms deny the non-scientist easy access to the domain of science. Theatrical transduction can encourage an empathetic audience response and therefore often results in the creation of an array of culturally imaginative possibilities for audiences of science-oriented performance. Anderson’s position as both resident of NASA and science-outsider allows her to empathize with NASA scientists as well as with general audiences. She establishes herself as an artist who is qualified to comment on science issues through her performed encounter with contemporary astronomy. Her feminist intervention is implicit; she, a woman artist performing science, is also fluent in scientific discourse and therefore challenges astronomy’s habitually exclusive practices. The kind of science mastery that Anderson exhibits falls into a category that philosophers of science Kyle Powys Whyte and Robert P. Crease, citing H.M. Collins’s and R. Evans’s 2007 study, refer to as “interactional expertise,” in which a non-scientist achieves “knowledge of a scientific field that is sufficiently advanced to understand and communicate within the discourse yet unable to contribute to research.” [19] But Anderson’s work is research. She uses her “interactional” expert position to conduct performance research that endeavors, at least in part, to discover what may be missing from the domain-specific attempts to diversify the laboratory. Anderson’s passion for astronomy and cosmology is infectious, and her performance craft transduces not only science concepts but also her enthusiasm for the subject. Her knowledge of NASA’s scientific processes grew through her residency, but her status as an outsider remains and necessitates the empathetic bridge-building of her science-integrative performance. Such interdisciplinary connections are needed if NASA and other physics and astronomy laboratories are to achieve the inclusive atmosphere that they purport to desire. Yet Anderson’s stakes are higher than the interests of a single government agency. The empathetic bridges she builds are also necessary for our society to function as a whole. Anderson and the Hubble Space Telescope [20] Historically, many scientists who began as astronomy outsiders made their most remarkable discoveries, in part, because of the field’s non-normative worldview that restricted outsiders’ access to mainstream spaces in which astronomy research had been conducted. These scientists were forced to introduce a new perspective if they were to perform science at all. American women such as Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921) and Vera Rubin (b. 1928) made remarkable discoveries about the cosmos that were directly connected to their limited access to traditional methods of astronomical research and experiment. Like the introduction of women and other socially excluded groups to the observatory , the addition of each new component—including machines—to the hybrid project of knowing outer-space holds the capacity to radically alter conventionally held notions of humanity’s place in the world. This was the case with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), which produces breathtaking images of the universe that are now readily available in a variety of contemporary media. [21] Anderson’s performance renders the HST’s process at once transparent and curious. History, astronomy, and technology are necessarily entwined enterprises because of astronomy’s methodological reliance upon the reference to and manipulation of many different visual representations of individual astronomical objects captured over long periods of time. [22] HST images add to an archive of telescopically transduced celestial imagery that has been accumulating around the globe for centuries. HST images have become a popular way for astronomers and curious amateurs to get an idea of the appearance and composition of objects in outer-space. In Moon, Anderson speaks for the non-expert as she performs her curiosity about the way that HST engineers manipulate images of celestial objects. She explores the knowledge-generative labor performed by the HST (and its team of astronomers, technicians, and astronauts) with her audience. Her performance of HST image transduction systems creates a metaenvironmental space in which spectators participate in NASA’s transductive processes. HST images are developed through networked transduction systems in a cyborgean enterprise designed to bring previously undetectable information about deep space objects into the optical spectrum. [23] Anderson illuminates this esoteric process for her audience, but she also indicates that the process is imperfect in its ability to align perception of distant objects with the spectral truth of those objects. In astrophotography, the distant celestial body may really exist, but it is also a product of the technology that detects it, the telescopic camera that captures previously unknowable information, and a transductive process that involves choices made by intentional human agents. [24] The original object—the Andromeda Galaxy, a mountain on the moon, the Great Nebula of Orion—disappears even as it is created for observation by a general, earthbound audience, and this presents a problem for Anderson. She voices a discrepancy between how celestial objects exist in their original environments and how those objects are represented to consumer-audiences of science media. Anderson brings her critique of technologically mediated images back to the human body: “We’re always fixing up photographs,” she remarks as she compares the work of HST engineers to photoshopping a “miserable family Christmas” photo. [25] “One of the things that really bothers me about photography,” she continues, “is that you never know how hot it is in the photograph.” [26] Anderson’s problem with photoshopped family pictures analogically grounds her critique of heavily mediatized HST images. Both types of images are fragmented, removed from first-hand experience, and therefore indicative of the posthuman condition necessary to the performance of astronomy. Mary Thomas Crane points out in her examination of early modern science that much of the experience of the laboratory (and, by extension, the observatory) counters “basic sensorimotor experience.” [27] Anderson describes her frustration with astrophotography’s incapacity to accurately convey the environment of a star or a galaxy in a two-dimensional image. HST pictures, she argues, are simply archives of data that document conditions that remain forever outside the experiential grasp of the human observer. A family photograph’s observer cannot distinguish the difference between the photographic subject’s embodied experience and the record of that experience. [28] The photograph is an index of original environmental conditions; the colors, texture, and size of the sweater, and who was wearing it are indicated by the photograph, but the embodied experience of wearing the sweater, as well as the circumstances surrounding the photographic event, is a much trickier experience to share with an observing agent across distances of time and space. For consumers of HST media images, this translates to an inability to sense data that does not normally appear on the human visual spectrum, such as ultra-violet rays and x-rays. Meanwhile, these inexact documents become iconic in their representation of events in cultural memory. Colorization is one way that HST engineers attempt to transduce spectrally invisible information collected by the HST into images that are meaningful for popular audiences and astronomy experts alike. Art historian Shana Cooperstein explains that colorization “encourages people to imagine links between photography and vision, as well as between ‘truth’ and visional perception.” [29] Elizabeth A. Kessler finds that ascriptions of authenticity and authority to colorized HST images depends “on a definition of truth that rests on human perception; but color carries a greater range of meanings. . . . [C]olor can be used to label, to measure, to represent or imitate reality, or to enliven or decorate. Furthermore, it incorporates both objective and subjective elements.” [30] Kessler describes the process of colorization as one that depends upon the variability of human perception as well as a number of possible choices that might be made by individual imagists working across history. Kessler discusses “false color” as “hues” that need not have any relationship to the visual appearance of the phenomena or the wavelengths of light registered by the instrument. Instead, different colors might indicate another dimension of the data….In addition to what the color indicates, false color has come to describe a particular color palette—flat, garish hues that do not resemble natural phenomena in our world.[31] A colorized image emotionally engages a general audience because of that audience’s memory of the familiar icon and subjective associations with the colors in the image. The process is creative in that some personal choice is involved on the part of the HST engineer, but these choices are constrained due to the indexical ends of the photography experiment. Such images are breathtaking, but Anderson is unsatisfied because of the HST’s inability to transduce celestial objects in their complete spectral splendor. She describes an encounter with some of the scientists who work on HST transduction. She performs the kind of expectation that the woman in “Row K” with a casual interest in science might share by asking NASA scientists, “Could you have used a whole different color range…. How did you arrive at these colors?” [32] By “these colors” she means pinks and blues instead of her suggested alternatives of brown and gray. The answer the scientists offer is simple: “We thought people would like them.” [33] She pauses as the audience laughs at the arbitrariness of human choice involved in the transduction of information that comes to us via the space telescope, is interpreted by human engineers who manipulate that data, and manifests in journalistic media images detectable on the visual spectrum. Anderson’s tone waxes lyrical and her text shifts back to the sublime as she muses, “It looks like a painting of heaven.” [34] Colorized HST photographs affect science media viewers in a manner similar to that of acting technique with regard to audiences of realist theatre: both are capable of engendering simultaneous states of curiosity and familiarity on the part of the spectator towards the observational object. Creators of HST outreach images must weigh factors of emotional connectivity, scientific objectivity, and personal memory in the subjunctive work of representing truthful information while also stimulating popular imagination towards distant celestial phenomena. Much like the unnatural techniques that actors deploy to convey a sense of realism in representational theatrical genres, HST astronomers isolate wavelengths that are not on the visible spectrum and ascribe an unrealistic color to them. The effect is a fantastic image that the unaided human eye could never see, but that nevertheless registers as realistic and familiar in the imagination of the observer. Neither realist acting techniques nor HST image manipulation replicate identical copies of the original object of observation, be it a fictional character or a distant star. In theatrical and photographic forms, a sense of familiarity with a scenario or an image is essential for spectators to empathetically engage with the representation of a novel object. Ultimately, it is the creative agency of the individual scientist that determines how distant astronomical events appear to a general public. The subjective memory of the scientist affects the color choices made, even when those color choices don’t represent the “true” color that the human eye would see. Cognitive theatre scholar Amy Cook claims, “[t]o represent the previously invisible, to perform the seemingly impossible, is vitally important to creating the visible and the possible.” [35] Such imagination is necessary each time astronomers reinvent a familiar celestial object with a new technology. In a similar way, Anderson reinvents the domain of astronomy through her critique of HST. Astrophotography distorts the truth while representing reality; it encourages audiences to learn something new about celestial objects through the process of composite imaging. [36] A composite photographic image is created by layering several negatives and thereby blending information of each to create a single image that represents the idea of a photographic object but does not reproduce visual information in a one-to-one manner. HST images are not only colorized, but composite, consisting of layers of captured spectra that have each been assigned colors representative of different aspects of the object’s qualia. Through HST composite, colorized imaging, astronomers create new pictures of familiar objects that index more information than ever before, but that continue to resemble the iconic images captured by earlier astronomers. Visual reference to earlier astronomical icons encourages non-scientist viewers of these images to access any memory they may have about what they already know of these objects, and thus to cognitively build upon previous memories in a continuous development of learning about the objects in question. In Anderson’s composite performance of NASA, she doesn’t work simply with color, but she blends cultural memories and impressions of NASA in order to elicit a simultaneously curious and critical audience response. While her inclusion of Armstrong’s footprint brings to mind a familiar moment in the history of science, it also conjures the Cold War context surrounding the space race. As discussed above, her female artist’s body might trigger a number of associations from different audience members. For those who work within the science industry, Anderson’s performance might signal the disciplinary exclusion of certain social groups from the field. Other audience members who remember Anderson’s previous performances as works of cultural critique may expect an unsubtle criticism of NASA’s affiliations with the military. Still others who have come to expect a spectacular array of high-tech gadgetry from a Laurie Anderson production might be disappointed by the apparently simple stage technology in a piece that deals with technics that are off-limits to the average American citizen. [37] In Moon , Anderson’s trademark electric violin solos create time and space for viewers to process her performatic transduction of NASA as it mingles with subjective associations among the audience. Defying Gravity (And Other Socio-Scientific Forces) In the midst of the multi-layered web of cultural memories that individual audience members experience when faced with the iconography embedded in Moon , Anderson deconstructs NASA even as she composes it. She questions whose bodies have the authority to occupy the subject position in a national conversation about science through her cyborgean relationship to culturally familiar objects that are commonly associated with Americans in space. Parker-Starbuck, in her discussion of the fragmentation of multimedia performance, states, “[a]bject and object bodies are both bodies at a distance, bodies outside of our ‘selves.’ These bodies triangulate around the ‘subject’ as those who are refused, rejected, desired, critiqued, or negotiated with. These are the bodies that reiterate who we think we are and where we fit in the world.” [38] On Anderson’s stage, Neil Armstrong’s body, invisible save for his footprint projected on the small screen, is at once abject and object. Anderson is the subject performing astronomy “in play with” the abjected object of the first man on the moon. [39] The physical and technological space created on her cyborg stage makes room not only for her, but for the witnesses to this feminist comment on representation and authority in the domain of astronomy, to join the cultural conversation. Further altering the triangular relationship she has established among herself as subject, audience as participatory witness, and abjected icons of American space exploration, Anderson playfully manipulates simple video technology in order to defy notions of a familiar physics concept: gravity. Her challenge to physics provokes audience members to increase their engagement with socio-scientific government actions. Towards this end, she performs a spacewalk that introduces NASA’s innovative space suits as war machines. In this sequence, Anderson uses a live-feed video camera to create a performance of weightlessness. She makes her illusory technics transparent to her audience by exposing her stagecraft even as she performs it, letting spectators in on the joke. “Our moon is just the moon,” she muses as she switches the camera on and focuses it toward herself, the audience visible within the camera’s frame. [40] The image of Armstrong’s historic footprint on the upstage left screen is replaced with a live projection stream from Anderson’s camera; now she occupies both subject and object positions on her cyborg stage. She holds the camera upside-down so that her projected image appears to be floating on the space of the stage, also upside-down, with a stage light shining like a sun behind her disembodied head, which bobs gently in accord with the movement of her live body. The camera captures some of the tea candle stars on the stage, and in an instant doubles the amount of “space” represented through the handheld projection device. Through this fragmented stage presence, Anderson raises the issue of gravity, verbally reflects on the experience of seeing old photographs of astronauts “suspended, floating in space” during her residency at NASA, and imagines what it must be like to walk on the moon. [41] As she begins to perform her spacewalk, Anderson describes the technology built into NASA’s new spacesuits that will, according to Anderson, “increase your strength, say, forty times.” [42] The suits contain all kinds of “liquids” and “entry points for medicine.” [43] Just as the audience starts to dream about space suits capable of transforming the human into the superhuman (posthuman?), she disrupts the audience’s reverie with news about the grim reality of war times. The super-suit project’s contract has been transferred from NASA to a “new joint team” between MIT and the U.S. Army. [44] The suits will not be worn by astronauts but will be sent “out into the desert. Out into the world.” [45] Like the touched-up family portrait and HST photographs, no matter how much a person learns about a thing—a physical force, a moon, a space agency—there is always something that remains outside the realm of immediate experience. What remains outside the grasp of the everyday American, Anderson suggests, is the end to which NASA puts its ingenious inventions. Her criticism resonates with Parker-Starbuck’s assertion that “how bodies are modified and by whom are the ethical concerns that surround what already is, and will continue to shape both humans and non-humans alike.” [46] Parker-Starbuck’s theatrical cyborg ethic echoes Haraway’s late twentieth century cyborg provocation: “Might there be ways of developing feminist science/technology politics in alliance with anti-military science facility conversion action groups?” [47] Anderson’s performatics model an alternative way of doing science—in public—that resists traditional power structures hidden within the practice of space exploration. While the spacesuits that Anderson describes resemble more conventional popular imaginations of the cyborg in their immediate melding of human body with technology, Anderson’s “reliance on corporeal-technological relationship” in performance is also cyborg in its technics and its critique. [48] She weaves her criticism into the fabric of transparent video-play about gravity, made strange within the space of the theatre. She proclaims, “Gravity is an illusion, a trick of the eye, not a force.” [49] In the metaenvironment of Anderson’s science-integrated theatre, imagination and illusion enable non-astronaut humans to participate in this rare aspect of the human experience and critique the politics within the institution that makes such experiences possible for a select few Americans. Saying “Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?” [50] she segues into a musical interlude that provides the reflective space for her audience to ponder the experience of weightlessness and the role of the individual in the socio-technological tangle of post-9/11 culture. She raises her electric violin and now the image on the screen takes the perspective of the bow as it meets the instrument’s strings. The illusion of space persists as the audience is presented with the live Anderson playing her violin beside the projected, more intimate, close-up image of her face. Quantum Anderson twins are separated by the space of the stage and connected by the electromagnetic force that powers her performance technologies, all in support of the artist’s efforts to transduce the hidden nature of NASA for the general audience assembled at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Anderson’s performatics encourage her audiences to engage with the domain of science in order to stay informed and active in a culture that would apply detection-related technologies developed in the domain of science to the art of global warfare. She presents herself as a science outsider, shares her socio-political performance response in an empathetic manner, and thus multiplies the number of non-scientists participant to the process of astronomy in the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, Moon can seem to be internally contradictory—should the non-scientist viewer love NASA or fear it? Seen as parts of a cultural whole, the balance between science and art, fear and wonder, becomes evident. This ability to isolate individual components in order to realize a whole system is integral to Anderson’s posthuman stage presence. Her doubled image—on the stage as well as on the projection screen—is an embodied metaphor for the ways that humans can hold contradictory opinions about one subject. She raises the social stases of war and peace as poignant examples for 2005. “Yes,” she says, “you can keep two things in mind.…[W]e can hold both at once without dropping.” [51] The show closes with a monologue in which Anderson imagines the end of time with a mixture of theories of quantum physics, dream sequences, and, of course, the haunting musical accompaniment of her electric violin. She offers a parting comment on the hybrid nature of human cognition at the dawn of the quantum age: “Sometimes, I think I can smell light,” a suspicion that resonates with her earlier human frustration with the inadequacy of transductive technologies to replicate original conditions of deep-space phenomena. [52] Here, she suggests that such previously undetectable information is accessible by means of our extended and imaginative posthuman state. Access to the previously inaccessible becomes a matter of a change in critical, embodied, and disciplinary perspectives. Feminist, posthuman, and cyborg criticisms of the domain of science in the space of the theatre model possibilities for non-traditional bodies to participate in interdisciplinary actions and conversations having to do with science. The representation of women performing scientist roles in performance is a critical move towards a culture that might imagine, accept, allow, and encourage the female body as normative for the task of practicing physics and astronomy. Anderson is transparent in her own creative process that also renders NASA a bit less opaque for non-scientists. Her presence as a woman onstage, performing science from the perspective of an artist, offers an empathetic bridge for other curious science-outsiders to critically participate in the experience of astronomy. References [1] Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 181. [2] This article was written, in part, during a Dibner Research Fellowship in the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California in 2015. Thanks also to the New York Public Library Performing Arts Research Collections for granting me access to review the archival footage of The End of the Moon . [3] The 2013 National Science Foundation (NSF) found that “the proportion of [science and engineering] degrees awarded to women has risen since 1993. The proportion of women is lowest in engineering, computer sciences, and physics.” National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering: 2015 , accessed October 20, 2015, http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15311/digest/ . There is much action that is currently being performed within astronomy in particular to emend these disparities. Blogs such as Women in Astronomy and Astronomy in Color are evidence of actions performed by women and racial minorities who work within the discipline of astronomy towards the end of equalizing access to astronomy. Women in Astronomy , accessed 14 November 2015, womeninastronomy.blogspot.com. Astronomy in Color , accessed 14 November 2015, astronomyincolor.blogspot.com. [4] “They [literary intellectuals] still like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of ‘culture,’ as though the natural order didn’t exist. As though the exploration of the natural order was of no interest either in its own value or its consequences. As though the scientific edifice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man. Yet most non-scientists have no conception of that edifice at all.” C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures: and A Second Look: An Expanded Version of the Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 14. [5] Ulrich in Grossnov, Michael Joseph, “Inviting the Cosmos Onto the Stage,” The New York Times, 11 November 2004, http://www.nytimes.com , accessed 1 March 2016. [6] Anderson in Solomon, Deborah, “Post-Lunarism,” The New York Times Magazine , 30 January 2005, http://www.nytimes.com , accessed 1 March 2016. [7] Gener, Randy, “Fly her to the moon: what’s art got to do with NASA? Laurie Anderson listens to the cosmic pulse,” American Theatre 22, no. 3 (2005): 26+, accessed 2 December 2014, http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA130570546&v=2.1&u=upitt_main&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w&asid=1d8012ba9f173f1b83d9bc51f4d0ad28 . [8] NASA ArtSpace , accessed 6 December 2014, http://www.nasa.gov/connect/artspace/ . [9] The Smithsonian recently curated an exhibit dedicated to the NASA Art Program’s history, documented in the book, NASA/ART—50 Years of Exploration . Selections from it may be seen on NASA’s website, https://www.nasa.gov . [10] Other pieces of the trilogy include Happiness (2001) and Dirtday! (2012). [11] Anderson has a history of connecting the dots between the domains of science, technology, and the military. Friedrich Kittler points out that she adapts the military technology of the vocoder for her representation of the voice of a pilot announcing a crash landing in the song, “From the Air” on the record Big Science (1982), also featured in the live performance, United States (1983). Mara Mills, “Media and Prosthesis: the Vocoder, the Artificial Larynx, and the History of Signal Processing,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 21, no 1 (2012): 110, accessed 19 October 2015, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/491050 . [12] Laurie Anderson, The End of the Moon (New York: Brooklyn Academy of Music, Harvey Theatre, February 27, 2005), videocassette, New York Public Library, Performing Arts Research Collections, Theatre on Film and Tape. [13] N. Katherine Hayles, “Refiguring the Posthuman,” Comparative Literature Studies 41, no.3 (2004), accessed 11 May 2014, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40247415 . [14] Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). [15] Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 6. [16] Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 14. [17] Braidotti, The Posthuman , 39. [18] Hayles, “Refiguring the Posthuman,” 313. [19] Kyle Powys White and Robert P. Crease , “Trust, Expertise, and the Philosophy of Science,” Synthese 177, no. 3 (December 2010), 411-25, accessed 26 July 2015, 417. [20] The HST is a 2.4m-wide reflective telescope that is situated three-hundred and eighty-one miles above the Earth’s surface. On 24 April 1990 it was carried in the cargo bay of the space shuttle Discovery and placed into orbit. Its “improved wavelength coverage,” will come to bear on this article’s examination of the HST role in detecting invisible spectra in the accessible performance of astronomy as it appears in The End of the Moon. Robert W Smith, “Introduction: The Power of an Idea,” Hubble’s Legacy: Reflections by Those Who Dreamed It, Built It, and Observed the Universe with It , ed. Roger D. Launius and David H. DeVorkin (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2014), 3. [21] HST has its own website that is operated by NASA. Hubblesite , accessed 19 October 2015, http://hubblesite.org . [22] Repeated observations and visual documentations of celestial objects like stars and galaxies allow astronomers to track changes in an object’s location and appearance over time and therefore learn about the object’s distance, heat, and movement. [23] The visual spectrum refers to the small portion of the energy, emitted by all objects to some degree, detectable to the human eye. [24] In a discussion of mid-late nineteenth century photographs that contain extra-visual data, art historian Josh Ellenbogen states, “[p]hotography does not reproduce data in such images, but instead it produces them.” Josh Ellenbogen, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The Photography of Bertillon, Galton, and Maray (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 6. [25] Anderson, The End of the Moon . [26] Ibid . [27] Mary Thomas Crane, “Analogy, Metaphor, and the New Science: Cognitive Science and Early Modern Epistemology,” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies , ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 107. [28] The relationship of experience to the documentation of experience is a recurrent trope in Anderson’s lifelong explorations of the connections that exist between science, culture, and the military: “Stand by. This is the time. And this is the record of the time.” Laurie Anderson, “From the Air,” in RoseLee Goldberg, Laurie Anderson (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000), 96. [29] Cooperstein’s case study is of the imagistic history of the Orion Nebula in which she compares nineteenth century astrophotography and the photography techniques used by turn-of-the-millennium astronomers. Shana Cooperstein, “Imagery and Astronomy: Visual Antecedents Informing Non-Reproductive Depictions of the Orion Nebula,” Leonardo 47, no. 2 (2014), 133, accessed 27 May 2015, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/len/summary/v047/47.2.cooperstein.html . [30] Elizabeth A. Kessler, Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 154. [31] Ibid., 157. [32] Anderson, The End of the Moon . [33] Ibid. [34] Ibid. [35] Amy Cook, “If: Lear’s Feather and the Staging of Science,” The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies: Tarrying with the Subjunctive ,” ed. Paul Cefalu and Bryan Reynolds (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 59. [36] Ellenbogen defines the composite image as “a synthesis of data—a condensed, abbreviative representation of the kinds of information one might otherwise derive from a binomial curve, or better, a series of binomial curves that measured the particular features a given composite shows” (Ellenbogen, 9) . [37] Most reviews remark upon the pared-down technology of Moon , when compared to the technological complexity of her earlier work. [38] Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre , 95. [39] Ibid. [40] Anderson, The End of the Moon . [41] Ibid. [42] Ibid. [43] Ibid. [44] Ibid. [45] Ibid. [46] Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre , 194. [47] Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women , 169. [48] Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre , 101. [49] Ibid. Gravity is (probably) a force, but one that physicists are still seeking to adequately explain. See Lisa Randall, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions (HarperCollins ebooks, 2009). [50] Anderson, The End of the Moon . [51] Ibid. [52] Ibid. Footnotes About The Author(s) Vivian Appler is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at the College of Charleston. Her writing has been published in Theatre Survey , Theatre Journal , and the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq. A former Fulbright fellow, her current research focus is on feminist performances of science. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Blue-Collar Broadway The New Humor in the Progressive Era Stages of Engagement Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Craig Quintero Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Craig Quintero By Published on May 20, 2022 Download Article as PDF The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness. Yuko Kurahashi. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Books, 2020; Pp. 240. Yuko Kurahashi’s The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness presents the first comprehensive analysis of Ping Chong’s five-decade long theatre career in which, according to Kurahashi, Chong “has created the largest and most complex body of work of any Asian American artist” (5). Kurahashi defines Chong as an “avant-garde artist who is also Asian American” instead of an “Asian American avant-garde artist” in order to highlight that his work extends beyond issues of Asian American identity and focuses on broader global concerns of displaced communities, marginalization, and racial and economic injustice (5). Kurahashi’s study traces the evolution of Chong’s performances from his early abstract productions to his multi-media performances, historical projects, and community-based oral histories, while also detailing the manner in which “the trajectory of his life and experiences underpin” his art (173). In Chapter 1, “Transpacific Journey of Two Opera Artists,” Kurahashi introduces the broader cultural and political landscape that Chong was born into in 1946 in Toronto, noting seminal moments that led to the massive influx of Chinese immigrants to North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the discriminatory laws enacted by America and Canada to stem this flow. Chong’s parents were both Cantonese Opera artists (his father was a director and his mother was a performer) who first made their way from Guangzhou, China, to San Francisco in the 1930s with a traveling Cantonese Opera company, before moving to Canada and finally settling in New York in 1947. Kurahashi emphasizes the impact that being raised in an immigrant household had on Chong, with issues of “isolation, loneliness, and the struggle of self-identity” recurring in his work as he grapples with being a “culturally hyphenated man” in America (11). Chapter 2 details Chong’s formative collaborative relationship with Meredith Monk that began after he completed his undergraduate degree in film at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He joined the Meredith Monk Dance Company in 1972, and later that year, Chong and Monk collaborated on the dance Paris. This collaboration provided the foundation for Chong’s early performances that emphasized abstraction, non-linear or non-existent narratives, tableau, music, dance, voice-overs, “framing” by constructing faux proscenium arches, projections, “bricolage” (a technique inspired by Joseph Cornell’s artwork in which Chong juxtaposed unassociated objects onstage to create new meaning), incorporation of movement styles inspired by Japanese Noh and other Asian performance traditions, and use of language as a “medium” instead of an “instrument of communication” (35-41). Kurahashi reads these early experiments as Chong’s attempt to “integrate a multiplicity of stage elements to provoke the audience to look at the work and their world anew” (42). Chapters 3-10 introduce Chong’s major performances from 1975-2017. Kurahashi presents his works chronologically, while also dividing the performances into thematic “categories” including fear of the unknown (Chapter 3), myths (Chapter 4), modern dystopia (Chapter 5), revisionary history of East-West relations (Chapter 6), staging voices in the community (Chapter 7), memories and stories of local communities (Chapter 8), puppet theatre (Chapter 9), and collaborating with educational institutions (Chapter 10). In each chapter, Kurahashi presents “mini-reviews” of 2-5 performances in which she briefly describes the design (set, costumes, props, music, etc.) and images from the works, while also providing her interpretation of the performances’ meaning. Kurahashi’s brief analysis often relies on piecing together published reviews, resulting in a fragmented description that is difficult to visualize. Black and white rehearsal and production photographs are important additions to the book, providing readers with a clearer understanding of the performance aesthetics. Kurahashi’s analysis is most insightful in Chapters 6, 7, and 8. In Chapter 6, she critiques Chong’s “departure from the abstract and allegorical works he completed in the 1970s and 1980s” as he shifts to “historical works which focus on cultural collisions and encounters” in The East/West Quartet (82). Kurahashi describes this series as an attempt to “bring to light history which would otherwise disappear” (86). Each of the four performances addresses specific cultural and political junctures of contestation: Deshima (1990) portrays Japanese and Western colonialism from the sixteenth through twentieth century (82), Chinoiserie (1995) illustrates the manner in which Western powers attempted to assert financial and political control over China (84), After Sorrow (1997) depicts Chinese and Vietnamese culture through a poetic combination of music, dance, text, and projections (85), and Pojagi (1999) demonstrates the impact colonizers had on Korea which culminated in the division of the country during the Korean War (85). Chapters 7 and 8 are dedicated to Chong’s ongoing collaborative, community-based oral history series, Undesirable Elements (1992–present). Chong initially designed the series as a creative space for displaced people to share their personal narratives before expanding the emphasis to encompass people who he describes as having experienced “otherness beyond the boundaries of the transit” (101). For the series, Chong and his creative team visit a host community, interview local residents, select the participants for the production, conduct more in-depth interviews, refine the “scripts,” then rehearse what Chong describes as a “seated opera for the spoken word” (99). Foregoing the elaborate theatrical design of his earlier works, the Undesirable Elements series requires minimal scenery, with performers seated in a semi-circle facing the audience and reading from their scripts (100). These performances provide a public space for marginalized people to share their memories of the past and dreams for the future (110). Chong has developed over forty productions with diverse communities in cities including Berlin, Tokyo, Rotterdam, Seattle, and New York. In the book’s final chapter, “Future: ALAXSXA/ALASKA and Beyond—Quest for Identity, Otherness, and Humanity,” Kurahashi describes one of Chong’s most recent works, ALAXSXA/ALASKA, which addresses environmental and political concerns of Alaska’s Indigenous people before addressing trends in Chong’s ongoing work. In this closing analysis and throughout the book, I found myself longing for more interviews with Chong and his collaborators, more details about his creative process (how does Chong structure his interview process and textual revisions?), and clearer descriptions of Chong’s performances instead of lengthy interpretations of their meaning. Nevertheless, The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness will serve as a useful introductory resource for scholars and classrooms, helping to deepen critical understanding about one of the most important and, unfortunately, overlooked theatre artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Craig Quintero Grinnell College Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Phoebe Rumsey Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 3 Visit Journal Homepage Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical Phoebe Rumsey By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical. Kevin Winkler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; Pp. 368. Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical by Kevin Winkler offers educators, students, and Bob Fosse enthusiasts a history of the choreographer’s early life, creative influences, apprenticeships, and Broadway and film successes. Winkler interrogates how Fosse’s passionate and often tumultuous relationship with collaborators, personal partners, and the musical theatre genre, in general, came together to create his indelible style and legacy. Big Deal is part of the Broadway Legacies series edited by Geoffrey Block that includes Carol Oja’s Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War and Todd Decker’s Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical. Big Deal is the second book in the series devoted to a choreographer, the first being Agnes de Mille: Telling Stories in Broadway Dance by Kara Anne Gardner. Prior to his twenty-year engagement as a curator and archivist for the New York Public Library, Winkler had a career as a professional dancer, and he danced in Fosse’s 1982 Broadway revival of Little Me. His bodily understanding of dance and keen attention to historical detail bring a fresh perspective to Fosse’s work and illuminate why Fosse privileged the dancing body above all else. To achieve this analysis, Winkler’s book traces Fosse’s career chronologically across three trajectories: the transformation of the Broadway musical over forty years, the women in his life and their influence on his aesthetic, and “the social and political climate of his era” (2). The first chapter provides an overview of Fosse’s dance training and early performance career that shaped his style. Winkler succinctly explains, “While his later work could display touches of sentimentality and pathos, it was the triangulation of vaudeville, burlesque, and nightclubs that formed the basis of Fosse’s aesthetic DNA” (17). Chapter two encapsulates Fosse’s apprenticeships as a Broadway choreographer, including his work and relationship with Jerome Robbins. Winkler is very insightful in this area as he details how Robbins watched over Fosse and, in turn, Fosse took on this role later in his career with other emerging choreographers. In chapter three, Winkler analyzes how Damn Yankees (1955) and Redhead (1959) established Fosse and his lifetime muse Gwen Verdon as forces on Broadway. He then charts Fosse’s quest for total control over a production through discussions of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961), Sweet Charity (1966), and Pippin (1972) in the next two chapters. The book then moves to an investigation of Fosse’s work as a film director. Winkler claims “film is the ideal medium for Fosse’s perfectionism” (149) and supports this argument by describing, from chapter six and onward, how Fosse worked to incorporate the choreographic on camera. Winkler devotes considerable time to probing the physicality of the bizarre choices that Fosse made (i.e. abrupt moves from reality to fantasy and up-close camera footage of open-heart surgery) to create All That Jazz (1979), a film of his life story loosely disguised by name changes. The book closes with the titular show Big Deal (1986) and the legacy that Fosse leaves behind. It is in these final chapters where Winkler explicitly articulates one of the main interventions of the book that has been simmering throughout—how the dancers Fosse worked with, such as Gwen Verdon, Ann Reinking, and Chet Walker, are the embodiment of his work. Winkler contends that, for all of Fosse’s tangible achievements and awards, the Fosse style is ultimately about the bodily repertoire and how the technique has been passed down through generations of dancers. Fosse’s legacy consists of “the dancers who hold within their bodies his unique choreographic language” (275). Overall, the text is well written and thoroughly researched. Winkler’s description and analysis of Fosse’s choreography and creative strategies are the book’s key contributions, particularly given the minimal amount of scholarship that delves deeply into what dance is doing in musical theatre. By providing a glossary of dance terms in the preface of the book, Winkler makes a concerted effort to model a method of critically examining dance in musical theatre. Some moments in the body of the text when defining terms, such as “the concept musical” or “Brechtian” are slightly abrupt but much appreciated. There are many backstage tidbits sprinkled throughout the entire book, but Winkler is at his best when exploring Fosse’s choreographic process through descriptions of the body in motion. For instance, he describes the dancers in the now famous “Hey! Big Spender” number in Sweet Charity as “Undulating and lunging in all directions, they travel like a giant Medusa across the stage before breaking out for a final exhortation” (120). Pointedly, Winkler identifies how Fosse borrowed, revised, and tweaked previous movements as part of his process and, through this sense of repurposing over innovation, the Fosse style solidifies. At his most critical, Winkler explains Fosse’s singular vision: “That he was not aware of, or chose to ignore, innovations by his peers that he now claimed for himself made Fosse appear disengaged from what was happening elsewhere in the theatre” (268). Towards the end of the book, Winkler alleges that Fosse cast dancers regardless of race or ethnicity, an unusual practice for the time. Though this topic is not a major throughline to the book, it is worthy of mention in this current era of attempts to diversify casts. This book will be helpful to students, researchers, and educators seeking to trace the historical chronology of choreographers into director-choreographers. For scholars of musical theatre, this book rethinks Fosse’s dedication “to redefine not only how a dancing chorus looked but how it functioned” (73). Big Deal also joins the larger conversation that surrounds theatre about the collaborative process and the artistic consequences of turning away from collaboration in search of ultimate control. Phoebe Rumsey The CUNY Graduate Center The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical Introduction: Embodied Arts "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance History, Musicals, and the Americas Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Franklin J. Lasik Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 1 Visit Journal Homepage May Irwin Franklin J. Lasik By Published on December 12, 2017 Download Article as PDF May Irwin: Singing, Shouting, and the Shadow of Minstrelsy . Sharon Ammen. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017; Pp. 296. In 1981, popular culture scholar Anthony Slide wrote, “if May Irwin is remembered at all…it is as a plump, somewhat unattractive actress, bestowing an amorous kiss in a flickering film from the cinema’s infancy” (2). This film was the famous Edison short The Kiss , an 18-second film featuring Irwin and actor John Rice re-enacting a scene from the musical The Widow Jones . Although the film is historically important, it represents a very minor part of Irwin’s resume. In May Irwin: Singing, Shouting, and the Shadow of Minstrelsy , Sharon Ammen goes beyond this brief moment to examine the entirety of Irwin’s career, which stretched from the 1870s to the 1920s. Ammen argues that Irwin deployed a wide variety of strategies both on and off stage from her early days in Tony Pastor’s variety shows to her run of successful comic performances to create and maintain a space for herself on the American stage for nearly 50 years. Ammen’s text is a critical biography of Irwin’s career, organized chronologically over the course of seven chapters. Chapter one traces Irwin from her first stage appearance in upstate New York to her breakout role in The Widow Jones (1895). Ammen connects Irwin’s growth as a performer to her work with figures like Tony Pastor, Augustin Daly, and Charles Frohman. Irwin’s relationship with her sister Flo also figures significantly, as Flo’s sometimes bitter struggle with her sister’s success would vex May until Flo’s death in 1930. Irwin’s performances in comic farces from 1895 to 1914 serve as the focal point of chapter two. Ammen examines the various strategies that Irwin employed throughout her career to connect with audiences. Noting that Irwin frequently succeeded “in spite of the quality of the material” (41), the author describes how Irwin’s personality dominated her performances, and how this charismatic connection between audience and performer forged a bond that transcended lackluster star vehicles. The author also touches on Irwin’s self-deprecation, particularly regarding her weight, a tactic she was certainly not alone in deploying. Chapters three and four both focus on Irwin’s complicated relationship to the most successful aspect of her performances, her coon songs. Ammen begins by connecting the emergence of coon songs, with their blatantly racist characters and imagery, to the perceived incursions African Americans were making into the dominant white culture. The author emphasizes the pivotal role Irwin, who was white but never used blackface, played in popularizing these songs. Delving into the specifics of Irwin’s coon songs, Ammen identifies seven distinct groups of songs from Irwin’s repertoire based on the stereotypes presented, such as the “Greedy Gal” or the “Pathetic Coon.” This analysis spills over into chapter four, which examines Irwin’s performance style, as well as her problematic relationships with African Americans offstage. Ammen’s careful exploration of how coon songs reinforced the burgeoning image of the “urban Negro, ready with a razor to cut anyone who dares encroach on his territory” (108) is well-integrated with her explication of Irwin’s performance style, especially in light of the racist paternalism she displayed toward African Americans in interviews. Indeed, Irwin’s offstage persona is the subject for chapters five and six. In the fifth chapter, Ammen looks at how Irwin turned the private activities of homemaking into a central aspect of her public image. The heart of this chapter is her analysis of Irwin’s cookbook, which included not only recipes but also jokes, anecdotes, and cartoons. Again, Ammen is careful to point out that while Irwin was certainly not the first (nor the last) celebrity to use her fame to sell books, it was the depth of her commitment to connect her domesticity to her professional career that set her apart. Chapter six, on the other hand, examines Irwin’s activities in the public sphere, particularly in politics. The bulk of this chapter is dedicated to Irwin’s support for women’s suffrage, and her related distaste for the temperance movement. Ammen ascribes Irwin’s freedom to espouse her more Progressive opinions without suffering the same backlash that other performers experienced to her facility with women’s sense of humor, “and the connection of this humor to self-awareness rather than feelings of superiority” (149). The final chapter focuses primarily on life after her retirement from the stage, which wound down during the 1920s. Financially sound thanks to her prudent investing, Irwin turned her attentions to upstate New York where she actively tended to her farm until suffering a stroke in 1937 and passing the following year. Ammen concludes the chapter with a brief summary of Irwin’s strategies “that enabled her to establish and sustain her popularity” (170), which she once again connects to Irwin’s association with coon songs, highlighting the casual racism that pervaded these performances. The body of the text is well-written and thoroughly researched, and the author is clearly devoted to her subject; however, there is an epilogue that does not seem to fit with the rest of the study. In this section, Ammen describes two performances she created and performed using Irwin’s material in a contemporary setting. While the premise of reading audience reaction to Irwin’s performance is interesting, the author’s choice to present this as a slimmed-down qualitative study is unsatisfying. This section of the text deserves more attention from the author, but in a different venue, and with more depth. This text, which arrives alongside new biographies of women in American theatre like Ellen Stewart and Ruth Malaczech, offers an historical counterpoint to these more contemporary figures. In exploring the means by which Irwin maintained her place in American popular entertainment, Ammen also connects to continuing research into the history of minstrelsy in popular culture. There are many deserving figures from this era who are just waiting to be (re)discovered, and one can only hope that the scholars who do so treat their subject with the care that Ammen gives May Irwin. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Franklin J. Lasik Independent Scholar Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue May Irwin American Musical Theater Musical Theatre Books New York's Yiddish Theater Chinese Looks Reclaiming Four Child Actors through Seven Plays in US Theatre, 1794-1800 The Illusion of Work: The Con Artist Plays of the Federal Theatre Project On Bow and Exit Music Legitimate: Jerry Douglas's Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jessica Brater Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 1 Visit Journal Homepage Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space Jessica Brater By Published on November 7, 2019 Download Article as PDF The American avant-garde company Mabou Mines inaugurated its refurbished theater in the East Village’s 122 Community Center by conjuring performers who are trapped on stage. Glass Guignol: The Brother and Sister Play , which opened in November 2017, was created from works by Tennessee Williams and Mary Shelley and conceived by founding co-artistic director Lee Breuer and artistic associate Maude Mitchell. Mitchell and longtime Mabou Mines collaborator Greg Mehrten play (among other roles) Clare and Felice, the brother-sister acting duo from Williams’s The Two-Character Play (1967). In the original and in Mabou Mines’s riff, the sibling actors have been abandoned by the rest of the company and are caught in a meta-theatrical loop of improvisatory performance, possibly because they rely on their touring income to survive. In Glass Guignol , this improvisation-under-duress includes short and long form citations of Williams’s works. Breuer and Mitchell imagine literary references as ready-mades, repurposing flashes of Williams and Shelley to pose questions about the relation of artist to creation, just as, for example, Dada’s controversial commode did in a concept long credited to Marcel Duchamp but more recently attributed to Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. [1] Glass Guignol ’s theatrical reframing of fragments from well-known artworks is especially poignant on location in the company’s first purpose-built theater in its half-century long history. As actors in exile, Clare and Felice underline Mabou Mines artists’ epoch as nomads during the extended period of 122 Community Center’s remodeling. In 2013, the City of New York began a $35 million renovation of 122 Community Center on 1 st Avenue and East 9 th Street, a nineteenth-century former schoolhouse where Mabou Mines has resided since 1978. The space was slated to reopen in 2016. The company had planned to present two premieres in their refurbished space in winter and spring 2017: Faust 2.0 , directed by co-artistic director Sharon Fogarty, and Glass Guignol . By summer 2017, the building had not yet passed code for occupancy. In a climate increasingly hostile to arts funding, the delay caused additional financial duress for a company already familiar with the relationship between risky artistic choices and economic instability. Co-artistic directors confronted an absence of ticket income, the loss of grant funding contingent upon production, and deferred opportunities to tour completed productions. The itinerant state all but suspended the radical spectacle for which Mabou Mines is renowned as they found themselves in a sort of performance purgatory. What was supposed to be a watershed moment became a dream indefinitely deferred. Mabou Mines artists are likely to feel that the space was worth waiting for. Gay McAuley asks what “the physical reality of the theatre building” tells artists “about the activity they are engaged in and about the way this activity is valued in society.” [2] New York City’s substantial investment in the company is a resounding response. The refurbished 122 Community Center provides a distinctly different scenographic environment for the company’s activities. Sleek and modern, the interior now resembles the many gut-renovated pre-war buildings in New York City. A steel and glass overhang above the new lobby entrance is reminiscent of the Pershing Square Signature Theater’s design by Frank Gehry Architects, though the city contracted with Deborah Berke Partners for this renovation. Although Mabou Mines has performed in state-of-the-art theaters in New York and beyond, its recent productions began and ended in their small office and adjoining slightly dilapidated ToRoNaDa studio in 122 Community Center. These spaces, shabby but spirited, served as a tangible connection to Mabou Mines’s origins in a pre-gentrified East Village. On a preview tour of the new space with co-artistic director Fogarty (we wore hardhats), I could not help but feel nostalgic for the demolished interior architecture and slightly nervous about what a polished backdrop will mean for Mabou Mines’s revolutionary artistic aims. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” says the narrator from Beckett’s novella Worstward Ho , staged by the late Mabou Mines co-artistic director Fred Neumann in 1986. [3] Here, as elsewhere in his writing, Beckett forthrightly acknowledges a process of perpetual trial and error—a creative purgatory—as organic to artistic exploration and the human experience. Mabou Mines artists gravitated early to Beckett’s work, staging eight of his texts between 1971 and 1996. [4] The company’s attraction to his writing is rooted in a corresponding philosophy that embraces uncertainty as an element of artistic creation. Co-founders JoAnne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech and David Warrilow as well as current co-artistic directors Breuer, Fogarty, Karen Kandel, and Terry O’Reilly have long been engaged in the business of taking calculated theatrical risks. These ventures, always both aesthetically ambitious and financially hazardous, have frequently resulted in critical disparagement and/or financial insolvency. Mabou Mines artists have regularly viewed risk as necessary to the creation of avant-garde work. The company has almost always been willing to stake economic stability and critical praise for a claim of unfettered artistic discovery. This claim is most readily apparent in the company’s investment in a creative process that absorbs, reiterates, and modifies previous approaches, while simultaneously adopting new techniques and adapting them to new spaces. When Mabou Mines stages a production in front of the audience, this encounter becomes an opportunity for artists to understand and evaluate which aspects of the process have achieved their objectives in performance. This appraisal continues retroactively, as when Breuer expressed dissatisfaction in 2014 about acting choices Maleczech made in her 1990 OBIE-award winning performance as Lear under his direction in Mabou Mines’s gender-reversed production of Shakespeare’s play. [5] Breuer’s assessment of this critically lauded performance demonstrates the scant regard company members have for external evaluation. But perhaps more importantly, Breuer’s scrutiny of previous artistic decisions suggests that the company’s desire to conquer uncharted artistic territory requires a constant practice of self-assessment and refinement, akin to the “Rep & Rev” process Suzan-Lori Parks has described in her own work. In Mabou Mines’s (and Beckett’s) world of creation, future artistic possibilities depend upon an artist’s willingness to confront the implications of past choices. The result is a process and product that are one and the same and a project that is ongoing, never “finished.” As a consequence, the company sees process and product as fluid, rather than as binary. Each Mabou Mines production is only fully visible in the moment of performance, after which elements of projects continue on their orbits. The ToRoNaDa—more equipped for rehearsal than for performance and yet not originally designed for either—underscored the company’s synergy of process and product. If, as Laura Levin suggests “identity is, both consciously and unconsciously, constituted through space,” Mabou Mines’s new theater invites the possibility of a reimagined personality for the company. [6] What will happen to Mabou Mines’s reiteration and modification of past impulses, times and spaces in a new, exclusive, purpose-built theater? As McAuley points out, theatre “space is, of course, not an empty container but an active agent; it shapes what goes on within it, emits signals about it to the community at large, and is itself affected. … The theatre building…provides a context of interpretation for spectators and performers alike.” [7] In order to imagine how the new space may re-energize the company’s aesthetic, it is crucial to consider the effect of performance spaces on the company as they move away from an old space and return to a new one. Ghosts of Performance Spaces Past It is probably impossible to create a complete rupture between the Mabou Mines of the present and its East Village past. Mabou Mines artists simply cannot escape their own geography; their performance history dots the East Village—ghosting it, in Marvin Carlson’s terms. The company’s temporary inability to move forward made Mabou Mines’s link to its history all the more palpable. The delay in presenting planned new work thrust the company into a liminal state of expectation; the set for Glass Guignol stood idly on the company’s new stage as spirits of future performances hovered hopefully around the construction site, mingling with the specters of past performances. Such past productions established a record of revolution, paving the way for the company’s recognition as a fixture of counter cultural “downtown” performance. Because the East Village functions as a palimpsest for Mabou Mines’s history, the company’s relationship to its history is in this respect inherently site-specific. Their presence in the East Village has likewise shaped the story of the neighborhood. As Kim Solga, Shelley Orr, and D.J. Hopkins argue, “performance can help to renegotiate the urban archive, to build the city, and to change it.” [8] Though the company debuted uptown at the Guggenheim Museum with The Red Horse Animation in 1970, the production was sponsored by the mother of downtown performance, La Mama’s Ellen Stewart. In 1971, Breuer directed Samuel Beckett’s Come and Go under the Brooklyn Bridge in a performance that anticipated Maleczech’s 2007 piece Song for New York —here the audience viewed the reflections of the performers in the East River. After years as East Village nomads, Joseph Papp invited co-artistic directors Akalaitis, Breuer, Glass, Maleczech, Fred Neumann and Warrilow to take up residency at the Public Theater in the mid 1970s. Thus, unabashedly avant-garde performance was institutionalized within the structure of New York theater, albeit in a marginalized position—Papp described Mabou Mines artists as his “black sheep.” [9] Those black sheep used the stability of the Public’s performance space to produce work on a larger scale than previously possible, although they continued to pursue more intimate works as well. Red Horse and the company’s early forays into Beckett were minimalist spectacles. In the Public’s Old Prop Shop, Akalaitis and company’s sprawling Dead End Kids (1980) was devised by more than thirty multidisciplinary collaborators and featured a cast of fifteen. The company’s residency at the Public lasted into the mid 1980s. Mabou Mines’s bold and diverse aesthetic aims, spurred by its collective structure, meant that the company continued to exploit the rawness of failure and success in emergent downtown performance spaces. Another Beckett text, Maleczech’s performance installation based on the short story Imagination Dead Imagine , was presented at the Wooster Group’s space, the Performing Garage, in 1984. Mabou Mines was part of a movement of New York avant-garde companies activating new spaces, often ones that were unequipped for the mechanics of performance. “Theatre artists,” McAuley points out, “are frequently obliged to work in buildings designed for earlier periods, and this can cause problems if there is too great a distance between the practice of theatre as predicated by the building and practices deemed appropriate to the present by the artists (and spectators) involved.” [10] The Mabou Mines artistic directors are among those theatre artists McAuley describes. In order to imagine how a new, technologically sophisticated space might alter Mabou Mines’s aesthetic, it is crucial to consider the ways in which the company’s former spartan site in 122 Community Center contributed to past works. For thirty-five years, the company’s administrative operations were run out of a tiny office and productions were rehearsed, workshopped, and often presented in the adjoining, bare bones ToRoNaDa studio. The ToRoNaDa was a large rectangular classroom with giant windows, midnight blue walls and a basic lighting grid named in honor of four deceased collaborators: Tony Vasconcellos, Ron Vawter, Nancy Graves, and David Warrilow. Appropriately enough, it is also a nickname for “no bull.” [11] It accommodated approximately 50 seats. The walls opposite the windows were lined with built-in cabinets fronted by chalk boards—relics of the room’s past life as a classroom. A loft space over an improvised office in the northeast corner of the room doubled not only as storage for lighting equipment but also as a staging area, featuring prominently in works such as Belén: A Book of Hours (1999), when Monica Dionne was stationed there as she provided contemporary commentary on the history of the notorious Mexican women’s prison. In this case, as in many others, the ToRoNaDa’s poor theater aesthetic provided a springboard for creative choices that were critically lauded; performers Liliana Felipe and Jesusa Rodriguez were honored with OBIE special citations and Julie Archer was nominated for the American Theatre Wing’s Hewes Design award. This charmingly dilapidated home, though constant, was insufficient for supporting the company’s integration of technology with live performance. Though Archer used projections artfully in Belén , her projection design for Lucia’s Chapters of Coming Forth by Day (2011; premiere 2007 at Colby College), based on the life of Lucia Joyce and directed by Fogarty, found a more sophisticated backdrop down the hall from the ToRoNaDa at Performance Space 122’s larger theater. A consideration of the history of this institution and other peers in the East Village contextualizes the growing pains Mabou Mines is experiencing as it faces its future in a refurbished space. The company has long shared the building with Performance Space 122, Painting Space 122, and the AIDS Service Center. Performance Space 122, better known as PS122, and now known as Performance Space New York, was founded in 1980 and quickly became integral to East Village theater and hosted artists including Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Spalding Gray, Penny Arcade, and Carmelita Tropicana. Its past, like Mabou Mines’s, is intricately connected to its geography. The organization proudly acknowledges its role in East Village history on its website: “As decades passed the city became cleaner, safer, greener and more expensive, and the neighborhood gentrified. Although PS122 became an ‘institution’ during this time, it also managed to retain its gritty non-conformist character.” [12] PS122 audiences grew intimately familiar not only with its bold programming of audacious artists, but also with its awkward horizontal layout and the Ionic columns that intruded into the stage pictures. The institution bills its new, custom spaces as “column-free.” These larger theaters “raise the roof to feature a two-story ceiling allowing for more agency for artists and more expansive experiences” for viewers. [13] In a sign of how significant the renovation is for Mabou Mines’s fellow tenants, PS122 has changed its name to Performance Space New York: a new name for a new architectural and artistic life. The changes to the interiors and inhabitants of downtown performance sites are not limited to 122 Community Center. The Old Prop Shop is no more. Richard Foreman bequeathed his Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark’s Church, itself the former site of Theatre Genesis, to Incubator Arts, a new generation of artists who were unable to sustain the space. The Living Theatre has gained and lost three East Village spaces, closing their 14 th street space in 1963, its Third Avenue space in 1993, and residing at its Clinton Street theater from 2008 to 2013. The Living has now returned to the nomadic state embedded in its history. La Mama has been more successful at putting down permanent spatial roots, expanding into two large buildings of prime property. This, too reflects institutional emphasis; as a producer, Ellen Stewart prioritized real estate from La Mama’s founding. New York Theatre Workshop, founded in 1979, opened its own scenery, costume, and production shop in 2011. Recent advances by La Mama and NYTW have been supported by the Fourth Arts Block (FAB) Cultural District, founded in 2001 by neighborhood cultural and community groups. The organization’s mission included the purchase of eight properties from the City of New York to “secure them as permanently affordable spaces for non-profit arts and cultural organizations.” [14] The refurbished space Mabou Mines inhabits includes a high-tech, 50-seat performance venue, a modern office, dressing rooms, storage space, and two rehearsal studios. Audiences no longer ascend well-worn stairs with intricate, wrought iron detailing in a dank stairwell, but enter instead through an airy and modern lobby and glide up to the theater in an elevator. The move into a deluxe suite marks the dawn of a new era for Mabou Mines in more ways than one. Maleczech died in 2013, leaving Breuer as the last remaining co-founding artistic director at the company’s helm. But both Glass Guignol and Faust 2.0 continue the company’s tradition of radicalizing classic works. And both take up recent and present company concerns, confronting the pleasure and pain of waiting as Clare and Felice tread water onstage and Faust postpones the consequences of mortality. It remains to be seen how the spectacle of a swanky, gut-renovated East Village building will continue to foreground risk for a company founded by a group of artists who once shared an apartment and worked as short order cooks in the same restaurant. After all, as McAuley suggests, “the point of access to the building, the foyers, stairways, corridors, bars and restaurants, the box office, and of course the auditorium are all parts” of the audience experience, “and the way we experience them has an unavoidable impact on the meanings we take away with us.” [15] Mabou Mines artists are unlikely to be terribly concerned about this. A space that will support the needs of their adventurous exploitation of technology and distinctive integration of design elements in early phases of development is surely overdue for the half-century-old company. Levin offers a useful claim in support of Mabou Mines’s colonization of renovated real estate: “While performance critics often view the absorption of self into setting as a troubling act of submission – reading ‘blending in’ as evidence of assimilation or erasure…it can also facilitate socially productive ways of inhabiting our physical and cultural environments.” [16] In this sense, the company’s absorption into a refurbished habitat signals a “socially productive” and crucial cultural acknowledgment of their contribution to the East Village in particular and to New York City at large. Attainment in Other Spaces Although the ToRoNaDa was undoubtedly a hub of creativity for Mabou Mines and served as an occasional performance space for full productions, its schoolroom aesthetic and limited technical capabilities meant that the company presented most performances off-site. The co-artistic directors’ early and sustained affinity for Beckett’s works reflects, in part, the resonance they found in the playwright’s ability to dramatize a perpetual state of limbo. This is certainly echoed in the company’s commitment to taking artistic risks regardless of the critical consequences, but also in Mabou Mines’s transitory relationship to the many performance sites away from 122 Community Center where its work has been presented. While the Living Theater’s work has always been suited to their nomadic existence, this is not necessarily the case for Mabou Mines (even the company’s name refers to a specific place in Nova Scotia). Although it is atypical for artists to rehearse regularly in performance spaces prior to technical rehearsals (the cost would be prohibitive), the resulting geographical split between process and product presents a particular challenge for Mabou Mines’s synthesis of the two, in part because the company emphasizes the early integration of design elements. This artificial divide is likely to have affected Mabou Mines artists’ goals as well as critical reception of works performed away from the ToRoNaDa. Confronting the unknown quantity of off-site space thus presents yet another risk the company has been willing to take. While its many awards and critical successes are likely responsible for the upgrades to Mabou Mines’s home, it may be its so-called failures that truly reveal Mabou Mines’s avant-garde mettle. As Beckett writes in Three Dialogues , “To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world… .” [17] But to what extent do Mabou Mines co-artistic directors take critical reception into consideration? Maleczech claimed she mailed negative reviews to a post office box unread. One way to understand how Mabou Mines artists evaluate their process and product given their healthy disregard for critical accolades is to examine works that others perceive to have failed but which make a significant contribution to the company’s sustained artistic priorities, despite a tension between their goals and the performance space in which they have found themselves. In the productions examined here, negative reviews are attributable, in part, to fundamental misunderstandings about the relationship between the company’s marriage of process and product and a lack of sensitivity to variables presented by the performance space. I will rely primarily on reviews from the New York Times , in part because the company’s critical ups and downs are most readily apparent in the context of a single source and because, for better or worse, the Times wields an outsized influence as an arbiter of theatrical taste. It is also useful to consider how Mabou Mines artists conceptualize their relationship to the audience in considering their creative values and prerogatives. Maleczech presented an ambitious project in 2007 that represents a logical progression of many of the company’s collective origins and impulses. Song for New York: What Women Do While Men Sit Knitting was organized around original poems about New York City, and produced site-specifically on a barge docked in the East River in Long Island City, Queens. Admission was free; Maleczech described the performance as her gift to the home that had given so generously to her as an artist. The landscape of reviews is mixed, but Claudia La Rocco, writing for the New York Times , panned the production in no uncertain terms: “This self-proclaimed ‘celebration of New York City’ by the collaborative theater ensemble Mabou Mines does not inspire. It does not satisfy. It does little more than prompt head shaking at all the very hard work and passion that must have been squandered in getting it off the ground.” [18] This is resounding critical disapproval. But what does Song for New York mean in the context of the company’s taste for adventurous collisions between process and product? As audience members arrived at Gantry State Park for performances of Song for New York , they could enter a photo booth and have their pictures taken with a pinhole camera as part of an interactive design (by former co-artistic director Julie Archer) that emphasized New York as a hometown. Spectators then gathered on the dock for the show. Maleczech had commissioned five artists to write poems, one for each borough. Some of the writers, such as Migdalia Cruz and Patricia Spears Jones, were seasoned playwrights. Another, Kandel—now a Mabou Mines co-artistic director—is primarily a performer. All of the writers and featured performers were women who represented a range of cultural backgrounds. Poems were set to live music. A chorus of men delivered interludes, or “yarns,” inspired by the city’s bodies of water as the barge—and the performance itself—rocked gently on the East River. Maleczech’s thank you note to New York was nothing if not writ large. While La Rocco’s review of Song for New York gestures towards an acknowledgment of Mabou Mines’s collective structure, it does not engage the relationship between product and what, even after thirty-seven years, remained a radical way of working in an unusual space. The text was not devised by the Song for New York company; each writer worked independently on her own contribution. This is precisely how Mabou Mines co-artistic directors operate. Productions initiated by artistic directors are produced in a queue. Often, co-artistic directors collaborate on developing new work, as Archer did in designing the barge and shore set for Song for New York ; but there is no requirement that co-artistic directors be artistically involved in every project. In this case, Breuer and O’Reilly did not collaborate. Such artistic independence and choice are hallmarks of the company’s self-defined success. [19] Song for New York is equally revealing of Mabou Mines’s staunch commitment to artistic risk. In inviting Kandel, known for her performance work, to participate as a writer, Maleczech demonstrated a zest for interdisciplinary exploration. The decision to commission women writers and performers of varied cultural backgrounds takes subtle yet unmistakable aim at patriarchal historiographic and artistic convention. Here, widely diverse female voices tell the story of a great American city. This is a more inclusive Walt Whitman for the twenty-first century. Maleczech envisioned performance on an epic scale, integrating a male chorus and live music and refusing to give up on the idea of the barge space even in the face of dire economic consequences and logistical nightmares. [20] In her invocation of New York City’s waterways alongside its diverse population, she evokes Levin’s idea of a “performance’s ‘environmental unconscious,’” a “notion of ‘site-specificity,’ central to space-sensitive performance practices” that “call attention to marginalized entities (human and non-human) and thus directly engage with the political dimensions of art making.” [21] While this production may not have satisfied the New York Times , Song for New York insists upon the political nature of public space and demonstrates avant-garde ideals in its embrace of an interdisciplinary way of working, its rejection of inherited societal standards, and its rebuff of bourgeois economic and logistical concerns as well as conventional spatial expectations. The complexity of the site for this production also tested the company’s organizational agility, perhaps preparing them for their unforeseen extended exile from 122 Community Center. Finn (2010), directed by Fogarty, also disappointed an establishment New York Times critic. Following in the company’s tradition of adaptation, Finn is a technologically ambitious live-action video game riff on the Celtic legend of Finn McCool described by Jason Zinoman as “soul-less.” It was presented at New York University’s enormous, state-of-the-art Skirball Center for the Arts. In his review Zinoman contrasts Mabou Mines’s use of technology unfavorably with the Wooster Group’s, arguing that “most theater companies fail to integrate video as well as the Wooster Group does.” [22] The Wooster Group, probably Mabou Mines’s closest peer in sustained theatrical invention, has had its own permanent space in which to rehearse and perform since its founding. When Wooster Group audiences arrive at the Performing Garage, they already have a context for the work they will see there and the company is in the enviable position of rehearsing where they frequently perform. Meanwhile, the cavernous Skirball Center, which seats 867, is strikingly dissimilar to the modest ToRoNaDa. Although Finn was not Mabou Mines’s debut at the Skirball Center—the company had presented Red Beads there in 2005—the space is not one that audiences and critics automatically associate with the company. The effects of this estrangement between performance and performance space for artists, audiences, and critics, are perhaps unquantifiable, but nonetheless significant for a company that is at once process-driven and technologically ambitious. Zinoman also fails to acknowledge that Mabou Mines was on the vanguard of technological innovation in the American avant-garde with the Red Horse Animation before the Wooster Group was founded. For this production, Philip Glass’s specially designed flooring amplified the sound performers’ bodies made as they came in contact with it. Hajj (1983), written and directed by Breuer and featuring Maleczech, was one of the first American productions to combine video with live theatrical performance. The OBIE-award winning Hajj was a result of a collaboration with SONY that allowed the company to work with state-of-the art equipment. In fact, it was partially developed at the Wooster Group’s Performing Garage, where Imagination Dead Imagine , groundbreaking in its holographic vision, would also be presented. Writing for the New York Times in 1983, Mel Gussow lauds Mabou Mines for its integration of video in Hajj : “the pictures in this mysterious piece – contrasting, overlapping, coalescing -demonstrate the virtuosity of video as an instrument in live performance art.” [23] Zinoman’s review omits Finn ’s context within the company’s pioneering history of utilizing cutting-edge stage technology. For the company, however, Fogarty’s encounter with video gaming is a part of a logical progression in an ongoing engagement with technology—one that its longtime space was incapable of adequately supporting. Audiences, too, have sometimes found Mabou Mines’s work perplexing. This befuddlement is often tied to the inventive nature of the work. In one such case, audience confusion derived from the technological accomplishments Zinoman overlooks. A representative of Actor’s Equity Association attending Imagination Dead Imagine sought to confirm that the performer who played the hologram was being treated properly. This hologram was a pre-recorded image of Maleczech’s daughter, Clove Galilee, dissected into three parts—to produce a single holographic image of that size was not technologically possible at the time. The result was the largest hologram ever to be featured on stage at the time of Imagination Dead Imagine’s premiere. Maleczech recalled showing the holographic equipment to the Actor’s Equity Association envoy to demonstrate that there was no one inside. Here Mabou Mines’s innovations outpaced at least one audience member’s technological literacy. In another instance, spectators were uncomfortable with stylistic interventions the company introduced to a classic text. When the company presented a workshop of Lear (1987), initiated by Maleczech and directed by Breuer at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey, half of the audience walked out. Although Maleczech ultimately won an OBIE for her performance, the production confronted spectators with a number of disruptions: a gender reversed cast featuring a female Lear (long before Glenda Jackson), a drag queen Fool (played by Greg Mehrten), dogs as Lear’s retinue, and golf carts tricked out as sports cars to transport performers around an American Southern setting. Here too the juxtaposition between site and content may have augmented the gap between expectation and reality for audiences. But as Richard Caves writes, “The smaller the pecuniary rewards of normal creativity, the more attractive are the highly uncertain and largely subjective rewards of assaulting the aesthetic frontier.” [24] Maleczech once lamented that many contemporary artists assume they “know what the audience wants to eat for dinner.” [25] Mabou Mines simply serves what is on their menu. This may suggest that the company does not consider the audience. Rather, Mabou Mines artists set high expectations for both spectators and themselves, challenging us to meet them in the middle in performance. Breuer identifies a dialectical relationship between audience reception and his work. Maleczech, meanwhile, described a process of attracting the audience’s attention without pandering to them: “you startle them or you push what you are doing so far that you get them to laugh, or you do the opposite of what you’re doing, and you have them for a second, and then you lose them again.” [26] Both approaches suggest an experience of performance that is reciprocal without being coerced. In Mabou Mines’s new space, the potential risks (or lack thereof) for artists and audiences are also evenly balanced. Artists will have tools that more easily and comfortably accessible, and audiences will know what to expect technically and architecturally at 122 Community Center, marking a departure from Mabou Mines’s history of producing in a variety of New York City venues. Will this lull spectators (and critics) into a state of comfort that is at odds with the alertness Breuer and Maleczech seek? Despite the potential excitement of what Sarah Bess Rowen described as a “masturbatory bubble cycle” [27] —a bubble machine resembling a bicycle positioned between Mitchell’s legs during a ready-made of Williams’s A Cavalier for Milady —Alexis Soloski complains in her review of Glass Guignol for the New York Times that the production fails to surprise the audience. In this brand-new theater, many of Mr. Breuer’s gestures, like a mostly nude Christ or Meganne George’s fetishwear costumes, point back to the company’s 1970s and 1980s heyday. This is shock treatment with a low current.Mabou Mines was always an exemplar of the theatrical avant-garde. The company is nearly 50 now. Maybe its members have slowed down. Maybe the rest of us have finally caught up. [28] Soloski’s critique suggests that the company may confront a new audience mentality attuned to its new space, one that requires a recalibration of the relationship to critical reception. But as is usual for Mabou Mines artists, Breuer and Mitchell seem to have accounted for this possibility; the company takes up the question of critical failure in its project description: “Glass Guignol explores the nature of the creative process, its triumphs…and its terrors.” [29] Despite Soloski’s concerns, Glass Guignol is best contextualized as part of a meta-conversation within the company’s work, and Breuer and Mitchell’s in particular. Coming on the heels of their celebrated 2011 production of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Comédie Française, which marked the first time in the theater’s 330 years that a play by an American writer was presented there, Glass Guignol continues Breuer and Mitchell’s interrogation of Williams’s work. Glass Guignol also takes up an artistic engagement with the history of Parisian theater, referencing the Grand Guignol—Paris’s late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century “bucket of blood” horror theatre—in its title and utilization of the grotesque. This stylistic affiliation is evident throughout the performance. Aside from Mitchell’s encounter with the bubble-cycle, at one point in the performance an actor dressed as a chained gorilla in a tutu makes an appearance; an S & M Nijinsky also materializes only to become the Gentleman Caller. These fleeting, cacophonous, and often opaque references are themselves homages to ghosts of Duchamp (but perhaps von Freytag-Loringhoven) and Alfred Jarry—two French artists renowned for playful, well-choreographed chaos, whose philosophies were foundational to Breuer in developing Glass Guignol . Glass Guignol also articulates an explicit but obscure link between the Grand Guignol and Tennessee Williams. As Annette Saddick notes, “In a page typed by Williams and dated August 1982, located in the archives of the Harvard Theatre Collection, he announces his plan for what he calls ‘Williams’ Guignol ,’ three evenings in repertoire of late plays in this tradition.” [30] In addition to “The Two Character Play,” the company also cites the relationship between Williams and his sister Rose as a guiding narrative in Glass Guignol ’s patchwork of references to plays, short stories, and poems by the writer. This microscopic engagement with intricacies of theatre history is typical of Breuer’s method of radically resurrecting classic works, as when he was inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s connection between African-American church traditions and Greek tragedy in creating The Gospel of Colonus (1983), an adaptation of Oedipus at Colonus set in a gospel church. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition inherent in Soloski’s critique between a half-century old company and the experience for audiences in a slickly renovated space remains. Once again, Beckett has expressed the challenge Mabou Mines artists face. “We are disappointed at the nullity of what we are pleased to call attainment,” he writes in his essay Proust , “But what is attainment? The identification of the subject with the object of his desire. The subject has died—and perhaps many times—along the way.” [31] What will rise from the ashes on Mabou Mines’s next try in their new space? A New Generation Mabou Mines is not only at a longitudinal crossroads, but also at a philosophical one. Breuer is the only founding co-artistic director remaining at the company’s helm. Julie Archer, who began working with the company in the late 1970s and became a co-artistic director in 2005, resigned her post in 2013, following Maleczech’s death. O’Reilly and Fogarty have been artistic directors since 1973 and 1999, respectively, and remain with the company. Kandel, who first worked with the company on Lear , is the newest co-artistic director. This transition from artistic associate to guiding voice will surely invite permutations of past investigations as well as fresh endeavors, but she is hardly a newcomer to the company. One radical way to consider the company’s ever-changing aesthetic is to consider the work of a new generation of artistic associates in Clove Galilee and David Neumann. Significantly, both are children of Mabou Mines artists: Galilee is the daughter of Breuer and Maleczech and Neumann is the son of Fred Neumann and the late artistic associate Honora Fergusson. Both founded their own performance companies that have co-produced new work with Mabou Mines since 2015. These co-produced pieces, Imagining the Imaginary Invalid and I Understand Everything Better , present intergenerational, meta-theatrical and meta-historical questions about the future failure or success of Mabou Mines. Wickets , another production by Galilee’s company, takes sustained Mabou Mines priorities in new directions. By briefly examining these artistic contributions by Neumann and Galilee, we can begin to speculate on what we might see on the company’s new stage in its reconfigured space. Of the offspring of Mabou Mines artists, Galilee has been the most frequent collaborator on Mabou Mines productions. Her company, Trick Saddle, co-founded with her wife Jenny Rogers, has produced or co-produced several bold productions. Wickets (2009) re-conceptualizes Maria Irene Fornes’s canonical feminist play Fefu and Her Friends , setting it on a trans-Atlantic flight by installing a recreated 1970s airplane in New York’s 3-Legged Dog (3LD) Art and Technology Center. Fornes’s characters become flight attendants. Seated as passengers, the audience goes along for the ride on this fictitious feminist flight. In a clever alteration of Fornes’s five environments, performers stage scenes in the nooks and crannies on the plane: aisles, galleys and bathrooms become playing areas. Here Galilee and Rogers escalate the tension Fornes exposes between women’s public and private selves. Wickets , developed as part of Mabou Mines/Suite residency program, follows in the footsteps of the company’s interest in adaptation. Feminist representation has also been a sustained priority for the company, and here we see Galilee and Rogers in the process of exploring original ways to stage feminism. This new generation of feminist artists brings a fresh perspective that may be gradually incorporated into Mabou Mines’s shifting process and product. Trick Saddle’s foray into new terrain brings with it the usual critical attempt to parse failure and success. In an otherwise positive review for the Village Voice , Garrett Eisler notes, “There’s much for Fefu fans to dispute in this radical adaptation…and, inevitably, many details just don’t translate,” citing in particular the production’s titular airborne game of croquet. [32] In TimeOut , Helen Shaw also praises Wickets but takes the production to task for evading “Fornes’s free-floating dread,” finding it excessively “sweet.” [33] It is too soon to know precisely where Galilee’s Generation X perspective on feminism will take the company’s aesthetics, but the journey is undoubtedly underway. Imagining the Imaginary Invalid was initiated by Maleczech for Mabou Mines based on Molière’s Imaginary Invalid and Versailles Impromptu as well as the history of medicine. Galilee, who began as a collaborator, became the lead artist and Trick Saddle a co-producer when Maleczech died before the project was completed. Galilee’s keenest contribution was her insistent underscoring of Maleczech’s absence. In a certain sense, the production, which never came to fruition in Maleczech’s lifetime, stages the failure of the human body and the limits of medical intervention. In a doctor’s office scene during which Maleczech declines further treatment for cancer, Marylouise Burke plays Maleczech, Christianna Nelson plays Galilee, and Galilee plays the doctor. This dislocated round-robin casting is a visceral reminder that the real Maleczech is not there, as is a chair that sits empty on stage for much of the performance. Galilee’s intervention in Imagining the Imaginary Invalid follows in the footsteps of another Mabou Mines production in its meta-theatrical representation of personal family drama: Hajj was based in part on Maleczech’s regret about an unpaid debt. Her father died before she had the opportunity to repay the money he lent her to her to fund her first directing work, Vanishing Pictures . Fittingly, Imagining the Imaginary Invalid was staged at the Ellen Stewart Theater at La Mama: another old company’s new space. David Neumann’s co-production with Mabou Mines also exteriorizes his private process of mourning parents who were public figures of the theatre. Neumann, a Bessie-award winning director, choreographer, and performer, founded the Advanced Beginner Group, which “utilizes experimental dance-making approaches with a humorous outlook and an inclusive layering of disciplines to create complex, thought-provoking dance works.” [34] I Understand Everything Better , which premiered at the Abrons Arts Center in 2015, was inspired by Hurricane Sandy and the death of Neumann’s parents in 2012. Honora Fergusson passed away quickly in July of that year, while Fred Neumann was in the throes of a long decline into dementia. “‘He would have terrible dreams,’” David Neumann told the New Yorker ’s Joan Acocella, “‘He’d wake up and tell me. He was driving in the mountains and there was all this furniture in the road. He didn’t know how to get past it.’” Acocella documents the younger Neumann’s correlation to Hurricane Sandy: “Meanwhile, on the TV, weathermen would stand on beaches and report that the hurricane was moving north.” [35] She also makes note of another parallel: Fred Neumann’s ignominious aging process and his history of performing Beckett’s unflinching exposure of mortal fragility with Mabou Mines. While David Neumann does not reference Beckett explicitly in his piece, he embodies the link between the storm and his father’s decline by playing both a meteorologist and “a man of distinction.” As Gia Kourlas writes for the New York Times , the production “dances around dementia and double meanings – the cleanup of a storm, the cleanup of a body….” [36] Those familiar with Fred Neumann’s fluency in Beckett’s works can connect the dots easily enough. I Understand Everything Better is also linked to Mabou Mines’s aesthetic in its pastiche style, evident in its juxtaposition of comedy and pathos and blend of Japanese dance-theatre techniques, weather reports, and family history. Imagining the Imaginary Invalid and I Understand Everything Better dramatize Galilee and Neumann’s process of grappling in artistic terms with the personal and aesthetic legacies of their parents. These productions are thus apt metaphors for Mabou Mines’s current liminal state in its newly minted space under the guidance of an updated composition of co-artistic directors and artistic associates. Galilee and Neumann’s works show us both where the company is now and suggests where it might be going. How will the next generation of Mabou Mines artists “try again” in the refurbished 122 Community Center? Both came of age as artists in upgraded performance spaces in the East Village and in newer, sophisticated spaces for alternative work that appeared in surrounding neighborhoods; Neumann has worked regularly in a number of capacities at NYTW and Wickets premiered at 3LD in lower Manhattan. Although Guignol baptized the new theater, it was work by a former Mabou Mines resident artist that spoke particularly poignantly about the ebb and flow of the company’s past and future. Mallory Catlett’s This Was the End , a cerebral rumination on Uncle Vanya , was presented at the refurbished space in June 2018. Catlett developed the piece between 2009 and 2011 as a resident artist in SUITE/Space, a residency program that provides artists with space, mentorship, and funds to create new work. Mabou Mines resident artists worked in the ToRoNaDa studio prior to the renovation, and Catlett came to rely upon the built-in cabinets along the wall in her spatial conception of the piece. “I knew the building was going to be renovated,” Catlett writes in her director’s note, “so I asked Mabou if I could take it and they said yes. This wall carries with it a history of their generosity. Think of all the things that happened in front of it.” [37] This Was the End was commissioned by and presented at the Chocolate Factory in Queens in 2014. Catlett stored the cabinet in her parents’ barn before returning it to the reconfigured 122 Community Center for this revival. Catlett employs several strategies to distort the relationship between past and present. She casts older actors to play the typically youthful Sonya and Yelena; Black-Eyed Susan as the former and Rae C. Wright as the latter. As a result, not just Vanya, but Yelena too seems to be a fly stuck in amber. Any hopes we had that Sonya might have escaped are dashed; the three are trapped where Chekhov left them in 1898 but now aged (as Chekhov’s characters are in Brian Friel’s Afterplay [2002]). The production also features prominent performers from the history of downtown New York performance: in addition to Black-Eyed Susan, a founding member of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Paul Zimet, a member of the Open Theater, plays Vanya. There is a jarring juxtaposition between the rugged East Village history that Black-Eyed Susan and Zimet personify and the sleek interior of the updated building. And then there is the cabinet. Extracted from its schoolhouse surroundings, the cabinet appears to float in the cavernous, ageless black box, the last ice cap in the melting Antarctic of a twenty-first century East Village. But the cabinet does not appear exactly as it did in the ToRoNaDa—the interior has been embellished in size to accommodate the presence of more than one performer. For those familiar with the original built-in, the revelation that even the cabinet has been renovated augments the strange sensation that actors and audience are caught outside of temporal boundaries. One performer, G Lucas Crane, remains inside the cabinet for the entire performance, playing cassette tape recordings of Sonya, Vanya, Astrov, and Yelena back to them. This archivist is literally, corporeally, stuck in the past. The use of the old cabinet in this new-old space emphasizes what McAuley describes as “the constant dual presence of the performance space and the fictional world or worlds created. The space the spectator is watching during the performance…is always both stage and somewhere else. … [H]owever convincing the fictional world may be, the stage itself is always also present at some level of our consciousness.” [38] Here, Catlett simultaneously evokes 122 Community Center pre- and post-renovation, engaging in what Levin might describe as “a mischievous tactic of” spatial “infiltration.” [39] Video work by Crane and Ryan Holsopple further warps our sensibilities. As the performers climb in and out of the cabinet and circle it, looking for someone or something, pre-recorded images of the performers doing the same thing flicker eerily on the cabinet’s façade and on the actors as we watch Chekhov’s characters try to catch up with or outrun other versions of themselves. “We were working with Uncle Vanya ,” Catlett explains but also with Proust’s notion of time as the convergence of past and present, which came from optics—the popular science of his day. The stereoscope showed how our eyes worked to create three-dimensional perception and Proust applied this to memory. In the studio we were projecting and mapping this wall onto itself—playing with the idea of blur and convergence. [40] In a certain sense, This Was the End fills in the dramatic dots between Chekov and Beckett. Time and habit have worn Catlett’s characters into threadbare versions of the originals who are still waiting. “There is no escape from the hours and the days,” Beckett writes on Proust, Neither from tomorrow nor from yesterday. There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place. Yesterday is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. [41] In Guignol , Breuer and Mitchell stage the artist as Frankenstein as they transmogrify The Glass Menagerie ’s Laura into a monster, stitching Mitchell into a gruesome, larger-than-life puppet. Catlett’s monster is a theatre purgatory where Chekhov, Beckett, and Mabou Mines co-artistic directors come and gone collide with East Village architecture of the past and present. In Mabou Mines’s new space, This Was the End bids a fond farewell to 122 Community Center as we knew it. In an homage to the ToRoNaDa, Fogarty says that the new theater was initially painted midnight blue, the color Archer selected for the walls of the former studio. But the blue walls were quickly painted over with black for the Guignol set. A flash of blue remains on the ceiling, just visible behind the lighting grid. This is for the best; should the company insist upon a distinction between its past and future, it would betray the boundaries of its own avant-garde perspective which refuses to categorize process and product in oppositional terms. For Mabou Mines artists, as for Beckett, “The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day.” [42] The purgatory of performance space can be ecstasy as well as agony. Each day in Mabou Mines’s new theater is an opportunity to try again. References [1] Josh Jones, “The Iconic Urinal & Work of Art, ‘Fountain,’ Wasn’t Created by Marcel Duchamp But by the Pioneering Dada Artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven,” OpenCulture.com, http://www.openculture.com/2018/07/the-iconic-urinal-work-of-art-fountain-wasnt-created-by-marcel-duchamp.html . Accessed July 17, 2018. [2] Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 69. [3] Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho in Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition , Volume IV, edited by Paul Auster (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 471. [4] Mabou Mines was founded in 1970. For thorough discussion of the company’s founding and its work in the 1970s, see Iris Smith Fisher, Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). [5] Lee Breuer, in discussion, “Ruth Maleczech: Art + Impact,” Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, 7 April 2014. [6] Laura Levin, Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage, and the Art of Blending In (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 7. [7] McAuley, 41. [8] Kim Solga with Shelly Orr and D.J. Hopkins, “Introduction: City/Text/Performance” in Performance and the City , edited by Kim Solga, Shelly Orr, and D.J. Hopkins (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 6. [9] “History,” Mabou Mines website. For thorough discussion of the company’s founding and its work in the 1970s, see Fisher. [10] McAuley, 38. [11] For more information on the origins of the studio’s name, see “Program History/Artist Alumni,” Mabou Mines website, www.maboumines.org/residency/program-historyartist-alumni . Accessed 29 August 2017. [12] “About,” PS122 website, www.ps122.org/about. Accessed 21 August 2017. [13] Ibid . [14] “Mission,” FABnyc website, fabnyc.org/mission. Accessed 21 August 2017. [15] McAuley, 25-26. [16] Levin, 14. [17] Samuel Beckett, “Three Dialogues” in Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition , Volume IV, edited by Paul Auster (New York: Grove Press, 2006) 563. [18] Claudia La Rocco, “An Affectionate Shout-Out to New York,” review of Song for New York by Mabou Mines, The New York Times, 3 September 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/09/03/theater/reviews/03song.html . Accessed 9 August 2017. [19] For a more extensive examination of Mabou Mines’s collective structure and aesthetic and a number of productions discussed here, see Jessica Silsby Brater, Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines: Woman’s Work (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). [20] Maleczech’s original vision was to present the performance on docks in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island, as well as in Queens. But the cost, which included a hefty fee for both the barge and the tug needed to move the barge, was prohibitively expensive, even if the company had been willing to charge for tickets. [21] Levin, 27-28. [22] Jason Zinoman, “Celtic Tale Becomes Video Game for the Stage,” review of FINN by Mabou Mines, The New York Times , 5 March 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/03/06/theater/reviews/06finn.html. Accessed 9 August 2017. [23] Mel Gussow, “‘Hajj,’ A Journey by Monologue,” review of Hajj by Mabou Mines, The New York Times , 11 May 1983, www.nytimes.com/1983/05/11/theater/theater-hajj-a-journey-by-monologue.html . Accessed 10 August 2017. [24] Richard E. Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 204. [25] Ruth Maleczech, interviews conducted by the author between July 2011 and March 2012. [26] Ibid. [27] Sarah Bess Rowen, “Through the Looking Glass Darkly: Lee Breuer and Maude Mitchell’s Glass Guignol: The Brother Sister Play,” review of Glass Guignol by Mabou Mines, The Huffington Post , 14 December 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/through-the-looking-glass-darkly-lee-breuer-and-maude_us_5a32d032e4b0e7f1200cf93e . Accessed 21 June 2018. [28] Alexis Soloski, Review of Glass Guignol by Mabou Mines, The New York Times , 17 December 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/theater/review-glass-guignol-tennessee-williams-mabou-mines.html . Accessed 25 June 2018. [29] “Glass Guignol: The Brother Sister Play,” Mabou Mines website, www.maboumines.org/production/glass-guignol-the-brother-and-sister-play. Accessed 2 October 2019. [30] Annette Saddik, “Glass Guignol: the Brother and Sister Play,” Theatre Review, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Number 17, tennesseewilliamsstudies.org/journal/work.php?ID=154 . Accessed 2 October 2019. [31] Samuel Beckett, “Proust” in Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition , Volume IV, edited by Paul Auster (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 513. [32] Garrett Eisler, “Wickets is Faux Site-Specific Performance at Its Best,” review of Wickets by Trick Saddle, The Village Voice , 14 January 2009, www.villagevoice.com/2009/01/14/wickets-is-faux-site-specific-performance-at-its-best . Accessed 26 October 2017. [33] Helen Shaw, “Wickets,” review of Wickets by Trick Saddle, Time Out New York , 12 January 2009, www.timeout.com/newyork/theater/wickets. Accessed 26 October 2017. [34] Advanced Beginner Group, “About,” www.advancedbeginnergroup.org/advanced-beginner-group . Accessed 23 October 2017. [35] Joan Acocella, “David Neumann’s I Understand Everything Better,” The New Yorker , 13 April 2015, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/dance-a-perfect-storm-joan-acocella . Accessed 23 October 2017. [36] Gia Kourlas, “In ‘I Understand Everything Better,’ Ruthless Elemental Forces,” review of I Understand Everything Better by David Neumann, The New York Times , 20 April 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/arts/dance/review-in-i-understand-everything-better-ruthless-elemental-forces.html . Accessed 24 October 2017. [37] Mallory Catlett, “Director’s Note.” Program for Mallory Catlett’s This Was the End at Mabou Mines, New York, NY, 2018, 2. [38] McAuley, 27-28. [39] Levin, 15. [40] Catlett. [41] Beckett, “Proust,” 512. [42] Ibid., 515-516. Footnotes About The Author(s) Jessica Brater is an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the BA and MA programs in Theatre Studies at Montclair State University. She is also a Community Engaged Teaching and Learning Fellow at Montclair. Forthcoming publications include chapters in Analysing Gender in Performance (Palgrave), the Great North American Stage Directors and American Theatre Ensembles series (both Bloomsbury) and The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre since 1945. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. 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Johan Callens, Guest Editor 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 Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Johan Callens, Guest Editor By Published on May 30, 2018 Download Article as PDF For a good understanding, the Spring 2018 American Theatre and Drama Society issue of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre is best considered as an initiative that follows up the BELSPO sponsored international research project, “Literature and Media Innovation: The Question of Genre Transformations.” Running from 2012-2017, it brought together six research teams, four of which hailed from Belgian institutions—two Flemish (KULeuven & VUB) and two Walloon ones (Louvain-la-Neuve and Liège)—besides one from Canada (UQAM) and one from the US (OSU). [1] Among the many genres analyzed and fields explored in light of the increasing mediatization of the arts and society at large, theatre and performance fell to the Center for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (CLIC) at the Free University of Brussels. On March 17, 2016, this Center organized a conference already devoted to the theme of the present journal issue, even if the ATDS contributions zoom-in on specifically American inflections of the topic. Still, in a globalized world, the mobility and mixed roots of artists, besides the constant need to find sponsors, renders the characterization of projects in national terms perhaps questionable and their mediaturgical interests seldom exclusive. As Jacob Gallagher-Ross, one of the speakers at the Belgian conference, in the meantime has argued, it is somewhat ironical that the first installment of Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s media-enabled Life and Times project, “singing the sorrows and pleasures of a very American childhood, was featured in Berlin’s Theatertreffen festival as one of the ten best German productions of the year.” [2] Aside from the ironies of international funding, and scholarship, we may add, I here want to mention, as a preliminary, some of the more general issues that the March 2016 VUB conference tackled. [3] Thus, Matthew Cornish (Ohio U) dealt with the reliance on diagrammatic scripts by the English-German theatre collective Gob Squad to support their improvised encounters with people on the streets, synchronously relayed into heavily mediatized stage productions. Bernadette Cochrane (U of Queensland) discussed the destabilization of the spatio-temporal locators of productions and audiences in global but not necessarily democratizing “livecasts,” whether from New York’s Metropolitan Opera or London’s National Theatre. Dries Vandorpe (UGent) returned to mediaturgical theatre’s related deconstruction of the vexed ontological distinction between live and techno-mediated performance on the grounds of diverse arguments (spatiotemporal co-presence and spectatorial agency, affective impact and authenticity, contingency and risk, unicity and variability…)—arguments all flawed because of logically defective classification systems. With the aid of some intermedial choreographic work by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, I myself queried the reciprocity between technology’s invitation to appropriation and adaptations’ increasing hybridization because of that very technology, a process challenging the logical discreteness, self-presence or self-sufficiency, as well as hierarchical character of generic, media, and gender identities, both, much like traditional authorship, making for an empowering yet disenfranchising exclusiveness. [4] The themes of the Brussels conference and present ATDS issue also adhere closely to the remit of the doctoral project conducted by CLIC member Claire Swyzen, here represented by an essay on the Hungarian-American Edit Kaldor and New Yorker Annie Dorsen. Kaldor’s Or Press Escape (2002) and Web of Trust (2016) are shown to open up the theatre stage to the social media, converting it into a more apparently than actually co-authored media-activist site, joining physically present and tele-present audience members. As a result, the authorship here already signaled towards Michel Foucault’s more discursive author function. Dorsen’s Hello Hi There (2010) in fact consisted of a staged conversation between two chatbots mouthing text bits partly culled by computer algorithms from an interview between Foucault and Noam Chomsky on whether language creates consciousness or vice versa. [5] As indicated by Dorsen’s post-human talk show, whose textual database was expanded with material from the Western humanist tradition, the scope of Swyzen’s research and of postdramatic mediaturgies obviously exceeds the American context, reaching out to the very processes of cognition. The term and concept of the “postdramatic” were nevertheless popularized by German scholars like Gerda Poschmann and Hans-Thies Lehmann who theorized the notion with the aid of the varied theatre practice in Germany and surrounding countries during the late 20th century. [6] As recently as 2015, Marvin Carlson still argued the relative absence of postdramatic theatre from the North American mainstream, despite important contributions from experimentalists like the Wooster Group, Richard Foreman, and Robert Wilson. [7] On both sides of the Atlantic, however, there have been misconceptions regarding the precise nature of the postdramatic, leading to confusions with collective, interdisciplinary, and devised theatre productions. [8] After all, these just as easily allow for the contribution of independently active playwrights with a lingering dramatic bent as for the more broadly defined writing integral to postdramatic mediaturgies. Central features of postdramatic theatre are the reconfiguration, if not abandonment, of Aristotelian dramatic concepts and traditional theatrical notions such as character, action and plot, proscenium stage and set, normative temporality and spatiality, etc. As a corollary, conventional drama’s underlying mimetic premise is challenged, too, though illusionistic effects, whether aestheticizing, activist, or media-critical, remain common, as Swyzen demonstrates with regard to Kaldor’s Web of Trust . These illusionistic effects are also hard to resist, as when critics interpreted the fragmentation of Spalding Gray’s recollections in India and After (America) (1979) as reflections of his cultural alienation and psychological breakdown, as argued by Ira S. Murfin in his contribution to the present ATDS issue. Mimesis possibly survives the postdramatic mediaturgical turn in the guise of reenactments which problematize any arguable paradigm shift, insofar as the “post-dramatic” signals both continuities and discontinuities. Reenactments therefore could be said to limit dramatic theatre’s creation of a “fictive cosmos” [9] to the overt recreation of a “reality,” whether artistic or not, often with the help of advanced technology, as in the scrupulously reproduced everyday speech, at times verging on uncanny nonsense, in the productions of Nature Theater of Oklahoma. This invites comparison with what Dorsen calls the occasional “near-sense” of the chatbots’ dialogue foregrounding the thingness and materiality of language, undermining dramatic theater’s logocentrism as well as infusing postdramatic theatre like Dorsen’s with an unexpected lyricism. As Gallagher-Ross argued at the Brussels conference and in his subsequently published study on Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage (2018), the technology-based practice of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, besides documenting an extant reality, touches on the very processes of perception and thought, struggling to achieve verbal expression prior to any artificially imposed aesthetic or (post)dramatic form, given that in the different installments of their epic Life and Times they also experiment with extant genres and media forms. Reenactments do not, for that matter, automatically reclaim realist art’s function as illusionistic slice of life. To the extent that this function indeed depends on maintaining the fourth wall, it actually staves off everyday reality to the benefit of some Platonist ideal controlled by the dramatist. Gallagher-Ross traces the roots of America’s theaters of the everyday, like that of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, to American Transcendentalism but this democratic homebred tradition represented by Emerson and Thoreau, revalorizes the aesthetic value of daily life as personally experienced. Quite surprisingly, a similar impulse may be at work in Kaldor’s work, insofar as it seems to share characteristics with the Slow Media movement, as argued by Swyzen. This reflective, contemplative impulse should be distinguished from European idealist aesthetics permeating the continental dramatic tradition via Hegel’s abstract moralism up to the late 19th century and beyond, which is not to say, as Gallagher-Ross argues, that there is no ethical-critical dimension to an enhanced awareness of our everyday experiences, be they technological or not. [10] In Swimming to Cambodia (1985), one of Spalding Gray’s “talk performances” discussed in the present JADT issue by Murfin, the manner in which Gray incessantly and obstinately pursues an idealized yet heavily mediatized “Perfect Moment” makes him oblivious to the everyday beauty Emerson advocated. On Karon Beach in the Gulf of Siam Gray apparently found his “Shangri-La,” evocative both of perfect Kodachrome color spreads for luxury resorts and of Robert Wilson’s mediaturgical theatre of images. [11] Emerson is explicitly referenced by Gray when he mentions his own studies at Emerson College and in his moment of “Cosmic Consciousness” echoes the philosopher’s famous “transparent eye-ball”-passage from his essay on “Nature.” The eventual shift to a non-contigent idealism making timeless abstraction of the evanescent everyday could be seen as evidence of Murfin’s claim that Gray’s early talk performances solidified in later productions under the influence of the very technologies he initially played off to preserve his monologues’ freshness. Put differently, Gray’s talk performances, as here argued, moved away from a more postdramatic authorship deflected by “intermedial contingency,” to a more self-authored dramatic literary model. Lehmann in this regard speaks of realist drama’s and the dramatic form’s “catharsis” of the real, [12] supplementing tragedy’s much debated abreaction of pity and fear (or the negative features of these emotions) in the course of a dramatic action thereby completed and closed off. Postdramatic theatre, by contrast, tends to reduce the dramatist’s control, it opens up the stage to the everyday, and redistributes authorial power. This happened partly under the influence of technology, partly by promoting the performer-audience relation or so-called theatron axis, [13] thus releasing a social activist potential in the joint “creation” of text and performance. What is eventually lost in terms of illusionistic representation, aesthetic pleasure and entertainment value may be gained in terms of political awareness, as the physical embodiment and exposure of, and to the mediation returns a sense of agency in a mediascape obfuscating its operations, material and immaterial, for whatever reasons (sheer complexity, profit, ideology…). The media’s prominence in contemporary dramaturgies has led Bonnie Marranca to coin the term “mediaturgy” for those productions where the technology is integral to the composition of the theatrical performance rather than a surface phenomenon. [14] Cases in point she provided at the time were Super Vision (2005-2006) by The Builders Association and Firefall (2007-2009) by John Jesurun. This is one of the reasons why the Brussels conference on postdramatic mediaturgies featured Shannon Jackson (UC Berkeley) as keynote speaker, with a talk on “The Relational Construction of Form and Authorship in Cross-Arts Collaboration.” In that talk, she explored a variety of institutional settings—museums, theaters, festivals, installations—and considered how conceptions of form and authorial signature change accordingly. Depending, in part, upon the curatorial conventions of the venue, a performer may be a collaborator, a subordinate, or a form of material. Similarly, moving work across institutional venues may shift the stance taken towards artistic contributions, whether by the artists-creators or spectators-consumers. Work discussed included that of The Builders Association, on which Jackson and Marianne Weems published the first lavishly illustrated monograph, and which Marranca deemed exemplary of postdramatic mediaturgies. [15] That Weems, the director of The Builders Association, together with several company members, should have co-authored this critical-genetic study which is partly archive, partly (auto)biography, marks the extent of her creative practice and possibly the postdramatic remediation of a retrograde seeming, paper-based platform, all too easily lending itself to linear single-authored stories. [16] The meticulous crediting of each and every one involved in each of the Builders Association productions is further evidence of the dispersion of traditional authorship, which may well have been the default of theatrical creation. To quote from the book’s intro: “Early pieces such as Master Builder , Imperial Motel (Faust) , and JUMP CUT (Faust) restaged and rearranged classic tales across unorthodox architectural assemblies of screens and bodies, a practice of postdramatic retelling to which The Builders returned in their recent restaging of House/Divided .” [17] The epilogue, too, in a conversation between Weems and Eleanor Bishop, extensively dwells on the mediaturgical aspect of The Builders Association’s work at large, more in particular the prominence of computer-aided media design as dramaturgy and the medial creation of meaning and implementation of media-related ideas, like the networked constitution of self by such a mediascape. [18] Thus the media become material and metaphor. This reciprocity gets reflected in Jackson’s critical vocabulary when she speaks of the company’s “theatrical operating systems” and “storyboard” phases—terms derived from computer science and cinema to designate the mediaturgical postdramatic (re)assembly process, “that may or may not be post-narrative as well.” [19] The resulting “smart” productions are directly addressed to a “smart” audience perhaps too much at ease with “smart” technologies [20] to fully fathom or question their implications. Hence these technologies have become the means and object of theatricalization, as in Super Vision , dealing with the economics and politics of “dataveillance,” or Continuous City (2007-2010), exploring global social networking technologies and their impact on how we inhabit local geographies. John Jesurun, that other exemplar of postdramatic mediaturgies Marranca singled out, has been at the center of the scholarship which Christophe Collard generated in the context of the inter-university research project on genre transformations and the new media. Like the predoctoral work of Swyzen, some of his wide-ranging postdoctoral work is here sampled, albeit with a more programmatic contribution in which Jesurun’s “ecological,” i.e. organic and holistic interrelational interpretation of the mediaturgical concept allows for a brief survey of his creative output. In the course of his playwriting career, Jesurun has collaborated with Weems’s Builders Association, as well as with Ron Vawter, founding member of the Wooster Group, on scripts that were subsequently produced by other companies, too. [21] But Jesurun is also reputed to reduce his live performers to language-machines, as here argued by Collard. This again attests to the lingering tension between the loosening and tightening of authorial control, equally evident in Dorsen’s algorithmic theater, where the options for the chatbots’ conversation in Hello Hi There have been preprogrammed and are thus contained by Dorsen and her collaborator, the chatbot designer Robby Garner. Even in Kaldor’s Web of Trust , the seemingly co-authored protocol in retrospect was prescripted, as Swyzen discovered. Whereas Kaldor herself may have obfuscated the “rehearsal” of the protocol for her Web of Trust prior to its live performance, Gray’s critics were the ones who tended to miss or neglect the reliance on media of reproduction in his low-tech monologues. [22] At first sight, his early “talk performances” seem diametrically opposed to Dorsen’s chatbot and Kaldor’s computer desktop performances. Yet Murfin in his discussion of Gray’s monologues demonstrates their postdramatic mediaturgical stance by foregrounding his deliberate extemporaneous use of language as material and process rather than narrative content, in reaction to medial fixity and dramatic linearity. This resonates with the aleatory artistic tradition in which Dorsen also inscribes her work partly because of the manner in which freedom is generated by constraints, just as for Jesurun language provides an enabling limit for his performers and technology, even if he opposes his actors’ improvisation. Contrary to his later reputation as unassisted “solo” performer, Gray’s monologues were heavily determined by media objects. During the creation and performance of his early work these were used as found or documentary material triggering improvisation rather than as support of a fixed script, whether the taped interviews with family members, slides, and vinyl recording of The Cocktail Party in Rumstick Road (1977), a dictionary in India and After (America) (1979), or his journal entries on a West Coast tour, framed by contemporaneous newspaper, magazine and book excerpts in The Great Crossing (1980). However, Gray’s reliance on the same media (writing, print, audio and video recordings) for the development and circulation of his monologues, in a sort of feedback loop fixed them, whereas the human recall and extemporization earlier on made for fragmentation and discontinuity, at the expense of an authoritative voice and story. What may have accelerated this process, Murfin argues, is the artist’s need for a commodifiable format or comedy act. By doing without the diary entries in Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk (1980) Gray very much resolved the dilemma in favor of the dramatic lineage and replication, but at the expense of intermedial contingency. Gray’s autobiographical talk performances, dependent on predominantly analogue media, form a radical contrast with the collective identity performance of in-groups by means of social media and the web, dealt with by Ellen Gillooly-Kress. This hybridized live and digital identity construction through visual signposts, insiders’ language and performative gestures, rather than solidify in the course of time, as argued by Murfin for Gray, keeps changing, as the markers of identity are appropriated by opposite parties, like anti-fascists and white supremacists. The hazards of the social media are indeed such that any meme can be co-opted and abused in ideological conflicts. This recalls Roland Barthes’s claim that the only way to outwit myths is to remythify them in turn, the more since myths in his definition exchange a physical reality with a pseudo-reality, much like the internet may be said to do. The partly arbitrary choice of a meme as vehicle for a new ideological content also fits Barthes’s myths, though in both kinds of appropriation, the original content is still needed as support of the new signification. [23] The initiative for these appropriated identity memes and their ideological reinscription may have been taken by individuals or be limited to the policy-makers of the ingroup. Yet, the memes’ viral spread on the social media and imageboard websites like 4chan and Reddit collectivizes authorship, short of exploding it altogether. Through its antagonistic rhetoric, making for a war-like scenario, the digital and discursive performance, when picked up by the traditional media, also risks spilling over from the internet back into the physical world and actual violence. This was the case with #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS , an unmoderated live stream participatory performance, set up by Nastja Säde Rönkkö, Luke Turner, and Shia LaBeouf on the occasion of Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017. Apart from traveling from New York to Albuquerque, Liverpool and Nantes, this installation and its reception provide a more disconcerting, inflammable hybridized “theater of the everyday” unlike those with which I started this introduction, in a space where physical and digital identity formations merge to end up forming what Gillooly-Kress calls a “hypermediated haunted stage” with all too dangerous consequences. By way of conclusion, I want to thank Cheryl Black and Dorothy Chansky, the former and current ATDS Presidents, for offering another forum next to the 2016 VUB conference platform; the ATDS members who submitted their work to this Spring issue of the JADT ; and last but not least, the ATDS members who acted as anonymous peer-reviewers. All generously contributed to the scholarship here presented, offering what I hope is an exciting and thought-provoking sample of American postdramatic mediaturgies in which authorship is variously modulated along different spectra, operating between the human and the non-human, the analogue and the digital, the individual and the collective, the distributed and the delegated. References [1] For a brief presentation of the overall project see Jan Baetens, Johan Callens, Michel Delville, Heidi Peeters, Myriam Watthee-Delmotte, Robyn Warhol, and Bertrand Gervais, “Literature and Media Innovation: A Brief Research Update on a Genre/Medium Project,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 64, no. 4 (2014): 485-492. [2] Jacob Gallagher-Ross, Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 152, original emphasis. [3] The VUB theatre conference program can be found online at http://www.vub.ac.be/en/events/2016/mediations-of-authorship-in-postdramatic-mediaturgies-conference . The March 17 event was matched the following day by a second series of talks, presented at Leuven University (UCL) under the title, “Intermediality, or, the Delicate Art of World-Layering” dealing with non-dramatic genres. See http://research.vub.ac.be/sites/default/files/uploads/clic-cri_confer_flyer_final.pdf . [4] Johan Callens,”Rosas: Reappropriation as Afterlife,” in Routledge Companion to Adaptation Studies , eds. Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, and Eckart Voigts (London: Routledge, 2018), 117-127. [5] The Chomsky-Foucault debate was moderated by Fons Elders and broadcast in 1971 by Dutch television as part of a series. Elders first included the transcript in a collection of three interviews he edited, Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind (London: Souvenir Press, 1974). He reprinted it separately as Human Nature: Justice vs Power. The Chomsky-Foucault Debate (London: Souvenir Press, 2011), though by then A.I. Davidson had already released the text in Foucault and His Interlocutors (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1997), 107-145. Elders’s 2011 edition consists of an introduction, followed by the two-part transcript. The first part tackles the question of human nature, knowledge, and science, the second deals more with politics. [6] See Gerda Poschmann, Der nicht mehr dramatische Theatertext. Aktuelle Bühnenstücke und ihre dramaturgische Analyse (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1997) and Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , trans. and introd. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006). [7] Marvin Carlson, “Postdramatic Theatre and Postdramatic Performance,” Brazilian Review of Presence Studies / Revista Brasileira de Etudos da Prescença 5, No. 3 (Sept.- Dec. 2015), 579. [8] Carlson, “Postdramatic Theatre and Postdramatic Performance,” 582. [9] Lehmann, Postdramatic Theater , 22. [10] The gap between European idealism and Emerson’s Transcendentalism is somewhat diminished in his theory of visuality, holding that sight, like language, is a way of inhabiting a visual field and integrating its objects, at the cost of distorting both by the idealizing operations of language and perspective, the visual distortions of the one and the other’s fixations by figures of speech and generic conventions, and we might add medium specificities. See Branka Arsić, On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 55, 68, as discussed by Gallagher-Ross, Theaters of the Everyday , 50-51, 68. [11] See Johan Callens, “Auto/Biography in American Performance,” in Auto/Biography and Mediation , ed. Alfred Hornung (Heidelberg: Winter Universitätsverlag, 2010), 287-303. [12] Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , 2006: 43; rptd by Gallagher-Ross, Theaters of the Everyday , 18. [13] Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , 128. [14] Bonnie Marranca, “Performance as Design: The Mediaturgy of John Jesurun’s Firefall ,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 96 (2010), 16. [15] See also chapter 5, “Tech Support: Labor in the Global Theatres of The Builders Association and Rimini Protokoll,” of Jackson’s Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (London: Routledge, 2011), 144-181. [16] In fact, Weems has always combined creative with critical work, whether as a founding member of the V-Girls and Builders Association or as dramaturg for the Wooster Group, also co-directing Art Matters and lecturing at different universities. [17] Shannon Jackson and Marianne Weems, The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 2015), 3. [18] Jackson and Weems, The Builders Association , xiii, 384-385. [19] Jackson and Weems, The Builders Association , 17. [20] Jackson and Weems, The Builders Association , 8, 393. [21] Faust/How I Rose , which The Builders Association used for Imperial Motel (Faust) (1996) and JUMP CUT (Faust) (1997-1998), received major runs at the National Theater of Mexico, while his Philoktetes , after featuring in Philoktetes Variations , as directed by Jan Ritsema in 1994, was revived in October 2007 by Jesurun himself at the SoHo Rep with a cast featuring Will Badgett (Odysseus), Louis Cancelmi (Philoktetes), and Jason Lew (Neoptolemus). See Johan Callens, “The Builders Association: S/he Do the Police in Different Voices,” in The Wooster Group and Its Traditions , ed. and introd. Johan Callens, Dramaturgies Series: Texts, Cultures, and Performances vol. 13 (Brussels & Bern: Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes-Peter Lang, 2004), 247-261; Johan Callens, “The Volatile Value of Suffering: Jan Ritsema’s PhiloktetesVariations,” in The Trojan Wars and the Making of the Modern World , ed. and introd. Adam J. Goldwyn, Studia Graeca Upsaliensia vol. 22 (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2015), 223-244. 2015; and Christophe Collard, “Processual Passing: Ron Vawter Performs Philoktetes,” Somatechnics 3, No.1 (2013), 119-132. [22] See also Claire Swyzen, “‘The world as a list of items’: Database Dramaturgy in Low-Tech Theatre by Tim Etchells and De Tijd, Using Textual Data by Etchells, Handke and Shakespeare.” etum: E-Journal for Theatre and Media 2, No. 2 (2015), 59–84, accessed May 15, 2018, https://cris.vub.be/en/searchall.html?searchall=swyzen , for an interpretation of one British and two Flemish low-tech postdramatic mediaturgical productions: Broadcast/Looping Pieces (2014), Peter Handke en de wolf (2005) and Elk wat wils. Iets van Shakespeare (2007). [23] Roland Barthes, “Le mythe, aujourd’hui,”Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), 191-247; “Myth Today,” Mythologies , ed. and trans. Annette Lavers, Noonday Press (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 109-164. 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. 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Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd and Suzanne Trauth Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 2 Visit Journal Homepage iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd and Suzanne Trauth By Published on May 26, 2016 Download Article as PDF ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. by Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd and Suzanne Trauth The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 2 (Spring 2016) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Introduction While an abundance of data clearly shows a gender imbalance in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, it is less clear how to motivate change regarding both overt and subtle barriers that hold women back.[1] This is particularly the case in the STEM field of information technology (IT). Since subtle gender barriers are transmitted through the cultural norms, values and gender roles of a society, creating a gender-balanced IT profession requires a way of addressing these emotional and implicit factors. The problem is that the scientific professions, on their own, are unable to do so. Information about structural barriers to social inclusion reported in scholarly publications is generally inaccessible to the lay person. Further, the scientific model of research dissemination leaves little room for the expression of subtlety, nuance, emotion, and holistic representation. Hence, artistic practice – specifically theatre for social change through relational aesthetics of transformative learning – can be employed to stimulate awareness, understanding, and activism about barriers to women in technological fields. It can also enable dissemination of research findings beyond the STEM academic community. In response to this opportunity, an original play, iDream, was written to communicate, in dramatic fashion, research results from an investigation of factors contributing to the under representation of women in the IT field. It did so by tackling the issues of experiencing, internalizing, and overcoming barriers to inclusion. The characters, plot, and dialogue of the play come from prior research that both developed theory and empirically applied it in over one hundred life history interviews with women working in the IT field. The characters in the resulting play embody the struggles of those who are marginalized in the IT field by virtue of gender but who seek inclusion and equality in the information society. Following staged readings of the play, audience feedback, and audience learning assessment, the play script was revised. The final version is now available to the public on the project website. This essay considers the challenges and opportunities of using theatre to address the important societal issue of exclusion in STEM disciplines. Backstory In 2007 Eileen Trauth sat at her computer having just sent her final report to the National Science Foundation (NSF) about a multiyear investigation into the gender imbalance in the STEM field of IT. She had developed and empirically tested a theory in the course of conducting life history interviews with women IT workers in the USA. During interviews that sometimes went on for three hours, these women willingly poured out their life stories – about their families, their communities, their schools, their hopes, and their dreams. They spoke about their interests and their passions, and about the people who helped or hindered their progression along a path that brought them to be participating in the interviews. She had already started publishing academic papers that added to cumulative scholarly knowledge about the problem of gender in the IT profession. But something was nagging at her. “How can I communicate what I have learned in this research in such a way that I can reach beyond my fellow academics? I want the results of my research to change the hearts and minds of parents, policy makers, educators, students and, ultimately, society,” she mused. Yet she recognized that scientific writing isn’t set up for such advocacy. This reflection and a fortuitous conversation the following year launched her on a journey through uncharted interdisciplinary waters. The conversation was with Suzanne Trauth, a playwright, who had just finished co-creating and presenting a play about Hurricane Katrina. The play was based upon interviews with residents of New Orleans and written in the genre of theatre for social change. Being aware of the interviews Eileen had conducted, Suzanne suggested a collaborative venture. Eileen’s research had revealed that the barriers to women entering and remaining in the IT field were not limited to those that are explicitly imposed on women, such as parents overtly discouraging their daughters from enrolling in computer science degree programs, or guidance counselors explicitly steering women students away from careers in computing. She had also found evidence of barriers that are implicitly internalized by young women themselves, when they receive messages from adults, peers, and the media about where they do and do not belong. As a result, they are sometimes unconsciously holding themselves back, which is being mistakenly diagnosed in the popular discourse as women “losing interest” in technology. Eileen was searching for a way to give voice to the powerful emotions expressed by the women she interviewed. There were times when she listened helplessly to the women express their feelings about isolation, exclusion from workplace socializing, being subjected to negative gender stereotypes, self-doubt, and being passed over for promotion. She wanted to communicate not just the facts she learned about the gender imbalance; she also wanted to communicate what it feels like to be on the margins. However, nuanced writing about subtle and unconsciously internalized barriers, writing that conveys what it feels like to be excluded, is the antithesis of scientific writing. Empirical research results that are published in scientific journals are expected to be presented in a straightforward manner, emphasizing objectivity and, typically, quantitative data. The emotion, nuance and subtlety that were an integral part of Eileen’s story of barriers did not fit with mainstream scientific research reporting. Consequently, she believed that her scholarly papers were telling only part of the story. She was also becoming increasingly dissatisfied with limiting the dissemination of her research results to fellow academics. Over the course of the project she had developed a growing desire to communicate to the broader public what she had learned about the nature of these gender barriers. She wanted to make a difference with this research and contribute to societal transformation. In recognizing that her research had taken her down the path toward advocacy, she was confronted with the limits of her discipline to effectively advocate for change. She acknowledged that art could pick up where science left off. Thus, this collaborative, cross-disciplinary project was born. This essay, about employing theatre to make a difference in STEM fields, recounts the process of enacting an NSF grant to develop and produce a play as an intervention to address the gender imbalance in science and technology. It also investigates some of the challenges associated with an effort to bring three different disciplines to bear on the enactment of societal change. That is, the play needed to satisfy the demands of playwriting in the relational aesthetics of theatre for social change. Performance arts can call people into relationship with each other and to objects, ideas, and places: a relational aesthetic, a term coined by Nicolas Bourriaud in 1988.[2] While doing so it needed to incorporate the results of scientific research and theorizing about gender barriers in the IT field into the characters and story line of the play. Finally, the play needed to evidence audience learning in the forms of awareness, attitude change, and intended behavior. Eileen Trauth is a professor of information science and technology, and gender studies, who conducts research on gender exclusion in the IT field.[3] She was principal investigator on this grant and co-wrote the play. She wanted to transform the findings from research interviews about gender barriers in the IT field into a medium that allowed for greater expression of emotion and subtlety than what is afforded by scientific journal articles. Karen Keifer-Boyd is a feminist arts educator and scholar of art pedagogy who served as the project evaluator; she wanted to assess the transformative learning that resulted as the playwrights, cast, and audience members experienced the performance of the play. Suzanne Trauth, a playwright, was a project consultant and co-creator of the play script. Her goal was to write a play script that would further societal transformation about barriers to achieving one’s dreams. Transformation: From Transcript to Play Script Theatre has frequently provided a venue for reaching audiences in order to achieve social goals beyond the purely aesthetic by healing, promoting action, encouraging community, and supporting transformation.[4] One articulation is called theatre for social change, which is enacted in times and places of crisis.[5] While theatre for social change has various understandings, our use of the term to describe our project is consistent with Thornton’s[6] depiction of theatre for social change as a set of five defining characteristics. The first characteristic is intentionality. Theatre is being used to alter the actual world, not just reflect it. In our project the intention is to create awareness, educate, and inspire action related to gender barriers in the IT field. The second characteristic is community, based on either geographical location or identity. The community shapes and informs the theatrical work. In our project the community consists of women IT workers whose voices are projected through the work to a potential community of IT workers in the audience. The third characteristic is hyphenation, the intersection of performing arts and sociocultural intervention. In our project the sociocultural intervention is awareness and education about gender barriers to IT careers. The fourth characteristic is conscientization: awareness leading to action. In our project awareness of gender barriers is intended to motivate behavior to resist them. The final characteristic is aesthetics. In theatre for social change multiple perspectives are often in evidence with the aim of giving voice to the voiceless. In our project two perspectives were employed (that of the playwright and that of a scientist) to give voice to an underrepresented group in the IT field: women. There are a number of current examples of theatre for social change. Katrina on Stage: Five Plays, [7] is a collection of works that employ theatre to promote awareness and activism about the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Tim Robbins’ Dead Man Walking (2004) was written to promote activism about abolishing the death penalty. William Mastrosimone’s Bang, Bang, You’re Dead (1999) was written to increase public awareness about violence in high schools. Insofar as the intention of our work is to create awareness and understanding, it also shares a goal of applied theatre, which is to focus on the use of theatre to educate and engage with social issues. Applied theatre is also sometimes referred to as Applied Theatre for Social Change.[8] The project discussed here employs relational aesthetics in which actors, readers, and audience members experience qualitative research findings as theatre for social change, which highlights the issues associated with oppressive societal institutions.[9] One approach in theatre for social change is to transform research findings into an original play script. This approach has several labels, including: performed ethnography, research-informed theatre, and performed research. According to Tara Goldstein et al., Performed ethnography and research-informed theater are research methodologies that involve turning ethnographic data and texts into scripts and dramas that are either read aloud by a group of participants or performed before audiences.[10] They developed a framework of research-informed theatre to analyze the melding of research, theatre, and education to produce transformative learning. Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon employed performed research techniques in her performance piece SHOT! (2009) in order to reframe the discourse about an impoverished North Philadelphia community.[11] Intended as theatre for social change, the play script—when read, performed, or experienced as audience—brings awareness about gender barriers in the IT field and teaches how to challenge, change, and overcome inequities in IT fields. It shares with other forms of arts activism the goal of using “theatre in the service of social change.”[12] Other forms of activist theatre are: community theatre, popular theatre, grassroots theatre, agit-prop (from agitation and propaganda) or protest political theatre, participatory theatre, Freirean “Theatre for Development,”[13] or Boalian “Theatre of the Oppressed”—also referred to as forum or playback theatre.[14] While the staged readings of iDream were performed with professional actors in professional theatre venues, we expect that it might also be performed by schools or community groups and be followed by audience talkback sessions. Our study of attitudinal change for the actors and the audience members at staged readings suggests that the pedagogy of this play project works through embodied learning when performing the play script as a staged reading, or experiencing the staged reading as an audience member. While our learning assessment occurred for staged readings of the play script we believe it is reasonable to expect that a full production would also result in embodied learning. As theatre for social change it aims to remove social and institutional barriers that women experience in the IT field. Theatre, dance, films, and animations in STEM fields is typically used only for explanatory purposes; the arts help non-scientists visualize abstract science concepts as well as bio-physical processes invisible without specialized apparatus. For example, Vince LiCata wrote the play DNA Story (2009)[15] to teach non-scientists about DNA structure and X-ray crystallography. In contrast, our goal was not to explain scientific concepts but rather to raise awareness and critique hegemonic social narratives regarding who could participate in the STEM field of IT. As theatre for social change, iDream performs research about women’s experiences in the IT fields in order to heighten awareness and to advocate for change. The NSF grant scheme that funded this project to transform research findings into an original play script, and to assess it as transformative pedagogy, was directed at innovative ways to communicate research results to a public audience.[16] The original research upon which the play project was built was a qualitative field study of women working in the IT profession.[17] Eileen Trauth interviewed 123 women working in the IT field in the USA. The themes explored in the interviews were: the extent to which the IT field in is socially constructed as a man’s world; pressures on women in the IT field, and how these pressures affect their professional development and working lives; the relationship between working in the IT profession and a woman’s gender self-image; and, finally, how women in the IT profession cope with the challenges presented to them. During open-ended interviews that ranged from one to three hours in duration, women discussed their life stories that led them to their current position in the IT field. They discussed their demographics, the type of work they did, personal characteristics, significant others in their lives, and influences from the larger society regarding gender roles and working in a technical field. At the outset of each interview Eileen explained her interest in understanding variation among women in the ways that they were exposed to, experienced, and responded to gender barriers throughout their careers.[18] While this research was being conducted, Eileen had not envisioned developing a play script as a way to enact societal transformation regarding gender barriers. But she was conscious at the time of the evocative and emotionally compelling nature of the narratives. Hence, in 2008, when Suzanne Trauth proposed writing a play based on the research findings, Eileen was quite receptive to the idea. Two intended audiences were envisioned as the play was being developed. Teenagers constitute the primary audience for the play—those who are experiencing and internalizing barriers to participation in the IT field. While the research that informed iDream is primarily about factors influencing the underrepresentation of women in the IT field, it is also recognized that underrepresentation is an issue for men in certain racial, ethnic, socio-economic, and sexual groups, and that gender stereotypes are enacted by members of all genders. However, while the learning objectives of awareness and understanding, attitude change, and intended behavior about gender, race, ethnicity, and class stereotypes that are embedded in a culture could apply to men as well as women students, the focus of this particular project was on the factors affecting the underrepresentation of women in the IT field. The secondary audience for the play consists of significant adults in teenagers’ lives—parents, teachers, coaches, guidance counselors, and others who are in a position to influence them. Hence, while performances of this play are intended for younger audiences, in order to make the play appealing to adults as well some themes that were intended primarily for this secondary audience were also embedded in the play script. An example is an adult’s effort to hold a young person back from pursuing a dream out of a desire to protect her or him from the same trauma s/he experienced. A concern raised during review of the grant proposal was the need to demonstrate how the play would be compelling to the target audience. In response, at the initiation of the project Eileen Trauth conducted a focus group with undergraduate women currently enrolled in an IT degree program. As relatively recent high school students they were in a position to provide feedback on the story line and advice on techniques to engage the audience. For example, participants said that when they were in high school they lacked exposure to the range of IT educational options that were available in college; they believed that creating greater awareness and understanding about this would be valuable to high school students. As a result, the three main characters in the play and their respective stories relate to a range of IT careers. With respect to awareness and understanding about imposed and internalized barriers to women, participants recommended that the message be conveyed with subtlety. Consequently, promotional materials about the staged readings of iDream emphasized its focus on current issues facing today’s high school students: how to follow one’s dreams while coping with real world issues such as obtaining tuition money for college, and dealing with the expectations and advice of significant people in their lives (parents, boy/girlfriends, guidance counselors, and teachers). Making a decision about careers in the IT field was positioned as the setting for the exploration of these larger themes of concern to high school students. The focus group participants also recommended the use of humor and audience engagement to make the play appealing to high school students. To that end, the script incorporates the vernacular of 18-year-olds, their music and language, their relationships, concerns, and sense of humor. It also includes references to popular video games, and references to contemporary social media and texting. Further, some characters only appear in a technology-mediated way, such as through text messages: MOTHER: Have you done your homework? AMANDA: Duh. It’s Friday night. I have a date with Jimmy. (She texts and laughs. Mother grabs the cell phone.) MOTHER (reads, confused): What is this? OMG. MOS. 5. CTN. BBL8R. ILU. WYWH. It sounds like a foreign language. Like a…a code or something. Are you hiding something from me? (Amanda takes the phone back.) AMANDA: OMG you are so boring. MOTHER: I want to know what you’re talking about. AMANDA: I’m making plans with Jimmy. Though Amanda’s mother reads the text messages, she doesn’t understand their meaning. The scene operates on two levels: it is a humorous exchange that underscores the generational differences between mother and child while, simultaneously, emphasizing Amanda’s obsession with the coded language of texts. Later, Amanda’s teacher Ms. D uses her student’s preoccupation with texting as a means of engaging her interest in a technology career in cryptography. The goal of this project, as theatre for social change, was to create transformation on the part of audience members who experience the play—about intentional and unintentional barriers that can be imposed upon and internalized by young people in the pursuit of their dreams about careers in the IT field. Eileen Trauth was focused on ensuring that the characters and the story arc in the play communicated research findings about gender barriers in the IT field and embodied the theoretical constructs of a gender theory that she developed and that was used in the research that inspired the play. According to this theory, The Individual Differences Theory of Gender and IT, the underrepresentation of women and gender minorities in the IT field can be explained by the interaction of three sets of factors (theoretical constructs). The first is individual identity: demographic characteristics (such as age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, socio-economic class) and type of IT work (such as computer hardware development, software design, or user support). The second factor is individual influences: personal characteristics (such as personality traits and abilities) and personal influences (such as role models and mentors). The third factor is environmental influences (such as cultural norms about gender roles).[19] Even though this project was undertaken to communicate the results of scientific research about gender barriers, the play had to satisfy aesthetic requirements as well. Suzanne Trauth had primary responsibility for writing the play script. She focused on ensuring that its aesthetic design created forward momentum with believable characters who live through a discernible story arc shaped by strong conflicts that force the characters to act to achieve objectives. The higher the dramatic stakes, the greater would be the audience engagement during a performance. Hence, a script was needed that would generate a high level of engagement during its performance in order to achieve the goal of societal transformation through awareness, attitude change, and intended behavior regarding gender barriers in the IT field. In the play, three girls—Khadi, Theresa, and Amanda—are high school students confronting an uncertain future: whether or not to go to college and, if they decide to, what they would study and how to make that happen. They are encouraged by Ms. D., the dynamic teacher of their Digital Design course, to explore the male-dominated fields of information and computer technology—computer science, computer engineering, and information science. In doing so, they begin to discover their places in the world while they struggle with the obstacles—personal, family, and academic—that might prevent them from following their dreams. The play focuses on the conflicts faced by all three protagonists: Theresa’s desire to attend college versus her father’s demand that she work in a hair salon with her cousin; Amanda’s blossoming interest in higher education versus her mother’s low expectations—and her boyfriend’s priorities—for Amanda’s future; and Khadi’s confusion about her choice of college versus the instability of her home life and lack of appropriate mentorship. iDream has a single plot with three threads that are woven together as the three friends face life decisions. By graduation day, Theresa has asserted her independence, Amanda has traded an early marriage for college, and Khadi has found her mentor in an empathetic boyfriend. In view of our goal, the interacting arcs of the three primary characters drove the narrative and textual foundations that held the production together. The integration of their three stories and the personal, academic, and familial barriers they confront as they face the challenges of planning for life after high school become the scaffolding upon which the moment-to-moment actions of the play unfold. Their objectives drive the narrative. The conflicts raised in the play reflect the range of obstacles discovered as a result of the research on barriers to careers in STEM for women and underrepresented groups. Theresa struggles with cultural and parental expectations. Her father is focused on the short term economic benefits of Theresa’s employment immediately after graduating high school. He does not see the long term economic benefits from Theresa remaining out of the labor force for four years while in college. Khadi confronts a lack of consistent mentoring about her future. And Amanda must tackle low parental expectations that affect her self-esteem. THERESA: Papi tells me to get my nose out of the books and learn to do something practical so I can earn money for the family. KHADI: Dad would say “yeah” but Mom is worried about money. I would need a scholarship or something. AMANDA (mimics her mother): Mom says, “I’m not wasting good money on college when I’m not sure you’ll even graduate high school.” All performance elements play a crucial role in the dissemination of the research findings. The story arcs of the characters express the results of the research: as the three girls confront personal and social barriers to achieving their goals, they embody the questions and concerns raised in the course of the interviews undertaken by Eileen Trauth. This storytelling, in turn, triggers audience engagement, via personal empathy during the performance and the public discussion afterward. Art and science converge in an exploration of career opportunities in the twenty-first century, and barriers that might hold people back. The focus is not so much on overt barriers that are imposed on individuals; rather the play dramatizes the process by which a young woman might unconsciously internalize limits on her dreams. Research-Informed Theatre Two forms of research were involved in this project. One form of research was the field study of women working with IT that produced the theoretical constructs and findings about the gender imbalance. These findings were, in turn, embodied in the characters and story line of iDream. The characters are a composite of the stories told by the adults about barriers they experienced and observed over the course of their lives, and the constructs of the theory used in the research. The other form of research was the process of obtaining and incorporating feedback into the writing and revising of the play script. Hence, the relationship of the audience to the performance was an integral part of this project. It was through audience engagement that this second kind of research was accomplished. The transformation of a scientific product into a theatrical process was intended to enact transformative learning through relational aesthetics in the experience of reading, performing, or viewing the play: to build awareness, change attitudes, and motivate behaviors and actions. The goal was to shift perspectives about individual, environmental, and social forces at work in creating barriers for women in technology fields. According to Juanita Johnson-Bailey, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor, Director of the Institute for Women’s Studies, and a professor in the Department of Lifelong Education, Administration and Policy at The University of Georgia, societal transformation is a movement to change oppressive forces and begins with investigating the ways the forces form and operate.[20] Jack Mezirow notes: Transformative learning refers to the process by which we transform our taken-for-granted frames of reference . . . to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, emotionally capable of change, and reflective so that they may generate beliefs and opinions that will prove more true or justified to guide action.[21] The need for societal transformation is evident in the data about both the significant underrepresentation of women and gender minorities (e.g., black men and LGBTQ individuals) in STEM fields such as IT and in the hegemonic masculine culture that pervades the high tech world.[22] Two groups of individuals are the focus of the societal transformation: those who are experiencing and internalizing the barriers and those who are in a position to tear them down. The development of the play script involved the creation of an initial draft based on the results of Eileen Trauth’s fieldwork and her interactions Suzanne Trauth. This was followed by two workshopping sessions and a series of public staged readings of iDream. Following each of these, the play script was subsequently revised. The script was first workshopped with actors at a table reading with Suzanne Trauth, Eileen Trauth, the director, and the dramaturg in attendance. The goal of this session was for Suzanne, the director, and Eileen to hear the play being read for the first time. The second script workshop occurred a month later on a stage in front of a small audience comprised of teachers, college students, and high school students. The project team observed the script being presented in a staged reading format and gained initial audience feedback on the script. Six staged readings of the play with professional (i.e., Equity) actors in front of public audiences were then held in 2012. The first staged reading was in June 2012 for an audience of several hundred NSF-funded STEM researchers. In October 2012 the remaining five staged readings in front of public audiences were held, three in New Jersey and two in Pennsylvania. Each performance was followed by audience talkback sessions held immediately afterward. Following each event, the script was revised. The final version of the play was completed in 2013. The New Jersey performances were held at Premiere Stages in Union, New Jersey. The audiences for the two daytime performances were recruited from high schools in Jersey City, Elizabeth, and in and near Union. The students came from urban schools that have significant ethnic and socio-economic diversity in the student bodies. Suzanne Trauth and John Wooten, Producing Artistic Director of Premiere Stages (who was also a consultant on this project) invited theatre teachers in these high schools to bring their students. The third performance took place on a Saturday evening as part of a new playwrights series with an audience consisting of adults who came to see the staged reading of a new play; the subject matter of iDream was not the main motivator for attendance. The two Pennsylvania performances were held on a Saturday night and a Sunday afternoon at the State Theatre in State College, Pennsylvania. The audiences for these performances were recruited from newspaper announcements, posts to email listservs, and an interview by a local television station with Eileen Trauth, Suzanne Trauth, and the director. The performances were also listed among the upcoming events on the theatre’s website. Audience members at all five performances were presented with a pretest and an informed consent form to sign, both of which provided background information about the project. In addition, immediately preceding each performance, the director came onto the stage and gave a brief introduction to the project and the play. We achieved engagement with the target audience by writing the script in such a way as to build empathy with the characters, by relating the storyline to the audience members’ own experiences, and enabling them to “see themselves” in the unfolding drama. In this way, audience members were drawn into the circumstances in iDream. Audience members’ connection, in a visceral way, to the play provided the emotional energy moving the story along to the climactic moment. THERESA (proudly): My trigonometry exam. I got 99 out of 100. (Father reluctantly takes the paper and studies it.) FERNANDO: 99 out of 100. (teases) Why not 100 out of 100? But what will you do with 99 out of 100 in your cousin Maria’s beauty shop? This trigonometry will help you cut hair? (He hands the paper back to Theresa.) THERESA: I was thinking about college— FERNANDO: No, Theresita. You will go to beauty school. You will have a trade that you can be proud of. You will be able to help your family. In America we have a better life. It has been hard and I work many long hours. But I do it for you and Mami and Imelda and Juan. Theresita, I know you are smart. But you must do this for the family. THERESA: But things change and it is different here now. FERNANDO: Your family never changes. THERESA: I could get a scholarship. FERNANDO: No Theresa! You cannot give any information to the school about our family. You must NEVER talk about us to [outsiders.] Do not betray your family. THERESA: But Papi, this is our country now. They are not outsiders— FERNANDO: No. Come and set the table. No more talk of [outsiders]. And no more talk of numbers. (He leaves. Theresa presses the exam to her heart.) During the talkback sessions, audience members, who had experienced being devalued as a woman or person of color, were emotional in their responses; they related the characters to their own lives. Two sub goals were embedded in the overall goal of stimulating awareness, understanding, attitude change, and activism. One sub goal was to generate awareness about types of careers in a field that has been stereotyped as being the exclusive domain of men. The second sub goal was to create awareness about both overt and subtle barriers to participation in the IT field, which are experienced by members of underrepresented gender groups. Karen Keifer-Boyd was responsible for designing and implementing the learning assessment. Research-informed theater can be transformative learning if the relational aesthetic experience of a performance “exposes a discrepancy between what a person has always assumed to be true and what has just been experienced, heard, or read.”[23] Consequently, Karen designed an assessment to gauge changed assumptions and attitudes about women in the IT field by audience members who attended the staged readings of iDream. Three forms of data constituted the audience learning gains assessment. First, audience members were asked to complete a pre-survey form consisting of open-ended questions. Second, at the end of each staged reading, Eileen Trauth, Suzanne Trauth, the director, and actors responded to questions and comments from the audience members during a talkback session. Karen Keifer-Boyd and a graduate student attended the staged readings and took handwritten notes regarding audience responses during these sessions. A third form of data came from a follow-up online survey that was sent to audience members who had completed the pre-survey. Responses during the talkback sessions and follow-up survey consistently showed that iDream “speaks” to the audience. One mother revealed, “I didn’t know the computer field was so broad.” A Latino actor commented that one of the characters “behaved just as my mother did.” An adult Latina audience member said: “The play was telling my life.” Some women audience members related the play to their own experiences of gender stereotyping and being dissuaded from IT careers, or not being given the same opportunities as their male counterparts. One woman audience member “strongly identified with Theresa because it brought back memories of being the oldest in an Italian family and being expected to help the family [rather than undertake a career].” Audience members revealed that after experiencing the staged reading iDream they were now aware that the IT field is available to women and underrepresented minorities and showed some evidence of change in their perceptions of who can pursue IT careers. For example, an audience member stated, “The careers were presented as really accessible in the play.” One student stated, “Students play games but they don’t think about how they’re made. The play did a good job of presenting careers.” A 41 year-old woman responded on the post-survey, “After the play I know they [IT professionals] do more than just ‘develop software,’ which was my original answer.” The audience members also revealed awareness of implicit and explicit barriers that can be both imposed and internalized. They identified with the characters, or knew people and experiences reflected in the play. A mother in the audience stated, “My daughter is nine and when she was five she told me that other kids told her math is not for girls. This play showed the options in the computer field.” Another area of awareness was about resources, particularly the role of teachers in helping underrepresented groups overcome restrictive stereotypes. Nearly all of the respondents in the post-survey mentioned the significance of the teacher in the play as encouraging the three female characters to pursue college and careers in IT. A male audience member stated, “I am pleasantly amazed with the presentation of representing a message in art. … This play spoke to … a dream deferred because the barriers are there, but the story also presented opportunities.” We are aware that identifying the arts as a venue to articulate women’s experience of barriers in STEM might perpetuate a stereotype of the arts as a feminized discipline in contrast to the masculine STEM fields. Throughout the life of this project, which included talkback sessions following the six staged readings and seven presentations at a diverse set of conference venues, there were numerous opportunities for this issue to be raised. Yet it never was. But this doesn’t invalidate the concern. Indeed, Eileen Trauth, in her capacity as a scholarly journal reviewer, has encountered this arts-feminine/science-masculine stereotyping in manuscripts she reviews. For this reason, we believe that it is best to anticipate the potential for this issue being raised and to be prepared to address it in discussions and workshops that accompany future performances of the play. Enacting transformative learning through relational aesthetics in theatre for social change is not to prescribe or expect specific behavior changes. Rather, it is a pedagogical design of this play project that awareness and attitude change set in motion behavior changes specific to each individual’s life and circumstances. For example, one female high school student related the character of Theresa in the play to her brother, who has an interest in gaming and graphic design. She intends to tell her brother he could make a career out of developing video games. A high school teacher “appreciated seeing the struggles of students at home and the different cultures represented, so I can understand and help get students through graduation.” Several audience members recommended that all high school students should see the play. For example, a college professor recommended to all in attendance at one of the staged readings that all first-year college students should see the play because “there’s confusion about STEM—everyone thinks it’s too hard.” A student asked that the script be made available to schools “so they could perform it. Another asked about courses for her daughter to take that would help her “attack gender bias in the IT community.” Transformative learning, a goal of this project as theatre for social change, is “behaving, talking, and thinking in a way that is congruent with transformed assumptions or perspectives.”[24] Assessment of the impact of experiencing staged readings of iDream indicates pedagogical potential for transformative learning. The accessibility of the play script, not only literally by downloading from the play website, but also in the familiar dramatic aesthetics of its construction, lends it the potential for societal transformation through widespread education of high school students, parents, teachers, and counselors about the overt as well as the subtle barriers to participation in the IT field that confront women and other underrepresented groups. Postscript At the conclusion of the project a website was created to make the iDream play script available to those interested in reading and/or performing the play (www.iDreamThePlay.com ). The final version of the play script became available to the public in 2014. The website also provides resource materials related to overcoming gender barriers in the IT field, such as a short video about the project and interviews with cast and production personnel. These materials offer an opportunity for both documenting and disseminating the performance, and for analyzing the performance process. Three questions accompanying the video convey the learning objectives of the play. How do we help people become aware of the subtle barriers that exist in our society, ones that are often unconsciously internalized, that hold young people back? How do we engage students in thinking about college and careers in science and technology? How do we awaken them to the possibility of creating their own individual dreams—and acting on them? As high schools, community groups, and universities perform the play or do in-class readings, these three questions can guide group discussion, providing a pedagogical design to be adapted to particular groups and places. The goal for the artist working toward relational aesthetics is to create an event or set in motion a social experience, which is the actors’ and audience’s experience of the art. In this project, the play script is the vehicle for creating art as experience. Groups can read and perform the script together and then work with the prompts and resources on the play’s website to reflect on their attitudes, perceptions, and positionality in relation to the IT field. The “Resources” section on the play website was created in response to audience members’ requests for a place to learn more about IT careers. Resources include information about information technology careers, organizations of underrepresented groups in information technology, and articles about theatre and STEM. The website is an important way for high school teachers to learn about the play and to produce a staged reading or full production in their schools. It provides a way to advance knowledge and practice, and enable others to build upon the results of the project. Through dialogue and research motivated by the play, further awareness, attitude change, and transformative learning with intended and actualized behaviors toward addressing gender barriers in STEM fields are the ultimate goals of the generative pedagogical design. From Karen Keifer-Boyd’s perspective as an arts educator who teaches students how to teach new media art, the benefit of working cross disciplinarily lies in the potential of the play script as education and art, to be used to challenge gender inequities in the IT field. Within her discipline she sees the potential for girls to be motivated to creatively play with technology as a mechanism for opening their minds to possible careers with technology. She believes society and institutions need to encourage such play. For Suzanne Trauth, a playwright, framing the issues of gender equality in the context of theatre reminds all involved in the process that these issues are not unique to the STEM fields. The American theatre has long struggled to establish gender parity with regard to the production of plays by female playwrights. That struggle is in the process of being addressed in recent years with the Dramatists Guild’s initiation of The Count, an ongoing study that explores the question of who is being produced in American theatres. In the November/December 2015 issue of The Dramatist, the organization presented for the first time three years of data from regional theatres across the country: only 22% of the plays produced from the regional sample were written by women. Meaningfully, playwright Marsha Norman, the author of the article, suggested that “if life worked like the theatre, four out of five things you had ever heard would have been said by men.”[25] Clearly, the American theatre has a distance to travel in achieving gender equality on its stages. In confronting the STEM issues, the artistic side of the collaboration is reminded that the goal of gender parity crosses disciplines. By the end of the project we came to see that it was really just the beginning. We had embarked upon this project with the goal of producing a play script as a way to disseminate Eileen Trauth’s research findings. The National Science Foundation funding supported development of a play script, and the production of a series of staged readings in order to obtain developmental audience feedback that would inform a subsequent revision of the script. That project is completed and the play script is currently available at the iDream website for those interested in reading or presenting a full production of the play. But we now view our original project as the inaugural steps of a longer-term mission. Eileen Trauth and Suzanne Trauth are currently exploring an expansion of this venture to broaden access to the story begun in iDream by using video story-telling and interactivity as options for greater engagement with the subject matter for a wider variety of audiences. Eileen Trauth is professor of information sciences & technology, and women’s gender & sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University. She conducts research on societal, cultural and organizational influences on the information technology profession with a special focus on gender and social inclusion. She held the 2008 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Gender Studies at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria, and served on the scientific advisory board for Female Empowerment in Science & Technology Academia (FESTA), a European Union project to increase female academic participation in science and technology. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the Australian Research Council and Science Foundation Ireland. She is editor of the Encyclopedia of Gender and Information Technology and editor-in-chief of Information Systems Journal. (www.eileentrauth.com ) Karen Keifer-Boyd is professor of art education and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University. She was the 2012 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Gender Studies at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria, and received a Fulbright in 2006 for research in Finland on intersections of art and technology. Her writings on feminist pedagogy, visual culture, inclusion, cyberart activism, transcultural dialogues, action research, social justice arts-based research, and identity are in more than 50 peer-reviewed research publications, and translated into several languages. She co-authored Including Difference: A Communitarian Approach to Art Education in the Least Restrictive Environment (NAEA, 2013); InCITE, InSIGHT, InSITE[amazon.com] (NAEA, 2008); Engaging Visual Culture[davisart.com] (Davis, 2007); and co-edited Real-World Readings in Art Education: Things Your Professors Never Told You[amazon.com] (Falmer, 2000). (www.personal.psu.edu/ktk2/) Suzanne Trauth is a playwright, novelist and screenwriter. Her plays include Françoise, which received staged readings at Luna Stage and Nora’s Playhouse and was nominated for the Kilroy List; Midwives developed at Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey; Rehearsing Desire; iDream, supported by the National Science Foundation’s STEM initiative; and Katrina: the K Word. She is a member of Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey Emerging Women Playwrights program and the Dramatists Guild. She wrote and directed the short film Jigsaw, nominated for best film in the shorts category at the PF3 Film Festival and screened at New Filmmakers, NY. Ms. Trauth has co-authored Sonia Moore and American Acting Training and co-edited Katrina on Stage: Five Plays. Her novels include Show Time and Time Out. (www.suzannetrauth.com .) [1] This work was supported by three grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF #1039546, NSF #0204246, NSF # 0733747). We would like to thank, in particular, Dr. Jolene Jesse at the National Science Foundation for her encouragement to pursue this project. [2] N. Bourriaud, Esthétique Relationnelle/Relational Aesthetics, trans. by S. Pleasance and F. Woods (Dijon, France: Les Presses du Réel, 2002). [3] See, for example: Eileen M. Trauth, “The Role of Theory in Gender and Information Systems Research,” Information & Organization 23, no. 4 (2013): 277-93. Eileen M. Trauth, “Are There Enough Seats for Women at the IT Table?” ACM Inroads 3, no. 4 (2012): 49-54. Eileen M. Trauth, and Debra Howcroft, “Critical Empirical Research in IS: An Example of Gender and IT,” Information Technology and People 19, no. 3 (2006): 272-92. [4] See: Diane Conrad, “Exploring Risky Youth Experiences: Popular Theatre as a Participatory, Performative Research Method,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 3, no. 1 (2004): Article 2. Retrieved from http://www.ualberta.ca/~iiqm/backissues/3_1/pdf/conrad.pdf. Susan Denman, James Pearson, Deborah Moody, Pauline Davis, and Richard Madeley, “Theatre in Education on HIV and AIDS: A Controlled Study of Schoolchildren’s Knowledge and Attitudes,” Health Education Journal 54, no. 3 (1995): 3-17. Jeff Nisker, Douglas. K. Martin, Robyn Bluhm, and Abdallah S. Daar, “Theatre as a Public Engagement Tool for Health-Policy Development,” Health Policy 78, no. 2 (2006): 258-71. [5] James Thompson, and Richard Schechner, “Why Social Theatre?” The Drama Review 48, no. 3 (2004): 11-16. [6] Sarah Thornton, “What is Theatre for Social Change?” in From the Personal to the Political: Theatre for Social Change in the 21st Century with Particular Reference to the Work of Collective Encounters: A Review of Relevant Literature (Liverpool: Collective Encounters’ Research Lab). [7] S. M. Trauth, and L.S. Brenner, eds. Katrina on Stage: Five plays (Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011). [8] Applied Theatre Action Institute. 2015. Retrieved from http://appliedtheater.org/. [9] Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (New York, NY: TCG Books, 1993). [10] Tara Goldstein, Julia Gray, Jennifer Salisbury, and Pamela Snell, “When Qualitative Research Meets Theater: The Complexities of Performed Ethnography and Research-Informed Theater Project Design,” Qualitative Inquiry 20, no. 5 (2014): 674-685, 674. [11] Kimmika L.H. Williams-Witherspoon, “On SHOT!: A Rationale for Resesarch and Dramas Depicting Violence in the ‘Hood’,” Theatre Topics 23, no. 2 (2013): 169-83. [12] Tim Prentki, and Sheila Preston, eds. The Applied Theatre Reader (New York: Routledge, 2009), 12. [13] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2007). [14] Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed. [15] Personal copy from the author. [16] National Science Foundation, Informal Science Education (#1039546). [17] National Science Foundation, “A Field Study of Individual Differences in the Social Shaping of Gender and IT” (#0204246). [18] For further explanation see: Eileen M. Trauth, “Odd Girl Out: An Individual Differences Perspective on Women in the IT Profession,” Information Technology and People 1, no. 2 (2002): 98-118. [19] See: Eileen M. Trauth, Jeria L. Quesenberry, and Haiyan Huang, “Retaining Women in the U.S. IT Workforce: Theorizing the Influence of Organizational Factors,” European Journal of Information Systems 18 (2009): 476-97. [20] Juanita Johnson-Bailey, “Positionality and Transformative Learning: A Tale of Inclusion and Exclusion,” in The Handbook of Transformative Learning: Theory, Research and Practice, edited by Edward W. Taylor, and Patricia Cranton (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2012), 260-73. [21] Jack Mezirow, “Learning to Think Like an Adult,” in Learning as Transformation: Critical Perspectives on a Theory in Progress, edited by Jack Mezirow & Associates (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 7-8. [22] Claire Cain Miller, “Technology’s Man Problem” The New York Times, April 2014. [23] Patricia Cranton, “Teaching for Transformation,” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 93 (2002): 63-71, 66. [24] Ibid, 66. [25] Marsha Norman, “Why the Count Matters,” The Dramatist, Nov/Dec, 2015. “iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change” by Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd and Suzanne Trauth ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 2 (Spring 2016) ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: James Armstrong Editorial Assistant: Kyueun Kim Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Bill Demastes Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D. W. Gregory’s Radium Girls” by Bradley Stephenson “Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of The End of the Moon” by Vivian Appler “iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change” by Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd and Suzanne Trauth “Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum” by Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio “Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters” by George Pate and Libby Ricardo www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Blue-Collar Broadway The New Humor in the Progressive Era Stages of Engagement Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.