By Frank Hentschker | A snapshot of the vibrant New York dance scene, through their manifestos. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu DANCE New York: Performed Manifestos Frank Hentschker Download PDF A celebration of the vibrant New York dance scene. New York choreographers and dancers present their manifestos, statements of why they do what they do and how they do it. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Watch Hamlet: A Monologue by Franco Laera at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. This film documents Robert Wilson's production of Hamlet: A Monologue, shot during the piece's presentation at the Teatr Narodowy Warsaw in 1997. The production was adapted from Shakespeare by Wilson and Wolfgang Wiens, and was performed by Wilson himself, who alone embodied every character in the play. Wilson's conception radically restructures Shakespeare's text by beginning seconds before Hamlet's death and unfolding the entire drama as a kind of flashback — a dream memory playing out in Hamlet's mind in his final moments. In Wilson's words: "I did it as a monologue, a kind of dream memory of the entire play. I restructured the text, beginning seconds before Hamlet dies. So the work is seen as a flashback, with Hamlet speaking the text of Ophelia, Gertrude and all the other characters. The play really takes place in Hamlet's mind. It begins with his last speech and ends with his last speech." The production is a concentrated demonstration of Wilson's approach to classical text — the emphasis on image, on the physical presence and movement of the performer, and on the gap between what is said and what is seen. By collapsing all of Hamlet's world into a single figure and a single consciousness, Wilson makes the play's meditation on memory, mortality, and interiority radically literal. The film was shot over the 1997-2000 period of the production's performance life. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Hamlet: A Monologue Franco Laera At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on June 1 at 6:30 PM, at Anthology Film Archives RSVP Please note that these screenings are ticketed and require prior registration at the Anthology Film Archives website. Country Poland / Germany Language English Running Time 95 minutes Year of Release 1997 About The Film This film documents Robert Wilson's production of Hamlet: A Monologue, shot during the piece's presentation at the Teatr Narodowy Warsaw in 1997. The production was adapted from Shakespeare by Wilson and Wolfgang Wiens, and was performed by Wilson himself, who alone embodied every character in the play. Wilson's conception radically restructures Shakespeare's text by beginning seconds before Hamlet's death and unfolding the entire drama as a kind of flashback — a dream memory playing out in Hamlet's mind in his final moments. In Wilson's words: "I did it as a monologue, a kind of dream memory of the entire play. I restructured the text, beginning seconds before Hamlet dies. So the work is seen as a flashback, with Hamlet speaking the text of Ophelia, Gertrude and all the other characters. The play really takes place in Hamlet's mind. It begins with his last speech and ends with his last speech." The production is a concentrated demonstration of Wilson's approach to classical text — the emphasis on image, on the physical presence and movement of the performer, and on the gap between what is said and what is seen. By collapsing all of Hamlet's world into a single figure and a single consciousness, Wilson makes the play's meditation on memory, mortality, and interiority radically literal. The film was shot over the 1997-2000 period of the production's performance life. Director: Franco Laera Performer: Robert Wilson Adapted from Shakespeare by Robert Wilson and Wolfgang Wiens About The Artist(s) Franco Laera is a filmmaker and documentary director who has worked extensively in the documentation of experimental theater and performance. His film of Robert Wilson's Hamlet: A Monologue, shot at the Teatr Narodowy Warsaw, provides a rare record of Wilson performing Shakespeare solo — one of the most distinctive productions of the director's career. Get in touch with the artist(s) and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

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

Heather S. Nathans 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 Performing Anti-slavery Heather S. Nathans By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Performing Anti-slavery: Activist Women on Antebellum Stages . By Gay Gibson Cima. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xiii + 298. Gay Gibson Cima’s new book, Performing Anti-Slavery , should become a model for how to combine detailed historical research with activism. In her compelling study, she imaginatively links the struggle to end slavery in antebellum America with the larger issue of human trafficking. At once erudite and passionate, it is an exemplary piece of scholarship that will provoke discussions among scholars of American theatre, American Studies, Africana Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and other academic communities interested in how historical research can be imbued with a sense of immediacy for contemporary readers. And as the author promises, it engages with an impressive breadth of interdisciplinary methods, including performance studies, critical race theory, American studies, and feminist studies. As Cima observes in the introduction, female anti-slavery activists seldom had the luxury of presenting the kinds of public performances available to their male counterparts. So she invites her readers to consider a broader definition of what might constitute “performance” for women traditionally relegated to the domestic sphere. She examines a range of performances, from the gatherings of African American female literary societies, to the public appearances of noted escaped slave Ellen Craft, who made her way to freedom and international fame by impersonating a white slave owner. While these exist outside the realms of the playhouse proper, they nevertheless became effective sites for women to perform resistance and political consciousness. In this, the project echoes her award-winning book Early American Women Critics: Performance, Religion, Race , in which she examined how antebellum women redefined themselves as “host bodies” and their roles as cultural critics rather than mere passive observers. Performing Anti-Slavery is a natural extension of that earlier work, shifting the discourse into the realm of political activism. Cima is interested in the “stickiness” of the questions that surrounded how black and white women performed affect throughout the first half of the nineteenth century (17). She acknowledges the need for nineteenth century women to develop a wide and often subversive array of political strategies “that would enable them to reach their antislavery goals” (17). Cima pays particular attention to the question of spectatorship and how female antislavery performers such as Maria Stewart, Sarah Douglass, Ellen Craft, and Lucretia Mott, among others, conjured their imagined audiences. Rather than projecting a neutral spectator, Cima argues that activist women often invoked slaves as “the partisan, outlier spectators of their activism” (15). This paradigm shift refocused the audience’s awareness of their position, and, as Cima suggests, their understanding of their own complicity in the slave system. Cima’s study also posits what she describes as a “combination of performance strategies—working simultaneously within and outside of the state,” as a possible model for contemporary thinking about human trafficking, since “the tension . . . shows what is and what is not possible in the way of establishing human rights within a democracy” (14). Performing Anti-Slavery spans four chapters plus an epilogue that extends the discussion into the present day. In chapter one (which lays the theoretical foundation for the study), she underscores a critical distinction between sympathy and empathy, suggesting that empathy is both an ahistorical and inaccurate term to describe how nineteenth-century women engaged with enslaved women (both directly and indirectly). For Cima, the term empathy slips too easily into the realm Saidiya Hartman cautions against in her Scenes of Subjection , in which supposedly empathetic spectators displaced the slave’s body at the center of the abolitionist narrative. As Cima observes, sympathetic critical responses prompt the “second step to performing sympathy” (55). Cima also takes up the role of religion in abolitionism (as she did in Early American Women Critics ), this time turning her attention to metempsychosis, a belief in the transmigration of souls from one form to another at the time of death. As she notes, this somewhat loose adaptation of Hinduism and Buddhism was synthesized with contemporary Western writings on sympathy (68). Not content merely to witness passively, female anti-slavery activists who embraced metempsychosis openly derided women who imagined that tears could substitute for action. The concept of metempsychosis recurs throughout the study as a touchstone for how antislavery performers envisioned their activist work. Cima acknowledges that while common themes and discourses circulated among female anti-slavery activists, “anti-slavery women were fueled by wildly disparate objectives, so they generated different effects,” and indeed she returns to this theme in her epilogue in discussing present-day activist efforts (61). She reminds her reader that distinctions of class, color, and faith continued to divide women in the movement, no matter how closely their affective practices drew them together. Throughout her study, Cima pays careful attention to the ways in which female activists mobilized theatrical practices (e.g., the readings of scripted “conversations” at literary society meetings the convenings of aid societies, deliveries of public lectures, publishing of poems or jeremiads under pseudonyms designed to at once conceal and provoke). In one instance that reveals a nice attention to detail, she even points to the inherently dramatic beats or moments embedded in the cry of “oh!” that punctuate antislavery writings (for example, “with no hope to cheer them—oh!”). Cima interprets this as an “indignant shout” rather than a helpless lamentation (71). Chapters two, three, and four flow together smoothly as Cima explores the ways in which her black female subjects found compassion for themselves as well as others. For example, in chapter two she examines Sarah Douglass’s 1832 speech to the Female Literary Association of Philadelphia, in which Douglass helped to shift the rhetorical ground of abolitionist speech. As Cima argues, black women faced physical jeopardy not only for participating in antislavery gatherings, but on a daily basis as laws governing free blacks tightened in Northern states. For Douglass, feeling for the slave in bondage to the South had to be implicitly and explicitly joined to the danger facing free black women. As Cima notes, Douglass thus “created a sisterly bond, a community” (117). Cima links that recognition of compassion to the women’s ability to develop effective performative practices. The realization (which she describes as an epiphany) that outsiders did not distinguish between enslaved and free, wealthy or working class, but saw only race, helped to promote one of the most stunning episodes considered in chapter four of the study work: the escape of William and Ellen Craft and the “brilliant theatricality” that allowed Ellen Craft to perform and re-perform both black and white racial identities on a transatlantic stage in a kind of “disruptive hybridity” (182, 205). In her brief epilogue, Cima turns her attention to the urgent question of human trafficking in the twenty-first century. Quoting a report from the US “Trafficking in Persons” office, she notes that “12.3 million people exist within conditions of ‘forced labor, bonded labor, and forced prostitution’ around the globe, and 56 percent of them are women and girls” (249). Asking, “How can artist-activists imagine interventions,” Cima cautions against the ‘new’ abolitionists whose debates over strategies and the links between slavery and the ideal democratic state risk reducing the enslaved bodies in question to the inert status of three centuries ago (247). At the end of the study, she invokes her own activist practice with the Humanities and Human Rights Initiative at Georgetown as a process that illuminated her own understanding of how the female antislavery activists of more than a century ago wrestled with the challenge of combining their sense of mission with the almost insurmountable obstacles around them. Framing the work of abolitionism as an ongoing process lifts the work of Cima’s subjects out of the past and places it firmly in our present. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Heather S. Nathans 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 Editorial Comment New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Musical Theatre Studies “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 Performing Anti-slavery American Tragedian Murder Most Queer The Captive Stage Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Peter Zazzali 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 Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Peter Zazzali By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF During the spring of 2013, Nora Ephron’s play Lucky Guy played to sold out houses recouping its producers’ initial investment of $3.6 million after a mere eight weeks, a remarkable feat for a Broadway drama. Whereas most successes on the Great White Way are splashy musicals with high production values (think Wicked and The Lion King ) so-called “straight plays” usually operate at a financial loss as part of a comparatively short run. Lucky Guy , however, was an exception in that Ephron’s play grossed over $1 million weekly while earning Tony Award nominations for its director, playwright, and most significantly, its leading actor: Tom Hanks. [1] Like Ephron, Hanks had never worked on Broadway prior to Lucky Guy , or anywhere else of note in the theatre, thereby begging the question: how can two relative novices of the stage achieve such critical acclaim and financial success on their first try? I argue that the reason for this is Hanks’s celebrity. With symbolic capital that included two Academy Awards and roles in Hollywood hits such as Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle (1993), Hanks’s involvement ensured that Lucky Guy would find and affect its audience. As Guy Debord states in his seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle , celebrity is a “commodity [that] attains the total occupation of social life,” [2] a conceit that speaks to the fetishization of movie stars like Hanks who try their hand at stage acting. But what gets lost in this negotiation between celebrity film star and theatre artist? What causes the commodified frenzy that defines the relationship between an actor and his audience, a connection whose ramifications are as significant artistically as they are socio-economically? What is the spectator’s state of consciousness in this phenomenal exchange? Ultimately, what does society’s fascination with celebrity mean for theatre as an art form? This article positions celebrity as a socially induced phenomenon that causes regressive perceptions of stage acting, and by extension, the art of theatre. Relying on a combination of cultural materialism and modern psychology, I will examine the phenomenological connection between celebrity actors and their adoring “stage” audience. Thus, I argue the festishization of a celebrity such as Hanks produces a viable, if imagined, relationship between a “star” and his audience, a negotiation that has reductive implications for the art of the stage actor. Celebrity actors are directly associated with film and television, insofar as their image is distributed and consumed en masse towards forging familiarity with the public. Indeed, the term familiarity shares the same etymological root as “fame” and is a benchmark for becoming a celebrity. In fact, fame and celebrity are mutually inclusive concepts resulting from exposure through the media. From Facebook and Twitter to television and the Internet, today’s cultural consumer has unprecedented access to the lives and careers of famous people. [3] As such, a social phenomenon has ensued in which the fascination of celebrities becomes a self-fulfilling practice with consumers craving and following mediatized narratives that create and perpetuate household names. With respect to actors, again, film and television especially apply to this dynamic. While stage performers have occasionally garnered fame throughout theatre history, its scope and measure pale by comparison to film and TV stars today. Whereas the likes of Edwin Forrest and the Lunts, for example, were celebrities in their respective chronological contexts, they simply did not attract the worldwide attention that today’s film and TV icons do. Thus, on-camera performance mediums in conjunction with mass media are the root and cause of an actor’s fame and celebrity formation. Being famous and being skilled in one’s artistic craft as an actor, however, are not necessarily inclusive considerations. It would seem rather easy to identify the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Cruise as celebrities, for example, but a different matter altogether to recognize them as trained actors. Like Hanks, neither attended drama school or received any formal education in acting. Instead, they had fortunate career “breaks” as young men and have since burnished their fame starring in blockbusters such as The Terminator and Mission Impossible —movies that could hardly be considered demonstrations of virtuosic acting, insofar as the material is largely driven by action-packed plotlines, special affects, and two-dimensional characterizations, thereby calling for a performance style that lends more to a personality type than a skilled artist. To borrow again from Debord, it is sheer spectacle. As such, a celebrity is needed to complete the branding and distributional appeal of the film. Of course there are film and television productions with gifted performers. Yet on-camera acting is decidedly different from the stage, where an actor must possess the physical, vocal, and emotional heft to render a performance with size and presence worthy of arresting the audience’s attention for lengthy periods of time. There are after all no second takes when acting onstage. On-camera performance, however, requires an authenticity that is not needed for the stage. The adage “the camera does not lie” is a truism in that film/TV acting is steeped in verisimilitude, whereas the stage actor renders a theatricalized illusion of reality. Acting for the camera and onstage are distinct practices that require separate and select skills. It is no different from distinguishing the qualifications between a musical theatre actor and one who specializes in Shakespeare, or, to reference another field altogether, it can be likened to the difference between a violinist and a trumpet player—both are musicians, but neither would be expected to handle the other’s instrument with the same skill as their primary métier. To be sure, I am not arguing that theatre acting is superior to on-camera performance, but rather, that it requires a specialized skillset that takes years of training and experience to master. The expectation that someone who has not been onstage for decades (as was the case with Hanks) can convincingly and compellingly render a major role seems remote. While a fine and accomplished film actor, Hanks was at best under-qualified to hold the stage for two hours, as noted by the New York Times’ Ben Brantley who meekly described his performance as “honorable.” [4] Celebrity can be understood in a number of ways. First, it is a social phenomenon in which the structures and institutions of a given culture are determining factors. For example, in Europe a football star like Luis Suarez is well known to the general public, given the continent’s passion for the sport, but in the US he is hardly a household name because we are comparably disinterested in professional soccer. On the other hand, some celebrities have a scope of recognition that is worldwide: Madonna, Muhammad Ali, and Barack Obama, to name a few. With respect to the latter, the symbiotic relationship of celebrity and fame comes into play, insofar as global leaders—for reasons that are both intended and not—receive media attention that provides them the same widespread idolatry (and criticism) as those in the more commonly celebretized spheres of sport and entertainment. The current phenomenon of Donald Trump’s pursuit of the US presidency supports this point in that he wields his celebrity to generate media attention and dominate his opponents: as the Wall Street Journal reports, Trump is “sucking the oxygen” out of the campaign. [5] Despite the fact that he has never held public office and refuses to offer a single policy plan of substance, as of this writing he continues to lead in every national and state poll. Thus, his celebrity and media coverage can be seen as the signature reason for his popularity among prospective Republican primary voters. The second distinguishing aspect of celebrity is what Robert van Krieken calls “the economics of attention,” or the ways in which the “intersection between culture and commerce” become endeavors of capital exchange. [6] The grist of this process is the invocation and distribution of a highly visible image that serves as a branding mechanism for the purpose of generating economic, cultural, political, and/or symbolic capital. Here too Trump provides an excellent example in that his brand, and by extension, the capital it garners on behalf of his campaign and the media outlets that cover him is significant. Likewise, an actor is valued for his brand as defined by fame and notoriety, characteristics that do not necessarily equate with his artistry. As this article endeavors to demonstrate, an actor’s status in the entertainment industry is commensurate with his prestige and sociopolitical status. [7] His worth to a given production often comes down to how much attention he can bring to it, a value that is determined symbolically. Therefore, celebrity can be understood as a form of symbolic capital that lends recognition, credit, and legitimacy to a project’s exchange value . Consequently, the “buzz” and “charisma” that a revered celebrity such as Hanks brings to a theatrical production has unmistakable economic implications. In addition to providing credibility to Ephron’s play, his status as a famous, Academy Award-winning star assured producers that Lucky Guy had a chance of being that rare Broadway drama that turns a profit. What does this dynamic mean for the US theatre, and more specifically, the aesthetic of American stage acting? To the extent that producers are intent on treating their production as a commercial endeavor, we will continue to see celebrities such as Hanks appearing in roles and contexts for which they are under-qualified. For all his remarkable accomplishments in film and television, Hanks is unproven and untrained as a stage actor. Casting him in a major part on Broadway, a venue that is itself considered the apotheosis of US theatre, sends a clear message that an actor is valued not so much for his craft, but rather, the attention that he can bring a project vis-à-vis his celebrity. The New York Times drama critic, Charles Isherwood, makes this very point in his article, “Stage Acting: It’s Nice Work if You Can Afford It”: Big movie and television stars are the mega-corporations of the acting profession, and they seem to be acquiring an increasing measure of the industry’s rewards, leaving less for the vast number of fameless actors…. If performers’ attractiveness and fame are what studios and even theaters want to buy and market, talent and experience naturally become commodities with lesser or no value.[8] The film and television industry has come to determine the casting practices of the US theatre. Though the example of Hanks pertains to Broadway, where Hollywood stars amass cultural capital by burnishing their resumes with stage credits, the US not-for-profit theatre is also prone to the commodified underpinnings of the celebrity society. In addition to landing the occasional household name to tread their boards, regional theatres from San Diego to Chicago consistently ape the production practices of the commercial theatre, as indicated by American Theatre magazine, which reports that thirteen of the fourteen “most-produced” plays appearing on US stages in 2013 were either done “On” or Off-Broadway. [9] US actors are incentivized to become celebrities, or at least to pursue work in the sectors of the profession that supplement the celebrity society: film and television. Indeed, having a stage career is generally unfeasible today. Whereas forty years ago an actor could work year-round as part of a resident company at a regional theatre, today he must look to film and television to make a living. [10] Unfortunately, the mid-1970s and early-1980s witnessed a downturn in the US economy and a generational change of artistic directors, inauspicious developments that caused regional theatres to disband their resident companies and cast on a show-by-show basis. This trend has persisted ever since. For example, the accomplished actor Jay O. Sanders claims that having a theatre career today is “totally impractical” and admits being forced to seek employment in the entertainment industry for his livelihood: My goal has been to make it work so I can do the great classics and new plays on stage. I’ve done over 100 films, but I don’t think of them as my career. I am forced to diversify my work to make the money to support what I love and am trained to do.[11] It is not only the remuneration of on-camera employment that benefits actors like Sanders, but the symbolic credibility that comes with working on a high profile project. The economics of attention could not be clearer. If an actor can appear with celebrities in major Hollywood films—a feat Sanders has repeatedly achieved—he advances his professional legitimacy, a crucial characteristic in winning future employment. This sociocultural paradigm has serious ramifications for acting as an art form and the ways in which it is perceived. The symbolic value of celebrity manifests through a spectator’s intangible connection to certain thoughts, affects, and most significantly, feelings that are caused by—yet otherwise divorced from—the object (person) being fetishized. The Western Marxist Theodor Adorno articulates this phenomenal exchange in describing the fetishization of music. He argues that singers or instrumentalists are valued not for their ability to express a given composition, but for the ways in which they are marketed publicly: “For all contemporary musical life is dominated by the commodity form; the last pre-capitalist residues have been eliminated.” [12] Adorno goes on to depict the “fetish character” of music as a schism between the musician and the listener, as identified by the artist’s detachment from the materials of his labor. He uses NBC’s radio broadcasts of the celebrity conductor Arturo Toscanini to exemplify how radio and television detach the artist from the musical composition. [13] Both the artist and listener measure the cultural product’s value by its symbolic worth, which in this instance pertains to Toscanini’s prestige. At no point in the production and reception of the NBC broadcast is there a tangible connection between Toscanini, his musicianship, and the listener/consumer. Instead, the dynamic of cultural production, distribution, and consumption is defined by the fetishization of Toscanini as “the world’s best composer,” thereby rendering both him and his work commodities that adhere to what Adorno terms the “culture industry.” [14] Adorno claims the fetishization of singers also occurs at the expense of their artistry: “Musical fetishism takes possession of the public valuation of singing voices.” [15] The singer’s technical virtuosity and craft is eclipsed once he is mediated as a marketable commodity whose image and music fit the formula for success, which, again, is synonymous with the singer’s exchange value, a criterion determined by his status as a celebrity. We can see this socially induced phenomenon in today’s pop artists in that their image operates as a material good for mass consumption at the expense of vocal technique or musicality. From Justin Bieber to Lady Gaga, celebrity singers seem more intent on creating and safeguarding their image than enhancing whatever musicianship they might have. Gaga’s formulaic music, for example, is accompanied by her outlandish costumes and highly contrived iconoclasm, a strategy that is clearly advancing her brand according to starcount.com, which anoints her the world’s most famous person. [16] A similar case could be made of her predecessor, Madonna, whose “success,” as pop culture scholar John Fiske asserts, was “due at least as much to her videos and her personality as her music.” [17] In tracing Madonna’s fame to her socially constructed image, Fiske reminds us that her first album, Madonna (1983), was initially a commercial failure and that it was not until she made the video “Lucky Star” that her career began to take off. [18] The basis for this breakthrough, he argues, was to use mass media to deploy mythical signifiers to evoke a sexually empowered figure towards rendering Madonna a pop icon for adolescent girls and gay men, both of whom comprised her fan base during much of the 1980s. As Lady Gaga would do years later, Madonna represented a “fine example of the capitalist pop industry at work” and established a singing career that had little to with “what she sounded like.” [19] As such, both would-be artists exemplify what Adorno refers to as “the star principle.” [20] Adorno’s contemporary and colleague, Walter Benjamin, explains how the mass production and distribution of cultural goods as images causes artists to be alienated from their audience. Echoing Adorno’s concern for the social role of art during a time of unprecedented advancements in technology, Benjamin uses the actor to differentiate what he terms “cult” and “exhibition” values relative to theatre and film. In the case of the former, he argues stage acting possesses an aura that must be experienced live between the actor and his audience. This exchange can be likened to Jerzy Grotowski’s theorization and practice of “Poor Theatre,” an aesthetic devoid of spectacle and marked by the direct, ephemeral, and “holy encounter” defining the actor/spectator relationship. [21] Contrarily, film acting represents exhibition value, which can be synonymously understood as exchange value deriving from the technological mediation of art into objects that are reproduced en masse . Thus, a film actor’s celebrity is directly proportionate to the distribution and consumption of his image. Benjamin depicts this dynamic as the spectator “identifying with the camera,” or more specifically the image emanating from it, thereby causing the same schism between an artwork and its beholder that Adorno describes in the commodification of music. [22] The irony to this phenomenon is when a celebrity does theatre. When an actor of Hanks’s stature appears onstage, it begs the question: is the audience responding to Hanks the celebrity or the character he is representing? Are they there to see Ephron’s play, or are they star-struck spectators arriving to see a celebrity in the flesh strut his stuff? While it would be impossible to exactly know what an audience’s collective intention is for seeing a given production, we can apply what the philosopher/psychiatrist collaborators Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari term the philosophy of desire to analyze the consciousness of said audience in the context of the celebrity society. Some psychiatrists and social scientists suggest that the phenomenon of fandom is para-social in that a beholder forms a fictional bond with a celebrity. This connection exists in degrees ranging from causal followers to an obsessed worshiper. In both instances, an individual idolizes celebrities according to how his/her “consciousness is structured and organized in a particular way.” [23] These points of connection can pertain to a range of self-identifying characteristics, such as gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and personal ideals. One’s sense of self and belonging in the world are reinforced through an imagined relationship with a complete stranger. Thus, the production and distribution of celebrities through and within the various media constituting the entertainment industry can be seen as a grand marketing ploy intended to appeal to intended audiences. This practice is obvious in advertising campaigns, for example, where celebrity endorsements are made according to the buyer being targeted. The commercial theatre operates this way too, which explains why actors are cast in leading roles not because they are experienced stage performers but rather, because they have the star power, the symbolic capital, to appeal to a certain consumer base. Indeed, America’s crème de le crème of theatre, Broadway, has been deploying this strategy for decades: Madonna’s appearance in David Mamet’s Speed the Plow had teens flocking to the theatres in 1988, just as Sean P. Diddy Combs and Daniel Radcliffe would respectively do on behalf of A Raisin in the Sun (2004) and Equus (2007). Though the celebrification process exists in part at the level of the individual fan, it must be seen as a social phenomenon to understand its role in the commodification of US theatre and acting. As such, desire plays a significant role in the formation and sustaining of a given celebrity and how he can be utilized to market a theatrical production. At the core of classical theories of psychiatry is the concept of desire as per the parental/child relationship that then gets transferred onto another individual, usually a romantic partner. When considering this paradigm in the social sphere, desire must be seen as an abstraction, which in the context of capitalism means commodities, be they material possessions or symbols; the latter of course could be conceived as a celebrity. In this way desire is understood as the social unconscious constructing and conditioning consciousness vis-à-vis an imagined relationship with a famous person. This relationship varies according to the degree of emotional investment on the part of any given beholder, yet even for the more casual fan some form of socially induced phenomenon is at stake. Nothing is formed exclusively at the personal level. Raymond Williams refers to such a process as structures of feeling where “there is frequent tension between the received interpretation [a beholder’s fantasy] and practical experience,” otherwise understood as reality. [24] His theory suggests a social experience like an art movement or the idolization of an individual that takes on an unconscious presence within a certain cultural context, within which an individual’s perceptions of an object and/or experience becomes subsumed by the collective, thereby creating a “structure of feeling” that has significant implications along social lines. In the case of celebrities, dominant forms of social understanding jointly create and potentially sustain a person’s fame. The construction of Tom Hanks as a cultural icon proves as much. Since Hanks began amassing symbolic value for his cinematic achievements, especially dating back to his Academy Award winning work in Forrest Gump (1994), his prestige has continued to grow in US popular culture. His numerous starring roles in Hollywood blockbusters, his work as a producer of films and television programs, and as mentioned at the outset of the article, his debut on Broadway in a work penned by an unproven playwright—a project that would never have been produced had it not been for Hanks and his symbolic capital—all demonstrate the process and ramifications of celebrity formation. Desire is at the heart of the social unconscious and can be seen as the primary source of celebrity formation. As such, it can be likened to Adorno’s critique of the fetishization of cultural goods in that society at large succumbs to the trappings of the culture industry in ways that remain largely undetectable. Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of desire can further illuminate the formation and function of celebrity. Though their overarching argument is to locate desire as a catalyst for political revolution, their paradigm can also apply to the social unconscious’s role in the celebrification process. Deleuze and Guattari argue that human desire exists at the level of the unconscious and is the catalyst for production in a capitalist society. Claiming that desire is constantly “striving [to] become more” by “becoming other [or] different,” they define it as a “force composed” of abstract machines that become manifest in an individual’s conscious and unconscious perception of social codes operating at the level of his thoughts, emotions, and corporeal experience. [25] The abstract machine, or force, functions as a sociocultural phenomenon dictating the course and content of material production, within which the psychological and the social are closely linked. The process of celebrification mobilizes a collective desire towards commodifying a given object for consumption: the star. Unlike standard material goods, however, the celebrity’s value to a consumer is intangible. Whereas one could purchase a stylish article of clothing or a fancy car to satisfy one’s consumer needs, purchasing a ticket to see a celebrity in a Broadway show provides the buyer the ontological experience he seeks: seeing a famous person in the flesh. To crudely borrow from Shakespeare, “the play is [NOT] the thing,” but rather, being in close proximity to the object of desire, the celebrity, is what prevails. [26] Driven by the social unconscious, the doting patron buys his ticket to have an experience that he desires to be as “real” as it is unique. However, these characteristics in the context of performance are antithetical and merely a psychological ruse existing at the social level. Adorno’s schematization of mass culture makes this case in stating that the “difference between culture and practical life disappear.” [27] The beauty of an aesthetic given to the realm of the imagination and uniqueness regresses to what Adorno terms “empirical reality,” a pedestrian experience defined by “doing what everyone else does.” [28] In fact, there is nothing unique whatsoever about seeing a celebrity up close in a performance; quite the contrary, it is merely a socially induced product of mass culture masquerading as something special. Adorno addresses the issue of an artwork’s uniqueness relative to “empirical reality” by referring to the “spiritual essence” of the former, and can therein apply to stage acting and theatre. [29] Comparing aesthetic beauty to a fireworks display, he depicts art as a transcendent experience that can be identified as an “apparition.” [30] The apparition implies a spirituality that causes a phenomenological effect that is evanescent—evanescence reconceived as “liveness” is of course a distinguishing characteristic of theatre. Ultimately, Adorno does not use the term “spirit” in an ethereal manner, but addresses it relative to an artwork’s form. In arguing that “the spirit of artworks is bound up with their form,” he defines it as a sensual affect that is the product of a given piece’s constituent elements. [31] Contrary to supernatural associations with the term, Adorno describes spirit as an artwork’s “vital” and “substantial” essence, and not “a thin abstract layer hovering above” the selfsame work. [32] It is affective, if phenomenal, and the result of a process that can be objectively measured. Identifying art as jointly spiritual and tangible, Adorno dialectically analyzes the dynamic between a work’s phenomenal affect and its material form, which he terms its “thing-like” dimensions; in the case of the stage actor this would be the expressivity of his body, voice, emotions, and imagination. [33] The work’s spirit is thus generated by the artwork’s material form for the purpose of transcending that very form. While the artwork’s spirit is its defining attribute, it is created through a process that is contingent on the work’s constitutive elements, such as the dialectical connection between the sounds of a sonata relative to its paginal composition, or actors mediating a scripted drama into a character. It is near impossible, however, for a celebrity to achieve spiritualization in a theatrical performance. No matter how skilled he might be, the celebrity actor’s fame ultimately becomes his undoing in that the audience is likelier to be conscious of his personality at the expense of the character he portrays. In fact, there are some celebrities who have been trained for the stage and are quite gifted as such—Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman, to name a few. Indeed, these three actors were the headliners for the New York Shakespeare Festival’s critically acclaimed production of The Seagull in 2001. Nonetheless, their familiarity to the average audience member compromised the significant criterion of losing themselves in the role, a point the headline of the New York Times review inadvertently underscored: “Streep meets Chekhov, Up in Central Park.” [34] The issue is not Ben Brantley’s praise for these three actors, which was consistent with nearly every critical account of their performances, but that their familiarity to the average spectator superseded the characters they played, and as Michael Quinn’s semiotic analysis of celebrity actors suggests: “exceeded the needs of the fiction [by] keeping them from disappearing entirely into the acting figure of the drama.” [35] Writing in 1990, Quinn’s prescient observation has never been more fully realized in US theatre. Today’s audiences are distracted by their preconceived perceptions of a celebrity’s personal life and/or former projects to the point of not being capable of “accepting” his performance at face value. [36] Moreover, this subliminal ghosting of a given performance is abetted by a show’s branding, as producers attempt to capitalize on the name recognition of their star performer(s). Unfortunately, the actor’s actual work gets lost in the exchange. The presence of the celebrity actor therefore has a potentially regressive effect on the theatrical production. To the extent that the performer takes attention away from the production, he can be seen as little more than a distraction, the source of which, again, comes from the social unconscious desire to be in the presence of someone famous. While it is altogether possible that some audience members can overlook these types of distractions, most cannot, as Ben Brantley suggests in his review of Julia Roberts in David Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain (2006): The startling conclusion of most of the critics seems to be that the Oscar-winning actress who can command $20 million for a role in Hollywood actually cannot act very well at all. At least, not when her audience is a flesh-and-bone one, rather than a sympathetic lens.[37] Brantley tellingly summarizes how Roberts’s celebrity dominated the production at the expense of Greenberg’s play: One of the three stars of the Broadway revival of Three Days of Rain, which opened last night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, is Julia Roberts, who is making her big-time theatrical debut…. There is no way that this show is not going to be all about Julia…. Ms. Roberts is the sole reason this limited-run revival has become the most coveted ticket in town.[38] The source of the theatrical production, Three Days of Rain , is overcome by the forces of socially manifested desire in which the material good, seeing Roberts perform live, becomes the selling point. While one might argue that casting Roberts has the benefit of widening the audience to include those who would not otherwise go to the theatre, her appearance onstage has reductive implications for US acting, and moreover, the role of art in society. The desire undergirding our social unconscious gives rise to the spectacle of celebrity, thereby causing society to consume a person’s image en masse at the expense of the actress’s work and the play in which she appears. The allure of Roberts in affect displaces her acting, and moreover, redefines the theatrical experience in her image. The irony of course is unmistakable in that Roberts’s fame negates any chance the audience will be capable of encountering her performance in the context of Three Days of Rain . Guy Debord argues that technologically generated spectacle formulates the phenomenon of celebrity. Similar to Benjamin’s description of an artwork’s “exhibition value,” Debord posits spectacles—and the images that constitute them—as “signs of the ruling production” that signify how people should live their lives. [39] Adorno makes a similar case in discussing the harmful effects of film and television, insofar as both mediums uphold potentially damaging and “nefarious” social stereotypes by evoking a “pseudo-reality” at the expense of a dialectical analysis of society, or put more simply, film and television tend to privilege conformity and discourage critical analysis. [40] The on-camera actor therefore feeds into a system of signs that simultaneously shapes and reinforces the “banal” status quo by offering cultural consumers “pseudo-enjoyment.” [41] Celebrity performers are particularly influential in this process, as Debord notes: The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Being a star means specializing in the seemingly lived; the star is the object of identification[42] Celebrity actors are therefore dominated by and contribute to society’s commodification of cultural goods, in which artistry loses its uniqueness and “everything” becomes “mediated by images” that separate people from themselves and others in favor of conforming to the capitalist social order. [43] Debord identifies the regression of fetishizing artistic goods for mass consumption, thereby reducing them to commodities that displace tangible human interaction. [44] The social unconscious is very much at play in this dynamic, as people unwittingly are led by desire in responding to technologically generated images and thus “the commodity attains the total occupation of social life.” [45] The acquisition of commodities relies on a process of “spectacular representation” that is marked by the peddling of sameness under the guise of autonomy, as the hocking of reproductions—such as an actor’s image—masquerades as “the real thing.” [46] The culture industry is at the center of this process, which in the case of acting can best be seen in the trappings of Hollywood, thereby causing what Adorno terms the “deaestheticization of art.” [47] The spectacular grip of celebrity on the American theatre persists. Every production of the 2013/14 Broadway season had at least one famous person among its ranks, a fact underscored by the commensurate Tony Awards telecast, when celebrities such as Samuel L. Jackson and Lucy Liu presented honors to the likes of Bryan Cranston (HBO’s Breaking Bad ) and Neil Patrick Harris ( How I Met Your Mother ). Guest appearances by Sting and Jennifer Hudson further demonstrated this practice. In Hudson’s case, she was pitching a song from the musical version of the hit film Finding Neverland , which was playing at the American Repertory Theatre at the time and later opened on Broadway that ensuing fall. It is ironic, however, that Hudson was hired solely for the Tony telecast and was never in the production. Other Hollywood stars that graced Broadway stages that season included Glenn Close ( A Delicate Balance ), Bradley Cooper ( The Elephant Man ), and Hugh Jackman ( The River ). Trying to bank on the symbolic capital of Hollywood, the Tony Awards telecast also featured Kevin Bacon, Rosie O’Donnell, Tina Fey, and Ethan Hawke, among numerous others. Perhaps the most incongruous star to appear was the iconic Clint Eastwood, who was so out of sorts that he butchered the name of the venerable stage director Darko Tresnjak and mistook the final titular word in the drama The Cripple of Innishman for “Irishman.” Two rather perplexing errors, given that Eastwood had the seemingly simple charge of merely reading the teleprompter and contents of the winning envelope, a two-minute action that a little bit of rehearsal could have adequately prepared him to execute. Unfortunately, the show was live and he had no chance to cut his flawed performance in favor of a second take. Perhaps the larger question is: Why was Eastwood presenting in the first place? He is not a theatre professional, a fact made all the more apparent by his bungled presentation. During the same telecast Rosie O’Donnell recalled her youth to describe how she first fell in love with theatre: “Hollywood was vague and an illusion, but Broadway was real.” Her privileging of “reality” can be read with unintended irony in that the illusory and imaginative essence of theatre, especially as it pertains to the work of actors, is often displaced by the spectacle of celebrity; theatre’s embracement of reality is—to borrow from Adorno—of the empirical or pedestrian variety, thereby discounting any chance to achieve a product steeped in wonder, spirit, and shared celebration. The unconscious desire of theatregoers—a drive that is socially induced—is projected onto the figure of the celebrity, whose presence therein is filtered through her image, which has been produced, distributed and consumed through the mass media. The object of desire is therefore not the play, its actors, or the theatrical event, but the star performer and her symbolic worth to an audience of doting fans. It is a phenomenon owed to the fetishized forces of capitalism and has precious little to with stage acting or the aesthetic of theatre. References [1] Adam Hetrick, “Nora Ephron’s Lucky Guy , Starring Tom Hanks, Ends Broadway Run, July 3 rd ,” Playbill.com , http://www.playbill.com/news/article/179720-Nora-Ephrons-Lucky-Guy-Starring-Tom-Hanks-Ends-Broadway-Run-July-3 (accessed 15 January 2014). [2] Guy DeBord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, MI: Black and Red, 1983), sec. 42. [3] For more on the cultural consumption of celebrities, see Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, Starstruck: the Business of Celebrity (New York: Faber and Faber, 2010); and Daniel Herwitz, The Star as Icon: Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). [4] Ben Brantley, “Old-School Newsman, After Deadline: Tom Hanks in ‘Lucky Guy’ at the Broadhurst Theatre,” New York Times , 1 April 2013. [5] Ben Zimmer, “‘Oxygen Out of the Room’: From Clever Cause to Cliché,” The Wall Street Journal , 31 July 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/oxygen-out-of-the-room-from-clever-clause-to-cliche-1438366552 (accessed 4 January 2016). [6] Robert van Krieken, Celebrity Society (New York: Routledge, 2012), 53. [7] For a useful analysis of the role of symbolic capital in determining the value of cultural goods, see Pierre Bourdieu, “The Market of Symbolic Goods,” in The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 112-41. [8] Charles Isherwood, “Stage Acting: It’s Nice Work If You Can Afford It,” New York Times , 15 January 2006. [9] “Season Preview,” American Theatre , October 2013. [10] Steven DiPaola, “The 2012-2013 Theatrical Season Report,” Equity News (December 2013). [11] Jay O. Sanders, interview with author, 31 August 2013. Sanders received his training from the professional acting program at the State University of New York at Purchase during the 1970s. [12] Theodor Adorno, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (New York: Routledge, 1991): 37-38. Also, see Marx, Capital , vol. 1, chap. 1, sec. 4, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.” [13] Ibid., 35. [14] Ibid. [15] Ibid. , 36. [16] According to starcount.com, a site that uses Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube to measure a celebrity’s popularity, Lady Gaga has over 30 million fans. This site identifies her as the most popular individual in the US. http://www.starcount.com/all-platforms/Worldwide/Musician (accessed 12 July 2015). [17] John Fiske, “Madonna,” in Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies , ed. James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein (New York: Routledge, 2001), 246. [18] Ibid. [19] Ibid., 246-47. [20] Adorno, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” 35. [21] Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (New York: Routledge, 2002), 55-60. [22] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Shocken Books, 1978), 220. [23] van Krieken, Celebrity Society, 73. [24] Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 130-31. [25] Phillip Goodchild, Delueze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire (London: SAGE Publications, 1996), 44-45. [26] Hamlet, ed., Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (New York: Arden Shakespeare, 2014), 2.2.566. Reference is to act, scene, and line. [27] Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” in The Culture Industry , 61. [28] Ibid. [29] Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 78-94. [30] Ibid., 85. [31] Ibid., 89. [32] Ibid., 88-90. [33] Ibid., 86-87. [34] Ben Brantley, “Streep Meets Chekhov, Up in Central Park,” New York Times , 13 August 2001. [35] Michael Quinn, “Celebrity and the Semiotics of Acting,” New Theatre Quarterly 6, no. 22 (May 1990): 154. [36] Ibid, 155. [37] Quoted in David Usborne, “Critics Rain Insults on Julia Roberts’s Broadway Debut,” The Independent , 22 April 2006 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/critics-rain-insults-on-julia-roberts-broadway-debut-475125.html (accessed 15 July 2015). [38] Ben Brantley, “Enough Said About ‘Three Days of Rain.’ Let’s Talk About Julia Roberts!” New York Times , 20 April 2006, http://theater.nytimes.com/2006/04/20/theater/reviews/20rain.html (accessed 28 March 2011). [39] Debord, Society of the Spectacle , sec. 7. [40] Theodor Adorno, “How to Look at Television,” in The Culture Industry , ed. J.M. Bernstein (New York: Routledge, 1991), 158, 171. [41] Debord, Society of the Spectacle , sec. 59. [42] Ibid., sec. 60. [43] Ibid., secs. 1, 4. [44] Ibid., sec. 36. [45] Ibid., sec. 42. [46] Ibid., sec. 60. [47] Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , 16. Footnotes About The Author(s) Dr. Peter Zazzali is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University of Kansas. A specialist in actor training and the sociology of theatre, his work has appeared in Theatre Topics , PAJ , and The European Legacy , among other peer-reviewed journals. In April of 2016, Routledge will release his book: Acting in the Academy: The History of Professional Actor Training in US Higher Education . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Comment New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Musical Theatre Studies “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 Performing Anti-slavery American Tragedian Murder Most Queer The Captive Stage Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Josep M. Benet i Jornet, Marion Peter Holt | A collection of two plays by Catalan playwright Josep M. Benet i Jornet. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Two Plays: Fleeting Stages Josep M. Benet i Jornet, Marion Peter Holt Download PDF Translated by Marion Peter Holt Josep M. Benet i Jornet, born in Barcelona, is the author of more than forty works for the stage and has been a leading contributor to the striking revitalization of Catalan theatre in the post-Franco era. Fleeting, a compelling “tragedy-within-a-play”, and Stages, with its monological recall of a dead and unseen protagonist, rank among his most important plays. They provide an introduction to a playwright whose inventive experiments in dramatic form and treatment of provocative themes have made him a major figure in contemporary European theatre. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Heather S. Nathans Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Heather S. Nathans By Published on May 12, 2021 Download Article as PDF During the fall of 2020 I had the privilege of interviewing a group of groundbreaking scholars in Black Theatre: Harry Elam, Jr., E. Patrick Johnson, David Krasner, Bernth Lindfors, Sandra Richards, Sandra Shannon, and Harvey Young . Asking each of these distinguished colleagues the same four questions, I invited them to share their insights into the current state of the field, describe important milestones they have marked, and suggest those that have yet to be documented. What a gift it was to spend time with these generous colleagues and to hear their perspectives on the state of Black Theatre and Performance. The essay below represents a synthesis of roughly eight hours of live interviews as well as written responses to my questions. Additionally, in some instances, the interviewees mentioned works by rising generations of scholars and I reached out to those colleagues for their thoughts. I have included the comments of those who were able to respond in a concluding section entitled “Afterviews,” featuring Julius Fleming, La Donna Forsgren, Donatella Galella, Douglas A. Jones, Jr. , and Adrienne C. Macki. Certain themes echo throughout the comments below: The need to embrace Black Theatre as a site of both joy and resistance; the need to explore and document uncharted histories that lie outside traditional definitions or sites of “theatre,” and the opportunities to create more intersectional narratives of Black theatremakers. I offer my thanks to everyone involved for making the time to share their insights and for laying out a number of pathways and challenges for students and scholars studying Black Theatre’s past, present, and future. What critical junctures in the field of Black Theatre have yet to be marked? David Krasner began with a call to expand and complicate the Black Theatre canon by delving back into the archives for long-forgotten or lost works: “Scholars need to consider what they do with the scripts that never received production—for example, the Black radical left works of the 1930s that often got buried or went unperformed due to political pressure.” Krasner cited earlier manuscript versions of Theodore Ward’s The Big White Fog or of Langston Hughes’s Mulatto that reveal the extent to which authors had to compromise their original visions. He asks, “What might an exploration of these texts reveal about the ongoing political discourses of this formative era in Black theatre and performance? Artists of the 1960s often critiqued what they imagined as the timidity of earlier generations, without grasping the levels of censorship those earlier playwrights faced on a daily basis.” He also pointed researchers towards Bert Williams and George Walker’s unproduced play, Just Like White Folks , which they could never get produced. Krasner describes Black artists walking, “a razor’s edge of how far you can push things – what you can say and what you can’t.” He invites scholars to explore, “what did artists want to say and how did they get their messages across despite the restrictions they faced?” As he notes, “Errol Hill and Jim Hatch really set the trend of exploring what performers had to do to get audiences and how they worked the system.” Bernth Lindfors emphasized the new directions that the field of Black Theatre Studies has taken since he first began his research into nineteenth-century Black star Ira Aldridge many years ago. Lindfors honors Errol Hill’s emphasis on the experience of Black actors beyond the US. He hails it as “essential in imagining the impact of Black performance outside the minstrel traditions and legal restrictions that hampered its growth in the US throughout the nineteenth century. Yet Aldridge continues to dominate the scholarly imagination, and in many ways, valorizes the narrative of exceptionalism so often attached to Black performers.” Just as Krasner urges research into less-familiar texts, Lindfors encourages scholars to explore the stories of lesser-known Black artists (as he has done in his most recent study, The Theatrical Career of Samuel Morgan Smith ), declaring, “Populating the history of Black theatre with their stories not only reveals the number of Black artists who managed to establish successful careers in a white-dominated industry. It can reveal patterns of collaboration and legacies of interracial performance traditions as well.” E. Patrick Johnson laughingly notes that he gives the “answer people would expect” about the critical junctures still to be marked in the field: the influence of LGBTQIA+ artists in Black theatre, as well as the impact of Black women and feminist interventions in Black theatre history. And, he adds, “Black queer theatre history has yet to be told in its fullness,” underscoring the importance of recognizing artists who either self-identified as queer or who likely were (such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston). Johnson pays tribute to the “plethora of Black queer artists producing work during the 1980s that we lost to AIDS, including Marlon Riggs, or the artists whose work explicitly explored the Black queer experience of that time, including the Pomo Afro Homos theatre troupe (1990-1995).” He also notes that Lorraine Hansberry’s queer identity had only been “celebrated very recently.” Sandra Shannon suggests that scholars of Black theatre are beginning to see the fruits of decades of labor and documentation, but that, “the inflection point we see at the moment – with the combination of the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, the murder of so many Black Americans, will inevitably transform our future scholarship on Black theatre in ways we can’t even begin to imagine.” She adds that, “the moment we’re in has put race relations front and center and has dispelled any illusions about what Obama’s election accomplished.” She stresses the need to see the “big picture” on confronting systemic racism through Black theatre. Shannon wryly acknowledges the irony that, “Black artists have always used moments like this to create revolutions,” suggesting that “We may even see the creation of a new cycle series,” (referencing August Wilson’s 10-play history of Black America). Sandra Richards invites scholars of Black Theatre in the Americas to rethink their chronologies, asking, “Where do we start? With Yoruba traditions? With the Middle Passage, to put it on the slave ship as various African aesthetics merged into new genres, all marked by trauma?” Richards asks, “where do we learn what Black is?” She looks to colleagues like Kathy Perkins who have helped to make visible the histories of production at HBCUs, or institutions like the University of Iowa, that contributed to the training of Black theatre artists (particularly designers, who are so often overlooked in chronicles of Black theatre history). Richards reminds contemporary Black artists and scholars that they, “may be following in someone’s footsteps and not realize it,” simply because that history remains undocumented. For her, that lack of historical context robs contemporary scholars and artists of a crucial sense of heritage—of a “family tree” that confers an important sense of belonging . Harry Elam, Jr. ’s comments echo Richards’s call to remember the “family tree,” as he observes, “Are we in a critical juncture now ? There is a tendency to focus on the contemporary in Black Theatre, rather than looking back . We have to mark our history.” Elam points to the rise of “neo-slave plays,” including those by Suzan-Lori Parks, Brandon Jacobs Jenkins, and Jeremy O. Harris, and the ways in which they, “look back at history as a way to reckon with it.” He ponders what scholars might take away from this irreverent approach to playing with history. Like Shannon, Elam also questions how the pandemic crisis will impact opportunities for new Black playwrights to make their mark, asking, “How will rising authors get seen” when theatre makers often privilege the more familiar and established Black writers? Harvey Young argues, “More attention could and should be paid to intersectionality, specifically Blackness and latinidad as well as Blackness and transgender identity. Although there have been important early studies in performance studies and communication studies—such as E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón Rivera-Servera’s terrific edited collection Blacktino Queer Performance and C. Riley Snorton’s stellar monograph Black on Both Sides , there needs to be more scholarship in those disciplines and also an equivalent set of smart, sophisticated writings that specifically center theatre. Furthermore, gender and sexuality, when indexed by race, should not be assumed (as topics) to exist primarily in the disciplines of performance studies or American Studies.” Young notes that, “It is difficult to conceive of latinidad without Blackness or African diasporic presence. This is increasingly apparent in the writings of mainstream authors (such as Junot Diaz). We need to more fully interrogate how and why scholarship on latinidad sometimes seems to deliberately erase or render invisible Blackness even as it offers nuanced, sophisticated ways of considering performances of whiteness and/or indigeneity. Certainly, the similarities of Blackness and Brownness is hinted at in Jose Esteban Munoz’s posthumously published Sense of Brown —in which Munoz (thanks to the keen editorial work of Joshua Chambers Letson and Tavia Nyong’o) links the affective resonance of being and feeling Black and Brown. Blackness and Brownness influence and build upon one another. It might be helpful to think of Blackness and Brownness as twins, perhaps fraternal, which influence and inspire one another with shared roots (and occasionally overlapping diasporic routes). Of course, there are myriad examples in which Blackness is Brownness, co-existing and overlapping within the same body.” How might we document the ways that Black theatre scholars and artists are remapping the field? How have you experienced shifts in the profession? Krasner highlights efforts to shift scholarly attention away from, “familiar urban centers towards less familiar regions such as St. Louis or Seattle that provided homes to active Black theatre artists and companies. By focusing on the performers, designers, dancers, and crew who made those regional theatres possible, contemporary researchers can illuminate rich histories that lie beyond the familiar Broadway-oriented narratives.” As he observes, “There are pockets of local Black theatre history that reveal wonderful acts of resistance and wonderful work.” Lindfors echoes Krasner’s suggestion to look beyond the familiar US circuits, but he directs attention, “beyond the borders of North America to a focus on Black mobility as a productive line of inquiry.” He points to recent studies such as Bill Egan’s African American Entertainers in Australia and New Zealand and Kathleen Chater’s Henry Box Brown: From Slavery to Show Business that looks at the experience of a Black American entertainer in Victorian England. In addition to telling the histories of Black artists in cities beyond familiar urban theatre centers, Johnson argues that, “there is so much Black theatre happening in informal spaces, not on formal stages,” and he highlights the recent scholarship of Koritha Mitchell and Julius Fleming that invites readers to frame alternate spaces for Black theatre. Richards sees Black Theatre becoming, “more inclusive as queer studies and explorations of trans and non-binary identities” intersect with current scholarship. She points to the work of E. Patrick Johnson and a generation of rising scholars who have expanded the parameters of Black theatre studies. She also stresses the expansion of research around Afro-Latinx intersections, Diasporic Studies, and Gender Studies, and their exciting potential to shape future research in the field of Black Theatre. Musing on the terminology that will emerge to define the new directions in the field, she queries, “ Is diaspora the correct term for a new generation?” Shannon points to the work of scholars like Harvey Young, Tavia Nyong’o, Jonathan Shandell, Donatella Galella, Douglas A. Jones, Jr., Koritha Mitchell, La Donna Forsgren, Nicole Hodges Persley, Sandra Mayo, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Adrienne Macki, and Brandi Catanese as part of a critical reimagining of Black theatre history, illuminating the milieu and context of Black dramas. Shannon sees these scholars delving into the histories of the communities that inspire Black theatre and how theatre in turn serves and supports these communities, “these scholars are taking the primacy off the stage and focusing on theatre as an ecosystem.” Like Krasner and Johnson, Shannon also points to the need to document theatre work being done at all levels in the Black community. With the passion that marks her Wilson scholarship, she exclaims, “I want to understand it all!” Like Shannon, Elam salutes Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., Harvey Young, and other Black Theatre scholars, “who are changing what we look at.” He also praised editors such as LeAnn Fields of the University of Michigan Press for making books on Black Theatre Studies visible across the profession, and credits Fields, along with Colbert, Young, and others with expanding definitions of Black Theatre beyond the stage to encompass broader definitions of performance. Elam notes particularly the need to look at failures as well as successes in telling the histories of Black Theatre: “Think about things that didn’t work. What reverberations did they create? When we don’t look at failures, we erase histories and we erase legacies of repetition and cycles of learning. Don’t imagine these things never happened. Tell their stories.” As Elam argues, scholars can look at histories of failed attempts to understand how Black Theatre emerged in its present forms. Young points to the opportunities offered by new technologies to document Black Theatre histories: “What is needed is a digital mapping project to better identify and chart the nodal networks of influence and inspiration to reveal how structures (archives, institutes, centers, funding initiatives) have been created to preserve the history and bolster the future possibilities of Black performance.” He adds that achieving a critical mass will prove as important as any new technologies: “A small number of people in the academy research and work specifically in Black theatre. This paucity means that single individuals build entire branches, whole genres, of study. While it is a testament to their rigor that a handful of names have become synonymous with the objects of their study (Sandra G. Shannon’s work on August Wilson’s dramaturgy is a clear example), it is important for collectives to form to engage future researchers in an effort to further these explorations (the August Wilson Society, co-founded by Professor Shannon is a prime example). Each one, Bring one. The work that Monica White Ndounou has done with her Craft Institute, in partnership with Dartmouth College, has helped to brings artists and scholars into conversation with the aim of impacting professional theatre and the academy. It is meaningful that Brandi Wilkins Catanese and thereafter La Donna Forsgren, as editors of Theatre Survey , will frame the conversations on theatre studies through the year 2024.” What and whose legacies have we begun to recognize and where does vital work remain to be done? Like Johnson, Krasner emphasizes the opportunity for researchers to explore and elevate “community” theatre histories in reclaiming legacies of Black theatre and performance. Asking how scholars can uncover the “invisible traditions people come from,” he described not only the community-based performance histories, “but early traveling circuits, Black gay cabarets, and the lives of those artists who had to stay invisible in order to stay safe.” As he argues, “You have to piece the stories together and use your imagination to think about what they went through.” He adds that historians need to, “think about where they see themselves in the story.” Johnson asks, “How do we document informal spaces where Black performance happens?” For Johnson, oral histories, rudimentary recordings, playbills, photos can start to fill in histories, but for pieces created in “non-traditional” spaces, documentation remains a significant issue. Johnson salutes contemporary social media for, “supporting documentation and distribution,” yet he expressed a significant concern about the urgent need to create an archive (and he is part of a Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Grant to develop a Black Arts Archives). For Johnson, “If the works are not documented, how do we provide evidence they occurred?” Lindfors invites scholars to “trace the histories of artists such as Dusé Mohamed Ali, editor of The African Times and Orient Review and The Comet , as well as an actor, playwright, activist, and theatre critic (who once interviewed Oscar Wilde). While much has been written about Ali in the context of literary and political histories, few have focused on his contributions to African theatre. What might a study of Ali’s theatre career reveal about the development of British Black Theatre history and historiography?” Shannon ’s role as President of the August Wilson Society offers her unique insights into the curation of Black theatre histories. She hopes to continue to document the impact of the “Wilsonian Warriors” – the artists, directors, designers, and other theatre-makers whose collaborations with Wilson continue to ripple across the field and to inspire rising generations. Richards recalls her own start in the field of Black Theatre when she had to seek out colleagues like Margaret Wilkerson after graduate school because neither her undergraduate nor her graduate program offered courses in Black or African American theatre and there was “no one else” to offer her guidance. She marks the shift in the profession that has brought Black Theatre into a sharper focus alongside Performance Studies in ways that have, “created more breathing space and more intellectual opportunities.” She also hails, “the push towards Black Theatre of the Americas ,” that she sees emerging across the field. She named colleagues including Douglas A. Jones Jr., La Donna Forsgren, and Koritha Mitchell among those doing exciting work to push the field into new conversations. Young points to developing areas in Black Theatre scholarship, “There has been a considerable effort over the past two decades to spotlight and recognize the work of Black women theatre makers. We are all indebted to the editorial work (as well as to the professional practice) of Kathy Perkins, whose anthologies have made it easier to access the writings of Black women dramatists. Koritha Mitchell’s spotlighting of women writers will inspire a new generation of researchers to consider Black women’s theatrical and performance literature. In addition, recent explorations into the life and theatre of Lorraine Hansberry, by Soyica Diggs Colbert and Imani Perry, are cementing Hansberry’s place within the canon of internationally significant playwrights.” However, he adds, “there is much to be done with regard to exploring Blackness within national theatre cultures. Significant research needs to be done on Black Canadian theatre. The critical study of performance by underrepresented groups (with the possible exception of First Nations theatre) in Canada remains at a nascent stage. Maureen Moynagh’s important edited collection, African-Canadian Theatre , helpfully charts the landscape. There is an emerging body of critical scholarship on contemporary Black British theatre but the volume of work does not compare with that centering African American theatre. However, Lynette Goddard has been an enviably effective champion of this necessary work and alongside other scholars, such as Deidre Osbourne and Mary F. Brewer, has created an impressively substantial critical core. In addition to continued exploration of the Caribbean influence inherent in the works of Lloyd Richards, Trey Anthony, and Winsome Pinnock among others, it is helpful to spotlight the ongoing theatre in the Caribbean, including but not limited to Jamaica.” Have you uncovered a milestone from the past whose impact scholars have yet to realize? In thinking about milestones, legacies, and the call to think about where he sees himself in the stories he explores, Krasner acknowledges his privilege in being a “Jewish boy from Brooklyn,” who feels the responsibility to bear witness to the racism he saw growing up and that he sees around him still. He argues that “scholars can connect to those who can no longer speak for themselves,” and they can honor the artists, “who refused to run away” from overwhelming racism and discrimination. Citing Ada Overton Walker, Krasner hails her bravery: “How good, how brave, how savvy, and how determined she must have been to succeed.” As he contends, “Performance can find the cracks in the walls. You can burn a manuscript, but performance finds a way.” Lindfors describes the moments that Errol Hill reached out to him with encouragement to keep going in his quest to document Ira Aldridge’s career. He mentioned one moment in particular when Errol was terribly ill, yet took the time to reach out and inspire him. He asks, “How can we offer the same generosity, support, and validation to the scholars of today? And can we bear in mind how meaningful it is to have our scholarly ‘heroes’ recognize our work?” Elam echoes Lindfors’s gratitude to the researchers and artists who paved the way for contemporary scholars, including Errol Hill (whom he described as an inspirational “model of rigor”). Hill was renowned as both a scholar and an artist, enjoying a career as a playwright, performer, and director, and Elam recognizes the importance of “ making theatre as well as studying it.” He asks, “Are we creating opportunities for these rising scholars to do work in labs that will help them understand their subjects in new ways?” He stresses the vital relationship of theory to practice as critical in thinking about and with Black Theatre. Elam also envisions a field which honors its past and nurtures its future – underscoring the importance of making those support networks visible so that new generations of scholars never feel isolated. Johnson salutes another group of “heroes,” shifting his lens towards the “unsung heroes in the curation of Black performance who were critical to making sure that the history of Black Theatre happens .” He also looks ahead to the “next frontier” in Black theatre – exploring the impact of sexuality gender and mapping the “whole genealogy of Black theatre made possible by artists like George C. Wolfe, Robert O’Hara, and Michael R. Jackson.” As Johnson notes, “We’re now seeing lots of Black queer artists creating – so many people whose work grew out of the art created in backyards, community centers, churches, and other spaces where Black artists found space and voice.” Shannon declares, “Black theatre has the potential to heal – how can we use Black theatre to show the way forward in this moment?” She invites colleagues to take advantage of this, “call to arms moment,” arguing that “subversive acts are necessary to deal with hegemonic structures.” She cites the current moment as, “particularly ripe for Black women who have become heroines and who are establishing their legacies.” Like Richards, she also reminds contemporary scholars to pay attention to the power of HBCUs, and to “reach up to claim and tout the value of these institutions.” Richards points to the COVID-19 crisis and the many other challenges shaping the professoriate as the next milestone to mark in the field of Black Theatre. She asks, “Where are we going after the pandemic when professional opportunities will have shrunk, but the need to do and to document Black Theatre will not?” Afterviews Each of the scholars I interviewed mentioned a number of newer voices that have begun to shape discourses on Black Theatre. The “ Afterviews ” below showcase some of their responses to the question: “Where do you think the field of Black Theatre is headed in the future?” Julius Fleming: “What will Blackness be?” “What will blackness be?” As I reflect upon the futures of Black Theatre and Performance Studies, this prescient question from literary and performance theorist Fred Moten looms. An aesthetic and political tradition, black theatre and performance has allowed us to probe what blackness is and what blackness might be. Because the construction of the modern world relies on the extraction and abstraction of black bodies, the critical attention that Black Theatre and Performance Studies pays to the body will be vital to understanding, critiquing, and reconfiguring the known world and its futures—and to discovering new worlds and otherwise possibilities. From expanding uses of digital technologies within live theatre to staging plays that spotlight the State’s uneven, race-based practices of State care in the wake of natural disaster, black theatre and performance consistently engages the most innovative tools and pressing social concerns that animate the “now.” And the concerns of the “now,” we know, are the animate legacies of various pasts and the building blocks of times that are yet-to-come. In this sense, what excites me most about the future of Black Theatre and Performance Studies is that it will become an even more radical and robust enterprise, one that expands what we know and how we know it. Mirroring the nature of its object of study (i.e., performance), the field will remain unruly and innovative—on the run as it were. And yet, it will continue to negotiate the structural threat of disappearance and ephemerality ignited by the harrowing rise of increasingly anti-intellectual societies. But whatever the nature of those times that are yet-to-come, Black Theatre and Performance will be a site to which we can continue to turn to understand what blackness is and might be, which is also to say what the world is and might be. Douglas A. Jones, Jr. “ “Hurston’s Call” Two recent publications explore theatrical practices that emerged from the sociality of everyday black persons that pay little to no regard for how such practices comported with mainstream tastes or courted sanction from black elites and other bourgeois gatekeepers. These books—Chinua Thelwell’s Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond (UMass) and Rashida Shaw McMahon’s The Black Circuit: Race, Performance, and Spectatorship (Routledge)—offer exemplary historiographies of how Black performance cultures are often at their most inventive and nourishing when they refuse to organize themselves around the white gaze. Thelwell’s examination of Black minstrels forging Black diasporic networks of care across continents and Shaw McMahon’s of thriving African American theatre makers outside and against majoritarian institutions reveal the importance of studying Black performance that traffics in (sociocultural) politics that easily offends prevailing critical opinion. In “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934), Zora Neale Hurston called on critics to carry out these very sorts of investigations—our sensibilities be damned! For a host of intellectual and institutional reasons, Black Theatre and Performance Studies has generally pursed tacks more in line with W.E.B. Du Bois’s cultural theories. But Thelwell’s and Shaw McMahon’s fantastic new books show the importance of decentering Du Boisean frameworks for those thinkers like Hurston formulated. Such an approach recovers undertheorized Black performance genealogies and, accordingly, helps redress several of the class, political, and regional biases that continue to organize our field. Heeding Hurston’s call is both urgent and necessary: my hope is that it will shape methodologies and archival priorities in Black Theatre and Performance Studies for decades to come. Adrienne C. Macki: “Clarion Call” Certainly, the Black Lives Matter movement has prompted important global conversations. Black Theatre and Performance will continue to build upon that momentum as it remains at the forefront of this clarion call to promote a more inclusive space advancing diverse, underrepresented, and often disenfranchised perspectives. Of course, this is a divisive time, but I am interested in choosing to embrace radical optimism and recognize Black Theatre and Performance’s labor to mobilize audiences. I have long been interested in activist community-based theatres that employ theatre as a transformative space to promote conversation, healing, equity, and action. Simultaneously, white institutions, white leadership, and white audiences must listen and be vigilant while working towards understanding as well as acknowledging their privilege. Such steps are necessary to topple white supremacy. It sounds simplistic, but I am taking seriously the need for radical change and I am thinking about what concrete actions would look like on a practical level. Towards that end, the recent institutional practice of circulating statements that “we stand in solidarity…” is insufficient; it pays lip service to issues of equity that have plagued the field for far too long. It is high time for theatre organizations and allies to implement real change. Action is imperative to dismantle anti-black racism. Silence is complicit. Accordingly, in this context, Black Theatre and Performance has the potential to cultivate tangible opportunities for communities to rebuild, reconnect, and reimagine equity and inclusion. Likewise, the field may assume an explicit and central role in guiding academic, community, and professional theatres. Donatella Galella: “Read, Cite, and Commit” Black scholars are doing brilliant work in the field of Black Theatre and Performance, and all of us should engage with it. A lot of current scholarship carefully considers affect to understand Black spectatorship and survival. La Donna S. Forsgren’s award-winning essay on The Wiz reveals the pleasures of queer Black feminist viewing practices. Ashon Crawley reminds us of the importance of Black joy in a context that spectacularizes trauma. To identify and navigate “know-your-place aggression,” Koritha Mitchell encourages us to center on Black success and frame white violence as a reaction. At the same time, anger can be useful, as Nikki Yeboah cites Audre Lorde and offers her play The M(O)thers , which encourages audiences to link personal stories of Black mothers to larger patterns of police anti-Blackness and to propel anti-racist action. Black creativity as research also emerges in new scholarship that challenges the normative academic book structure of analyzing one case study per chapter with allegedly objective distance. In Ezili’s Mirrors , Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley follows the lwa to sing multi-voiced Black girl ways of knowing. E. Patrick Johnson similarly follows Miss B., playing with meanings of honeypot and presenting oral histories of same-gender-loving Black women in the U.S. South. This is but a fraction of the exciting work that will shape the future of the field. I am eager to learn more, and I hope that more scholars will read, cite, and commit to radical Black politics from reparations to prison abolition. La Donna Forsgren: “Agitate for Change” While the need to produce life-sustaining art may seem especially urgent during the Black Lives Matter movement of today, the reality is that creating and disseminating Black art has always been vital to our survival as a people. As such, I am cautiously optimistic about the future of black theatre and performance. I envision the rising generation of Black theatre artists creating new works and manifestos that speak to the needs of our community. Manifestos such as “We See You, White American Theatre”—incited by the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests—have created space for critical thought and action to obliterate systemic racism from our professional and university stages. I envision rising scholars also attending to the material realities of what it means to be Black in America and amplifying works produced at historically black theatres, many of which will not survive years of scarce funding compounded further by the financial devastation of a global pandemic. Despite my optimistic vision, I also understand that systemic racism intrenches every aspect of our society. To revolutionize our field, we must agitate for change beyond the appearance of inclusivity. History has shown that granting a select few Black artists and scholars “a seat at the table” does not change the nature of the table. If we do not take action now, this newfound interest in Black art and scholarship will slip through the cracks of history as a passing “trend,” going gently into that good night. I want scholars to reconsider what constitutes the “archive” and reclaim heretofore marginalized works of Black women and LGBTQ+ members of our community. I want historically Black theatres to sustain the next generation of artists and thrive. I want Black artists and their allies to use this moment to dismantle all oppressive behaviors and practices of the past and envision a new, truly equitable future. If we can do this; I envision another great era of Black cultural flowering. BIOS: Harry J. Elam, Jr , currently the President of Occidental College, is the author and co-editor of seven books, including the award-winning The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (University of Michigan Press, 2006), and dozens of journal articles and book chapters. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. The Association for Theatre in Higher Education awarded him its highest recognition, the Distinguished Scholar Award, and he is the recipient of the Career Achievement Award from the American Society for Theatre Research. Elam has also directed professionally for more than 25 years, including Tod, the Boy, for the Oakland Ensemble Company, and Blues for an Alabama Sky for Theaterworks in Palo Alto, winner of Drama-Logue Awards for Best Production, Best Design, Best Ensemble Cast and Best Direction. He also has directed several of August Wilson’s plays, including Radio Golf, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Two Trains Running, and Fences . Julius B. Fleming, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he specializes in African American literary and cultural production and black performance studies. Fleming is currently completing his first book manuscript, entitled “Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Refusal to Wait for Freedom,” under contract with New York University Press. He is also beginning work on a second book project that explores the new geographies of colonial expansion and their impact on Afro-diasporic literary and cultural production. Having served as Associate Editor of Callaloo and Black Perspectives , the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, his work appears and is forthcoming in American Literature , American Literary History , South Atlantic Quarterly, Callaloo , The James Baldwin Review , and The Southern Quarterly . La Donna L. Forsgren is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre; concurrent faculty in the Gender Studies Program; and affiliate faculty in the Department of Africana Studies. She currently serves as Vice President/Conference Planner for the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Her first book, In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement, investigates the works and careers of Martie Evans-Charles, J.E. Franklin, Sonia Sanchez, and Barbara Ann Teer (Northwestern University Press 2018). Her second book, Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance (Northwestern University Press 2020) explores the art and activism of pioneering black women intellectuals of the 1960-1970s . She has contributed articles to journals such as Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, Continuum, and Callaloo, as well as book chapters in The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance (Routledge, 2019), Teaching Critical Performance Theory in Today’s Theatre Classroom, Studio, and Communities (Routledge, 2020), The Great North American Stage Directors (Bloomsbury Methuen, forthcoming), and Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism (Routledge, forthcoming). Her current book project explores queer black feminist spectatorship in contemporary musical theatre. Donatella Galella is an associate professor at the University of California, Riverside. She researches how systemic racism shapes contemporary American theatre from the ways white institutions capitalize on blackness to the persistence of yellowface in musicals. Her book America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington DC’s Arena Stage was an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research and a Finalist for the 2020 Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Patrick Johnson is is Dean of the School of Communication and Annenberg University Professor at Northwestern University. A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Johnson’s work has greatly impacted African American Studies, Performance Studies, and Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He is the author of several books, including Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (2003); Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History (2008); Black. Queer. Southern. Women.—An Oral History (2018); Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women (2019), in addition to a number of edited and co-edited collections, essays, and plays. Douglas A. Jones, Jr. is an Associate Professor at Rutgers University, where he is also Assistant Dean of Humanities. He is the author of The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Michigan 2014); co-editor of the essay collection Race and Performance after Repetition (Duke 2020); editor of the special issue of Modern Drama 62.4 “Slavery’s Reinventions” (Winter 2019). He is currently writing a book on black minstrelsy and its role in the production of African American literary modernism; an essay from that project appears in Theatre Journal 73.2 (2021). David Krasner has taught acting, directing, and theatre history for 40 years. He is currently Chair of Theatre at Five Towns College in Long Island, New York, where he oversees the BFA Program in Musical Theatre, Acting, and Design/Tech. He is the author and editor of eleven books, three dozen articles, and over sixty book and performance reviews, ranging from theatre history, dramatic literature, a two-volume history of modern drama, acting, theatre and philosophy, theatre in theory, and a two-volume history of African American Theatre. He has twice received the Errol Hill Award from the American Society for Theatre Research for the best work on African American Theatre, and in 2008 he received the Betty Jean Jones Award for the best teacher of American theatre and drama. He has served, and continues to serve, on a dozen editorial advisory boards, including Stanislavsky Studies, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, African American Review , and Theatre Annual . He has been the co-editor of the University of Michigan Press’s series Theater: Theory / Text / Performance since 2006. Bernth Lindfors, Professor Emeritus of English and African Literatures at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote biographies of Ira Aldridge and Samuel Morgan Smith after retiring from teaching in 2003. His earlier theatrical research focused on works by African playwrights such as Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Hubert Ogunde and Mbongeni Ngema, most of whom wrote their plays in English. He also published two books that dealt with African entertainers who performed in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (Indiana University Press, 1999) and Early African Entertainments Abroad: From the Hottentot Venus to Africa’s First Olympians (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014). Adrienne C. Macki is an Associate Professor in Dramatic Arts, Faculty in the Institute for Africana Studies, and American Studies Program at the University of Connecticut. She teaches courses in gender and performance, Black theatre, African American women playwrights, sports and performance, and introduction to theatre. She enjoys developing new work for young audiences and has authored numerous articles and essays. Her book, Harlem’s Theaters: A Staging Ground for Community, Class, and Contradiction, 1923-1939 (Northwestern UP, 2015) received the 2016 Errol Hill Award, Honorable Mention, for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). She has served on the boards of the American Theatre and Drama Society, the Black Theatre Network, and on the Executive Committee of the American Society for Theatre Research. Adrienne received her B.A. in Theatre from Middlebury College, Masters in Theatre Education from Emerson College, and Ph.D. in Drama from Tufts University. Sandra Richards is Professor Emerita at Northwestern University. Her research specialties include African American, African, African Diaspora, and American theatre and drama, she has authored Ancient Songs Set Ablaze: The Theatre of Femi Osofisan and numerous articles on a range of black dramatists. Richards is co-editor (with Sandra Shannon) of the MLA Handbook of Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson . She was also part of the editorial term of Kathy A. Perkins, Renee Alexander Craft, and Thomas F. DeFrantz that produced The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance (2018). From 2001-2004, she held the Leon Forrest Professorship of African American Studies that supported research and publication on issues of cultural tourism to slave sites throughout the Black Atlantic. In 2007 ATHE recognized her as an Outstanding Teacher of Theatre in Higher Education, while ASTR honored her with its Outstanding Scholar award in 2017. Sandra G. Shannon is Professor Emerita of African American Literature in the Department of English at Howard University, is widely considered the leading authority on playwright August Wilson and a major scholar in the field of African American drama. She is the author of two book-length studies, numerous essays, and chapters on African American literature, in general, and, more specifically, on August Wilson and his American Century Cycle plays. She has also served as Editor and Co-editor of four essay collections. Dr. Shannon is a Founder member of the August Wilson Society, and, since 2006, has served as its President. She is a Fellow of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre–so honored in 2018 for being a “distinguished achiever in professional and educational theatre.” She was elected by this body to serve as its next Dean (beginning in 2022). In 2018, Dr. Shannon was awarded the prestigious Winona Fletcher Award from the Black Theatre Network for her “academic excellence in theatre scholarship.” Dr. Shannon is currently Artist-in-Residence at Pittsburgh, PA’s August Wilson African American Cultural Center where she serves as a chief consultant for the Center’s forthcoming state-of-the-art interactive exhibit, August Wilson: A Writer’s Landscape. (For a complete list of her publications see: https://works.bepress.com/sandra-shannon/ . Harvey Young is Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Boston University. His research on the performance and experience of race has been widely published in academic journals, profiled in the New Yorker , the Wall Street Journal and the Chronicle of Higher Education . As a commentator on popular culture, he has appeared on CNN, 20/20, and Good Morning America as well as within the pages of the New York Times , Vanity Fair and People . He has published seven books, including Embodying Black Experience , winner of “Book of the Year” awards from the National Communication Association and the American Society for Theatre Research. His forthcoming edited collection (with Megan Geigner) Theatre After Empire will be published in 2021. He is Immediate Past President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and has served as Trustee/Board Member of the African American Arts Alliance of Chicago, American Society for Theatre Research, Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra and Yale Club of Chicago. References Footnotes About The Author(s) HEATHER S. NATHANS Professor, Tufts University Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Clara Jean Wilch 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 Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Clara Jean Wilch By Published on June 1, 2017 Download Article as PDF Global climate change has been a major issue of concern and political debate in the US and internationally for over 20 years, marked notably by the Kyoto Protocol in 1992. While politically-fraught contention still surrounds the rhetoric of how climate change is discussed, from a scientific perspective, the physical mechanics by which greenhouse gases raise atmospheric temperatures have long been documented and understood. Due to their molecular structure, gases, including CO 2 and methane, capture and reradiate infrared photons, and as these gases accumulate in our atmosphere, heat that would otherwise leave our biosphere is trapped. [1] It is also not a subject of scientific controversy that such greenhouse gases are mined and released by human activities like industry and agriculture, and that they are continuing to rise to the highest levels experienced in our atmosphere in over 800,000 years. [2] No human, scientist or otherwise, can predict the future with certainty, but evidence has mounted to indicate climate change is occurring, and even the most conservative projections of continued climate change indicate major consequences for life on earth. In the words of the environmentalist and author Bill McKibben, “Global warming is not some distant problem waiting to appear, some hypothetical trouble we should start preparing for. The world is already changing with deadly speed. Every time we burn coal and gas and oil, we send carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and now that carbon dioxide is trapping enough heat to create a new planet.” [3] The need for a response is pressing as climate change becomes increasingly an issue of social consequence. The international NGO Oxfam has found that levels of famine are worsening in already financially impoverished regions as a result of climatic change and unpredictability. They report that roughly 26 million individuals have been forced from their homes and regions by climate change and project that “200 million people may be on the move each year by 2050 because of hunger, environmental degradation, and loss of land.” [4] The reality of global climate change thus far is that though emissions are generated disproportionately by wealthy and industrialized nations, ecological challenges have fallen disparately to the world’s poorest populations. Political scientist and environmental policy scientist Frank Biermann draws from several large government studies to caution, “climate change could ‘seriously exacerbate already marginal living standards in many Asian, African and Middle Eastern countries, causing widespread political instability and the likelihood of failed states’… migration… will be ‘uncontrolled and generate significant social and economic impacts… States and cities that are unable to cope are likely to seek international humanitarian assistance of unprecedented scale and duration.’” [5] Humanity might already be in the process of facing monumental difficulties including huge populations of dispossessed people, international chaos, or perhaps a plan for global governance which will help mitigate major disasters, and ideally, curb their magnitude. International conferences aimed at slowing or halting climate change have occurred, but significant action has been absent or inadequate, lagging far behind evidence and demand in the opinion of experts. [6] This is exemplified by the longtime refusal of the US and other primary polluters to ratify a major international effort to confront carbon emissions, the Kyoto Protocol, a disagreement that has been categorized as “an impasse between rich and poor nations.” [7] While the 2015 UN Paris Agreement demonstrated unprecedented international solidarity to lower carbon emissions, [8] recent changes in leadership in key carbon contributors like the US and Britain threaten to undermine or undo this hopeful development. Within academia, a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene has been proposed to contextualize climate change and other contemporary human-driven planetary changes within deep time. While the idea had some predecessors, the Anthropocene as such was first introduced by chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer in 2000, and has since been widely studied and theorized within and beyond the sciences. [9] By acknowledging a departure from the 10,000 year-plus Holocene epoch that characterized modern, agricultural human history, the Anthropocene seeks to capture the contemporary age as a dawning geological period threatening substantial changes to “earth’s ecological assemblage as a whole.” [10] The Anthropocene squarely defies narratives that would deny the existence of wide-spread, irreversible climatic change, and underlines other global changes including oceanic acidification and widespread extinction events. Inherent in its naming—“The Human Epoch”—is the indication that these changes are intrinsically linked to human activity. By extension, proposing this new epoch forcefully overturns philosophical and political thinking that conceives of social and natural realms as separate or autonomous entities. In Socionatural Relations in the Anthropocene , Manuel Arias-Maldonado discusses the implications of this new epoch within a historical survey of changing conceptions of “nature” and its relationship to man. His wide-ranging work shows that our present biological and environmental status as summarized by the hypotheses of climate change and the Anthropocene “are arguably the most fruitful examples of…new ‘cooperation through dialogue’ among the sciences.” [11] He also asserts the deep and irreversible entanglement of social and natural systems that characterizes our time, despite deeply entrenched traditions of dualistic thinking stemming from philosophers including Descartes; Arias-Maldonado urges us to confront “the relation between the cultural and the material,” as much of what is evidenced in our worldly reality clashes with widely held beliefs. [12] Today, we are faced not just with the challenge of trying to address carbon emissions but also the human consequences of environmental changes already underway, and in the face of widespread indifference and denial. These complex, vital and urgent issues, while still demanding rigorous scientific study, belong also to the work of artists and scholars who help to shape the narrative of how we conceive of and feel about climate change, how we conceive of ourselves as humans, and how we conceive of our capabilities to act cooperatively and altruistically. An issue already affecting the so-called “third world” should become the concern of privileged nations before the necessity of mass-migration requires it. Only a world-wide response can address this global occurrence. Limitation of major discussions of climate change to the scientific and political realms, along with forces like bipartisan divisions and economic loyalties within major responsible nations like the US have resulted in little to no policy change or collective action. A new approach is required that constructively brings together the challenges of those dramatically affected by climate change, the abstract emotional distress of those already concerned, and the minds of those ignoring these issues. This article aims to illustrate the powerful need to grow a populous translocal community connected through an awareness of the Anthropocene as it dawns. Translocalism reframes the effort to think about and react to climate change from the abstractions of “the world” to a collection of communities, in which one’s specific locale (of culture, activity and familiar or knowable people) is connected and related to many other specific locales within and across national boundaries. The massive population upheavals climate change portends endanger the continuation of contemporary nation-states, and social formations adapted to the Holocene may be mal-adapted for the Anthropocene. Regardless of future circumstances, a reliance on government-led proposals and actions has not yet proved sufficient for creating significant change in the acquisition and use of materials that contribute to atmospheric carbon levels. I propose that there is great potential to begin an alternative discussion and movement that might grow, harness and direct the energy and action demanded by the challenges of climate change through translocal performances. Considering the current modes of global connection, I propose that this translocal effort to confront evolving matters of climate justice and environmental responsibility occur through a web-based social media platform dedicated to creativity and communication. I begin by discussing how, from a philosophical, historical and cognitive perspective, performance can spur societal and governmental action through the generation of emotions, narratives and altruistic acts. Next, I seek an understanding of how previous efforts to address climate change through performance in different media have both succeeded and failed in generating empathy and community. Finally, I propose an aspirational blueprint that attempts to generate effective altruistic action through an Internet-based community. The aim is to move thoughtfully from older to newer to possible future media formats of representing and understanding this particular concern, with the understanding that creative input is needed as much as edification. Perhaps confronting global upheaval with creativity and media seems like an incongruous and unrealistic proposal from the outset. Yet concern about climate change has not yet coalesced into a powerful mass movement on political or civil fronts in part because representations of it have produced nearly as much division and debate as action. In her book Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice , the philosopher Martha Nussbaum illuminates myriad instances of how the arts’ appeal to emotional connection and understanding has played essential roles in organizing significant and sustainable progress in national and international issues. Her basic premise is that the structures and habitual practices of societies are predominately shaped by emotionally significant narratives, and that love, defined as “a delighted recognition of the other as valuable, special, and fascinating” is the key emotion which produces sustained movement toward optimally equal and just systems . [13] Analyzing art and speeches, Nussbaum articulates how many historically monumental actions were enabled by narratives that informed public emotions, ideals and norms through performance . How we respond to global climate change is inextricably connected to how we think and feel about the crisis, and history demonstrates the importance of public performance to creating a shared emotional context that shapes belief. In a discussion of performance, ethics and history, theatre scholar Bruce McConachie explicitly compares the challenges of global climate change today to the work of the American Abolitionist movement. [14] McConachie shows how the success of the latter depended upon performances of narratives, including sermons, the speeches of Frederick Douglass, and Henry Ward Beecher’s practice of staging reverse slave auctions. Such performances produced public emotions of sympathy for the lives of slaves and were crucial to the movement’s eventual political effectiveness. This emotional investment helped to create a widespread willingness to undergo tremendous economic and mortal sacrifice during the Civil War. McConachie’s parallel emphasizes the fact that our current ecological crisis is also a matter of social justice, in which inaction has and will cause devastation to human lives. Further, it validates the possibility of a social willingness to withstand short-term economic losses for the long-term good (as, for example, oil companies and their associates would be required to do in countering the trajectory of climate change). McConachie includes a discussion of some extant efforts to create a performance-based response to activities and emotions pertinent to climate change, and writes that the Internet may be the most appropriate medium for addressing such a large-scale issue. If the challenge and approach broadly outlined seem daunting, Kitcher’s Ethical Project gives substantial reason for optimism by providing evidence for the prehistoric evolution of humanity’s now inherent capacity for altruism (acting against one’s own interest for the good of others). Kitcher argues that cooperation and egalitarianism born of a behavioral and cognitive ability to empathize—to take the perspective of others—conferred greater survival success to our ancestors than to those who behaved primarily with indifference or hostility. [15] Therefore, the human ability to relate to one another with compassion or to act altruistically is a genetic inheritance that does not need to be created wholesale in our efforts to act pro-socially in the cases of climate justice. According to Kitcher’s model of human cognition, societal failures to meaningfully confront climate change do not reflect an inherent inability to care about the welfare of others, but the peripheral positioning of this concern with regard to a given social group. Geographic distance from populations being most affected by climate change now or temporal distance from future generations who will suffer later can relegate climate change to the periphery. Fortunately, personal identification with the significance of others is not difficult to achieve. According to Nussbaum, just focusing attention on strangers (as in listening to a news story) can generate an appreciation of their importance, at least in the short term. McConachie draws attention to one cognitive basis for this reality: mirror neurons create the same neuronal activity in a human viewing intentional movement as does the movement in the brains of the viewed. These movements include emotionally involved facial expressions; so, for instance, the experience of seeing someone smile is cognitively similar to smiling. It stands to reason that simply but persistently focusing on the social plight that global climate change is creating will trigger the predisposed tendency to feel compassion for other human beings, identify empathetically and act with altruism. Performance’s activation of empathy and emotions through attention to others and storytelling has historically contributed to justice and progressive change, and can be effective in the case of climate change. Of course, performance has already been deployed to address this global crisis. The most well-known example is the 2006 documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth , an effort to educate global viewers about climate change and a call to redirect human action with greater environmental responsibility. This film brought the discussion of climate change to public attention and succeeded in familiarizing many with the issue. On an emotional register, however, the film may have unintentionally contributed to dividing public opinion, particularly in the US. Compassion and love are not the only emotions to which humans are predisposed. Nussbaum describes how the capacity for disgust, genetically reinforced through its benefits to survival throughout history, has been redirected socially as an intuitive defense against our mortality. She describes “projective disgust” as a powerful emotion that underpins systemic inequalities like racism, sexism and homophobia, in which groups of “others” are designated and defined by an association with the gross (bodily fluids and odors, for example) in order to reinforce a psychologically comforting separation for individuals from their own bodily and mortal nature. Along with the related emotions of shame, fear, and envy, disgust counters sympathy and involves the separation and “othering” of individuals in a psychologically satisfying way. [16] These constructions of human emotion and behavior can contribute to a widespread phenomenon that Jonathan Haidt has termed “groupishness,” which, like altruism, is a part of humanity’s genetic heritage because of its ability to confer success to individuals loyal to a specific group in cases of competition over evolutionary history. [17] An Inconvenient Truth is emphatically centered on Al Gore, who narrates the film and is the visually dominant figure throughout. The film documents a presentation about the science and ramifications of global climate change which Gore made throughout the world, interspersed with narrative segments about his upbringing, family and political career, including personal photographs and scenes of his daily life. In situating its call to action intimately within Gore’s life, the story becomes as much an account of climate change as one man’s mission to stop climate change in the face of widespread opposition. For people who never saw the film, the very premise—Al Gore advocating for climate change awareness—reinforces and may have helped generate the notion that climate change belongs to the American Democratic Party’s agenda, or that it is an interest of the wealthy and powerful. This construct is highly susceptible to the hard-wired reactions of groupishness (along political lines) and of envy (which Nussbaum writes is directed toward people perceived to have more status or wealth), [18] both of which disrupt compassion and create a sense of difference and exclusion. The centrality of this political figure seems to have promoted the human tendency to groupishness in some, widening fissures along class and party lines, and may have inadvertently helped de-universalize an inherently global issue. This is not to dismiss the significance and successes of this film in bringing attention to climate change, but an attempt to understand its potential limitations so that future efforts to create performed narratives might be more or differently effective in promoting compassion and united action around the issue. The potentially problematic narrative structure of An Inconvenient Truth is related to its media structure as a movie. Director Davis Guggenheim’s decision to blend climate change information with Gore’s life story drew from the reality of Gore’s committed activism, capitalized on his notoriety, and satisfied generic expectations of the feature movie format for a dramatic plot and engaging emotional and character through-line, while the film in turn provided publicity and accessibility for the content’s message. However, political polarization around climate change also suggests the major potential flaw of positioning climate change as the message of any single authority. The trouble is not Gore, but the ease with which a message about ecological responsibility can be dismissed or corrupted when it is closely associated with any one person. The media landscape has changed significantly since 2006, as the Internet has become a sophisticated, central tool for accessing information, entertainment and communication, and (where computers and web-connectivity are affordable) a primary focus of attention. Social media use among Internet users, for example, grew from 6% of those over fifteen years of age in 2007 to 83% by 2011, 1.2 billion people worldwide. [19] Although film remains an important and massively popular medium, its accessibility to both viewers and creators through the Internet and related technologies has broadened immensely and its formats have diversified. As the Anthropocene reshapes our existence at an accelerating rate, new media dissemination forms have transformed communication. Within the realm of video, the key Internet platform is YouTube, which was launched in 2005 and became the third most trafficked site on the Internet in 2011. [20] While technology and cultural theorist Johanna van Dijck defines YouTube as essentially an alternative to television that maintained many of the same technologies as TV, she states that it departs from traditional audio-visual media in significant ways. Specifically, she highlights the “novelty of having users upload self-produced or pre-produced audiovisual content via personal computers from their home to anybody’s home—that is, networked private spaces.” [21] YouTube enables the translocal distribution of professional and amateur productions by users to users, who have freedom to explore this eclectic and ever-expanding collection at will. A key to understanding the nature of the Internet interface generally is the flexible multiplicity of choices available to the user. Cultural studies scholar Berteke Waaldjak summarizes this element of the Internet experience: “Several new media scholars … stress the importance of the metaphor of the plurality of windows, enabling a less defined subject position: the user can see and relate to several things simultaneously, alternating between immediacy and hyperimmediacy, between transparency and opacity, between immersion and distance.” [22] Film primarily creates an immediate, immersive experience for the viewer through sustained attention to a linear narrative. The Internet video, conversely, is one of countless subjects of attention simultaneously available to Internet users, who can dissociate from that narrative and alternate or recalibrate their attention to multiple subjects as desired. A consequence of YouTube’s free-to-all upload capabilities in the “multiple window” environment has been the proliferation of shorter-form videos whose formats, consumption and use can depart radically from movie media. Van Dijck describes short form “snippets,” videos of less than ten minutes, as “resources rather than as products… meant for recycling in addition to storing, collecting, and sharing… posted on video-sharing sites to be reused, reproduced, commented upon, or tinkered with. [Snippets] function as input for social traffic and group communication or as resource for creative remixes…touted as typical of YouTube’s content.” [23] Individuals and organizations working to combat climate change have utilized YouTube and short-form snippets. Frequently, the resulting videos are documentaries aimed toward viewer education and engagement, not unlike An Inconvenient Truth . Due to their shorter form and reliance on cost-free YouTube dissemination, however, they are much more efficiently and cheaply produced than a full-length film and can respond quickly to of-the-moment events in climate and climate-related action. One illustration of such communication comes from 350.org, a grassroots organization aimed at combating climate change and founded by environmentalist Bill McKibbon. 350.org has posted several videos on the UN conference that culminated in the Paris Agreement. The short form alleviates the pressure to produce a strict “beginning, middle and end” narrative with specific character development, but 350.org videos still work to generate emotional engagement and promote empathy between viewers and the people depicted. In their one-minute YouTube snippet, “Global Climate March- Solidarity and Resilience,” piano music and text overlay photographs and video of climate activists who gathered worldwide on the eve of the global summit in early December, building rhythmically to those who gathered and performed protests in Paris despite security measures prohibiting a large-scale march after the local terrorist attacks on November 13th. [24] The text describes the images of shoes that thousands of would-be protestors laid out symbolically in the streets where the march had been scheduled to occur. The same technique documents indigenous people leading a prayer for victims of climate change and terrorism outside of the Bataclan, the nightclub center of the lethal attacks just weeks before. Portraits of protestors of different genders, ages and ethnicities in various emotional states appear throughout, communicating the presence and power of resilient and cooperative resistance to inaction. This video promotes a sense of inclusive empathy in the viewer through both its written narrative and its diverse images of human faces, whose wordless expressions of joy and sadness cue emotions through the spectator’s mirror neurons. The presence of varied visual social indicators and an absence of specific narrative information about the subjects are conducive to enabling widespread identification without providing fodder for envy (wealth or position) nor leaving wide room for disgust: viewers of most ethnicities, ages and gender can visually identify with someone portrayed, so the collective “subject” of the video is fairly invulnerable to body-focused projective disgust, which would group the protestors as “others.” The juxtapositions of a contemporary lethal terrorist act and the impending threats of climate change to human lives eloquently cast climate policy as an issue of basic justice, especially in regard to the equitable valuing of human life. By implying a connection between the atrocities committed against indigenous communities, the sudden violence of the 2015 Paris attacks, and lethal weather events linked to climate change, this video imbues climate issues with the combined emotional impact of major historical and very recent tragedies— and with a related sense of urgency. Certainly, the groups documented are not impervious to disgust or rejection. For example, some viewers might react with “groupish othering” and rejection of the subjects because of their status as protestors. However, the shared emotional event of the Bataclan shooting is a powerful framework for promoting a broad coalition. Nussbaum notes the power of tragedy and public grieving in promoting a shared sense of human vulnerability conducive to empathy and, eventually, shared hope. [25] This video also creates a narrative of empowerment by demonstrating the mourning and persistence of marchers in a wide and unified effort against tragic and preventable death. In addition to potentially activating an inclusive emotional significance in viewers, the video promotes viewer hope and involvement, concluding with a written message to “share this video” on social media outlets. [26] The snippet “Video On Climate Change,” also available through YouTube, deploys some of the same tactics as “Climate March,” particularly in focusing on a diverse selection of people expressing concern about climate change. This video was produced by Oxfam, a grassroots charity organization to combat world hunger that was founded in Great Britain after World War II, and has since expanded internationally. In this video, the subject is climate change in the context of agriculture, where increasingly unpredictable growing seasons and extraordinary weather events are threatening food quality and availability. The video combines instrumental music, the voice-over of a poem about climate challenges, tracking landscape shots of flooded and drought-dried environments, and testimonials regarding climate change from female farmers and organizers in the Philippines, Bolivia, Zimbabwe, and the UK. [27] The women attest in their native languages (subtitled in English) to observations of climate change in their communities and fields, and discuss their perspectives and efforts to rally support and promote sustainability. More so than 350’s video, Oxfam’s is representing a specific demographic. Conceivably, a viewer could react in self-protective, projective disgust by categorically “othering” the female farmer/laborer subject; diverse languages and localities, coupled with the topic of the universal need for food, could also promote a sense of inclusive relevance for the viewer. Summarizing the challenges brought by climate change in the stories of specific people creates an emotional narrative and visual capacity for connection through mirror neurons with suffering individuals. The focus on personal stories invites viewers to consider the video subjects, and increases their potential for significance to the viewer (without, of course, universally guaranteeing it.) This enables empathy, the painful recognition of another’s trouble, and in turn, the desire for altruistic participation, specifically prompted as the women discuss climate change as a shared responsibility. The tragedy of hunger and hardship, like the tragedies in 350.org’s video, is used to create a connecting acknowledgement of human vulnerability that is converted into hope. The music and poem begin somberly, as the women discuss their difficulty, and become more uplifting with the entrance of trumpets and the stanza “join the chorus, let’s make a difference,” as the women are shown smiling and educating others, demonstrating their hope and determination. The conclusion is a frame that promotes a specific campaign by Oxfam to bolster Europe’s role in growing food and a specific gateway for people to mobilize their altruistic desires. This video relies less on a linear narrative structure than those discussed previously, imaging people’s homes and daily lives rather than events, and presenting mood motifs based in empathetic sadness and the relief of hope. A particularly effective dimension of this video is how the geographic distance between the selected subjects illustrates the shared difficulties these climate events have on people from varied continents, cultures and economies. This reinforces the truly global impact of climate change and creates a sense of a translocal community that may motivate action. The word “global” has more complex meanings in a social context than in its geographical use. Mass media and communication scholar Fabienne Darling-Wolf writes that the lived reality of globalization exists predominately as bidirectional influences between local communities. The model of globalization Darling-Wolf wishes to promote pushes against the dominant theory of hegemony subsuming local differences, though she acknowledges an imbalance of influence linked to economic inequity. Simultaneously, local groups (villages, towns, subsets of cities) take in information, culture, even climate change itself, and process them with their own tools and ideas. Forces like Western culture and climate change are widespread, but they manifest in experiences, interpretations and reactions that are hybrids of the particular characteristics of that instance of influence (a certain imported fashion trend, or a specific abnormal weather event) mixed with local characteristics and values. Still, understanding a culturally globalizing world and even the capacity to imagine it are dependent on representations: “the notion of the global would not exist, at least not in its current form, without the media.” [28] In Oxfam’s snippet, the vision of the global is defined by what Darling-Wolf refers to as “local-to-local links,” [29] achieved here through interwoven images and narratives of small farmers and farming communities. The video maps a global reality of specific, unique and kindred communities. Darling-Wolf writes that translocalism is the ideal mode for understanding ongoing cultural globalization in which “we can learn from both the differences and similarities between contexts about the nature of larger processes of globalization.” [30] This approach is significant in the context of climate change because it promotes the inclusion of diverse political actors and ideologies representative of the global action and/or the policy at stake, and shifts away from Western hegemony embodied by US leaders alone. A global discourse about climate change and possible responses that perpetuate the dominance of Western hegemony can be highly divisive, according to Heather Smith. She observes that constructions in which “global” is understood “as a means by which to externalize the environment, deny the local and provide a sense of distance and detachment… as a solution as embodied in multilateral processes that are state-centric” have allowed the wealthy and powerful to “deny responsibility” and have alienated communities of would-be participants in confronting climate change. [31] A video like Oxfam’s may appeal to communities that are resistant to endorsing any global action for fear of western hegemony by instead illustrating a translocal vision of the global—connectivity through shared experience and causes resulting in cooperation rather than cooptation under one dominating authority. Critically, both Oxfam and 350.org’s videos, while arguably promoting greater empathetic inclusivity and more diversified visions of community, are professional products curated by large organizations with their own influence and authority, and could themselves generate political, class or ideological differences and groupish opposition. YouTube is also available to individuals outside of the audio-visual production professions, however, and the climate justice advocacy and education videos available on that site present a greater plurality of producers and tactics than there is room to discuss. They include theatrical, animated and humorous approaches to climate change, conducive to a broad range of cognitive and emotional experiences. For instance, in comedy and political satire particularly, projective disgust, envy and shame are used to promote positive change. Internet videos demonstrate the ability of such “negative” emotions to reinforce groupishness and solidarity conducive to climate justice when they are directed toward ecologically irresponsible corporations and leaders (see Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah or The Young Turks for examples). Such techniques in performance could be particularly important to the public’s role of holding governments accountable for the promises of the Paris Agreement. Other YouTube videos and websites instruct viewers in how to behave with ecological responsibility in their own lives and consumer choices to reduce their carbon footprints. [32] One can safely suppose that the mission of finding a perfect video which is universally effective in motivating every individual viewer to care about climate change and to altruistically act with greater ecological responsibility is not possible. However, there is an inherent ability of performance forms to generate interest, empathy and altruism, and a diversity of performance modes are crucial in making this issue resonate with larger, more diverse audiences. Audiences that respond by distancing themselves from one depiction of climate change or “othering” its concerned spokespeople could be moved to empathy or altruism by another depiction. Yet audio-visual content is still a product for consumption, and motivating a change in viewer perspectives is only a small first step toward reigning in carbon emissions, or ameliorating the effects of climate change. Myriad psychological tendencies underpin an avoidance of climate change as a topic; George Marshall outlines these in his book, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. He argues that even among populations that accept climate change as a serious and human-driven threat, silence about climate change remains common among individuals and private sentiments rarely translate into action. [33] Among his conclusions is that concerned people need to personally engage this issue in their lives and social circles. Active participation and input are required to maintain and spread growing empathy and environmental responsibility, to generate innovative approaches to combating emissions and their ramifications, and to build a committed translocal community prepared to respond with meaningful support in the case of, say, mass migrations of climate refugees. This requires a dialogic and dynamic interface. The Internet is already dominated by social media platforms conducive to exactly such personal and dynamic interaction. As Dijck notes, social media websites enable the creation of media content by users, and the exchange of this content between them. Social media has become a “new online layer through which people organize their lives” and it “influences human interaction on an individual and community level, as well as on a larger societal level, while the worlds of online and offline are increasingly interpenetrating.” [34] Social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube itself have come to define communities for a growing number of people. There are limitations to using one’s personal social media to disseminate or promote any activism. “Sharing” 350.org’s Climate March video with one’s Facebook friends, as the video prompts viewers to do, may help attract some attention but only continues a mode of essentially passive, if good-willed, media consumption. Besides this, personal social networks connect people who predominantly share one another’s cultural and social context in most cases and do little to broaden the message into new, differently-minded communities. Furthermore, these established sites, because they are the means by which active users “organize their lives,” are already rife with information spanning wide ranges of relationships and interests. The multiple window phenomenon of divided and ever-shifting attention is intrinsic within the structure of Facebook where one’s “shared” climate video might appear in juxtaposition (and competition) with an amusing cat video, news of a friend’s wedding, and a video concerning a different cause or protest. In short, dominant social media websites are neither the ideal platform for concentrating interest nor for generating action. A new social media platform uniquely dedicated to bi-directional communication about global climate change, environmental responsibility, and altruistic support for climate change victims could create a dynamic, innovative and effective contribution to climate justice and preparedness. Given the increasing inter-disciplinary academic awareness of the level of flux in which our planet and societies are mutually entwined, and the great uncertainty inherent to this upheaval, such a forum would seek to provide a transnational ground for a citizenship of the Anthropocene, unified in empathy, creativity and action, whatever the Anthropocene comes to be. I believe that such a site, drawing from the user-sharing formats of existing platforms but filling an uninhabited niche, could rally interest and would meet a demand for active involvement and community around these issues. While highly effective organizations already exist, their websites function primarily in the one-way production of professional media and static information. When US Internet users search “climate change” on Google, the most ubiquitous search engine, the current top results are all within the scientific and informational realm, and represent an important but limited perspective that does not present dynamic opportunities for involvement. In A History of Communications , Marshall Poe differentiates the Internet from the audio-visual form as being dialogic rather than monologic, and having a structural tendency towards egalitarianism, pluralism, and individualism, all elements conducive to this ideally cooperative yet diverse translocal global community. [35] Yet scholars have attested that Internet media is not necessarily very “new” at all, and most of the easily searchable media associated with climate change demonstrates this in essentially providing virtual versions of traditional media (books, movies, etc.). The structural possibilities and connectivity of the Internet could be utilized to greater effect in confronting the major issues of the Anthropocene. The website platform proposed might include existing media representations about climate justice as a foundation for generating interest, empathetic investment and educational information. Primarily, however, it would encourage users to express and interpret their lived, local experience of global climate change. Inviting creative forms like video, photography or writing, this site would act as a global canvas for envisioning climate change on a specific and human scale. It would aim to create an investment in and outlet for the personal stories and ideas of people in their confrontations with climate change and the Anthropocene as experienced by individuals. These could conceivably range from video of live plays or performance art about climate change to documentation of one’s thoughts or activities (gardening, farming, etc.) coming from anyone compelled to share. Like contributions, contributors could span a vast range of demographics and experiences, from people displaced from their homes by extreme weather events to comfortable urbanites discussing practices by which they work to engage in environmental responsibility. The diversity created by this non-professional content would provide still more dimensions for empathetic effectiveness and alternative modes of legitimacy, which are potentially challenged in the case of organizational or political productions. Presenting scientific research beside the lived experiences and observations of a Bolivian farmer, for instance, could have a synergistic effect in generating interest, while providing a dedicated platform where each user might feel heard. YouTube, as discussed, is open to user generated content, but the vast majority (over 80%) of users are strictly passive consumers. [36] Presumably many of these passive users have not felt empowered or motivated to generate content. The existence of a dedicated portal would provide inspiration, motivation and an audience for people concerned with climate justice, and hopefully draw new involvement through the egalitarian diversity of input and representations. While technological (in)availability would have major ramifications for the proposed platform’s content, the German statistics aggregator statistica.com estimates the current number of smartphone users globally at around two billion and rising, [37] a tremendous number of potential users across the globe who could access and submit text, photo and video (or any medium they are compelled to use). All media creations and participation would be encouraged. An altruistically-inspired game designer, for example, might provide a dynamic virtual world for better understanding climate change through an experimental manipulation of energy-use scenarios in a way that could engage and educate visitors. The central guiding principle would be a lack of limitations and specific directives. The guiding purpose of the platform would be an open invitation for individuals to create their own forms and shape their own narratives, to transform isolated personal experience of confusion, fear, or frustration through some concrete public contribution. Creativity is conducive to the formation of meaningful community; one can easily imagine how the exchange of new, expressive works might engage and connect users to one another in a powerful emotional camaraderie around a historically divisive and often privately-kept concern. Localism entails immediate visibility, direct contact and personal relationships between citizens, while translocalism is communication and contact between locales of different regions and nations, a globe-spanning network built from nodes of tangible, meaningful, collaborative communities. The website platform would exist to enable a translocal network of novel and non-commercial consideration of climate change as a social issue, and as a tool to encourage unmediated engagement and discussion within peoples’ non-virtual lives and localities. The broad invitation to create would (ideally) inspire open performances and public theatre, sparking avenues for education and empathy in live audiences, beyond the virtual platform and its economically restricted accessibility or ideologically-specific appeal. The Emergency Circus, a clown group that travels internationally to play and perform comedy with refugee families and other dispossessed groups, publishes video documentation on YouTube; it is just one model for creative performance action that breaks from the economic limitations of Internet-based activism, specifically relevant in the case of climate refugees. The proposed network would be conducive to a rhizomatic increase in ideas and inspirations, undercutting the dominant capitalist-driven notions that limit climate activism to consumerist choices. A benefit of a new platform is that existent forums like Facebook and YouTube conform to the interests of commercial sponsors, a distorting factor that would ideally be absent in the proposed site. Discussion boards in a diversity of languages would allow for dynamic conversation and debate in which new ideas might be innovated and shared, and personal connections and relationships might be forged. Despite the obstacle of language differences, the site would define its mission in translocal terms, and would hopefully attract a diversity of people given the global influence of its cause. In time, perhaps multi-lingual contributors and translators would enable increased cross-cultural communications. Through person-to-person international communities, one can imagine the formation of significant, material support in case of climate catastrophes. Were climate change to radically alter environments globally, the translocal community could conceivably form a base-line plan of action and communication resource in emergencies. The website might also allow for collaborative efforts to keep governments in check regarding protocols like the Paris Agreement; already, voluntary scientific observation teams gather to collect data for a diversity of ecological projects and this model could be easily formed to fit an active citizen team invested in climate accountability. Simultaneously, this platform would likely face difficulties, potentially including website promotion, user activity like “trolling,” submission of scientifically unsound information, or evolving through curation into another static authority. The primary defense against these challenges would be dynamic openness to user suggestions and ideas. This proposal is speculative, a gesture toward how this global crisis might be networked between localities, and an optimistic argument that they ought to be because pluralism and empathy are powerful tools. 2016 was the hottest year on earth in historical record (breaking the records set by 2015 and 2014), while the span of global sea ice was at a near-record low. [38] Environmental transformation has serious social consequences that are unfolding all the time; a recent report shows that terrorist groups including ISIL and Boko Haram have begun using climate-related natural disasters and resource shortages in their recruitment and control tactics. [39] While some people face dire realities like food and water shortages, large populations of developed nations live in frustrated anxiety about evolving climate change. According to a recent Gallup Poll, an increasing majority of Americans across political groups “worry” about climate change either a fair amount or a great deal. [40] Yet the US government is in talks to abandon or scale back its commitment to the Paris Agreement. [41] We must put our concern to use, push beyond the isolation of anxiety, support one another, amplify public will, and develop and coordinate practical strategies. We cannot wait for a grand solution and perfect resolution of this crisis. We are all citizens of this new epoch, the Anthropocene, and there can be no better focus of our attention and creative power than the dynamic global crisis of climatic disturbances to our geographies and subsistence. We must connect with one another to communicate and innovate approaches on individual and community levels, and to help one another take responsibility in our individual actions, through a translocal network that thrives on the limitless diversity of human perspectives provoked by climate change. This is an open-handed offer to anyone motivated and able to act on this proposal to please do so, in collaboration with me or independently. The more individuals who publically share their investment and dedication to acknowledging and confronting climate change, the better – and there is no time to waste! References [1] Graciela Chichilnisky and Kristen A. Sheeran, Saving Kyoto: An Insider’s Guide to How it Works, Why it Matters and What it Means for the Future (London: New Holland, 2009), 9. [2] Chichilinisky and Sheeran, Saving Kyoto, 20. [3] Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Times Books, 2010), 13. [4] Alex Renton, “Oxfam Briefing Paper- Summary,” Oxfam International, last modified July 2009, https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/bp130-suffering-the-science-summary.pdf [5] Frank Biermann, Earth System Governance: World Politics in the Anthropocene (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014), 8. [6] McKibben, Eaarth , xiv. [7] Chichilinisky and Sheeran, Saving Kyoto, 4. [8] Carol Davenport, “Nations Approve Landmark Climate Accord in Paris,” New York Times , December 12, 2015. [9] Manuel Arias-Maldonado, Environment and Society: Socionatural Relations in the Anthropocene (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2015), 73. [10] Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 66. [11] Arias-Maldonado, Environment and Society , 9. [12] Ibid., 4. [13] Martha Craven Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 176. [14] Bruce McConachie, Evolution, Cognition and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). [15] Philip Kitcher, The Ethical Project (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). [16] Nussbaum, Political Emotions , 34. [17] as cited in McConachie, Evolution, Cognition and Performance. [18] Nussbaum, Political Emotions , 34. [19] José van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4. [20] Ibid., 110-111. [21] Ibid., 113. [22] Berteke Waaldijk, “A Historical Comparison Between World Exhibitions and the Web,” in Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology , ed. Marianne van den Boomen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 107. [23] van Dijck, Culture of Connectivity , 118-119. [24] “Global Climate March- Solidarity and Resilience,” YouTube video, 1:04, posted by “350.org,” December 2, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWPpibC7Kt4. [25] Nussbaum, Political Emotions , 267. [26] “Global Climate March.” [27] “Oxfam Video on Climate Change,” YouTube video, 8:20, posted by “Slow Food,” June 16, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuc38-Q6TBs. [28] Fabienne Darling-Wolf, Imagining the Global: Transnational Media and Popular Culture Beyond East and West (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2015), 12. [29] Ibid., 3. [30] Ibid. [31] Heather A. Smith, “Disrupting the Global Discourse of Climate Change: The Case of Indigenous Voices,” in The Social Construction of Climate Change: Power, Knowledge, Norms, Discourses , ed. Mary E Pettenger (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), 201. [32] “How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint,” YouTube video, 2:31, posted by “Howcast,” March 31, 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7zwrzEyzkA. [33] George Marshall, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). [34] van Dijck, Culture of Connectivity , 4. [35] Marshall Poe, A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). [36] van Dijck, Culture of Connectivity , 116. [37] “Number of smartphone users worldwide from 2014 to 2020 (in billions),” Statista, accessed January 2, 2017. https://www.statista.com/statistics/330695/number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide/. [38] Jugal K. Patel, “How 2016 Became Earth’s Hottest Year on Record,” New York Times , January 18, 2017, accessed April 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/science/earth/2016-hottest-year-on-record.html. [39] Ben Doherty, “Climate Change Will Fuel Terrorism Recruitment, Report for German Foreign Office Says,” Guardian , April 19, 2017, accessed April 20, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/apr/20/climate-change-will-fuel-terrorism-recruitment-adelphi-report-says. [40] Lydia Saad and Jeffrey M. Jones, “U.S. Concern About Global Warming at Eight-Year High,” Gallup , March 16, 2016, http://www.gallup.com/poll/190010/concern-global-warming-eight-year-high.aspx. [41] Coral Davenport, “Policy Advisers Urge Trump to Keep U.S. in Paris Accord,” New York Times, April 18, 2017, accessed April 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/us/politics/trump-advisers-paris-climate-accord.html . Footnotes About The Author(s) CLARA JEAN WILCH received her BA in Biology from Occidental College and MA in Theatre Studies from the University of Pittsburgh. She will begin as a PhD student of Performance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles in Fall of 2017. She thanks JADT and its editors for bringing an interdisciplinary approach and ever-necessary attention to the topic of the Anthropocene. Guest Editor for Special Issue: Bruce McConachie Editorial Board for Special Issue: Meredith Conti Allan Davis John Fletcher Ju Yon Kim Scott Magelssen Julia Walker Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Acting in the Academy: The history of professional actor training in US higher education. Peter Zazzali. London, New York: Routledge, 2016; Pp. 219. 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Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 2 Visit Journal Homepage Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF “The knowledge that you acquire here, you must bring back to the Black community to benefit that community.” —Stokely Carmichael When W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1916 that Black drama could both “teach our people the meaning of their history and reveal the Negro to the white world as a human, feeling thing,” he was anticipating the pedagogical terrain I walk at William & Mary, where I teach a seminar on “August Wilson’s American Century Cycle.” 1 M ost students who take the seminar are non-Black, a demographic reality that reflects the institution rather than the course design. This composition does not diminish the value of student engagement; however, it shapes the work, demanding a pedagogy attentive to the difference between access to a tradition and belonging to it. In such instances, Wilson’s plays can create a necessary space for recognition, empathy, and the disruption of flattened understandings of Black life. Yet this possibility is not without its tensions. First, to “reveal the Negro to the white world as a human, feeling thing” is a noble goal with a measurable cost. As podcaster Deanté Kyle suggests, attempting to prove one ’s humanity to those committed to practicing inhumanity is often an act of depletion rather than transformation. 2 Stokely Carmichael made a similar intervention in his 1967 debate on “Black Power and the Future of Negro America,” reference d later in the essay. While acknowledging the intellectual genius of Du Bois, Carmichael argued that it is not the responsibility of Black Americans to persuade white audiences of their worth. 3 My experience as a Black woman teaching in a predominantly white context (PWI) confirms the tension. At times, this labor illuminates; at others, it simply drains, leaving the structure unchanged. Then, there are the rare but instructive occasions, as in my most recent offering of “Nommo Force: Black Acting Theory and Performance ” class, where I include at least one of the cycle plays, white students—despite lectures and advisory guardrails against cultural appropriation—mistakenly presumed that their creative and intellectual proximity gives them permission to inhabit Black inner life. This embodied trespassing, rather than witnessing, reveals both the reach and the boundary of Wilson’s vision in some settings. Theatre may beckon the heart toward empathy, recalling Bill Moyer’s discussion of his weeping at Fences , 4 but it cannot erase the miles of history, memory, and blood that determine who may speak from within a story and who should posture themselves to listen. As Wilson declared to the 1996 Theatre Communications Group (TCG) audience, “We cannot allow others to have authority over our cultural and spiritual products.” 5 Teaching in this context pulls my pedagogy in two directions at once, and each direction generates its own set of questions. In teaching Wilson in a collegiate setting, I began to question what it meant to steward his work in rooms where the responses Black Americans were making to individual and collective histories risked becoming a performance rather than a cultural inheritance. 6 Recalling a white female theatre major who had taken classes with other Black professors and was “so excited” to learn more about Black aesthetics from me, I was curious. Would she view this information as a gift or a credential? How, if at all, would this information position her to advance in a field that Black labor had helped build, but struggled to reap the benefits of? Would her cultural homework ultimately benefit Black people? If so, how? Yet, as Wilson once said, “…to celebrate and accept responsibility for one’s place in the world is all that can be asked of anyone,” 7 dwelling on the presence of white learners was incomplete without reckoning with the absence of Black students and the institutional forces behind it. 8 My questioning shifted not only from what white students would do with this knowledge, but also why there were not more Black students here to receive and celebrate it. In that absence is disinterest, but also the effects of curricular marginalization, recruitment gaps, skepticism about the usefulness of Africana Studies and theatre, and the long-standing devaluation of Black theatre as a site of intellectual and cultural inheritance. In my moment of pedagogical reckoning, Stokely Carmichael’s words in the opening epigraph arrived not simply as a political directive, but as an ancestral instruction: “The knowledge that you acquire here, you must bring back to the Black community to benefit that community.” 9 As I listened to his 1967 debate on “Black Power and the Future of Negro America” with Reverend Samuel Williams and Vincent Harding, I was reminded that Du Bois’ 1916 premise begins with the insistence that Black art must teach Black people “the meaning of their history.” The question became unavoidable: even as Black students can encounter their cultural inheritance in other disciplinary formations and wrestle with the political, emotional, and existential implications of Du Bois’ aim, their underrepresentation in Africana Studies and theatre courses reveals a disciplinary hierarchy. How, then, do I ensure that Wilson’s dramaturgical vision remains accessible as a form of knowledge and a site of performance? Sitting in this tension with these questions doesn’t break the work, but stretches it, revealing that one classroom alone cannot bear the full weight of the ancestral directive; another space had to be made. If Du Bois casts the function of Black drama as a dual project—one that instructs within the Black community and reveals to white audiences—my work must extend into a second site of practice. Drawing on the legacy of the Freedom Schools of the Civil Rights Movement, which were designed to cultivate political literacy, historical awareness, and collective agency, I developed a Freedom School Series on August Wilson’s American Century Cycle. I co-host this initiative through my own platform, Omiwerx, with The Village Initiative for Equity in Education, founded by Jacqueline Bridgeforth-Williams. It is free, and participating students, aged 11-18, receive a complete set of the American Century Cycle plays. We gather monthly in church and community spaces, studying Wilson’s cycle not as a curriculum but as a cultural inheritance, with each meeting serving as a rehearsal in collective study and shared memory. Offered for the first time in fall 2025, the series will culminate in a performance on Juneteenth 2026, followed by a public dialogue where participants share their voices, histories, and insights in a communal space. Teaching the cycle under the Freedom School model, the plays serve as mirrors, imparting what Wilson believes to be essential for Black Americans: who we are and what our history has been, and what our relationship to society is, so that we can find ways to alter that relationship and, more importantly, to alter the shared expectations of ourselves as a people. 10 In this framing, Wilson positions theatre as a site of knowledge transfer, a means of cultural exploration and grounding that can prepare students for the world beyond the theatre. In 1926, Du Bois insisted that a “real Negro theatre” must be about us, by us, for us, and near us. 11 A century later, as academic freedom narrows and Black cultural autonomy is cast as a threat rather than a right, teaching the cycle at a PWI (even with its tensions) and in a community-rooted Freedom School is not simply pedagogy; it is an act of ancestral fidelity and a performance of resistance. In both settings, I am not just teaching plays. I am tending a lineage and guarding the ground from which it grows. Wilson, like Du Bois, recognized that Black art is inherently bound to Black being, history, and struggle. Thus, through my Freedom School Series, the cycle becomes a form of propaganda for Black human flourishing, shaping the “spiritual temperament” essential for confronting, withstanding, and surviving anti-Blackness. 12 What follows interprets Du Bois’s four imperatives not as historical artifacts but as living methodologies for teaching the American Century Cycle in an age of democratic decline, expanding from pedagogies that invite white students to recognize the human depth they have been socially trained not to see, to practices in Black communities where Wilson’s drama operates as nourishment, lineage work, and a form of collective care. About Us: Centering Black Life in a Predominantly White Context If Black drama, as Du Bois argued, must “reveal Negro life as it is,” then teaching Wilson in an age of democratic decline is not merely a syllabus choice, it is an act of refusal against erasure and revisionist comfort. Since I first offered “August Wilson’s American Century Cycle” in 2012, 183 students have taken the course. The plays of the cycle have seen us through four presidential elections, political upheaval, racial reckonings, and pandemic grief. Each semester the course is offered, we confront how America rehearses its own amnesia. The erosion of democracy in 2025 is not theoretical for my students; it is unfolding in real time on their newsfeeds, in their families, and in the policies that govern their lives and education. At the time of this writing, the government has been shut down for 35 days. Across the country, the study of race, gender, and history is being reframed as divisive rather than foundational. The arts are being defunded. Books are being banned, and in Virginia, at least one play of the American Century Cycle, Fences , is on a list of challenged books in Loudon County Public Schools. 13 Universities are being conscripted into ideological battles that mistake compliance for patriotism and silence for neutrality. Against this backdrop, studying Wilson, playwright, prophet, and chronicler of the costs of forgetting, is a rehearsal for conscience, and an inquiry into what happens when a nation, its institutions, and citizens lose sight of their moral center. As authoritarian currents quietly advance, to teach “about us” in such times, and specifically to teach about Wilson’s warriors, is to affirm that the quest for knowledge itself is a form of protest, and that the classroom—like the theatre—must keep open the fragile space where human beings can still imagine their way toward freedom. Imagination is not ornamental, and cultivating it is an insurgent, sovereign, and necessary preparatory work for the pursuit of freedom. As Angela Davis reminds us in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle , drawing on the insights of Orlando Patterson, the very idea of freedom—so cherished in Western political thought, so often claimed as its inheritance—was first imagined by enslaved people. Before freedom could be enacted, it had to be envisioned. 14 By Us: Stewardship, Mutual Aid, and the Work of Returning Home If “about us” affirms the centrality of Black life in the study and making of American democracy, “by us” emphasizes reclaiming authorship (or ownership) of the institutions where that study takes place. Du Bois believed that only those who know “from birth and continual association just what it means to be Negro today” can create truthful art. As a Black woman, my teaching is rooted in both my lived experience and the ongoing effort to reshape the institutions through which that knowledge is taught. At W&M, “August Wilson’s American Century Cycle” is housed in Africana Studies, not as an afterthought but as a core part of the program. As a freshman writing seminar, it serves as one of several entry points to the Africana major. This structural choice matters: it asserts that Black dramatic art is central to the study of African-descended peoples, not just an add-on. Housing the course in Africana Studies also safeguards the integrity of its epistemic roots. In that space, Wilson’s plays are seen not just as repertoire or roles but as theory, philosophy, and a historical archive. This approach ensures that Black students experience the cycle as an inheritance, not just an elective, and that the course remains grounded in a tradition of knowledge-making rather than exercises in performance. However, even within Africana Studies at a PWI, I often feel the tension between preserving Wilson’s legacy and the conditions under which that preservation occurs. Wilson wrote about a community that mostly existed outside the academy, as well as the elite, regional, and predominantly white institutions in which his work was frequently developed and encountered. This tension, not incidental, is a constitutive feature of the American Century Cycle's dramaturgy and central to teaching it. Yet it is precisely the misalignment between Wilson’s dramaturgical commitments and the institutional conditions under which his work is most often taught that compelled me to develop this series, to relocate the plays within the Black social, vernacular, and spiritual ecosystems that shaped them. I extended my teaching of Wilson into the community through a Freedom School model, where these same plays are not studied for course credit, but within a familiar glow of fellowship, collective memory, and song. At the heart of Du Bois’s concept of “by us” is mutual aid, the oldest form of Black institutional practice. Mutual aid reminds us that Black survival has always depended on collective care, involving the pooling of resources, sharing of knowledge, and mutual support when formal systems fail to provide the critical assistance needed. It is both economic and spiritual, an ethic that links my teaching to the same communal networks that have long sustained Black art and life. Support for the 2025-2026 Freedom School Series was provided through the generosity of individuals and local organizations, such as Omiwerx, An Achievable Dream, The Links, Inc., Newport News (VA) Chapter, and Black-owned businesses like Resist Booksellers and Cory’s Southern Kitchen & Catering. This economic reciprocity—circulating the fruits of art back into the community that gave birth to it—is itself a Du Boisian practice. Local churches also play a vital role: Williamsburg Christian Church distributed copies of Wilson’s plays, while St. John’s Baptist Church hosts the monthly gatherings, connecting the series to the sacred heritage of the Black church as a place of education, performance, and prophecy. In this way, “by us” becomes more than just curricular facilitation and ownership; it transforms into an ecosystem of care where mutual aid, curricular reclamation, and spiritual fellowship converge. Together, these practices honor Du Bois’s call for art that reveals “The Souls of Black Folk” and Wilson’s insistence that we stand firm on the ground that made us, ensuring theatre remains accountable to the people whose stories gave it life. 15 For Us: Centering the Local Black Community In Du Bois’s third principle, the audience is important. The “real Negro theatre” must be “for us…the theatre must cater primarily to Negro audiences.” In our Freedom School Series, many participating students are descendants of families displaced by the expansion of Colonial Williamsburg, which abutted university expansions. 16 We explore Wilson’s cycle alongside local Black history, guided by oral histories and walking tours through historic sites curated by Mrs. Bridgeforth-Williams, with the support of other members of the descendant community. These gatherings remind me that our work is not simply pedagogical but ancestral. Teaching “for us” steadies my spirit in a time of hyper-surveillance of faculty and renews my sense of accountability to those whose stories I carry. We do not view Wilson’s plays solely from a safe perspective of literary analysis; we see them as rituals, and our reading, teaching, and analysis as acts of remembering . Students are asked to consider the following questions: How do they see themselves building on the legacy of enslavement?   What new observations are they making about Black life in Williamsburg, and where can they intervene in addressing the most pressing issues facing their community?   How does their engagement with the American Century Cycle ignite the revolutionary spirit within and motivate them to challenge the forces aiming to oppress and dehumanize them?  How does the cycle motivate them to become students of history and their own “blood memories” so they can understand the story of America’s history correctly as the semi-quincentennial approaches, and uncover the stories of their mothers, fathers, and ancestors?  How are they defining, rethinking, and shaping their own ideas of freedom during this moment of national crisis? 17 The gatherings are intentionally intergenerational, with parents and grandparents seated behind and around middle and high school students, as well as members of the descendant community. Within that circle, knowledge isn’t just passed down but shared outward; the room acts as a rehearsal for collective memory. As Wilson instructs, we place culture before them so that: When [they] leave [their] parents' house, [they] are not in the world alone. [They] have something that is [theirs], [they] have a ground to stand on, and [they] have a viewpoint, and [they] have a way of proceeding in the world that has been developed by [their] ancestors. 18 These acts of remembering cannot remain abstract , especially within classrooms, removed from the communities whose stories we bear. Every revolution of consciousness must be grounded in the soil that bore both the wound and the witness. The question, then, is not only what we teach, but where we teach, and whose footsteps echo beneath our classrooms. Near Us: Place and Proximity Du Bois insisted that Black theatre must be near us, rooted in the communities where Black people live. After all, a theatre detached from Black people’s daily rhythms risks becoming a monument to itself in service of white needs, rather than a mirror for the Black community. 19 Teaching the American Century Cycle in Williamsburg—part of the trifecta of cities that make up the Birthplace of American Independence—means teaching within earshot of auction blocks, plantation fields, and the echoes of once-thriving Black communities displaced by urban renewal and gentrification. Wilson’s Hill District is not my classroom’s geography, but it is its mirror: a concentrated stage through which the wider Black American story refracts. Its specificity invites us to look closer to home, to see how the same forces at play in the American Century Cycle have and continue to shape Black life in Williamsburg and beyond. In a political climate where policy shifts will undoubtedly constrict Black enrollment at PWIs, I may never see any of these 11-18-year-olds at William & Mary. Thus, the prospect of teaching Black theatre in the richly diverse classrooms of my early career feels increasingly remote. In bringing the cycle near Black students , we fulfill Du Bois’s fourth principle in its fullest sense: art that not only remembers the people but returns to them. “About us” names the courage to study Black life as a form of cultural transmission, and an act of repair and protest in an age of democratic decline. “By us” affirms that such a study must be authored and governed by those who live its truths. “For us” extends the circle of learning to the communities that continue to bear both the burden and the beauty of those truths. “Near us,” in this instance, refers not to the Hill District itself, but to places closer to home, such as Williamsburg, where the same forces of urban renewal, exclusion, and resilience have shaped the landscape. Thus, the Freedom School Series on August Wilson’s American Century Cycle is a Du Boisian imperative enacted: teaching about us, by us, for us, and near us, where Wilson’s plays are not simply studied but engaged as inheritance, and where participants—including me—are strengthened to make our freedom mean something in this age of democratic decline. 20 A luta continua for all stewards of Black theatre pedagogy and production. These times are unprecedented for many of us, but not new. The cycle we face now is one that many of our ancestors recognized, resisted, and survived. In this repetition lies both a warning and the inheritance Wilson makes clear: the strategies for navigating this moment already exist in our collective memory. May Ògún continue to be the force and energetic link that bridges the distance between our visioning, our efforts, our accomplishments, and our survival. 21 References 1 W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Drama Among Black Folk,” The Crisis 12.4 (August 1916), 171. 2 Deanté Kyle, “War on Drugs,” Episode 43, Grits & Eggs Podcast (25 December 2024), accessed 3 November 2025, https://youtu.be/R_XtX4f2Goc?si=EU5Dtf36LmT36eVr . 3 August Wilson, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” American Theatre (20 June 2016), accessed 3 November 2025, https://www.americantheatre.org/2016/06/20/the-ground-on-which-i-stand/ . 4 American Archive of Public Broadcasting, “August Wilson,” A World of Ideas, Episode 129 (20 October 1988), accessed 3 November 2025, https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-904f8e84cc . 5 August Wilson, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” American Theatre (20 June 2016), accessed 3 November 2025, https://www.americantheatre.org/2016/06/20/the-ground-on-which-i-stand/ . 6 While my Wilson seminar asks students to read, analyze, and write, the risks there tend to remain at the level of interpretation. Students may romanticize or misread Black life, but the encounter remains textual. In the acting studio, however, where students are asked to think about how to bring the language of Wilson and other writers of Black drama into the body through Nommo Force, those risks intensify for the reasons addressed above. 7 August Wilson, Two Trains Running , Plume (1992), back cover. 8 These students do not form a single uniform group. Some enroll out of genuine intellectual curiosity and a desire to engage deeply with Wilson’s vision. Others arrive because the course fits their schedule, satisfies a requirement, or has been misperceived as less demanding. And it is important to note that Black learners, too, may enter for these same reasons; neither earnestness nor convenience adheres neatly to racial lines. This mix of interest, necessity, and misconception creates a classroom where the effort to foster understanding is weighted and where cultural teaching necessarily extends beyond content mastery into questions of responsibility, extraction, and care. 9 Hezakya News & Film, “1967 Special Report: Stokely Carmichael Black Power Debate,” American Broadcasting Company (22 March 2025), accessed 1 November 2025, https://youtu.be/PtDup63f9t4?si=W8fdlRpc88aGTBZR . 10 Vera Sheppard, “August Wilson: an interview,” National Forum , 70.3 (Summer 1990), 7, accessed 1 November 2025, https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=0ad8c720-b1bf-31d3-b040-dcfffe9988dd . 11 W.E.B. Du Bois, “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement,” The Crisis 32.3 (July 1926), 134. 12 August Wilson, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” American Theatre (20 June 2016), accessed 3 November 2025, AMERICAN THEATRE | The Ground on Which I Stand . 13 “PEN America Index of School Book Bans – Fall 2022,” accessed 2 November 2025, https://pen.org/book-bans/index-of-school-book-bans-2022/ . 14 Angela Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Haymarket Books, 2016), 67. 15 George Plimpton, "August Wilson: The Art of Theater XIV."  The Paris Review (Winter 1999), 67-94, accessed 3 November, 2025, https://www.proquest.com/magazines/august-wilson-art-theater-xiv/docview/219435031/se-2 . 16 Zach Meredith, Urban Renewal in the Colonial Capital: Contextualizing the Williamsburg Redevelopment & Housing Authority, Undergraduate Honors Thesis, William & Mary (2019). 17 Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green, “Teaching Wilson for the Public Good,” keynote lecture, August Wilson Society Biennial Colloquium, University of Pittsburgh (4 April 2025). 18 Sheppard, Vera. “August Wilson: an interview,” National Forum , 70(3) (Summer 1990), 7., accessed 3 November 2025, https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=0ad8c720-b1bf-31d3-b040-dcfffe9988dd . 19 Dominic Taylor, “Don’t Call African American Theatre Black Theatre, It’s Like Calling a Dog a Cat,” The Massachusetts Review (September 2019), accessed 3 November 2025, https://www.massreview.org/node/10262 . 20 August Wilson, Gem of the Ocean , Theatre Communications Group (2003), 28. 21 Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green, “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 33.2 (April 29, 2021), accessed 3 November 2025, https://www.thesegalcenter.org/jadt/%E2%80%9C%C3%B2g%C3%BAn-y%C3%A8-mo-y%C3%A8!%E2%80%9D-pathways-for-institutionalizing-black-theater-pedagogy-and-production-at-historically-white-universities . Footnotes About The Author(s) Omiyemi (Artisia) Green is Professor of Theatre & Africana Studies at William & Mary. She holds an endowed professorship as a University Professor for Teaching Excellence and was recently designated the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Theatre & Performance. An artist-scholar with more than twenty years of higher education experience, her scholarship focuses on Black Theatre and African Diasporic performance. Her research has been presented internationally and published widely, and she is the founding editor-in-chief of  The Black Theatre Review , the only peer-reviewed, open-access journal dedicated to African Diasporic theatrical scholarship. At William & Mary, she expanded Black theatre pedagogy and production, developed curricula, and directed stage and screen projects. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has held national leadership roles in the Black Theatre Network and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. 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 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Reflections on Fundamental Principles An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T The Wild Duck Picnic at Hanging Rock Last Call: A Play with Cocktails The Dinosaurs The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Peak Hour in the House by Blue Ka Wing at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. 《Peak Hour in the house》 illustrates a solitary woman who, while "enjoying" her private space, faces sudden surges of anxiety and learns to coexist with them. In the midnight, she enjoys her me-time, savoring moments of solitude. However, this is precisely when the hidden anxieties within her are most likely to visit. In the stillness of the night, the doorbell rings, akin to a nightmare striking during peaceful sleep. Gradually, she attempts to unveil her body like a diary, page by page. She uncovers not only the chaotic thoughts in her brain but also the internal organs carrying her personal history. The accumulated impurities over the years require her to untangle and digest them herself. By courageously confronting the sources of her anxiety and becoming someone capable of embracing negative energy, she gains the strength to make positive changes. Official selection of 《Peak Hour in the House》 - FIFTH WALL FEST Edition V (New Manila, Philippines) - Brighton Screendance Festival 2024 (Brighton, United Kingdom) - Together We Dance ! A 30-Year Journey: Dance Film Nights - PLUS by Hong Kong Dance Alliance (Hong Kong) - FIELDS by The Place and Studio Wayne McGregor (London, United Kingdom) - SHAPE 2 (Atlanta, USA) - The 5th Edition of the ROLLOUT Dance Film Festival (Macao, China) - The 43rd International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) (Québec, Canada) - Online platform ARTS.FILMS (Québec, Canada) - Cinedans FEST '25 (Amsterdam, Netherlands) - 2025 92NY Future Dance Festival (New York, United States) Award of 《Peak Hour in the House》 - Special Mentions from The 5th Edition of the ROLLOUT Dance Film Festival (Macao, China). The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Peak Hour in the House At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Blue Ka Wing Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 11am (as part of the Short Film program) and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country United Kingdom Language No Dialogue Running Time 7:19 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film 《Peak Hour in the house》 illustrates a solitary woman who, while "enjoying" her private space, faces sudden surges of anxiety and learns to coexist with them. In the midnight, she enjoys her me-time, savoring moments of solitude. However, this is precisely when the hidden anxieties within her are most likely to visit. In the stillness of the night, the doorbell rings, akin to a nightmare striking during peaceful sleep. Gradually, she attempts to unveil her body like a diary, page by page. She uncovers not only the chaotic thoughts in her brain but also the internal organs carrying her personal history. The accumulated impurities over the years require her to untangle and digest them herself. By courageously confronting the sources of her anxiety and becoming someone capable of embracing negative energy, she gains the strength to make positive changes. Official selection of 《Peak Hour in the House》 - FIFTH WALL FEST Edition V (New Manila, Philippines) - Brighton Screendance Festival 2024 (Brighton, United Kingdom) - Together We Dance ! A 30-Year Journey: Dance Film Nights - PLUS by Hong Kong Dance Alliance (Hong Kong) - FIELDS by The Place and Studio Wayne McGregor (London, United Kingdom) - SHAPE 2 (Atlanta, USA) - The 5th Edition of the ROLLOUT Dance Film Festival (Macao, China) - The 43rd International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) (Québec, Canada) - Online platform ARTS.FILMS (Québec, Canada) - Cinedans FEST '25 (Amsterdam, Netherlands) - 2025 92NY Future Dance Festival (New York, United States) Award of 《Peak Hour in the House》 - Special Mentions from The 5th Edition of the ROLLOUT Dance Film Festival (Macao, China) About The Artist(s) https://drive.google.com/file/d/17Gegq0SmwG6MQfWj7imX2CZ5cSxTaZsU/edit Get in touch with the artist(s) bluekawing＠hotmail.com and follow them on social media https://www.facebook.com/bluekawing/, https://www.instagram.com/bluekawing/, https://www.youtube.com/@danzrainbow Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

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

Valerie Joyce Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Valerie Joyce By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF An immigrant mother arrives at the border with only her child and the possessions she can carry. Whether she chose to leave her homeland for a chance at a better life or she was forced to flee persecution and violence, she left behind her community and her culture. However, in her memory and her body, she carries her traditions as tangibly as the most precious belongings. This story could be ripped from the headlines in 2024 about a woman at the southern border of the United States or be a tale about an expectant mother disembarking at Plymouth with a band of religious separatists from the seventeenth century. Whatever the setting, these women all have a common acculturation experience once they arrive: America begins to shape them just as they begin to shape America. Upon contact with a new culture, immigrants begin to acculturate, choosing what traditions and behaviors to keep and what to discard. According to cross-cultural psychologists David Sam and John W. Berry, acculturation is an integration process that occurs in three distinct phases: “contact, reciprocal influence, and change.” (1) This often-painful assessment process lives in the body as much as in the possessions, language, and clothing each immigrant evaluates as they navigate between the need to protect their heritage and the pressure to assimilate. For American immigrants, acculturation often centers around adapting to an ideal of Anglo-conforming “Americanness” and, for millions of immigrants, this process began upon arrival at Ellis Island. In 1883, a group of Russian Jewish immigrants detained at Ellis Island inspired empathy in poet Emma Lazarus. Hoping to offer a more welcoming beginning at Ellis Island, she composed “The New Colossus” which reads: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! (2) Lazarus’s evocative sonnet harnesses the powerful symbolism of the towering Statue of Liberty that greeted millions of Eastern European Jewish immigrants approaching Ellis Island, signaling that they had reached the land of freedom. (3) These intertwined pieces of art have long inspired Americans to empathize with the fate of immigrants who arrive at its borders. Similarly, American musical theatre has taken up the project of developing empathy for the painful task of abandoning cultural traditions while forging an American identity. Musicals such as West Side Story (1958), Rags (1986), and Hamilton (2016) have interwoven story and song with evocative choreography to elevate the expression of the immigrant experience, creating a vocabulary of movement and a gestural language for the immigrant body. In her work, Choreographing Empathy , dance theorist Susan Leigh Foster asserts that empathy is a phenomenon that “connects humans to one another” and that choreography helps audiences connect to what a character is feeling so that they might better understand the character’s emotional pain. (4) In coalescing with the plot, music, and lyrics, choreography magnifies the immigrant character’s thoughts and desires, mapping their tension onto the actor’s body and creating a visible and visceral spectacle of acculturation. The original Broadway production of Rags , considered a flop due to its brief run of four official performances, provides an excellent illustration of musical theatre choreography—deployed here to tell an embodied story of acculturation—as a powerful tool to create empathy, motivating its audience to be more compassionate, engaged, and supportive of the American immigrant experience. Rags was created by Joseph Stein (book), Charles Strouse (score), and Stephen Schwartz (lyrics) as a follow-up to Stein’s smash hit Fiddler on the Roof . The action begins at Ellis Island in 1910 and follows Rebecca Hershkowitz, a mother who has followed her husband to America for a better, safer life for her son. Like most immigrant mothers’ experiences before and after hers, Rebecca’s transformation begins upon arrival, as she is challenged to find her way alone in a mysterious system of housing, employment, social relationships, and politics. Through a case study of the plot, score, and movement in the original production of Rags , this essay highlights how performers’ bodies create and build tension through a confrontation of music and movement styles that echoes their characters’ transition from Jewish immigrant to acculturated American. Jewish identity, as dance theorist Rebecca Rossen argues, is “a multilayered performance of repetition and invention” and “dance and the dancing body are particularly germane locations for providing theoretical insight into identity.” (5) This choreographed tension around the loss of these characters’ cultural traditions was impactful for me as a non-Jewish audience member as I watched the videorecording of the original production, and I argue that the detailed and accumulating embodiment of the painful immigration process in Rags crafted empathetic connections that have lasted long beyond my viewing experience. Despite the brevity of its initial run, the choreography of acculturation in this production illustrates the power of musical theatre to connect us to different cultures in ways that remain with us, shaping our understanding of and empathy for others as they wrestle with their own acculturative journey. Tradition(s): From Fiddler to Rags Jewish ethnicity involves traditions based on teachings of the Torah passed from generation to generation. In American popular culture, the musical Fiddler on the Roof (1964), with Stein’s libretto that centered on traditions at the heart of the Jewish culture, defined and even dictated broader cultural understandings of these traditions. Stein and his collaborators, Sheldon Harnick (lyrics), Jerry Bock (music), and Jerome Robbins (direction and choreography), cemented the musical theatre expression of three aspects of Jewish culture in the first moments of Fiddler : first, the role tradition plays in setting fundamental social expectations; second, the interpolation of traditional klezmer music into a Broadway sound; and third, an identifiably “Jewish” physicality in movement, gesture, and dance. Alissa Solomon asserts that a “special alchemy” among these aspects turned Fiddler into “folklore” and “a sacred repository of Jewish ‘authenticity.’” (6) A brief examination of Fiddler’s opening number, “Tradition,” delineates the Jewish cultural traditions still at play in Rags . “Tradition” establishes the conflict at the heart of Fiddler’s plot, setting up gender role expectations and society’s rules for marriage, appropriate dress, and business. Patriarchal milkman Tevye articulates the tension around these conflicts stating, “And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word. Tradition!....And because of our traditions, every one of us knows who he is and what God expects him to do.” (7) Throughout Fiddler , modernizing forces test these traditions in both Tevye’s home and the larger tightknit community. In Rags , Stein stages the pressures and pain of the “double bind” many immigrants face choosing between maintaining tradition or assimilation. (8) His plot illustrates the three formal phases of acculturation and how the characters’ values, attitudes, and behaviors change, resulting in four different outcomes identified by Berry and Sam: integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalization. These outcomes reflect the degree to which each has embraced or rejected their original and new culture and their overall sense of belonging. (9) The acculturation story in Rags invites audiences to make empathetic connections as the central characters experience contact and reciprocal influence in the first act and more intense reciprocal pressure that results in change and belonging in the second act. In crafting the Fiddler score, Bock relished the opportunity to explore his own cultural memories, claiming the musical about Russian Jewish shtetl life “opened up a flood of possibilities for me.” (10) The ersatz sonic landscape he established in “Tradition,” heavy with violins, clarinets, and klezmer rhythms, became the iconic musical theatre sound to evoke the Eastern European Jewish culture. Strouse had a similar connection to the material in Rags stating, “These were our grandmother’s journeys.” (11) His score echoes and builds upon Bock’s work in Fiddler , purposefully fusing two musical idioms that were popular in America at the turn of the twentieth century, klezmer and ragtime. Strouse also articulates the “Jewish” sonic identity in Rags through klezmer music, which had historical roots in Ashkenazi Jewish culture that migrated to America from areas throughout Eastern Europe but was considered “immigrant street music” by the 1900s. (12) He then utilized rags, the popular music of the era that was distinctly not imported from Europe, but rather originated in African American communities, to represent the “American” influences in the musical. The expressions of klezmer and ragtime music in Rags are theatrical realities, rather than literal expressions of the original forms of music, and are both filtered through Strouse’s subjectivity and orchestrated to offer the Broadway audience a cultural memory rather than documentary accuracy. Strouse places these forms in concert with and in contrast to one another to establish cultural and ethnic sonic traditions. Through this fusion that extends Bock’s work in Fiddler , Strouse creates and builds tension in a confrontation of musical styles that echoes the characters’ negotiation of the transition from immigrant to acculturated American. Finally, Jerome Robbins’ choreography in Fiddler on the Roof establishes the gestural language for each familial character group in “Tradition ” with communicative hand and arm movements that embody cultural traditions of Anatevka. Walter Zev Feldman asserts that gestures incorporating the hands and arms “formed a large part of the vocabulary of Jewish dance” and were a way that Jewish dancers expressed individuality and “sought connection to the divine.” (13) In the opening number Robbins also utilized the circle, a prominent feature of Jewish dance, to establish the central metaphorical movement pattern for the production which would wind and unwind as traditions were affirmed or destroyed. (14) In Rags , Strouse’s eclectic fusion of klezmer and ragtime syncopations and melodies also inspired an evocative clash of “Jewish” and “American” choreography. Through carefully arranged “Jewish” and “American” gestures and accumulating movement patterns, the actor’s bodies accrued culturally specific meanings and magnified the immigrant characters’ thoughts and desires regarding their traditions and their acculturation process. These careful arrangements and meaningful structures, however, cannot be attributed to a specific collaborator on Rags , as the original production suffered from a lack of consistent directorial vision, cycling through several directors and even opening for previews in Boston without a director listed. (15) Compounding this frantic shifting, producers brought in Broadway veteran Ron Field to replace choreographer Kenneth Rinker three weeks before opening in New York. Since the choreography and movement cannot be assigned to either Field or Rinker, I must focus my analysis on the choreography of acculturation in the musical, including the vocabulary of movement they created, as well as the character work of the individual actors, that established a gestural language for the Jewish immigrant body. As Foster asserts, this immigrant body invites an empathetic response from its audience through a choreographed “system of codes and conventions,” that are expressed in “physical images” that convey meaning through the arrangement of parts of the body. (16) Utilizing Foster’s theories to analyze the choreographic coding of empathy in Rags, I examine three expressive areas of the performer’s body—the hands and arms, the feet and legwork, and the position or shape of the torso—to illustrate how the immigrant body is developed and articulated throughout the musical. This study also expands Foster’s theories on the way dance “summons its viewers into an empathic relationship” by an inclusive evaluation of choreographed, gestural, and natural character movement utilizing these categories: body stances (open or closed), bodily shapes (erect or curved), timing of movements (slow or quick, continuous or abrupt), qualities of motion (restrained, sustained, or bursting), and relation to dimensional space (center, upstage, downstage). (17) By applying Foster’s analytical structure to immigrant identities and expanding the field of consideration to the actor’s characterization and movement, I argue that the compelling contrasts in stylized movement, in concert with the varied flavors of the musical score, build tension and define the Jewish characters’ immigrant identities in the choreography of acculturation through various stages of their struggles with tradition and change. Jewish cultural traditions, like the ones set out in Fiddler’s “Tradition,” have proven instructive in the theatre, as enacting the painful process of melting away these defining practices while acculturating has created dramatic impact in plays from Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot (1908) to Paula Vogel’s Indecent (2015). Rags joined this lineage in the 1980s, as American popular culture reclaimed a narrative of American multiculturalism in a wave of nostalgia for the early twentieth century. Theatre theorist Henry Bial argues that Broadway began to see a phenomenon of playwrights focused on a “desire to reconstruct a lost or forgotten Jewish culture” that had been “denied them by their parents’ desire to assimilate.” (18) He argues that this “desire to remember” produced work that offered audiences “key elements of acting Jewish” and distinguishes more modern work “from earlier ‘Jewish revivals’ such as Fiddler on the Roof .” (19) Stein crafted Rags in this cultural moment to explore how core Jewish traditions adapted once they met the American melting pot, purposefully connecting within the musical’s title the rags of the syncopated musical style with the physical rags the immigrants wear. And, although the constant changes spelled disaster for the production, what emerges in the archival performance footage from 1986 is a coherent and complex synthesis of artistically embodied immigrant characters who dance with joy and pathos to Strouse’s score. Rags encourages empathy in its audience by illustrating the turmoil immigrants experience while acculturating, creating opportunities for viewers to be moved to be more compassionate to, engaged in, and supportive of the broader American immigrant experience. Contact with a Brand New World: Acculturation Begins Rags ’s creators begin crafting an empathetic response by artistically constructing the contact stage of the acculturation process, starting on Ellis Island where the Eastern European Jewish immigrants and Americans first make contact and then illustrating how the initial interactions during this phase can result in acculturative stress. (20) The central characters’ choreographic coding falls on a spectrum pinned by two starkly different embodiments, as both the Jewish immigrant and the American bodies are established in the opening number “I Remember/Greenhorns.” (21) These contrasting songs splice together two conflicting musical styles, and the physical staging of this sequence emphasizes the characters’ chaotic initial moments of transition from Immigrant to American. In “I Remember,” Strouse’s music begins with the lush brass sounds of classical Americana which then turn harmonic, evoking a Eastern European mood as a “Homesick Immigrant” sings, “Sometimes we don’t love things/ Till we tell them goodbye/ Oh, my homeland, my homeland/ Goodbye.” (22) Aurally and lyrically, Rags establishes its focus on the internal emotions of more than two million Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who arrived between 1880 and 1924, as the immigrants experience the confusion and homesickness that is typical of this stage of acculturation. The Jewish Immigrant physicality becomes discernable as they shuffle to disembark, clothed in ragged overcoats and carrying packages. (23) Although each character holds something different, a belonging, luggage, or a child, their body is the main vessel of what they carry with them – their history, relationships, religion, memories, and sorrow. They huddle together, establishing the core coding for the Immigrant body in Rags . This corporeal expression is characterized in Foster’s terms by a closed stance with torso collapsed, legs together, and arms bent to chest in a clutching motion. Their huddled shape is curved, with their shoulders thrust forward, functioning in the mode of “protecting” their belongings as well as their physical center. Even as the music and lyrics recall their beloved homeland, the still, strained quality of their bodies express their exhausting ordeal, and their huddling conveys their communal instinct to protect their children, their possessions, and their traditions. Strouse’s sorrowful tune disrupts the scene with the catchy ragtime music of “Greenhorns,” which features clarinets, trumpets, and percussion in a polyrhythmic melody over a metrically regular accompaniment figure. Two Anglo-looking “Cynical Americans” in white suits, white shoes, and boater hats appear in spotlight. The men dance in a powerful spatial position at center, downstage of the mass of immigrants, hungrily observing, “Another load of greenhorns/ Fresh off the boat/ Another wave of refugees/ To fill the mills and factories/ A little grist/ For the capital system” (1-1-10). The men in white stand in stark contrast to the shadowy mass of bewildered immigrants in dark rags shuffling in line behind them. These commanding men establish the active “American” physicality for the production, characterized by an open stance with their loose torso, arms, and legs. Their shape is erect with shoulders back and head up, evoking a sustained quality of ease in their movements that captures the essence of freedom they embody. The Americans’ movement timing is quick and continuous as they execute a simple combination of grapevine steps in unison while shaking their boaters, a playful style that evokes the most notable Yankee Doodle song-and-dance man of the period, George M. Cohan. Their heels jauntily scuff as they walk downstage, with small kicks and a wide lean, opening their arms and torsos to the huddled “Greenhorns” who are desperate for jobs. Filled with a sense of belonging, the Cynical American’s relaxed attitude and loose physicality indicates full assimilation into the culture. As the Immigrants join their last lyric, “We’ll keep America green!” (1-1-10), the men stand together and swing their left arms open wide on “America,” as if opening Emma Lazarus’ mythical Golden Door for this latest flood of immigrants. As “Greenhorns” ends, Rebecca Hershkowitz, played in the original production by opera diva Teresa Stratas, emerges from the huddled mass with her ten-year-old son David, played by Josh Blake. Stratas was malleable as the beleaguered yet indestructible Rebecca at the center of the musical. At five foot tall with a “birdlike physique,” she effectively performed frailty, but her powerful voice established her commanding presence and tremendous gravitas on stage. (24) As Rebecca, Stratas’s first physical choices are emblematic of the “typical” immigrant: curved, collapsed, and shielding David. She experiences a specific crisis in the first stage of acculturation, looking expectantly for her husband, Nathan, who arrived in America six years ago. Rebecca is detained when Nathan does not appear, but an older passenger, Avram Cohen, accepts responsibility for her and her son. Avram, his daughter Bella, and Bella’s would-be fiancé Ben round out the core group of immigrants in Rags and offer audiences alternative versions along the spectrum of the Jewish immigrant physicality to follow through their individual acculturation processes. Dick Latessa plays Avram, the dignified and humble religious scholar, and chooses a closed stance and erect shape with his hands clasped in front of him, only opening his torso when he praises God. Avram is the intellectual community elder who vigilantly protects the traditional values and practices that define their Jewish faith, including rules for aspects of conduct in daily life, all with the goal of embodying in “everyday conduct the consequences of the revelation of the Torah.” (25) Latessa’s embodiment establishes Avram as the cultural cornerstone that each character trips over as they rush into choosing their American life. In direct contrast to Avram, Bella is hopeful and in love with Ben Levitowitz, the brash, young, self-starter played by Lonny Price. Bella and Ben embody the youthful Jewish immigrant who is ready to embrace all America has to offer, even if that means abandoning Old World traditions. With his suit open, no hat, and no beard, Ben is “assertive and romantic,” and Price’s stance is wide open as he bursts onto Ellis Island with his arms extended in forward momentum. (26) Judy Kuhn’s stance as Bella is tentatively open as she flits about, trying to contain her excitement. Avram informs his daughter, “He’s not for you…He’s cut from cheap cloth. Besides, a Jewish boy without a hat…Ah well, with God’s help, we’ll never see him again.” Undaunted, Ben promises Bella, “I will find you in America!” before dashing off into his future (1-1-10). The Jewish immigrants in Rags move swiftly through the confusion of the contact stage, exploring their new culture. Setting out for the Cohen family’s tenement on the Lower East Side, they excitedly sing “Brand New World.” However, during this phase, immigrants (in the musical and in life) also experience sensations of difference, including in dress, ideas, language, values, food, and clothing. According to Sam, the contact stage can transition to Acculturative Stress (sometimes likened to Culture Shock) which can result in disorientation and anxiety. (26) Finally alone after settling David in their cramped room, Rebecca takes a moment while her new reality sets in. Although Stratas’s diminutive figure is almost hidden as she crouches behind her suitcase, she projects Rebecca’s intense fear. She protectively curves herself over Blake’s sleeping body, singing, “Shasha, Shasha, Duvedel…We’ll find papa, and we’ll be/ Safe again at last, love…/ Like the Old World,” a lullaby that is klezmer encoded with violins and clarinets in thirds (1-2-12). In the first of many musical confrontations that will open Rebecca’s body and mind as she transforms into an American, Strouse interrupts her solitude with a stock ragtime figure wafting up from the street featuring a trilling synthesized sound like a carnival ride over which a piccolo and tuba continue the melody of “Brand New World.” Transfixed, she sings, “What’s that music/ Playing down there in the street?...So many noises, colors/ Mixed up and swirled/ Into a brand new world here” (1-2-12). However, David awakens, and the music returns her mind to her Old-World lullaby. Before Rebecca can quiet David, Strouse’s contrasting music cuts through again. Together, they absorb the sights and sounds of their new world from the tenement fire escape as the ragtime music begins to affect their immigrant physicalities. Here, Stratas and Blake play at “trying on” the American body with different stances, shapes, and qualities of movement. They slouch forward and lean on the railing, their bodies relaxed for the first time. David, who has little to protect and fewer traditions to preserve, blossoms into another youthful immigrant ready to embrace America with an open torso and outstretched arms. Rebecca, realizing that the encroaching outside world will change her son, is torn between restraining David or allowing him to experience the city. Stratas conveys Rebecca’s choice to embrace their future as she stands behind Blake and mimics the gesture of the Golden Door the Cynical Americans made, opening the “New World” to David. As they sing in counterpoint, David grows more entranced and Rebecca more fearful of losing their connection to their traditions. In their final pose, Stratas’s physicality evokes her emotional turmoil as she opens one arm as if receptive to this new world, but holds David close with the other arm, huddling protectively as the song ends. The early portion of the acculturation process typically concludes with a difficult period as immigrants become frustrated with the choices they must make between their old and new cultures. At times, their experience can be humiliating, leading to depression and despair as they are forced toward change. In the original production of Rags , Rebecca reaches this breaking point after days of searching for her husband Nathan, becoming more and more vulnerable and realizing she will have to fend for her son alone. Recalling their harrowing escape from the violent pogroms and how David had been physically hurt, Rebecca is terrified. Stratas heightens the magnitude of this moment by falling to the floor, creating a striking contrast with her crumpled body on a bare stage. As Stratas begins singing the musical theatre anthem “Children of the Wind,” she is an extreme version of the huddled immigrant body almost prostrate on all fours. Foster notes that this pose “evokes a more primeval or earthly existence.” (27) From this emotionally bereft spatial and physical position, Rebecca pulls herself up and embraces becoming an American. Stratas moves forward and rises with growing passion, motion that Foster interprets as indicating “progress and increasing significance.” (28) Her arms remain clutched to her chest until she sings, “Bring us to the shore/ No more/ Children of the wind” (1-3-16). Stratas finishes the operatic crescendo on “wind” fully erect, with her torso and legs flung open and her arms extended. Her palms face forward to the audience, as though Rebecca is not pleading or begging, but rather connecting to and drawing strength from a larger entity that fuels her transformation in this new world. Stratas’s final gesture makes the overall arc of the movement in “Children of the Wind” at once as simple and as complex as Rebecca’s acculturation journey in America. With “Children of the Wind,” Rags’ s creators conclude the contact phase of Rebecca’s journey with choreographic coding that blends the Jewish Immigrant body with the American body in a thrilling song, tailored to highlight Stratas’s operatic talents. The plot, music, and movement coalesce in this moment, placing Rebecca in a position to move on without Nathan and embrace what America has to offer. This choreography of acculturation formulates, in Foster’s terms, “an appeal to viewers to be apprehended and felt, encouraging them to participate collectively in discovering the communal basis of their experience,” summoning the audience into an empathetic connection with the immigrant experience. (29) Reciprocal Influence: Old World, New World, Strange Harmonies Once the characters have established their physicalized starting points, Rags builds on this emotional and artistic foundation to develop empathy as the Jewish immigrant characters move into the reciprocal influence stage of acculturation, where “both cultural groups affect the other’s cultural patterns” economically, domestically, and socially. (30) During this phase, the choreographic coding of the Jewish immigrant body is in constant tension with the American body as the immigrants engage in the decision-making process of adapting while also maintaining connection to the integral parts of their heritage. Throughout this section, Strouse places klezmer and ragtime music in increasingly closer proximity, sometimes in true contrast and counterpoint, and the audience learns how the immigrants develop a sense of belonging by coping at work, exploring romance, and surviving violence. As time passes, Rebecca and David find employment and adjust to their new community. The song “Penny a Tune” illustrates this transition as Rebecca stitches in a dress factory, David and Avram sell pots from a pushcart, Ben makes cigars in a warehouse, and Bella sews at home. The entire neighborhood sings, “Where folks are poor/ That’s where music is rich/…At only a penny a tune,” as three klezmer street musicians accompany the upbeat rhythm of their work (1-3-17). The musicians’ appearance on stage is significant, as the klezmer sound and rhythm ground the Jewish characters in their ethnic traditions, even as their world expands. (31) David acclimates swiftly, and the klezmer band shifts to a swinging ragtime rhythm and instrumentation as he sings out his peddler’s spiel. Blake’s new embodiment mimics the movements of the Cynical Americans, conveying that David has embraced his role and now moves at a ragtime tempo. This shift is highlighted by his pairing with Avram, who retains his closed, erect, and protective physicality. As David slips away from their reserved culture, Avram’s dismay is amplified as the klezmer band’s syncopated ragtime rhythms crescendo and now incorporate the klezmer sounds as well. The neighborhood sings, “Old world, new world, jumbled up in strange harmonies” in an overwhelming cacophony (1-3-27). Although a klezmer band is playing, the Jewish characters either stand still or gently step touch to the ragtime rhythm. Once again, Strouse has placed the musical styles next to one another, but the neighbors’ reticence to dance to these familiar sounds paints a vivid picture of their ongoing process of deciding to keep or abandon their traditions. The band underscores this cultural conflict as it returns to the raucous klezmer rhythm and melody, presenting the first opportunity for the Rags choreography to teach the audience about joyful Jewish expressiveness through additions to the movement vocabulary. In response to the music, the crowd separates by gender, and the Jewish neighbors dance with an open stance, heads high, and arms up. Their quick synchronized steps and claps are a part of the folkdance traditions that remain in their memories and bodies. Some neighbors execute more intricate steps that Feldman notes are embellishments or variations on the conventional Jewish dance canon, linking arms and circling one another with open torsos and outside arms extended. In this circle dance, similar to a traditional hora , Feldman notes that “upper body movement was deemed essential for the cohesion and internal communication of the group.” (32) This celebratory group dancing connects the spirit and the corporeality of these immigrants with the communal joy of the Old World’s customs, while highlighting how much has been forgotten or already lost as they disperse from their tight-knit community and focus on work each day. The immigrants also experience the reciprocal influence of acculturation as romance blossoms. Rebecca develops confidence as an independent American woman while at the dressmaking factory. She meets union-organizer Saul there, who introduces her to the Yiddish Theatre and radical activist Emma Goldman. One evening, Rebecca loses her inhibitions and allows Saul to kiss her. Afterwards, she sings “Blame it on the Summer Night,” during which Stratas’s embodiment of Rebecca changes, in stance, shape, tempo, and quality of movement. Stratas’s relaxed and open body conveys that Rebecca is awash in conflicting emotions that, for the first time, do not directly relate to her very survival. A klezmer musician accompanies Rebecca with a bluesy clarinet, as Stratas’s swaying hips betray Rebecca’s burgeoning sexual freedom. She spends most of the number leaning back on a low wall, with an open torso, closed eyes, and her head thrown back. Stratas’s gestures are particularly expressive, with her hands on her throat and solar plexus, enjoying Rebecca’s inner tumult. Rebecca claims, “I’m not to blame/ It’s just the shameless summer night” (1-5-40). Stratas then dances and skips around the empty stage, flinging her arms overhead and swaying to the music. In this moment of acculturation, the music, lyrics, and movement intersect to support Rebecca’s rejection of traditional Jewish cultural expectations of propriety and her defiant denial of blame for her actions. Only in the last moments, as Stratas slides from riffing in the blues idiom to an operatic trill, does the musician return to an authentic klezmer riff as he fades into the background. The choreography of Rebecca’s developing embodiment of an independent American woman invites the audience to empathize with her as she embraces what now may be possible. Meanwhile, in another budding romance, Ben visits Bella at the apartment and sweeps her up to dance an Irish waltz. She is shocked and delighted, as traditional Jewish communities forbade men and women from dancing together and maintaining “close physical contact.” (33) With no dancing experience between their characters, Price and Kuhn hold hands while running in circles until they are interrupted by an astonished Avram who condemns this radical behavior. Avram accuses Ben of turning “his back on his people” to embrace America, and Bella flees the stifling apartment (1-6-48). Choking on the polluted air outside the tenement, Bella sings the song “Rags” while arguing with her father about their future. During the narrative portion of the song, Strouse’s music blends klezmer instrumentation, mainly clarinets and violins, with ragtime piccolo, brass, and percussion in a rhythm that bursts forth as Bella laments her lost sense of belonging and her frustration with being outside of the acculturation process she sees around her. Strouse’s music underscores the conflict she faces while living between two cultures but having access to neither. Once Bella escapes uptown to an affluent neighborhood, the music changes to evoke the dreamlike state of an early Hollywood dance film. Couples in stark white suits and gowns surround her while dancing a balletic social dance called the Maxixe to an up-tempo ragtime rhythm that is reminiscent of Vernon and Irene Castle’s dance in the 1915 film The Whirl of Life . Carol Téten describes the beginning of ragtime dancing as a wild expression of the New World’s freedom danced by both acculturating immigrants and the American elite. For both demographics, this new style reacted “against inhibited and restricted movements” and rejected “an antiquated lifestyle.” (34) This synchronized dancing is the first sustained choreography in Rags and serves to highlight Bella’s drastic marginalization from American culture. The Castles, who were prominent dance instructors of the period, invented rules to refine ragtime dancing that “bridled the energy and enthusiasm fostered by the up-tempo music.” (35) The Maxixe in Rags follows the Castle’s technical and social standards which forbade (among other things) wiggling the shoulders, shaking the hips, and twisting, flouncing, or pumping parts of the body. They admonished their students to glide rather than hop and to “avoid low fantastic and acrobatic dips.” (36) These parameters, though somewhat restrictive, channeled potentially wild movements into an elegant and stylish dance. In Bella’s fantasy, the dancers display the animated and erect torso of the ragtime style, and their heads and arms turn together as they change directions in sustained motion across the floor. Danielle Robinson notes that ragtime dancing fascinated young immigrant women like Bella for several reasons. First, the style “offered them access to a particular kind of Americanness…[through which] they affiliated themselves with whiteness…and obfuscated their connections with the foreignness that other Americans projected onto them.” (37) Second, ragtime dancing appealed because it “radically differed from Jewish folk dancing both in terms of social context and movement vocabulary.” Without friends and relatives watching, Robinson notes, the dancers could explore the “unparalleled expressions of sexual desire and pleasure [that] were made possible by the physical intimacy between dancing partners.” (38) Tellingly, Bella’s fantasy embraced the intimate and sustained means of communication between two free adults while rejecting traditional multi-generational, sexually segregated ethnic street celebrations like “Penny a Tune.” Her dream fades as Bella spits out, “I’m the same as you/ but it isn’t true/ I’m just one more Jew/ in her rags!” (1-6-53). The contrasts within the staging of this sequence, from the fantastical white elegance against Bella in her rags to the highly stylized Maxixe whirling around her emphasized the disparity between Bella’s American Dream and her reality in class-conscious American society. These dramatic choreographic contrasts compel the audience to connect with Bella’s pain through, as Foster asserts, a “fundamental physical connection between dancer and viewer.” The choreography has constructed and cultivated “a specific physicality whose kinesthetic experience guides our perception of and connection to what another is feeling,” increasing the likelihood of creating empathy for Bella’s troubled acculturation experience thus far. (39) Finally, Rebecca’s husband Nathan surfaces at the East Side Democratic Club as an assimilated American with political ambitions who is, as John Bush Jones notes, “vigorously denying his Jewish heritage.” (40) As Nathan, Larry Kert leans back on a bar stool with an open stance, smiling and drinking beer in a three-piece suit and boater hat, the very embodiment of a Cynical American. With his Tammany Hall-style cronies, he sings, “What’s Wrong with That?” which filters ragtime through the Vaudevillian idiom. These cronies, including “Big Tim” Sullivan, are not fooled by Nathan’s American camouflage and encourage him to convince recent immigrants of his “persuasion” to register as Democrats (1-7-57). Nathan arrives in the Lower East Side as Rebecca huddles over David who has been injured in a street fight. Having returned to her original immigrant physicalization, Stratas reinterprets her lullaby to comfort David. Surprised to find them, Kert lifts them both, clutching them to his chest and revealing his own vulnerable, closed, and curved immigrant body. But, even as Nathan reconnects with his Jewish immigrant physicality, Rebecca asks him in disgust, “Where were you?” (1-8-63). The cataclysmic end to the act makes clear to Rebecca the dangers of assimilation into American culture and her role in resisting this process. Rags ’s creators detailed the characters’ experiences during the reciprocal influence phase of acculturation, illustrating how American society created pressure to assimilate and offered opportunity to grow in their work, romantic lives, and social connections, to further encourage an empathetic response in viewers. Throughout this stage, Rebecca’s values, behaviors, and identity were malleable, but she faced an instructive crisis when David, who had begun to assimilate, was attacked. As she returned to her huddled immigrant body and the Eastern European sounds of the lullaby, Strouse conveys her strong connections to cultural memory, and Stratas’s body expresses her core objective – protecting her child. By the end of the act, through the choreography of acculturation, Rags’ s creators deliver Rebecca and her fellow Jewish immigrants to the brink of change, where they must decide how America will shape them and how they will shape America. Changing into Americans: Belonging and Legacy The final movement of Rags summons the audience to an empathetic response to the immigrant characters during the last stage of acculturation, as they change into integrated, assimilated, separated, or marginalized Americans. Throughout this phase, the conflicting musical styles and physical expressions of identity continue to clash until several climactic events finalize their full transition from Immigrants to Americans. At this point, the central characters’ choreographic coding transforms into a stabilized interpretation of their adapted American body. Markers of change are apparent as the second act of Rags opens at a rooftop Fourth of July party, with exuberant ethnic dancing set to Strouse’s wild klezmer music that is punctuated by ragtime music when patriotic fireworks burst. Nathan has dropped Hershkowitz and now introduces himself as “Nat Harris,” an identity that horrifies Rebecca. She recoils at trying on this American name for herself, but he equates this exciting improvement with “getting new clothes” (2-1-66). Nathan, in his bid to be Ward Leader for the East Side Democratic Club, works the tenement crowd with an open, erect, and expressive American body shouting, “Nice to see ya” and shaking hands (2-1-64). To emphasize his full assimilation, Nathan sings “Yankee Boy,” playing on the popular 1904 George M. Cohan Broadway musical Little Johnny Jones . Kert’s performance of “Yankee Boy” becomes a condensed enactment of Nathan’s transition from immigrant to American, with his body as the site of contestation. He begins by imitating Latessa’s reserved Avram physicality with a closed stance, his arms stuck tight to his sides and legs together. Kert shrugs his shoulders and brings his arm up along his torso and twists his wrist in two slight circles to complete the parody of a devout Jewish scholar. To underscore Nathan’s distance from this embodiment, Kert’s movements are broadly comic, disjointed, and abrupt. He then adapts the Cynical Americans’ choreography from “Greenhorns,” and David, the remaining potential legacy of Old-World traditions, enthusiastically joins the dance on “I’m gonna be/ A Yankee boy” (2-1-67). The Jewish neighbors tentatively march in place with their arms close at their sides, observing tradition. However, when Nathan and David sing “America the Beautiful,” the neighbors parade down to the street as newly minted Democrats. To accomplish his goal of living “Uptown” like “real Americans,” Nathan convinces Rebecca that he needs money to buy finer clothing for the Democratic Club on election night. Rebecca hands over her entire savings, and Kert greedily hordes the money as he leaves her. Although she reaches after him, her physicality is not curved or closed. She is already solidifying her American stance and stands erect with the contrasting swell of the klezmer strings and wind instruments betraying the pain this choice causes her, as she reprises the Homesick Immigrant’s tune, “Sometimes we don’t love things/ Till we tell them goodbye…” (2-2-70). With acceptance that her old life is gone, Rebecca prepares for the final transition in her acculturation journey. The East Side Democratic Party Rally is the culminating moment in the confrontation of music and dance styles in Rags. During this scene, Rebecca encounters more immigrants like Nathan who have abandoned, forgotten, or hidden their immigrant personas and assimilated as Americans. The intense pressure for Rebecca to assimilate produces a choreographic struggle at the rally that communicates the deeply rooted physical and emotional struggle immigrants experience as they choose what to keep and what to leave as they acculturate and find a sense of belonging. First, Rebecca is tested on how she is adapting to American norms and values as “Big Tim” Sullivan, who has assimilated enough to become the Democratic Party Boss, addresses Rebecca as “Mrs. Harris” and encourages her to dance with one of his men. Her partner pulls her close, and Rebecca becomes a reluctant enactor of Bella’s earlier ragtime dance fantasy. Stratas’s syncopated imitation of her partner’s Fox Trot is more suited to an ethnic dance, and she receives a scandalous slap on the upper thigh as a reprimand. The precisely choreographed formal dancing mimics Bella’s dream, with couples sailing about the room. However, Rebecca breaks off from her partner, and Stratas weaves through the crowd like the leader of a circle dance might, displaying quick footwork, open arms, clapping, and turning, the markers of Jewish ethnic group dancing seen earlier in “Penny a Tune.” Feldman describes a leader creating “snake formations” breaking the circle “into a line moving in a single direction.” (41) To curb Rebecca’s act of resistance, her partner drags her back into line and overpowers her by throwing her back in a dip to finish the number. As the dancers turn upstage to applaud the band, a spotlight isolates Rebecca who faces downstage, isolating her from the assimilated crowd. Stratas holds her arms above her head, clapping with a strongly opposing rhythm. She dances alone to klezmer music, with an open stance and strong angular arms raised in a display of power. Then, as she bows her head, her hands flutter down in the shape of an hourglass. This gesture is the only movement in Rags where an actor performs what Feldman describes as an artistic “communicative” gesture with the hands and arms. (42) By embracing her Jewish ethnic identity through movement, Rebecca reconnects with her past through the cultural and religious traditions she is expected to abandon. As Rebecca’s confidence in choosing her heritage over assimilation grows, Stratas moves center stage, lifts her skirts, and begins to incorporate her entire body into a traditional Eastern European Jewish dance. With her feet together, Stratas moves toe/heel/toe/heel from side-to-side, stomps, circles herself and draws in her dancing partner for coordinated deep knee bends that evoke Ukrainian Hopak dancing. Rebecca is so transported by her corporeal connection to her cultural traditions that it galvanizes the latent immigrant body in the other dancers who divide by gender, replicating the traditional format of the ethnic celebration in “Penny a Tune.” With Nathan and “Big Tim” Sullivan watching from the bandstand, the male dancers move to the klezmer music. Their bodies recall the traditional movements as they do athletic deep knee bends with their hands on their waists and then spring up to their heels with their arms extended, palms flat to ceiling. They perform high jumps with two feet flung behind their body, as one hand touches the soles of their feet and one arm is raised above their heads. Their expert choreography is technical, sustained, and up-tempo. By shrugging off their American identities, these former immigrants reconnect to their cultural roots. However, the struggle continues as the music slides into ragtime rhythms, and the men shift to the “Chicken Scratch,” a ragtime animal walk, that alternates high steps and low kicks with their arms creating angular “wings.” (43) The women then take their turn as the klezmer music returns, building on the men’s ethnic dance style. The groups continue to alternate with the clashing music and dance styles, moving back to their original partners and dancing in unison to ragtime music. The dancers turn to center, forming a large circle holding hands with arms raised, evoking the traditional hora dance. The group circles, kicking their legs high and rocking their bodies front to back, then return to the formal partner dance position. The chaos of switching between dance styles and the cacophony of clashing music not only physically and aurally expresses the pressure these immigrants feel to adapt to American norms and values, but it also engages the audience energetically in the culmination of the choreography of acculturation. The conflict within the dance creates the greatest tension in Rebecca’s acculturation process, forcing an integrated rather than assimilated resolution to her journey . Stratas finishes the jubilant dance at center lifted by her partner with her arms raised in a strong “V” position. This physical image recalls her earlier pose at the end of “Children of the Wind,” blending a refusal to abandon her cultural beliefs and an openness to embrace being an American. Visually connecting these two dramatic moments, one her breaking point and one her triumph, is the production’s most effective climax for crafting empathy through movement. As they finish, Sullivan shouts, “She’s full of vinegar!” recognizing that Rebecca will be an asset who can touch the very heart of the community and bring people together (2-5-86). To Nat’s delight, he is announced as the new Ward Leader. However, this joy is undercut by the news that Bella has died in a factory fire, invoking the infamous 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire that took the lives of one hundred forty-six mostly young, Jewish immigrant girls. This tragedy brings Rebecca to her lowest point since “Children of the Wind” and tests her sense of belonging as an American. To mourn Bella, the creative team chose to incorporate the Mourner’s Kaddish into the musical. The producers were concerned that audiences might find this interpolation offensive, but Stein, Strouse, and Schwartz insisted that the realist aspect was “essential” to the emotional impact of the scene. (44) They crafted “a semi-operatic duel between male and female mourners,” with Schwartz setting transliterated lyrics to Strouse’s music that reinterpreted the traditional melody of the Kaddish. (45) During the scene, Rebecca, David, and Avram cling together but never revert to the closed off physicality of the opening scenes of the musical, affirming that even this sorrow cannot crush their burgeoning American spirit. Rags’ s creators crafted the musical’s original dramatic climax to summon the audience’s empathy for the immigrant characters acculturation struggle. The most marginalized character, Bella, suffers a tragic end, resulting in Ben’s continued assimilation and Avram’s deepening separation from American culture. After Bella’s funeral, Rebecca quits her factory job, joining the Union organizers. She leads with a strong American stature but also loses Nathan. Confounded by her transformation, Nathan asks, “What happened to you?” Her simple reply, “America. I guess America happened to me,” belies the cataclysmic struggle she has experienced (2-7-97). She ascends the Union platform, surrounded by a tableau of American bodies with open torsos and arms extended in unity and power, and reclaims herself as “Rebecca Hershkowitz.” This final sustained, open, and erect gesture expresses the balance she now feels as an integrated Jewish immigrant who will not abandon her cultural heritage but embraces her new identity. *** In 1985, Stein wrote, “ Rags is a story of one woman forced to flee with her son to America and a safe life. She doesn’t find it. Instead, she finds the pleasure-pain of involvement and the price we often pay in caring for others. These others pry open doors within us that allow us to recognize what we are and mold ourselves into something new and wonderful.” (46) Rags ’s creators purposefully crafted empathy by coalescing the plot, score, and movement, recognizing that empathy for immigrants is important, both as a social ideal and for personal growth. Through a screen decades later, the embodied empathy of the choreography of acculturation was still affective, and their ideals have sustained multiple revisions and revivals of the musical for almost forty years. Losing cultural traditions while becoming American is painful and, as sociologist Kris Kissman notes, developing empathy for this process increases the likelihood of building positive relationships with our students, co-workers, and clients who have experienced immigration. This work may include recognizing difficult immigrant experiences, respecting language preferences, or patiently accepting how much time the acculturation process takes. (47) However, developing the empathetic response grows increasingly difficult in a deeply divided and ultra-mediated America. The arts, and specifically musical theatre through its combination of visual, aural, and visceral impact, can craft powerful work by staging the embodied stories of others that invites and provokes audiences to make empathetic connections that remain long after the performance ends. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References David L. Sam, “Acculturation: Conceptual Background and Core Components” in The Cambridge Handbook of Acculturation Psychology Eds. David L. Sam and John W. Berry, (Cambridge UP: New York, 2006), 11 &14; John Berry and Feng Hou, “Immigrant Acculturation and Wellbeing Across Generations and Settlement Contexts in Canada,” International Review of Psychiatry 2021, 33, no. 1–2, 142. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2020.1750801 Barry Moreno, The Statue of Liberty Encyclopedia (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2000), 111, 140 & 172. Moreno, 172. Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (New York: Routledge, 2010), 168 & 2. Rebecca Rossen, Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance (online edn, Oxford Academic, 19 June 2014), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199791767.001.0001 , accessed 16 Apr. 2024.12. Alisa Solomon, “Balancing Act: Fiddler’s Bottle Dance and the Transformation of “Tradition”, TDR: The Drama Review 55:3 Fall 2011, 22. Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, Fiddler on the Roof (New York: Crown Publishers Inc., 1965), 1. Rossen, 29, and Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage & Screen (E-book, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 30. Sam, “Acculturation,” 17; Berry and Hou, “Immigrant,” 141-142. “‘Fiddler’ Songwriters Discuss Putting Themselves in the ‘Soul of The Characters,’” Fresh Air January 15, 2016 https://www.npr.org/2016/01/15/463162072/fiddler-songwriters-discuss-putting-themselves-in-the-soul-of-the-characters . Alvin Klein, “Hoping to Turn Rags into Riches,” New York Times , August 17, 1986, 11LI. Klein, “ Rags into Riches.”; Frank Rich, “Teresa Stratas as a Jewish Immigrant in Rags , a Musical,” New York Times , August 22, 1986. C3. Walter Zev Feldman, Klezmer: Music, History and Memory (New York: Oxford UP, 2016), 164 & 201. Feldman, Klezmer , 174; Richard Altman, The Making of a Musical: Fiddler on the Roof (New York: Crown Publishers, 1971), 31. Ken Mandelbaum, Not Since Carrie (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 321. Foster, Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in American Dance (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1986), xviii. Foster, “Choreographies,” 209. Bial, Acting Jewish , 5 & 110. Bial, 110. Sam, “Acculturation,” 14. These song titles are connected by a slash in published and unpublished scripts, but not in the original playbill. Joseph Stein, Charles Strouse, and Stephen Schwartz, Rags, unpublished libretto, 1987, 1-1-1. Joseph Stein papers, *T-Mss 1993-010. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. All text and lyric references are to act, scene, and page of this edition. Stein, et al., Rags , filmed August 23,1986, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Division, Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, videorecording. All descriptions of movement and choreography in Rags are from this recording at the Mark Hellinger Theatre. Peter G. David, The American Opera Singer (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 522. Jacob Neusner, Halakhah: Historical and Religious Perspectives (Leiden: BRILL, 2002), 135. Accessed February 20, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central; Harmeet Kaur, “What does it mean to be Jewish in the US?” CNN , April 4, 2023. Accessed February 15, 2024 https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/04/us/us-jewish-racial-identity-religion-explained-cec/index.html . Klein, “ Rags into Riches.” Berry, “Stress Perspectives on Acculturation,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Acculturation Psychology Eds. David L. Sam and John W. Berry, (Cambridge UP: New York, 2006), 43. Foster, Reading Dancing , 85. Foster, Reading Dancing , 85. Foster, Choreographing Empathy , 218. Sam, “Acculturation,” 14-15. Mark Slobin, “ Klezmer Music: An American Ethnic Genre,” Yearbook for Traditional Music v. 16 (1984): 34-35. Klezmer music first appeared in America circa 1910. At its core is “good-time music…inextricably tied to dance.” Feldman, Walter Zev, Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory (New York: Oxford Academic 2016), 174. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190244514.001.0001 , accessed 27 Mar. 2024. Feldman, Klezmer , 175. Carol Téten, How to Dance Through Time: Dances of the Ragtime Era: 1910-1920 (Volume II) , Dancetime Productions, 2003, DVD. Ralph G. Giordano, Social Dancing in America Vol. 2 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 16-18. Maurice Mouvet introduced the Brazilian Maxixe to America in the 1910s. Téten, How to Dance Through Time . Danielle Robinson, “Performing American: Ragtime Dancing as Participatory Minstrelsy,” Dance Chronicle 32 (2009):108. Robinson, 101 & 108. Foster, Choreographing Empathy , 2. John Bush Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves (Hanover, MA: Brandies University Press, 2003), 223. Feldman, Klezmer , 174. Feldman, Klezmer , 172 and 187. Giordano, 11; Robinson, 116. Animal dances served in a “liberating, escapist capacity.” Russo, “Tailoring Rags. ” No choreography accompanied this scene and, although the choice to include the Kaddish was dramatically effective, it also illustrates the creators’ own acculturation, since using this sacred ritual for entertainment was blasphemous. See Bial 70. Vito Russo, “Tailoring Rags for Broadway,” Newsday , August 17, 1986, 3. “ Rags : The Theme,” Stein Papers, Box 16.6, dated October 14, 1985. Kris Kissman, “Deconstructing the journey from assimilation to acculturation in academia,” International Social Work (Sage Publications: London) 44(4): 423. Footnotes About The Author(s) Dr. Valerie Joyce is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre & Studio Art at Villanova University. Her scholarship cuts across race, genre, and historical period to center on the cultural constructs of gender and the theatre’s role in shaping American womanhood. She has published chapters in The Palgrave Handbook of Musical Theatre Producers and The African Experience in Colonial Virginia: Essays on the 1619 Arrival and the Legacy of Slavery as well as articles in Complutense Journal of English Studies and Pennsylvania History Journal . She is also a director, choreographer, and costume designer with recent credits that include The Drowsy Chaperone , Sunday in the Park with George , and The Importance of Being Earnest . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Eric M. Glover 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 American Musical Theater Eric M. Glover By Published on December 11, 2017 Download Article as PDF American Musical Theater . James Leve. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015; Pp. 448. American Musical Theater by James Leve provides instructors and students with an interdisciplinary approach to the history of the musical from Reconstruction to the contemporary period. From burlesque, the minstrel show, operetta, and vaudeville to the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber and those of Stephen Sondheim, Leve presents the musical as a narrative genre that shapes and is shaped by national themes of cross-cultural encounter. Leve argues that the musicals of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, II were and remain the standard by which all musicals are judged, a standard to which he does not capitulate unconditionally but resists throughout. Leve’s stated purpose for the textbook is to track and explain “the evolution of musical comedy from a popular entertainment to a popular art form as well as to measure the impact of Rodgers and Hammerstein on musical theater” (xvii). He accomplishes this by presenting thirteen case studies of stage works from Oklahoma! to The Light in the Piazza alongside artists’ biographical information, relevant criticism from scholars, a script’s production history, and the social and historical values a stage work reflects and embodies. Leve’s remaining case studies of the “black musical” ( The Wiz , adapted from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , by L. Frank Baum), musical theatre off-Broadway ( The Fantasticks ), rock on Broadway ( Hair ), and the star ( Gypsy ) allow him to synthesize the breadth and depth of American musical theatre. American Musical Theater rises out of the school of thought that a well-made musical, quintessentially American in origin, is integrated, having a book and a score of lyrics and music that work together as a unit, and as a result Leve adds to our knowledge of musical theatre and relates to current debates in our field. By beginning chapter one with a case study of Oklahoma! , Leve shows the extent to which integration theory is as much a construction of the artists who created Oklahoma! as it is a construction of the scholars who study musicals. Leve weaves a literature review of scholarly works by Geoffrey Block, Scott McMillin, Andrea Most, and James O’Leary into the case study of Oklahoma! to show that artists and scholars have not reached agreement and likely never will. Leve notes, “It is therefore helpful to consider integration as an overarching artistic attitude, a frame of mind, a basic aesthetic of coherency, rather than as a strictly observed dramaturgical approach” (5). Leve reads closely Lemuel Ayers’s sets and Miles White’s costumes, Agnes de Mille’s choreography, Hammerstein’s book and lyrics, and Rodgers’s music to support his claims, all of which are complemented by “And Bear in Mind,” a section that presents Kiss Me , Kate as a counterpoint to Oklahoma! and includes discussion questions, key names, terms, and concepts. Leve is at his best when he describes the nature of racial formation in the archive and the repertoire of American musical theatre. Even though it is widely accepted by artists and scholars that Oklahoma! is a musical about the wants of the community taking primacy over the wants of the individual, Leve makes a case for taking Oklahoma! seriously as a grim reminder that an individual becomes part of a community but at a cost: either assimilation in the case of the Jewish (Ali Hakim) or elimination in the case of the black (Jud Fry). Recent textbooks on American musical theatre prior to Leve’s omit several black major authors and musicals and subscribe to a history of the musical as the province of white people. Chapter fifteen, “The ‘Black Musical,’” provides a genealogy from A Trip to Coontown to The Scottsboro Boys in spite of cultural barriers that make it hard for musicals by and about black people to climb to the top and make it on Broadway. Leve intervenes in the fields of theatre and performance studies by suturing the black origin of the musical to the organization of the textbook. There are few if any weaknesses at the level of argumentative coherence, formal analysis, and textual evidence when judging the textbook by its intentions. However, Leve’s use of musical examples presumes technical knowledge of music on the part of the reader, and this forms a particular challenge for some to understand his analyses of lesser-known stage works like Little Johnny Jones and Very Good Eddie . It would also have been helpful if Leve’s content on greater-known stage works like Anything Goes and In Dahomey were not beholden to a racial binary of black and white so that artists, black and white, who participated in the practice of yellowface in those very musicals could have been held to account for stereotypes of Asian American people. American Musical Theater is a textbook about just that, American musical theatre, and yet Leve lacks a chapter on musicals by and about Asian Americans. Instructors who are teaching in fields like African American studies, American studies, digital humanities, English, music, and theatre can use Leve’s textbook. Educators and students would benefit from this work in courses about not only the history of the musical, but also popular culture, race, and sex. Leve’s textbook is well-written, its argument and evidence are clear, and its large number of illustrations in black-and-white and color are helpful. Moreover, its free, open-access companion Web site, complete with annotated bibliographies and unit quizzes, is easy to navigate. Given the fact that interdisciplinary approaches to American musical theatre are hard to find, Leve’s own in which a musical like The Phantom of the Opera sits comfortably with a musical like Company is a great boon to instructors and students, in that it demonstrates a way of discussing Lloyd Webber and Sondheim together and apart without putting down the former to uplift the latter. Leve’s textbook is recommended to anyone who counts among their teaching interests the place of American musical theatre in the production of cultural knowledge. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Eric M. Glover Swarthmore 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 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.

By Marvin Carlson, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Ali Ahmad Bakathir, Ali Salim, Walid Ikhlasi | A varied collection of Arabic explorations of one of the central dramas of the European canon. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu The Arab Oedipus: Four Plays Marvin Carlson, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Ali Ahmad Bakathir, Ali Salim, Walid Ikhlasi Download PDF Edited by Marvin Carlson An awareness of the rich tradition of modern Arabic theatre has only recently begun to be felt by the Western theatre community, and we hope that this collection will contribute to that awareness, not only because of the importance of the dramatists represented, but because of the fascination of seeing a variety of Arabic perspectives on one of the central dramas of the European canon. These varied Arabic explorations of Oedipus range in tonality from dark fatalism to rollicking farce and in time from ancient Greek and Egyptian Thebes to a contemporary computer laboratory, where a super-computer replaces the Delphic oracle as the source of the fatal prophecy. This collection includes: King Oedipus by Tawfiq al-Hakim The Tragedy of Oedipus by Ali Ahmad Bakathir The Comedy of Oedipus by Ali Salim Oedipus by Walid Ikhlasi Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Javier Hurtado Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. Javier Hurtado By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences . Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences testifies to the fact that “today’s theatre workers know the value and importance of the next generation,” as Jorge Huerta observes in the forward (9). The book brings together contemporary docudrama, solo performance, and plays with and without music written for young, Latina/o audiences by Latino/a playwrights. The anthology also includes six scholarly articles that conduct in-depth analysis of the plays in the collection; document conversations with leaders in the field; offer pedagogical tools; and ultimately model paradigmatic shifts in the ways Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) is produced, presented, and taught. In the introduction, José Casas writes that as an artist of color, he often feels like an “uninvited guest” in the greater landscape of TYA (9). Diane Rodriguez shares this sentiment. In an interview for the collection, she addresses what she calls “the gap,” a disconnection in the field that has not made TYA a means for “building audiences of color over the past 50 years” (88). This 581-page anthology is an attempt to address that gap, featuring plays by Josefina López, Guillermo Reyes, Lisa Loomer, and more. However, it is not a collection begging for an invitation; it is an affirmation of the work that Latina/o/x communities have already been doing for generations. By pairing these plays with essays that engage the themes of the plays in the collection as well as issues in the field of TYA, Palabras del Cielo provides critical tools for degree programs in TYA to center Latina/o plays in their classrooms and on their stages. University-driven efforts to train scholars and professionals in TYA have expanded; at thirty-one universities across the United States, there are six MFA programs, eight MA programs, seven BFA programs, and eighteen BA programs that offer degrees in educational theatre or TYA. Palabras del Cielo makes an intervention for Latina/o-specific studies in these programs. The texts within offer a unique opportunity to deepen conversations about Latina/o experiences in the United States and to interrogate the history of the craft of storytelling through the theatrical adaptation of Latina/o folktales. In turn, three of the included plays reimagine western canonical texts like Voltaire’s Candide and Dante’s Inferno . These plays allow young actors to perform a variety of acting styles and genres while maintaining a focus on the “young audience” aspect that is central to the form. Beyond the theatre classroom, this anthology could easily be used to explore how Latina/o identity and culture shifts over time, since the plays reflect issues in the community from the mid-1990s to 2014. In addition, the companion essays offer scholarly context that make the book a resource for those in the social sciences and humanities more broadly. For example, in her essay, “The Historical Developments and Emergence of Latina/o TYA: Towards a Mestizaje Theatre,” Cecilia J. Argón traces the specific trajectory of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences (LTYA) through the role of children in performance traditions from Indo-Hispanic rituals and indigenous ceremony to the Chicano Movement. Aragon concludes by affirming that “this anthology of plays recognizes the performance of regional specificity, migration, and transnationalism and global impacts on Chicana/o and Latina/o children and youth” (25). In the essay, “They Don’t Look Like Me: A Look at Representation of Marginalized Populations in TYA in the United States,” Kelly Fey uses a cultural studies framework to write about the impact that cultural representation has on identity formation and interpersonal relations. Fey also puts forth a framework to assess diversity and inclusion work being done at theaters across the United States and provides readers with a TYA Inclusivity Manifesto modeled after the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s work in audience development. Palabras del Cielo amplifies the voices of Latinos and Latinas equally throughout. However, the experiences of trans, non-binary, and gender nonconforming youth and the works of playwrights who identify as Latinx are palpably absent. Despite this absence, some of the stories in this book do engage with young protagonists who challenge gender norms. Cinderella Eats Rice and Beans: A Salsa Fairytale (book and lyrics by Karen Zacharías, music by Deborah Wicks La Puma) is a great example. In this fantastic, fast-paced musical adaptation, the title character is a sixth-grade exchange student from Puerto Rico who comes to a new school to learn English. However, this fairytale is not about a young girl who goes to the ball, loses her shoes, and meets a prince; it is about two young girls who learn empathy and fairness, after tempers flare between them on the basketball court. This version of Cinderella makes a significant effort to counter the sexism of the original story. For instance, the girls compete to earn a spot on a national team with a celebrity coach, played by a fairy godfather, while his wife enjoys a day off at the spa. Like the rest of the titles in this collection, Cinderella Eats Rice and Beans is a strong play that can easily tour schools or hold an audience as part of any university or professional mainstage season. Meaning “words from heaven,” Palabras del Cielo is ultimately a stellar anthology of Latina/o TYA geared toward the classroom. It lends itself to production-based and historical survey classes at the university level, providing a necessary intervention with the potential to reverberate across stages and classrooms for generations. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JAVIER HURTADO Tufts University Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Jalila Baccar, Fadhel Jaïbi, Marvin Carlson, Nabil Cherni | A collection of recent work by Tunisian playwright and actress Jalila Baccar and director co-author Fadhel Jaibi, capturing the complexity and depth of grand themes prevalent in Arab societies. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu The Trilogy of Future Memory Jalila Baccar, Fadhel Jaïbi, Marvin Carlson, Nabil Cherni Download PDF Edited by Marvin Carlson Translations by Marvin Carlson and Nabil Cherni. Tunisian playwright and actress Jalila Baccar and director co-author Fadhel Jaïbi are two of the most important voices in contemporary Arab theater. No theatre artists were more closely involved with the ongoing events of the Arab Spring nor more astute critics of the constantly shifting political scene and their plays are enormously helpful in understanding the cross-currents of a country like Tunisia at the opening of the twenty-first century. Baccar’s roles, acting and theatrical narratives, co-created by her director and husband Fadhel Jaïbi, are extremely intricate, psychologically multi-layered, and have the uncanny ability to capture the complexity and depth of grand themes prevalent in Arab societies. Baccar has performed in over twenty of her plays, including major theatrical productions that have been staged worldwide by Jaïbi: Junun (Dementia, 2009) at the Edinburgh Festival, Khamsoun (Captive Bodies, 2006) – the first Arab play to be performed at the Théâtre de L’Odéon in Paris, and Araberlin (2002), among many others. Together they founded Tunisia’s first private theatre company, Le Nouveau Théâtre in 1976, as well as (in 1994) Familia Productions, instrumental in modernizing Tunisian theatre and engaging it in contemporary political concerns. This collection of their recent work, The Trilogy of Future Memory, includes Khamsoun (2006), translated by Nabil Cherni, and Amnesia (2010), and Tsunami(2013) translated and Marvin Carlson who has also provided an introduction. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Karl G. Ruling Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Karl G. Ruling By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Jason Sanchez and Xavier Cano in Long Wharf’s production of El Coquí Espectacular and the Bottle of Doom. Photo: Curtis Brown Photography. “We’re still here,” is the declaration announcing Long Wharf Theatre's 25-26 season. It's a good lede for my review of Long Wharf's last season, too. Long Wharf Theatre is still here, but “here” is not fixed; it moves. Long Wharf's performances and events were held at venues throughout New Haven and as far away as Middletown, Connecticut. All the shows and events supported Long Wharf's goal to be a nexus “where bold storytelling and vibrant communities come together to shape the future of American theatre.” The shifting event locations also got audience members into communities and venues they'd perhaps never visited before. The season started with a three-day “Artistic Congress,” 15 consecutive sessions each scheduled for 1 1/2 to 2 hours that were talks, panel discussions, audience workshops, and short scenes at venues in New Haven, culminating with a staged reading of Anna Deavere Smith's work-in-progress, This Ghost of Slavery, in the Crowell Concert Hall at Wesleyan University in Middletown. The New Haven events were held at Gateway Community College, BAR (a nightclub), the New Haven Public Library, Yale's Schwartzman Center, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Long Wharf's signage—often sandwich boards on the sidewalk—was excellent for guiding attendees to the venues, and there always were smiling greeters to tell us we'd arrived at the right place. Long Wharf's publications often talk about how storytelling is essential for understanding ourselves, each other, and the world around us. The Congress touched on those ideas but also suggested that collaborative work (what theatre makers do) can be a way for our communities to address our common problems. One of the sessions, “Civic Scores #2 : 'Who has the pen to shift the housing crisis,'” had audience members in teams using Lego blocks to design ideal communities. What's ideal and for whom? There were interesting discussions among participants about the complexities of zoning and building codes. We didn't solve the housing crisis, but we got far beyond, “Somebody should do something.” Anna Deavere Smith's This Ghost of Slavery is an extension of her work in documentary theatre. Previous verbatim theatre works of hers have featured a solo performer (often herself) portraying a multitude of people with a script based on interviews she had with those people. This Ghost of Slavery is a bit different, being based on archival material as well as recent interviews. The 39 characters of the play, originally published in The Atlantic magazine's December 2023 issue, were portrayed by 17 performers, including two musicians, in a staged reading, arrayed across the platform at Crowell Concert Hall. The play, directed by Aneesha Kurdtarkar, is set in Baltimore and Annapolis, moves between the 1860s and the present, and explores the school-to-prison pipeline as part of the legacy of American slavery. Although published, the script was a work in progress, a bit long in performance, but an important exploration of how the past affects how we treat each other now. She Loves Me, with music and lyrics by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick and book by Joe Masteroff, was a wonderful holiday celebration, performed at the Lab at Conncorp in Hamden. Based on a play by Miklós László and set in Budapest in 1937, the plot revolves around the employees of Maraczek’s Parfumerie. Clerks Georg and Amalia loathe each other in the shop, while unaware that each is the other’s secret pen pal who met through lonely-hearts ads. A lovely final scene had the lovers together under falling snow. Director Jacob G. Padrón, assembled an excellent singing company of actors of different races and ethnicities, different body types. The only nod to conventional American musical casting expectations was that the lead couple were thin people, young and lively. The performance space at the Lab at Conncorp was formerly a middle school gym. The staging, designed by Emmie Finckel, was tennis court style, with the audience on two facing sides, the main playing space in the middle, and the larger scenic elements at the ends. One end was the parfumerie shop. The other end, a comfortable 1930s living room, held the four-piece orchestra. Scenes outside the parfumerie, such as the restaurant, were played in the middle space with a few props quickly brought into place by the actors playing the minor characters. Changes of season were indicated by simple devices such as the delivery boy taking leaves from his pocket, tossing them into the air, and announcing “Autumn.” Later he took snow from his pocket and tossed it and announced “Winter.” The lighting, designed by Jiyoun Chang, shifted color to match. The show ran smoothly and the singing was beautiful. I found it enchanting. El Coquí Espectacular and the Bottle of Doom had us visiting Southern Connecticut State University’s John Lyman Auditorium in New Haven for a show in the stage left wing. The Lyman stage is so big that the stage wing provided enough room for five rows of audience seating facing an end-stage. The setting, designed by Gerardo Diaz Sanchez, was a city block in Brooklyn: three brick building facades, a fire escape, a roll-up steel door, and a billboard facing a sidewalk, forming a wide but shallow playing space. The door rolled up and a wagon rolled out for interior scenes. The brick walls and the billboard were surfaces for projections by John Horzen. The play, written by Matt Barbot and directed by Kinan Valdez, is a mash-up of comic book superhero fantasy and Puerto Rican real-life in American capitalist economy. Alex, the main character, a young Nuyorican comic book artist, creates a comic book superhero, El Coquí Espectacular, a crime-fighter based on Puerto Rican folklore about a tree frog. Alex takes his invention further by creating an El Coquí costume and wearing it as a real-life protector in his neighborhood. His older brother Joe, a marketing exec for a major soda company, sees an opportunity to use Alex's help marketing to Puerto Ricans a spicy, sugary soft drink Voltage—so sugary it's unhealthy. The play at SCSU worked with the tensions between identity, responsibility to community, and making a living—and went off into fantasy with the appearance of the blood-sucking El Chupacabra and battles between it and El Coquí, punctuated with POW! and BAM! as seen in the Batman 1960s TV series projected on the setting. El Coquí Espectacular and the Bottle of Doom was an interesting piece, but many scenes were played with the volume turned up to eleven. That intensity was amusing for the 25-minute Batman TV shows but wearying for a full-length play. However, it spoke to the audience. One person during the talkback said, “I am in a comic book,” and he seemed to like that. Another audience member said he appreciated seeing Puerto Rican folklore being taken seriously. Why can't there be Puerto Rican super-heroes? Unbecoming Tragedy: A Ritual Journey Toward Destiny was a one-person show written and performed by Terrence Riggins. It was presented at the Off Broadway Theater, behind the Shops at Yale—literally off Broadway, accessed via a footpath through the middle of the block. Unbecoming Tragedy was his own story of addiction and incarceration. The setting was the corner of a jail cell. The blank cell walls served as projection surfaces for fantastic images by designer Hannah Tran. In the playwright's notes in the program, Riggins calls his show a ritual, a confession, a rite of passage, a cleansing, a way through. I saw an exorcism. Riggins portrayed a tortured soul, trying to tear the shame of stealing his dying mother's opal necklace to support his drug habit out of his life. The director, Cheyenne Barboza, in her program note invited the audience members to “become more aware of the systems in our society that isolate and marginalize. And in that awareness, I hope we choose compassion.” An insert in the program listed thirteen local resources offering help for people and their families dealing with addiction, hopelessness, and problems with mental health, incarceration, and reintegration into society. “More than a theme, We’re Still Here is a statement of resilience,” said Long Wharf Theatre's 2025-26 season announcement. In early May, Long Wharf Theatre was notified that the National Endowment for the Arts had terminated four grants, totaling more than $170,000. Besides terminating these grants, the NEA issued new guidelines for grant applications prohibiting programs promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” in accordance with Executive Order No. 14173, or promoting “gender ideology,” in keeping with Executive Order No. 14168. "Gender ideology" has no accepted definition but is used by opponents of gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights. Unlike some major entertainment corporations, Long Wharf Theatre has not canceled shows to align with Executive Orders; DEI is integral to its vision. The season webpage promises the next chapter in this vision: “co-productions that reach beyond state lines, programming that uplifts historically marginalized voices, and performances that blur the boundary between art and civic action.” References Footnotes About The Author(s) KARL G. RULING is the technical editor for Protocol , the journal of the Entertainment Services and Technology Association. Prior to that position, he was the technical editor for Theatre Crafts and Lighting Dimensions magazines, and a contributor to Stage Directions . He has an MFA in theatre design from the University of Illinois, and a BA with majors in Dramatic Art and Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has designed scenery, lighting, special effects, or sound for over 100 productions. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Henry Bial Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Henry Bial By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. The concept of artistic research travels under various names (practice as research, performance as research, creative research, etc.) through various national and institutional contexts. At the same time, performance studies scholars insist that art-making constitutes not just the preservation and transmission of culture, but the generation of new knowledge. “Yet,” as scholar-artist Ben Spatz notes in their introduction to Race and the Forms of Knowledge, “a wide gulf remains between this critical assertion and the activation of its implications, which in their implementation imply nothing less than an epistemic revolution” (3). The stakes of that revolution are the decolonization of knowledge itself, demanding a radicalized and reflective approach to artistic research that is informed by “black studies, critical race studies, critical indigenous studies, and critical whiteness studies, as well as feminist and queer theory” (11) [an Author’s Note (ix), explains Spatz’s choice to lowercase all identity designations]. An Introduction, “Materialities in Artistic Research” lays out the book’s intent “to reformulate and radicalize artistic research as an intervention into the racialized forms of knowledge” (23). This is accomplished through three chapters, each a lengthy meditation of fifty pages or more exploring how and why performance can and must challenge our concepts of knowledge, power, and identity. The introduction also announces the author’s desire “to avoid what I call ‘white writing’: the logocentric usage of alphabetic writing to inscribe a dominating sense of prior reason and truth” (21). Instead, Spatz offers sustained engagements with a range of ideas and practices both familiar and unfamiliar to performance studies scholars. These engagements, which unfold gracefully across each chapter, are as provocative as they are evocative, frequently gesturing at understandings that the text itself cannot contain. Chapter 1, “Molecular Identities,” begins from the premise that considering identity in performance solely through the lens of casting is inherently limiting, anchoring analysis to a fixed notion of identity as adhering only and always to an individual performer. “To think beyond casting,” Spatz writes, “is to bypass the individualist framing of identity as that which a given person is or is not and to think instead about how racial and other identities cut through a given moment, event, or practice, at levels both above and below the individual” (31). Instead, drawing on the work of dramaturgs Dorinne Kondo and Katherine Profeta, the chapter argues for greater attention to the lived process of performance-making, in which racial and other identities are continually explored, negotiated, and played with. In this context, suggests Spatz, “the individual performer is no longer taken for granted as a premise or starting point but is recognized as a nexus or site at which multiple layers of technique and identity intersect” (36). Building on the framework established in What a Body Can Do (Routledge 2015), the chapter offers a complex and radically interdisciplinary model in which elements of performance technique (gesture, melody, breath) are understood as “molecule[s] of gendered and racialized material” (60) that have both material and sociocultural significance. Significantly, this means shifting our attention from a finished public performance to the rehearsal room as the most active site of artistic research, as well as looking beyond the live performance to technologically-mediated audiovisual works. Chapter 2, “Whiteness and the Racialization of Knowledge,” provides a dense but masterful opening section (“White Writing,” 83) that synthesizes a wide range of theoretical perspectives from black studies, performance studies, and poststructuralist theory to argue that concepts such as “ knowledge, expertise, science, thought, rationality and research ” should be reframed “in the context of european colonialism and the ongoing global hegemony of european and eurocentric modes of thought, as artifacts of white writing” (101, emphasis in original). In response, the author calls for a critical whiteness practice, one that unmasks whiteness from its unmarked claim to universality. The chapter considers the post-theatrical work of Jerzy Grotowski as a possible model, noting that in his interculturalism and his move away from logocentrism, “Grotowski looked for techniques that could transform or even transcend identity” (131). Yet Grotowski’s work, Spatz argues, proved difficult, if not impossible, to scale beyond the individual, suggesting that more significant social transformation demands confronting institutional forms and structures of knowledge, i.e. the university. The latter part of the chapter then considers three approaches to artistic research developed in European and North American universities, “roughly glossed as those of inclusion, escape, and experimentation” (134). The inclusive approach seeks to make space within the research university for artistic work to be recognized and valued; such attempts, as illustrated by the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru), are well-intentioned but prone to co-optation by the corporate and political power of the institution. Escapist approaches take the opposite tack, positioning artistic research as “always in excess of the university, constantly fleeing and escaping its expectations and in this way radically unavailable to capture and co-optation” (140). This tactic, which looms large in contemporary performance studies, is illustrated through an analysis of Erin Manning’s Concordia University (Montreal)-based SenseLab. The third model, experimentation, takes more direct aim at the institutional structure itself, explicitly challenging the primacy of (white) writing. Though all three approaches have their merits, the author concedes, “It is only honest to admit that I find myself personally in closest alignment with pragmatist and experimental approaches: those that neither take prevailing institutions for granted nor seek to disappear from them but instead grapple with them through a kind of technics that is deeply engaged with matters of form” (134). This is vividly illustrated in Chapter 3, “Audiovisual Ethnotechnics,” which details some of the author’s own experiments in artistic research. Most of these examples are drawn from “The Judaica Project,” an extended multi-year series of investigations conducted at various sites in the US, UK, and Poland, and organized around “an embodied practice of singing or songwork in which jewishness is treated as molecular” (152). These examples are richly described, with particular emphasis on how strategic uses of audiovisuality, including both sound and video recording, can enhance the generative power of artistic research by capturing the dynamic relationship between identity and technique theorized in the first chapter. This is not simply a matter of documentation, but of using the potential of audio-visual media to juxtapose and layer sound and image in ways that explore new relationships between identity, temporality, and place. Importantly, Spatz’s explorations of “molecular jewishness” are based not only in practice, but in a deep engagement with major thinkers in Jewish cultural studies, such as Jonathan Boyarin, Shaul Magid, and Santiago Slabodsky. Along the way, the chapter makes a compelling case that critical theory itself can be understood as a counter-hegemonic mode of reading and writing that is specifically Jewish. Building on the work of other scholars who have highlighted the marginalized position of figures such as Marx, Freud, Benjamin, and Derrida, as well as the Talmudic tradition of learned disagreement that, some argue, anticipates poststructuralism, Spatz suggests that a critical Jewish studies might find common cause with critical Black studies, critical Indigenous studies, and other decolonial approaches to knowledge, if and only if it can acknowledge and overcome its “entanglement with whiteness” (136). While not the central focus of the book, this nevertheless represents an important contribution to Jewish studies, and I hope Spatz finds an opportunity to expand on this thesis in the future. Considered singly, each chapter of Race and the Forms of Knowledge makes a substantial contribution to conversations within theatre and performance studies about practice-as-research, about audio-visual media, and about the critical slipperiness of identity in performance. Taken as a whole, however, this ambitious and uncompromising volume poses a different kind of challenge to the field: to embody that which we profess, and to profess that which we embody. References Footnotes About The Author(s) HENRY BIAL is Professor and Chair in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Kansas. He is a past President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and a Fellow of the Mid-America Theatre Conference. He is the author of Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen and Playing God: The Bible on the Broadway Stage , and the editor or co-editor of Brecht Sourcebook, Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions, The Great North American Stage Directors, Vol. 4: Abbott, Carroll, Prince, and The Performance Studies Reader , now in its fourth edition. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Andrea Harris Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 1 Visit Journal Homepage Sur la Pointe on the Prairie: Giuseppina Morlacchi and the Urban Problem in the Frontier Melodrama Andrea Harris By Published on March 5, 2015 Download Article as PDF When the frontier melodrama, The Scouts of the Prairie , And, Red Deviltry As It Is! , opened in Chicago in December 1872, it marked the beginning of a performance genre that would have significant impact on the American national imagination. Written by Ned Buntline (E. Z. C. Judson), the dime novel author who christened William F. Cody “Buffalo Bill,” The Scouts of the Prairie was the first stage play to star the famous frontiersman as himself, playing out the “real” drama of his Western adventures for spectators. Scouts launched a fourteen-year theatrical tradition that evolved into Buffalo Bill’s Wild West , the extremely successful performance spectacle that played across the US and in Europe for three decades. Scholars have long credited Cody’s Wild West as “the most important commercial vehicle for the fabrication and transmission of the Myth of the Frontier,” the thesis that the road to modernity was necessarily fraught with violent conflicts between “civilized” and “savage” peoples. [1] Appearing alongside Cody in the frontier play were Buntline himself, the scout John “Texas Jack” Omohundro, and, as the American Indian princess Dove Eye and Cody’s love interest, the Italian ballerina Giuseppina Morlacchi. The lion’s share of the existing scholarship on Cody’s performance focuses on his better-known large outdoor spectacles, sidelining the theatrical combinations that started his thespian career. More recent studies are expanding our knowledge of Cody’s stage plays, but even here, no one has questioned the incongruous casting of the famous Italian ballerina as an American Indian woman in the production that launched the western celebrity’s stage career, The Scouts of the Prairie . [2] Most authors mention that the cast of Scouts included a well-known Italian dancer, but stop short of asking what kind of dance she did in the play, why dance might have been included, or what meanings it might have expressed. But by casting such a neutral lens on the dancing Dove Eye, scholars have failed to understand dance itself as a meaningful text in the play. As I will show, Morlacchi’s dancing in The Scouts of the Prairie —not only the fact that she danced, but how , set in context with nineteenth-century discourses on ballet, the female ballet dancer, and the city—produces a more complex reading of Morlacchi’s character and the frontier melodrama. Born in Milan in 1836, Morlacchi was six years old when she entered the famed La Scala ballet academy, then the world’s leader in classical dance under the leadership of Carlo Blasis. With her impeccable training, Morlacchi worked with some of the most reputable choreographers in Europe, and was soon invited to join the ballet company at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. She was engaged by artist-manager Don Juan de Pol to come to the US to appear in the 1867 The Devil’s Auction , one of the elaborate ballet-spectacles that became immensely popular after the success of The Black Crook in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Morlacchi worked as both a dancer and choreographer on the ballet-spectacle stage, until she left that genre to pursue her own choreographic career. Making its home in Boston, the Morlacchi Ballet traveled the country from 1868-1872, performing a mixed repertory drawn from European Romantic and post-Romantic ballets and American spectaculars and melodramas. Critics saw in Morlacchi’s dancing the essence of European culture transported to American stages. “She has sparked an excitement among the most cultivated of our citizens and everyone wants to see her perform,” [3] asserted the New York Evening Transcript , and Boston papers concurred, “Many of the refined and cultivated people . . . whose knowledge of art has been perfected by European experiences have been the first in America to detect the genius of this danseuse.” [4] How interesting, then, to find Morlacchi, the embodiment of European classicism, the exemplar of cultured taste, appearing alongside the rugged western scouts, bringing European academic dance onto Buffalo Bill’s (otherwise) “wild” frontier stage. It is not clear how Morlacchi found her way into the western melodrama. Her company was performing at Nixon’s Opera House in Chicago in late 1872, when Buntline finally convinced Cody and Omohundro to meet him in that city for their theatrical debut. Morlacchi was a sought-after performer by theatre managers, and was known as a talented dramatic mime. Perhaps previous roles she had created for herself, including a mute Native American woman in The Wept of Wish-ton-wish , made her seem an especially attractive choice for the Dove Eye role. Perhaps it was Morlacchi’s manager, Major John M. Burke, who met Cody a year later through the dancer and became the highly influential publicity manager who crafted much of the legendary imagery of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West , who pointed her towards Buntline’s cast. At any rate, at the end of her company’s season in Chicago in late 1872, Morlacchi was engaged to join the cast of The Scouts of the Prairie as Dove Eye, the Indian maiden. [5] Though no script survives, scholars have been able to rebuild much of the plot of Scouts through program scene synopses and newspaper reviews. [6] As the play opened, trapper Cale Durg (played by Buntline) entered the camp he shared with his ward, the “lovely white girl” Hazel Eye. [7] Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack (both played by themselves) stormed in “with a fiendish yell” [8] and a tale of their last hunt. Dove Eye ran into the scouts’ camp to warn them of her tribesmen’s plans to attack them, led by Wolf Slayer. Yelling war whoops, the four exited, intent on revenge. In the next scene, Hazel Eye was captured by Wolf Slayer and his Indians, recruited by the renegade Mormon Ben, who desired her for his fiftieth wife. Durg tried to save her, but he was outnumbered, and he and Hazel Eye were tied to the stake to be burned. The Indians danced and sang a “Death Dance” around Durg, while he, unperturbed, taunted his captors. Dove Eye “dance[d] in [and] sever[ed] the bonds of Hazel Eye;” together they freed Durg, and fought the Indians. [9] Bill and Jack came to the rescue, vowing “Death to the Redskins,” and Act I concluded with a massive slaughter of Indians, leading the New York Times reviewer to comment that “the unmitigated bloodshed that ends every act and almost every scene of this unique composition were so satisfactory to the public, that the management might be forgiven for hereafter assuming that the key to success must lie in the exhibition of cataracts of gore.” [10] In Act II, Bill declared his love for Dove Eye, and, in turn, Jack his for Hazel Eye. Their bliss was short-lived, however, as both women were again abducted by the Indians, and Durg again captured. Once again tied up (to a tree this time), Durg took the opportunity to deliver a temperance lecture, one of actor/playwright Buntline’s long-time causes. Durg was shot and killed by Wolf Slayer. As Act III opened, Bill and Jack swore vengeance for their slain friend, and Dove Eye and Hazel Eye expressed their loyalty to one another. The Indians gathered for a “Scalp Dance,” as a struggle between Wolf Slayer and Big Eagle, Dove Eye’s father, ended in the stabbing of the latter. When Dove Eye found her father’s body, she prayed to Manitou, the Indian god of revenge—perhaps another opportunity for a dance—then she and Hazel Eye returned to the camp for a final battle. [11] The renegades started a fire and a ferocious war ensued as the scouts and women “triumph[ed] over their enemies, with a train on the Pacific Railroad and a burning prairie in the background.” [12] In the play’s final tableau, the two couples embraced, the lights fading on the triumph of romance framed by the inevitable progression of America’s western frontier. In the very few studies that give her more than a passing mention, Dove Eye is interpreted as “the ubiquitous friendly native maiden,” or the “noble savage” in contrast to the “utter savage” of the warlike Indians around her. [13] Her character is viewed as a Pocahontas figure, giving up her people and culture for the love of the white man, Cody. A common trope on the nineteenth-century stage, the Pocahontas character served as the “most well known and irresistible symbol” of the absorption of American Indians into white culture and the expropriation of their own culture. [14] That absorption was accomplished through the lens of gender and sexuality; as Mary Dearborn notes, “it is precisely because Pocahontas is expected to embody both aspects of the image [the noble Princess and the randy Squaw] that hers is so convenient, compelling, and ultimately intolerable a legend. . . . Her story functions as a compelling locus for American feeling toward . . . miscegenation, or sexual relations between white men and ethnic women.” [15] As Buffalo Bill’s love interest, Dove Eye’s Indian Princess role fulfilled many of these elements in Scouts : the contrast of royal heritage and sexual availability; the assimilation of the forgiving, supportive Indian woman; and proof of the supremacy of white culture with the reassuring combination of Native consent and cooperation. Although the centrality of movement in Morlacchi’s role has not been taken into account in previous scholarship, a dance analysis would reinforce this reading, particularly given the fact that at least some of her dances as Dove Eye seem to have been performed on pointe . One critic noted how a “few graceful steps inserted into one of the scenes reminded playgoers of [Morlacchi’s] former triumph in the ballet.” [16] Another observed in her performance “the fawnlike bound of the antelope—if the antelope ever bounds on the points of its toes.” [17] Joellen Meglin has shown that ballet served to symbolize “civilization triumphing over savagery” in representations of Native Americans in productions at the pre-Romantic Paris Opéra. [18] In Scouts , Morlacchi’s ballet dancing would seem to have functioned similarly, the consummate European ballerina serving as the “whitening” force that mediated between civilization and savagery in Dove Eye’s character. When the Italian ballet star rose to the pointes of her slippers, the image signaled that Dove Eye was more civilized, closer to European culture than her tribesmen, especially in contrast to the other “Death” and “Scalp” dances in the play that served as signs of an “authentic” Indian culture. [19] The incorporation of ballet into Scouts literally replaced a Native dance form with a European one on Dove Eye’s body, an erasure that colluded with the US government’s efforts to colonize Native lands. Yet the “civilization” and “savagery” binary only in part explains the incongruous mixture of buckskin and pointe shoes in Morlacchi’s Dove Eye performance. Robert C. Allen has shown the way in which the female burlesque performer’s body was a site of multiple interpretations, often ambiguous and contradictory, that were related to changing gender and class roles. [20] As I will show, the ballet dancer (or “ballet-girl,” as she was known in popular discourses, no matter her rank onstage) embodied a similar set of tensions, and Morlacchi brought this complexity with her into The Scouts of the Prairie : a little bit of the burlesque tradition on the frontier stage. When dance becomes an equal part of the analysis, the way in which the foreign ballerina and her dancing served as a necessarily complicated signifier for a host of socio-cultural anxieties appears, many of them conflicting, and all of them indicating the need for the stabilizing and reassuring force of the exemplary western hero, Buffalo Bill, at the end of the play. In what follows, I attempt to widen the scope on the meanings that ballet brought into this frontier melodrama by putting it in dialogue with contemporaneous discourses of ballet and the ballet dancer in the mass circulation print industry out of which Scouts arose. Critics certainly found Morlacchi to be a civilizing force in the play, and a much-needed one at that. Although little venom was spared in appraisals of Scouts or its audience, Morlacchi was persistently set apart in the press. “Mlle Morlacchi deserves a word by herself in this wholesale slaughter,” decreed the Boston reviewer; “In the opening piece . . . she danced exquisitely and with all her accustomed grace and skill, and the audience recognized her merit and called her before the curtain accordingly.” [21] Penned another, “in her opening performance she gave a number of her beautiful dances as gracefully and as equisitely [ sic ] as ever.” [22] And one reviewer noted that that the “Indian scalping, buffalo shooting and redskin-whooping drama” appealed to the lower classes seated in the gallery, while the better class of patrons in the house preferred Morlacchi’s dancing in the curtain raiser. [23] For critics, Morlacchi’s dancing was a welcome respite of upper-class taste in the otherwise uncouth frontier melodrama. Such praise of Morlacchi’s dancing in The Scouts of the Prairie has been interpreted rather straightforwardly as evidence of her talent. But here the plot thickens. Critics’ responses to Scouts , and to Morlacchi’s appearance in it, are indicative of the cultural hierarchy that emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century, one that Lawrence Levine has described as a “struggle to establish aesthetic standards, to separate true art from the purely vulgar.” [24] Persistently dividing the audience and the content of Scouts into “high” and “low” components, the extant criticism points to the struggle over class that that was waged in theatrical life in the latter nineteenth century. And critics indeed saw The Scouts of the Prairie as class warfare. “To criticize this composition as a play, or analyze its plot, would be ridiculous, for it has nothing to do with art,” declared a New York writer. “It is simply a dime novel set to scenery.” [25] While critics readily perceived ballet as a civilizing influence in The Scouts of the Prairie , the existing criticism cannot fully demonstrate how the mostly male, working-class audience that cheered the play would have responded to the incongruous contrast of the “best dancer in New York” playing the role of an Indian woman who shot a rifle, fought, screeched war whoops and chased the bad guys—and mixed it all with the occasional Romantic-style divertissement. [26] The comparison to a dime novel pointed to the fact that playwright Ned Buntline was among the highest-paid authors of the dime novel industry: cheap popular fiction mass-produced by publishing firms between the 1840s and the 1890s, predominantly for a male, white, lower class readership. [27] Buntline’s readership was likely the same audience targeted by The Scouts of the Prairie ; the script was created very quickly by piecing together characters from his dime novel series on Buffalo Bill (although the novelette on Dove Eye was published after the premiere of the play, which suggests she was a new character he created for the stage,) [28] and, as a celebrity author, Buntline received top billing, along with Cody and Omohundro. Before he turned to Western tales in 1859, Buntline was well known for his mystery-of-the-city books, which unveiled the crime and poverty of the city, along with the extravagance and decadence of the rich. [29] Alexander Saxton aligns Buntline’s turn to the West with an overall shift in dime novels after 1850 that brought the ideological dimensions of the “Free Soil hero,” particularly white egalitarianism and class mobility, into the new Western hero. [30] I will return to Saxton’s argument at the end of this article. For now, it is worth noting that Buntline was committed to a nativist political ideology that preached anti-aristocratic egalitarianism and class mobility, and blamed urban problems onto foreign presence in the US. [31] As author and activist Buntline helped shape a working-class, anti-immigrant culture in opposition to the elite and foreign corruption of the industrial city. In Buntline’s urban fiction, the city is a dangerous and unpredictable place, full of dark, secret corners in which foreign-born villains prey on working class heroes and heroines. As Shelley Streeby describes, Buntline’s urban adventures cast the city “as a feminizing space in which ‘fashion’ holds sway and distinguishes a ‘simple’ yet civilized yeoman masculinity from a ‘savage’ state that is implicitly identified with foreign, nonwhite, or urban others.” [32] Buntline often positioned the theatre as one of the primary sites of corruption and immorality in the city, as was the case in his 1848 The Mysteries and Miseries of New York . [33] More precisely, the ballet theatre was the setting for his urban melodrama, Rose Seymour, or The Ballet Girl’s Revenge . Written seven years before the premiere of The Scouts of the Prairie , this dime novel portrayed the ballet world as a den of underground crime in which wealthy and licentious immigrants preyed on poor American girls. Every time Rose, the impoverished, motherless heroine who auditions to be a ballet-girl, enters the Broadway theatre, or even dons her ballet costume, her situation quickly becomes life-threatening: she is pursued, abducted, imprisoned, lusted after, and even set aflame one night when her muslin skirt brushes the gas lights. At one point, six particularly rough male audience members, overcome by her performance, leapt onto the stage and chased her through the theatre, howling and breaking down doors in their pursuit. [34] Published four years before he gave up urban reform literature for the Buffalo Bill dime novels that launched Scouts , the ballet theatre figured in Buntline’s story as a handy metaphor for urban perversions; a violent place devoid of morals, where passions ran wild, appearances could not be trusted, and dangerous foreigners, “rich, handsome, and liberal,” constantly sought to destroy Rose’s innate American goodness. [35] Buntline’s characterization of the moral and social dangers of the ballet theatre was part of a much larger set of nineteenth-century discourses that viewed ballet as a foreign threat to American values. Anti-ballet rhetoric was multi-faceted: religious reformers saw it as a menace to middle-class morality, while dime novel and story paper authors, like Buntline, cast it as part of the larger threat posed to the working classes by immigration and industrialization. That is, attacks on ballet appeared in a wide variety of popular literature, directed at different segments of the population. But these genres were united in their anxiety over the increasing influence of a rapidly growing middle class after the Civil War. Persistent connections were made in popular discourses between this new “fashionable” class, European social and political decay, and the presence of ballet in the United States. The “ballet-girl” (as she was called, no matter her rank) became a site for these anxieties; as in Buntline’s Rose , she was a trigger for multiple concerns about foreign influence, social divisions, and the dangers to American virtues within a rapidly transforming urban space. Unlike on the Opéra stage, to American audiences in 1872, ballet would not necessarily have served as an uncomplicated or even positive symbol of modern civilization. As Barbara Barker has shown, the history of ballet in the US involved “the slow transplanting and rooting of an essentially foreign form.” [36] Since before the turn of the nineteenth century, French and Italian troupes had been touring to America, and by the early decades, European ballerinas were appearing in the US with increasing regularity. As ballet become more popular, debates raged over the meaning of a European high art on the American stage. According to Christopher Martin, by the late 1820s debates over ballet in the US had evolved into a discourse that superimposed questions of national values and identity—indeed, the very fate of the nation—onto the theatrical representation of the female body. [37] While some hoped that European ballet would help America develop its own high culture, detractors saw ballet as symptomatic of a decadent and degenerate European civilization. The latter is perhaps most famously expressed in Samuel Morse’s vitriolic speech on French ballerina Francisque Hutin’s 1827 appearance in New York, in which he decried ballet, “the PUBLIC EXPOSURE OF A NAKED FEMALE,” as “the importation of these lowest instruments of vice from the sinks of monarchical corruption.” [38] For like-minded dissenters, the problem with ballet was that it went for the senses instead of the intellect, inappropriate for the values of the young republic. As the Christian Register put it: There is nothing in Europe which so directly and effectually saps the fountains of virtue and moral sensibility. It has no fellowship with the mind. . . . It excites none of the finer sensibilities of the heart—it calls forth no moral sentiments of any kind. It is the product of a state of society worn out with luxury and indulgence and seeking excitements in the lowest order of natural propensities. . . . We should consider the establishment of the Ballet in the U. States not only as a wide dereliction from the virtues of our forefathers, but as a great moral evil—an evil more contagious and more pernicious to society than any bodily disease which has ever afflicted our country. [39] In such discourses, ballet, seducing viewers with its spectacular and feminine beauty, represented the bread and circuses of the European monarchy, a threat to not only the American theatergoer’s morals, but also to American political institutions. In the furor over ballet in America that raged for most of the nineteenth century, the dance form was linked to European civilization, and the anxieties it provoked for its critics were inextricable from concerns about the fate of the republic. Some hoped that the European art would help America develop its own high culture, but ballet’s dissenters saw it as a threat to the moral, social, and political fabric of the country. When foreign correspondents wrote columns home about the corruptions of Parisian society, ballet was embedded in their warnings. The Parisian ballet-girl was a representative of “the loosest class in the world”: self-indulgent and reckless with her body, her money, and her health. [40] Behind Paris’s proliferation of glittering amusements—its cafes, gardens, department stores, theatres, operas, and ballets—lay a society in decay, a darker world of courtesans and immorality. An attitude of extravagance had overtaken French culture, replacing the Revolutionary “watchwords” of “liberty, equality, [and] fraternity.” While the French people mouthed these ideas, and were taught that they had a democratic government, in reality, they have undergone a social revolution and have come to regard these words in another sense. Liberty [here] does not imply freedom of political action and opinion. On the contrary it means to be free from all concerns of government and to have license to do anything they please with themselves and their property. . . . The French notion of liberty is fulfilled [as long] as the people have the wherewithal to fill their stomachs and indulge their sensuality. [41] Beneath the Parisian fashionable life lurked the ruins of revolutionary ideals. In these accounts, ballet, with its “sumptuous and exhausting lifestyle,” was emblematic of the ruin to which such a life of self-indulgence would inevitably lead. [42] Ballet was a foreign other, a symbol of a decadent and degenerate European culture and political system, and a menace to republican values. But if ballet’s sensuality and excessive “indulgence” made it morally suspect in the antebellum US, by the mid-1860s such lavishness had become the major selling point for a new form, the ballet-spectacle. Most famously represented by the 1866 The Black Crook with its “bewildering forest of female legs” and “barbaric splendor,” ballet-spectacles combined elements from melodrama, farce, and parody, and featured fantastical plots, spectacular special effects, and numerous grand ballets with large casts of European ballerinas. [43] The popularity of these productions generated an outpouring of warnings about their dangers, many of them focused on the female dancer as a site of moral and social transgression. Ballet dancers contrived “to reach men through the senses; to stir their blood with material agencies as the Maria Bonfantis and Sohlkes, and Morlacchis do. Charming exemplars they for American ladies—for the pure daughters of a proud country.” [44] The real cause for alarm was that these amusements indicated a growing preoccupation with pleasure as an end in itself. As a writer for the Brooklyn Eagle parsed, it was not the popularity of ballet per se that was the problem; it was that “the function of a ballet-girl in a modern burlesque or spectacle has nothing to do with either graceful or pantomimic action. She is hired to look pretty, and to appear in little clothing.” The worry that ballet went for the senses, rather than the mind, had long troubled its critics, particularly the religiously-oriented. But after the Civil War, ballet’s pleasurable ends increasingly pointed to larger socio-economic concerns; in particular, “the enjoyment of wealth by a class to whom labor, whether of hand or brain, is alike strange. Money which brings with it no obvious duties . . . can hardly fail to be a disastrous inheritance.” [45] Whereas ballet triggered fears of the corrupting influences of foreign culture throughout the bulk of the nineteenth century, postwar it became central to a new domestic threat: the rise of a culture of consumption and the growth of a new bourgeois class. William Leach has identified the decades after the Civil War as the key period in the development of a “culture of consumer capitalism,” marked by “acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness, the cult of the new, the democratization of desire, and money value as the predominant measure of all value in society.” [46] Urbanization and industrialization eroded the familial and agricultural culture that had characterized America to that point, bringing not only rapid economic and lifestyle changes, but also creating a much more fluid socioeconomic system and an expanding class of nouveau riche in the metropolis, variously known as the “fashionables” or the “shoddy aristocracy.” This new class had gotten their fortunes quickly, probably in a business venture, but completely lacked the “good breeding and intelligence” that suited their new social class. [47] The shoddies were the most flagrant example of a society that worshipped money, and was “content with nothing less than . . . an ever-changing life of amusements.” [48] Certain spaces in the city that were built to accommodate this new upper-middle class, including the park, the shopping mall, the theatre, and the ballet-spectacle—spaces, in other words, in which the fashionable life of newness, leisure, pleasure, and social display was lived—became geographical symbols of the debauchery of this new class in popular literature. [49] Such was the case in a new genre of urban nonfiction formed after the Civil War. These works retained the “wicked city motif” found in their dime novel antecedents, yet they purported to be true accounts of city life, even guides to urban spaces. On the surface, it seems that these urban exposés were primarily addressed to upper class concerns over the disruption posed by the shoddies to the socioeconomic order; yet their wide readership also suggests they were highly popular. Nonetheless, there was a clear relationship between the genres, as the nonfiction works carried forward the core themes of popular urban fiction, including the concern that the metropolis was generating both an aristocracy and an underclass whose degenerate lifestyles were endangering American values. [50] Most of these urban nonfiction works were organized around social types and/or social spaces. A repeated structural motif was the grouping of classes of women to symbolize various forms of urban vice. As Mona Domosh notes, as the primary class of consumers, women often served as targets for fears about the rise of consumer capitalism in post-Civil War discourses. The “desiring” woman became the symbol of the lack of control and tendency for excess responsible for the moral decay of the city. [51] In the urban nonfictional exposés, certain types of women who disrupted conventional social and gender boundaries stood for the physical and moral danger of the city streets: the prostitute, the working woman, and, most importantly for my purposes, the “New York Woman.” The New York Woman served as a metaphor for the vices of “fashionable society,” as illustrated in two urban nonfiction books published in the 1860s: Marie Louise Hankins’s Women of New York and George Ellington’s The Women of New York or the Underworld of the Great City . She dressed stylishly, even extravagantly, performed an elaborate daily toilette to make herself beautiful, and devoted her time to shopping and going to parties, the theatre, the opera, and the ballet, all to the neglect of her children. Amongst the New York Woman’s trespasses was her artifice: through dress, make-up, facial enameling, false hair, false teeth, and devices such as padded calves and ankles, she could appear to be what she was not. Such external artifice pointed to internal deceit; the New York Woman could appear respectable on the outside, but be of wicked heart. “Did we speak of the falsity of women as regards their heart and their inner life,” wrote Ellington, “we would not only tire the reader, but make him lose all faith in human nature, at least as far as women are concerned.” [52] A particular dilemma was the New York Woman’s ability to pass for a higher social class than the one to which she belonged. The New York Woman was also self-indulgent. Obsessed with money and luxury, she gave into her own desires and was seemingly incapable of restraint. The urban exposés traced two possible “routes from personal indulgence to societal destruction: one path followed the course of overconsumption; the other route followed the course of sexual deviance.” [53] In the first of these, her New York Woman’s extravagance led to the downfall of others around her: the men who struggled to support her resorted to illegal ways of getting money or, frustrated by her indulgences, to infidelity; or her servants found themselves buying things they could not afford in a vain attempt to keep up with her expectations of social status. “There is no influence so powerful as that of example; and when one woman steps beyond the bounds of propriety in any direction, she is sure to be followed by a dozen other weak ones,” avowed Ellington, until finally, “the whole of society becomes demoralized and corrupted.” [54] In the second path to social degredation, women turned to various modes of prostitution in order to fulfill their extravagant need for goods, either in gift or payment form. The ballet-girl was a special subtype of the New York Woman in these books. She shared the same faults: she was overindulgent, and her appearance was the result of a great deal of embellishment. “The coryphée is not one to let a chance slip that promises any pleasure,” noted Ellington. “The majority of these girls need and must have excitement. Without it they could not exist. . . . Seemingly, they live but for the pleasures of the day.” [55] The ballet dancer’s grace was a façade that required not only make-up and hair care, but also great physical pain. Accounts of the arduous, violent nature of ballet training were ubiquitous in mid-nineteenth century exposés. Not unlike the fashionable metropolitan woman, who would undergo foot binding to make her feet smaller for the latest footwear, the ballet dancer submitted her body to abnormal suffering in order to create her illusion of perfection. She could not be trusted either. “When ‘made up’ on the stage, with aid of ribbons, gause [ sic ], false curls, a gay costume, and pearl power and vinegar rouge,” cautioned Hankins, “she will appear to be not more than sixteen, and as beautiful as an angel; but […] by day light, in her plain clothes, she might be taken for thirty-five—perhaps forty!” [56] Moreover, her lifestyle all too often led to sexual deviance or to her own destruction. Ellington’s summation is characteristic: “Many have risen to the goal of their ambition, many have given up and returned to their former occupations, while many have sunk low into that dark abyss from which there is no resurrection, without hope and without mercy, betrayed by those who flatter but to ruin.” [57] On the one hand, authors saw the ballet-girl as a victim of this dangerous urban world, even though her temperament made her particularly susceptible to its temptations of materialism and indulgence. This was especially true if she were American: numerous dime novels and newspaper short stories followed the adventures of good American girls, who, being forced into the ballet world (usually because they suffered financial distress, and lacked a mother’s moral guidance), had no choice but to navigate its moral and physical dangers. [58] As Ellington put it, American ballet-girls tended to be much more chaste, especially when compared to the “peculiar ideas of morality” of the French dancers. [59] But on the other hand, the ballet-girl was a symptom of a much bigger socio-economic epidemic. She personified the destruction of simple American values in the one of the city’s most dangerous places: the ballet theatre. The theatre, and especially the ballet theatre, figured prominently in this literature as one of the primary signifiers for the transforming class structure of the city under the influence of the new bourgeoisie. The ballet was one of the places the shoddies could be found flaunting their extravagance, “throw[ing] bouquets to the bare-legged dancers;” even worse, ballet was one of the disrespectable professions, along with “mineral waters” and prostitution, on which the shoddies depended for quick money. [60] In Hankins’ tale, the ballet-girl, whom she calls Helen, came from this shoddy class, forced into dancing to keep her family from starvation when her father quickly made a fortune in some unnamed business, then just as quickly lost it. Helen’s life was miserable: “with an aching heart, and a brain too often burning with the insults which she has received from those who take advantage of her exposed and unprotected situation, poor Helen Bray, like many of her sisters, comes upon the stage to dance and smile, and entertain the public world.” [61] For these authors, ballet served as a locus for the shoddies and their transgressions in multiple ways; it was the site of their creation, existence, and also their downfall. The ballet-girl thus functioned in mid-nineteenth century sensationalist urban literature very much in the way that Peter Buckley has noted of the prostitute. As a “fallen” woman, she served the narrative function of being authorized: to move among the dangerous classes of the city and to recognize—where the novelist and the reader might not—the evil intentions of the fashionably dressed. Because she [was] situated in the places of social and sexual promiscuity, where the extremes of social class converge, she provoke[d] the story of the city. [She allowed] the narration of the unnarratable. [62] The same might be said about the ballet-girl. In both the fictional mysteries-of-the-city and the nonfiction urban exposés, she was able to simultaneously reference the feminized hedonism of “fashionable” society, and the encroachment of European decadence on American society and values. Connoting an influence that was unavoidably “foreign” and potentially deviant, the ballet dancer ushered in the class conflicts and contradictions of the industrial city in all of its most dangerous, “unnarratable,” connotations. Alexander Saxton argues that what united the dime novel industry was the reliance on class struggle as a structural trope, across a diversity of subject matter. Most importantly for my purposes here, the Western narrative was “conceptualized in dime novels in terms of conflicts between fraternal egalitarianism on one hand and social hierarchy and deference on the other.” [63] The widespread support for territorial expansion in the mass press was buttressed by the belief that western lands held the fix for the socio-economic problems of the city. [64] Following this argument, Indian killing was de rigeur for the western hero because western expansion held the promise of a concept of civilization not racked by class conflict, “a western expanding white republic.” [65] Saxton views the western hero as the progeny of the prewar Free Soil hero, the literary representative of the ideals of social mobility and white fraternity that lay at the foundation of Republican ideology. Key characteristics of the western hero included lower-class roots, a background in Indian killing, and the ability to cross class divisions, usually by winning the favor of an upper-class woman’s family and marrying her. [66] Saxton’s exemplary model of such a character is Buntline’s first depiction of Cody in his 1869 Buffalo Bill: The King of the Border Men , the work that soon led both author and subject to their theatrical debut in The Scouts of the Prairie . As Bill, in Buntline’s story, leaves his modest vernacular beginnings to, first, fight the Indians who work for white ruffians, and finally, marry a banker’s daughter, he dramatizes American social advancement. Importantly for my purposes, romantic partnership is crucial to the western hero’s liberation from class boundaries. “It is not so much that lower-class origin has been denied,” explains Saxton, “but that equal access to privileges of the upper class, including acquisition of wealth and marriageability, has been triumphantly vindicated.” [67] From this perspective, one might speculate that, in the eyes of the working-class audience, as Buffalo Bill and Dove Eye embrace at the end of The Scouts of the Prairie against the backdrop of a speeding locomotive, symbol of the westward push of industrialization, perhaps the corruptions of a foreign, elitist culture that the Italian ballerina signified were at least as much in need of containment by the western hero than the alterity represented by the Indian Dove Eye. Not only the savagery of the Native American, but also the vices and cruelties of industrial conflict, were quelled under Cody’s stabilizing hand. When read intertextually with the narrative of the ballet-girl in popular literature, the spectre of a European “other” who gestured Eastward to the class and cultural reorganization of the metropolis emerges in The Scouts of the Prairie , the earliest prototype of the Wild West spectacles. In addition to affirming Dove Eye’s civilized side, Morlacchi’s ballet-dancing body pointed to social and economic worries about class, gender, and race in capitalist civilization. Several issues linger: how was Morlacchi’s dancing positioned in the play, and did the relationship between text and dance ultimately embrace these various levels of meaning or attempt to resolve them somehow? How would audiences in non-urban geographical locations have perceived ballet dancing in Scouts ? What role did the racism aimed at immigrants during the period play in Morlacchi’s—and ballet’s—positioning in the frontier play? [68] These questions remain difficult to answer, given the extant textual and critical resources through which we might rebuild the way in which a high “foreign” art intersected with this dime novel drama. [69] Such problems emerge, however, when we see the incorporation of ballet dancing, and the associations it carried, as a specific dramaturgical choice in The Scouts of the Prairie , one that went far, far beyond mere spectacle to gesture towards the class and cultural divisions at the heart of the question of “civilization” itself. References [1] Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 87, 86. On the Wild West as American mythology, see also Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000). [2] Sandra K. Sagala’s monograph is the most comprehensive source on these theatrical productions: see Buffalo Bill on Stage (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008). See also Roger A. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 1870-1906 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 50-67. Neither author considers Morlacchi’s dancing in the role of Dove Eye or explores the historical context of ballet in the image or the plays. [3] Qtd. in Chris Enss, Buffalo Gals: Women of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show (Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press, 2006), 4. [4] Qtd. in Barbara Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo: The American Careers of Marie Bonfanti, Rita Sangalli, and Giuseppina Morlacchi (New York: Dance Horizons, 1984), 121. [5] Morlacchi’s company was in financial trouble at the time, but there is no direct evidence that she took the role in Scouts out of financial desperation. The year after Scouts premiered, Morlacchi married Omohundro. She appeared in two subsequent Cody melodramas, playing an Indian maiden in The Scouts of the Plains and an Irish girl in Life on the Border , in between which she returned to the opera house for productions of Ahmed and her own production of La Bayadère . Morlacchi and Omohundro split from Cody in 1876 to create their own western combination plays, in several of which Morlacchi played an Indian maiden role. After Omohundro died in 1880, Morlacchi retired from the stage, and spent the following years teaching ballet lessons to the mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, where she and Omohundro owned a home. All biographical information drawn from Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo , 111-167. For John M. Burke, see Chris Dixon, “Introduction: The Mysterious Major Burke,” in John M. Burke, Buffalo Bill from Prairie to Palace . Introduction ed. Chris Dixon. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012). Online at Cody Studies , http://www.codystudies.org/?tag=john-m-burke (accessed 5 September 2014). [6] Early studies that mention the plot include James Monaghan, “The Stage Career of Buffalo Bill,” The Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 31, no. 4 (December 1938): 414-416; and William S.E. Coleman, “Buffalo Bill on Stage,” Players, 47, no. 2 (1971): 80-91. Craig Francis Nieuwenhuyse’s unpublished dissertation is the most detailed study of The Scouts of the Prairie , and his attempted reconstruction of the plot the most thorough. See Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage: Buffalo Bill Cody’s First Celebration of the Conquest of the American Frontier” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1981), see especially 43-74 for the plot. Sagala also includes a detailed account of the narrative ( Buffalo Bill on Stage , 21-23). [7] Chicago Daily Tribune , 19 December 1872, 4. The role of Hazel Eye was initially played by Eloe Carfano, but the secondary sources are not clear about her identity. Barbara Barker, Morlacchi’s biographer, says that Carfano was a member of Morlacchi’s ballet company (Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo , 153); Sandra K. Sagala describes her as a “Cuban actress” who joined the Scouts’ company on tour (Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage , 27). Both could be true; as Sagala notes, the reviews are confusing, and it may be that reviewers could not always tell the two women apart. However, Barker’s evidence that Carfano danced with Morlacchi in Scouts is based on the after-the-fact recollection of Omohundro’s brother that “both women danced on the tips of their toes” in the play (Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo , 156). I have found no reviews that mention Carfano’s dancing, only Morlacchi’s. [8] Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 54. Nieuwenhuyse’s source for the following quotations regarding the plot is the Troop C Ledger , Buffalo Bill Historical Center. See note 9 for details about this Ledger. [9] “The Scouts at Pike’s Opera House” (Cincinnati), Clipping, n.d n.p, William F. Cody Collection, “Stage Play Notices and Reviews 1872-1880: Black Book,” in Buffalo Bill Cody Scrapbooks 1875-1903, Manuscript 6, William F. Cody, roll 1. Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, WY. This is a microfilm of the Troop C Ledger, held at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, which contains numerous newspaper clippings cut so as to fit as many as possible on a page. Most of these clippings do not include dates or page numbers, and in some the name of the publication and/or its location has been omitted as well. Hereafter: BBHC Ledger. [10] “Amusements,” New York Times , 1 April 1873, 4. [11] Barker suggests a dance may have been incorporated into Dove Eye’s prayer scene; see Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo , 156. [12] Qtd. in Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 72. [13] Hall, Performing the American Frontier , 54; Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 111. [14] Rebecca Jaroff, “Opposing Forces: (Re)Playing Pocahontas and the Politics of Indian Removal on the Antebellum Stage,” Comparative Drama 40, no. 4 (Winter 2006/2007): 486. [15] Mary V. Dearborn, Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 99. [16] “The Scouts of the Prairie: A Lively Representation of Border Life” (Utica), BBHC Ledger, n.d., n.p. [17] “Academy of Music” (Indianapolis), BBHC Ledger, n.d n.p. [18] Joellen Meglin, “‘Sauvages,’ Sex Role and Semiotics: Representations of Native Americans in the French Ballet 1736-1837, Part Two: The Nineteenth Century,” Dance Chronicle 23, no. 3 (2000): 291. [19] Real Native Americans were added to the cast after the premiere, where they were mixed with non-Native “extras.” Costumes, weaponry, songs, and dances included in the play all worked to signify the display of an authentic Native culture onstage. Nieuwenhuyse notes that critics had trouble seeing the difference between the Native and non-Native performers, and that, ultimately, reviewers emphasized the overall brutality of the Indians through stereotypes that reinforced government’s eradication policies. Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 29, 43, 79-80, 130-31. [20] Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). [21] Boston Daily Advertiser , 4 March 1873, issue 54, column G. The reviewer’s reference to “Madmoiselle” Morlacchi points to the fact that, although predominately Italian, dancers in the ballet-spectacles were typically billed as “French” to cater to an emergent bourgeois class who saw Paris as the apex of cultural refinement, see Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo , 6. [22] Qtd. in Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 50. [23] Qtd. in Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage , 64. [24] Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 128. Also see Hall, Performing the American Frontier , 12-14; Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage , 16, 64. [25] “The Scouts of the Prairie” (Niblo’s Garden, New York City), BBHC Ledger, n.d n.p. [26] BBHC Ledger, no title, n.d., n.p. Reviews note that, while the packed houses at The Scouts of the Prairie were predominantly male, the audience was a mixture of upper and lower class patrons. See also “From the Prairie: Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack and Ned Buntline at the Academy of Music,” which describes how “men seemed to be arranged in close layers from the orchestra railing clear away up to the remotest corners of the gallery.” BBHC, n.d., n.p. My account of Morlacchi’s dancing in the play draws on the account of her biographer Barbara Barker, who describes that Morlacchi’s choreographic style adhered to the pantomimic, dramatic style of the ballet d’action tradition in which she was trained. [27] The dime novel industry included story papers, dime novels, and pamphlets like the cheap library. Michael Denning states that the continuities and repetitions between these formats justifies embracing them all under the term “dime novels,” which also distinguishes this genre from publications aimed at a middle-class readership. I am following his usage of the term. See Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987), 10-12. On the composition of the dime novel audience, see Denning, Mechanic Accents 27-30, and also Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1990), 328. [28] Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 82-83. This is not to say that Dove Eye did not have antecedents in Buntline’s novels, which invites further research. [29] Buntline’s first frontier story was Stella Delorme; of The Comanche’s Dream: A Wild and Fanciful Story of Savage Chivalry , which launched a series of Western dime novels. Nieuwenhuyse, “Six-Guns on the Stage,” 82. Buntline’s oeuvre also included international adventure romances, Naval stories, and urban melodramas. For a well-developed examination of Buntline’s career, see Chapter 5 of Peter Buckley, To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820-1860 . (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984). [30] Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic , 196. [31] Buntline switched party affiliations often, but was a committed member of the nativist cause from at least 1848 to the late 1850s, a member of the Order of United Americans and their offspring, the Know-Nothing Party. He also played a leading role in the American Committee, which helped instigate the 1849 Astor Place theatre riot, an event directly related to the class oppositions grafted onto the growing division between “high” and “low” culture. Later, as a celebrity author, Buntline was recruited to campaign for the Republican Party in 1876, 1880, and 1884. Splitting with the Republican Party in 1884, when he refused to support candidate James G. Blaine, he announced himself as an Independent Republican, and then fell out of favor with the Party for his earlier affiliation with the Know-Nothings. See Jay Monaghan, The Great Rascal: The Life and Adventures of Ned Buntline (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1952), 162-181, 192-217, 264, 272, 279-80. While it goes beyond the scope of my analysis of Morlacchi’s role in The Scouts of the Prairie , it also bears mention that Buntline’s nativist politics are also evident in the fact that, although the Indians in the play bear the brunt of the punishment, the real villains are the Mormon and immigrant renegades who mastermind the Indian attacks on the scouts. For a fuller account of mid-nineteenth century Republicanism than I can provide here, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); on nativism, see Dale T. Knobel, America for the Americans: the Nativist Movement in the United States (New York: Twayne, 1996). [32] Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 143. [33] For instance, the working-class heroine is threatened by the wealthy foreigner who pursues her that he will have her reputation ruined like Clara Norris (an actress of the day) “or any other of the stock company of the theatre of vice in the city.” Elsewhere, the theatre stands as a metaphor for the dark side of the city: the domain of the city prostitute is referred to as “the theatre of nightly infamy.” Ned Buntline, The Mysteries and Miseries of New York: a story of real life (New York, 1848), 159, 9. Electronic version available by Sabin Americana . Gale, Cengage Learning, http://galenet.galegroup.com.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/servlet/Sabin?af=RN&ae=CY103135748&srchtp=a&ste=14, (accessed 15 August 2013). [34] Ned Buntline, Rose Seymour, or The Ballet Girl’s Revenge, a tale of the New-York Drama (New York: Hilton, 1865). [35] Ibid., 29. [36] Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo , 3. [37] Christopher Martin, “Naked Females and Splay-Footed Sprawlers: Ballerinas on the Stage in Jacksonian America,” Theatre Survey 51, no. 1 (May 2010): 95-114. [38] Qtd. in ibid., 100. [39] Christian Register , 8 December 1827, 6, 49. [40] “The Ballet-Girls of Paris,” Brooklyn Eagle , 22 February 1870, 6. [41] “Foreign Correspondence,” Brooklyn Eagle , 9 January 1858, 2. [42] “The Ballet-Girls of Paris,” 6. [43] Qtd. in George Freedley, “The Black Crook and the White Fawn,” in Chronicles of the American Dance: From the Shakers to Martha Graham , ed. Paul Magriel (New York: Da Capo Press, 1978), 77, 70. [44] Junius Henry Browne, “The Ballet as a Social Evil,” Northern Monthly , II (2 April 1868). Qtd. in Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo , 18. [45] “The Social Morality of the Day,” The Brooklyn Eagle , 8 June 1871, 1. Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online, http://eagle.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/Default/Skins/BEagle/Client.asp?Skin=Beagle (accessed 14 November 2012). [46] William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 3. [47] George Ellington, The Women of New York: Or, the Under-World of the Great City: Illustrating the Life of Women of Fashion, Women of Pleasure, Actresses and Ballet Girls, Etc. (New York: New York Book Co., 1869), 117. [48] Ibid., 24. [49] On the construction of social spaces, including theatres, for the growing middle-class, see Mona Domosh, “The Women of New York: A Fashionable Moral Geography,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19, no. 5 (2001): 577-579. On the way in which the rise of the ballet-spectacle intertwined with and helped promote the dominance of business-class theatrical production in the post-Civil War years, see Bruce McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 231-257 (especially 242-243 on ballet-spectacles, or “musical extravaganzas”). [50] Stuart M. Blumin, “Explaining the New Metropolis: Perception, Depiction, and Analysis in Mid-Nineteenth Century New York City,” Journal of Urban History 11 (November 1984): 11. See Blumin, “Explaining the New Metropolis,” 35, for the sales of these books, which numbered in the hundreds of thousands. As Blumin noted in 1984, the postwar urban nonfiction is an understudied genre; I found little additional scholarship on this literature, with the exception of Mona Domosh’s “The Women of New York: A Fashionable Moral Geography.” Drawing on Blumin’s work, Denning notes that the relationship between these nonfictional urban exposés and mysteries-of-the-city novels is evidenced in the fact that some authors attempted to work in both genres; Denning, 228, no.8. [51] Domosh, “The Women of New York,” 575. [52] Ellington, The Women of New York , 90. [53] Domosh, “The Women of New York,”586. [54] Ellington, 121. [55] Ibid., 515. [56] Marie Louise Hankins, Women of New York (New York: M.L. Hankins & Co., 1861), 157-58. [57] Ellington, 514. [58] See, for example, “The Ballet Dancer,” Brooklyn Eagle , 20 August 1853, 1. [59] Ellington, 513, 511. [60] Ibid., 117, 119. [61] Hankins, Women of New York , 159-160. [62] Peter Buckley, To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820-1860 . (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984), 442-443. Buckley’s subject is the character of the prostitute in Ned Buntline’s 1848 The Mysteries and Miseries of New York . [63] Saxton, Rise and Fall , 330. Arguing that dime-novel thematic material often supported Republican party ideology, and that the industry maintained close ties to that party, Saxton places the western hero in popular fiction after 1850 within the lineage of the earlier “Free Soil hero,” who “by transcending the limits of region and class, could bid for national spokesmanship” (187). See Saxton, 183-203; 321-347. [64] Alexander Saxton, “Problems of Class and Race in the Origins of the Mass Circulation Press,” American Quarterly 36, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 229-230. [65] Alexander Saxton, “The Racial Trajectory of the Western Hero,” Amerasia 11, no. 2 (1984): 70. Saxton locates one source of the western hero in Jacksonian democracy, in which class divisions and upper-class dominance were broken down through appeals to egalitarian ideals within white civilization and racial hostility against enemies outside of it; see 68-70. Also Saxton, Rise and Fall , 183-201. [66] On the Free Soil hero, see Saxton, Rise and Fall , 195ff; on the western hero as the inheritor of those values, see 321-344. [67] Saxton, Rise and Fall , 337-338. [68] Matthew Frye Jacobson has documented that, with swelling immigration in the nineteenth century, “white” became no longer a singular, monolithic category, but rather plural, subject to shades and variations. Celtic, German, and Italian immigrants in particular were perceived as “savage,” or racially in-between, and thus unfit for citizenship. See Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Some criticism of the Italian dancers who brought ballet to American shores suggests that they were at times viewed through such racialist lenses, not readily seen as “white” in the public eye. For instance, in her role as Dove Eye, Morlacchi was referred to as the scouts’ “dusky-faced friend” (“The Scouts of the Prairie: A Lively Representation of Border Life” [Utica]), and as “tawny but not tawdry” [“Academy of Music” (Indianapolis), BBHC Ledger, n.d., n.p.]. And when a Omaha reviewer described Morlacchi as “a mulatto dancer,” Cody shot back that such a claim was “simply contemptible ,” and corrected that “[her] skin is as white, and blood as pure as your own—if not purer” (qtd. in Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage , 26). The racialist conflicts associated with Italian ballerinas in the nineteenth-century US warrant greater exploration. [69] I explore the historiographic problems associated with this research more fully in Andrea Harris, “The Phantom Dancer, or, the Case of the Mysterious Toe Shoe in the Frontier Prop Closet,” in “A Tyranny of Documents: The Performing Arts Historian as Film Noir Detective,” ed. Stephen Johnson, special issue, Performing Arts Resources 28 (2011): 151-59. Footnotes About The Author(s) ANDREA HARRIS is assistant professor of dance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her current book, Making Ballet American , is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Her essays have appeared in Dance Chronicle , Interrogating America Through Theatre and Performance , Discourses in Dance , and Avant-Garde Performance and Material Exchange , and she is the editor of Before, Between, and Beyond , the most recent collection of dance historian Sally Banes’s works. Dr. Harris has also taught at Texas Christian University, the University of Oklahoma, and the Universidad de las Américas. Her performance credits include the Martha Graham Dance Company and Li Chiao-Ping Dance. Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Refusing the Reproductive Imperative: Sex, Death, and the Queer Future in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom "Just Saying Our Goodbyes": Elegies' Queer Interventions into the History of 9/11 James Purdy as Playwright: A Retrospective Reading of A Day After the Fair and The Paradise Circus Sur la Pointe on the Prairie: Giuseppina Morlacchi and the Urban Problem in the Frontier Melodrama Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 34 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. Hui Peng BOOK REVIEW The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. David Pellegrini BOOK REVIEW Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Jennifer-Scott Mobley BOOK REVIEW Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. Kristyl D. Tift BOOK REVIEW The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York Mia Levenson and Heather S. Nathans ARTICLE “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Dan Colson ARTICLE Theatre of Isolation Madeline Pages ARTICLE “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat Michael Y. Bennett ARTICLE “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Leticia L. Ridley ARTICLE Issue 2 Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress Devika Ranjan BOOK REVIEW The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Craig Quintero BOOK REVIEW Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration grace shinhae jun BOOK REVIEW Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Donatella Galella INTRODUCTION Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies Donatella Galella, Dorinne Kondo, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Sean Metzger, and Karen Shimakawa INTERVIEW On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Christine Mok ARTICLE Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band Jennifer Goodlander ARTICLE The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Kristin Leahey with Joseph Ngo ARTICLE Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Roger Tang ARTICLE Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Jenna Gerdsen ARTICLE Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Baron Kelly INTERVIEW Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed kt shorb ARTICLE Dance Planets Al Evangelista ARTICLE Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Amy Mihyang Ginther ARTICLE Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Bindi Kang ARTICLE Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Daphne P. Lei ARTICLE Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Ariel Nereson ARTICLE Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

Dohyun Gracia Shin Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 1 Visit Journal Homepage Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Dohyun Gracia Shin By Published on January 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft presents an ambitious compilation of interviews with twenty-seven contemporary women stage directors, while archiving and reflecting on relatively underrepresented women stage directors in the US and the UK. Tracing the past two decades, Marty notes that few published books focus on female stage directors. She points to two volumes by Anne Fliotsos and Wendy Vierow as rare examples. Marty distinguishes her project by focusing on mid-career women stage directors—who she argues are not featured enough by Fliotsos and Vierow. This volume provides readers the rare chance to hear disparate, highly-active women directors’ reflecting in their own words about their experiences, insights, styles, labors, and vision. Based on her experience working both as a theatre researcher and practitioner (dramaturg/director), Marty also provides a window on the contemporary theatre industry, opening far beyond how gender intersects with artistic lives. What makes this book unique in structure is that Marty directs, in effect, her book. Interview-based books deploying question-and-answer structures often feature a handful of interviewees in a chapter or section. Instead, she divides chapters, as if splitting beats, and places quotes and excerpts from her interviewees in each chapter according to its theme, as if casting speakers in dynamic dialogue. She aligns thematic chapters like scenes that build into a larger narrative: this journey of women directors pursuing their careers begins with incubating projects and concludes with each director’s own vision of today’s theatre. Although the book’s organizational structure does not provide a clear, holistic profile of each individual director, as Marty acknowledges in the introduction (9), this thematic approach instead distinctly guides readers to respect a director’s role and labor. Marty also provides a series of inspiring models, amplifying the influence of women directors working at an array of theatre venues in the US and UK. In the first two chapters, Marty sheds light on the directors’ incubating process. Chapter 1 opens by laying out how individual directors choose a particular piece of work. For example, Lear deBessonet, the founding director of the Public Theater’s Public Works project, explains that she stages classics since “no one is the authority” (24) which thereby opens up collective imagination. Marty also considers how varied directors and artistic directors actually scaffold their work: finding their niche, planning seasons, choosing collaborators, and mounting their plays in a theater. Chapter 2 demonstrates her subjects’ labor of engaging with scripts and ideas prior to rehearsals. She emphasizes each director’s signature style of analyzing the play, for instance. Further, she expands our grasp of the directorial role by examining how her subjects collaborate with playwrights, play multiple roles besides that of a director, prepare for rehearsals, and communicate with audiences. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on how these directors shape performances, starting from conceptualization of the visual and acoustic, and then moving into the rehearsal room, and, ultimately, the stage. Chapter 3 highlights how the chosen directors envision theatrical worlds visually and acoustically, collaborating with designers. Here, Marty approaches relationships between directing and designing theatre horizontally. Inspired by her subjects, she analyzes spectacle and sound beyond servers of directorial messages, conveying a comprehensive picture of the theatrical process to readers. In Rachel Chavkin’s words, it is a director’s process of “discovering the world with designers and actors” (99).True to the volume’s subtitle, Chapter 4 presents a “conversation on craft,” guided by these leading directors’ invaluable experiences and advice on the rehearsal process. Using quotes, Marty covers the practical process of rehearsal: casting actors, setting the tone for rehearsals, empowering actors, shaping the process, and using research in rehearsals. For instance, Maria Aberg, who is known for “her innovative, feminist productions of Shakespeare and other classics at the Royal Shakespeare Company” (2), introduces points she considers in the casting process when she changes the gender of a character. Readers will find many gems and tips. In the final chapters, Contemporary Women Stage Directors focuses on how each of these experienced directors develop their careers and navigate the US and UK theatre scenes. Chapter 5 considers how the directors sustain their projects, dealing with concerns such as “financial security, community, quality of life, and relationships” (159). Pursuing the theme of work-life balance, Marty places quotes from Leah Gardiner, Kimberly Senior, and Lucy Kerbel together to cover issues such as motherhood, labor and pressure. In particular, Kerbel explains that “the loop of visibility” (190) exposes directors to critics’ attention which sustains their projects. She elaborates on gendered inequality in the field by mentioning how maternity leave easily drops women directors from that loop. If Chapter 5 extensively covers their individual lives and career arcs, Chapter 6 specifically focuses on their diverse experience with systemic challenges tied to their gender, racial and/or ethnic identities in the theatre industry. The 6th chapter analyzes obstacles and disparities in the field through her array of case studies, integrating an intersectional perspective. For instance. Leah Gardiner, Paulette Randall, and KJ Sanchez tell their stories of experiencing misogyny and racism in the field. Importantly, Marty pays attention to how these women directors navigate systemic obstacles. For example, Roxana Silbert and Nadia Fall emphasize that diversity opens up more diversity and brings an alternative gaze to the field, which is dominated by white male directors. Marty concludes her book with the directors’ insight on theatre today and their expectations as working professionals. In the conclusion, Marty summarizes her interview research in two categories: what she did not find and what she did. What is notable here is her picture of a director as a relationship builder. Marty explains that “the director’s role is to build and facilitate relationships , specifically (1) between a play and an audience and (2) among members of the collaborative team” (288). Likewise, Marty, as the director of this book, builds a relationship between these women directors and her contemporary readers. She creates a bridge for these mid-stream women directors —who struggle for their comparatively underrepresented stories and insights to be heard— bringing their voices and methods as accomplished practitioners to readers, both artists and scholars. By providing many substantial examples of brilliant, motivating women stage directors from the US and UK in the early 21st century, this significant study will benefit theatre researchers and our future generation of women (and other) theater directors, artistic directors and, one hopes, producers. References Footnotes About The Author(s) DOHYUN GRACIA SHIN The Graduate Center, CUNY Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue "Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here": Romanticizing Grifters in American Musical Theatre Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero: The Mark of the Marketplace in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1-3 Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202. Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec; Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.