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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 American Tragedian Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Performing Anti-slavery The Captive Stage Musical Theatre Studies Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Murder Most Queer New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Stacy Wolf 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 Musical Theatre Studies Stacy Wolf By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Musical Theatre Studies, whose presence as a viable academic field is not much more than a decade old, is spreading out in all directions of chronology, geography, approach, and methods. Scholars trained in theatre studies, dance studies, and musicology and ethnomusicology are becoming more comfortable with each other’s intellectual tendencies and conventions, sharing our analytical languages and epistemological assumptions. A quick, ad-hoc survey of some colleagues turned up an inspiring and formidable range of recent and current projects. Some books expand the field in valuable ways. These include, for example, Elizabeth Wollman’s Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City , which takes seriously sexually explicit shows and their conversation with the city, with feminism, with gay culture, and with mainstream musicals. Carol Oja’s Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War looks at the work of Leonard Bernstein from a new angle, focusing on his collaborations with artists of color, including actors, conductors, and dancers. Liza Gennaro’s Making Broadway Dance , a much-needed study of Broadway choreographers, is also in process. I’m working on Beyond Broadway: Four Seasons of Amateur Musical Theatre in the U.S. , which argues that nonprofessional artists at high schools, summer camps, and community theatres sustain and are the lifeblood of the form. Other scholars re-locate what’s been called the most American of entertainment genres in a global context. Both David Savran and Laura MacDonald, for example, are working on international projects: David’s explores the branding of Broadway and its significance across the globe, and Laura studies Korea and China-based productions of Broadway musicals. Some current projects put musical theatre in conversation with other fields, such as urban geography and architecture—Dominic Symonds’ performance cartography of Broadway’s music—and Jessica Sternfeld’s work in disability studies. In Raymond Knapp’s recently completed book on Haydn, German Idealism, and American popular music, he discusses the important role of musical theatre and its sensibilities to the development of American popular music. In an effort to bolster the undergraduate curriculum, which for generations consisted of knowledgeable professors—typically longtime fans of musicals and collectors of trivia who listed facts and dates and told stories (many of them fascinating and crucial to understanding how musicals are made but with no critical framework)—several textbooks have been published recently. James Leve’s American Musical Theater and Larry Stempel’s Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater offer historical context and critical tools to help students learn the repertoire and develop analytical skills. Several other anthologies geared towards undergraduates and graduate students are in process: The Disney Musical: Stage, Screen and Beyond , edited by George Rodosthenous, and Childhood and the Child in Musical Theatre , edited by James Leve and Donelle Ruwe. Elizabeth Wollman is editing The Methuen Critical Companion to the American Stage Musical , which shifts away from the typical production-based study to a culture- and industry-based overview of the American commercial theater. She and Jessica Sternfeld are editing the large Routledge Handbook , which examines musicals of the last fifty years from many angles and will be the first collection to focus on recent repertoire. In addition, Dominic Symonds notes that musical theatre studies’ methods and critical ideas, such as “musicality, collaboration and interdisciplinarity” are increasingly being taken up in other disciplines. This moment in scholarship and pedagogy is, I think, marked by two other issues, which ironically (or not?) seem to pull in opposite directions of access and popularity. The first is the ubiquitous challenge of accessing visual archives to be able to teach musical theatre. Some students are lucky enough to see a New York or regional production of a show, and others can take advantage of local community theatres or high schools, which are both fantastic and underused resources for teaching college students about musicals. But some instructors are limited to what they can find on YouTube, whether clips produced by Playbill or BroadwayWorld, or, more commonly, illegally taped and posted to the web. It’s impossible to teach students the complexity of the genre of musical theatre without a dynamic visual and aural archive. If we want students to understand not only the text-based elements of musicals (script and score) but also casting, staging, and design (to name only a few), we need access to productions for them to see, even in video’s imperfect form. Sondheim’s professionally taped and commercially distributed musicals, including John Doyle’s production of Company , Hal Prince’s Sweeney Todd , and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George , for example, are invaluable teaching tools. Legal restrictions on taping hamper our ability to teach a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of performance. Second, the fans of Broadway musicals have gone mainstream, at once resonant of the 1940s and 50s when musical theatre was a part of popular culture, and with a new, intensely social media orientation. In 1996, Rent broke open a new place for young, politically-progressive musical theatre fans. Now, Hamilton has connected with a diverse audience unlike anything we’ve seen in decades. The fanatical (and I mean that as the highest compliment) passion of “Rentheads” in the mid-to-late 1990s has been bettered by the Hamilton frenzy, which I witnessed firsthand when I attended and gave a talk at the first BroadwayCon in January. Many of the fans I met at that gathering of mostly women, mostly under 30 grew up on Disney musicals and the film versions of Sweeney Todd , Chicago , Les Miz , Phantom , and Into the Woods . Though they (and all of my students) can sing the entire cast album of Hamilton , they also know and love Broadway musicals more generally, and they express their fandom of Fun Home , Fiddler on the Roof , and The King and I on Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. Social media enables the consolidation of widespread fan communities, whose engagement with a musical might be by way of the cast album, artists’ tweets, YouTube clips, or the musical itself. But these new modes of communication and connection don’t alter the fact that the object of affection and desire is the live performance event of a Broadway musical. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Stacy Wolf is Professor of Theater and Director of the Princeton Arts Fellows at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She is the author of Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical and A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical . She is currently working on a book about amateur musical theatre in the US. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue American Tragedian Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Performing Anti-slavery The Captive Stage Musical Theatre Studies Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Murder Most Queer New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Michael Y. Bennett Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat Michael Y. Bennett By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF Edward Albee’s 2002 play, The Goat or, Who is Sylvia? (Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy) , centers around Martin—a very successful, 50-year-old Pritzker Prize-winning architect—and how his family (i.e., his wife of many years, Stevie, and his gay, teenage son, Billy) and his best friend, Ross, react to the fact that Martin has been having an affair with a goat named Sylvia. In short, Ross turns on and betrays the confidence of Martin, Billy is beyond embarrassed and angry, and the once-playful-and-witty Stevie, ultimately, kills Sylvia, dragging the dead, bloody goat across the stage at the end of the play in a scene befitting of Greek tragedy. With these three characters vying for Martin’s attention, this play contemplates the fact that one cannot look in two different directions at once. Humans have stereoscopic vision: we have two eyes, but we can only see one image. Love is being seen, and that is why it is so significant that the moment, according to Martin, when Martin locks eyes with Sylvia is the moment that he knew he was in love with her. And the moment their eyes locked, nobody else (neither his wife, nor his son, nor the familial unit as a whole) could be seen. So, too, in Jesus’s telling of the parable, “A Certain Man had Two Sons,” more commonly known as “The Prodigal Son,” the elder son does not feel seen. The elder son realizes that he is not being seen or heard not just in the moment when his father would not answer his question, but the elder son realizes then, too, the fact that he never was seen during all of his years of being a good son and responsible person. Unlike the other parables of Jesus (which are, largely, didactic ), and unlike the other plays of Albee (which are, largely, tragicomic ), I argue that both “A Certain Man had Two Sons” and The Goat are, ultimately, tragic parables , as love and attention can be focused on a single entity, with everyone and everything else left to fall, unloved and unseen, by the wayside. The following four ideas open up Edward Albee’s The Goat to a biblical reading: 1) the name “Jesus” and “Jesus Christ” are uttered numerous times in the play; 2) Martin’s best friend, Ross, is called “Judas”; 3) John Kuhn suggests that there is a “ leitmotif of religious imagery” [1] in this play; and 4) in his earlier play, Tiny Alice (1964), Albee critiques the illogical nature of the Catholic Church. Furthermore, Kuhn has called the baby-on-the-lap story in this play, a “parable.” [2] However, the baby-on-the-lap story is not just a parable; I argue that the play as a whole, is the parable. I am referring to the the most complete and complex of Jesus’s parables: “The Prodigal Son,” or as biblical scholars call it by its first line, “A Certain Man had Two Sons.” POOF! And then it hits you: Billy, the son, is not a reference, necessarily, to a “Billy goat,” but to the prodigal, “Billy the Kid.” In Albee’s retelling of the parable, all of the characters in the play vie for the father’s (Martin’s) love, a goat/kid is sacrificed, and the father has two “kids.” Albee’s play, then, is a modern adaptation of “The Prodigal Son,” or, rather, Albee’s play is A Certain Man had Two “Kids,” where the focus remains on the impossibility of loving two things at once. In short, both Albee’s The Goat and Jesus’s telling of “A Certain Man had Two Sons” are cautionary damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t tragic parables , where the only learning that occurs is to try to avoid that which cannot be avoided: both trying to love two things at once and loving just one thing, yields tragedy. Current Scholarship on The Goat The Goat premiered on Broadway on March 10, 2002, directed by David Esbjornson and led, most notably, by Bill Pullman (Martin). The play immediately garnered a tremendously positive critical response, racking up major nominations (e.g., a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize) and receiving major awards (e.g., 2002 Tony Award for Best Play and 2002 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play). European (Vienna’s English Theatre, 2003) and UK (Almeida Theatre, 2004) premieres quickly followed, directed by such notable directors as Pam McKinnon and Anthony Page, respectively. While The Goat is over fifteen years old, the field has yet to fully coalesce around a single, central issue involving Albee’s play. Although, in part, because of the title and subtitle (and its call to understand tragedy), scholarship has revolved around two general concerns: the relationship between animals and humans and the nature of different theatrical genres. Deborah Bailin examines the relationship between humans and animals in Seascape (1975) and The Goat to show that what is at stake in this ambiguous relationship is what it means to be human. [3] Brenda Murphy also discusses the relationship between humans and animals in relation to Seascape and The Goat to demonstrate the ways in which anthropomorphism allows The Goat to reverse generic expectations. [4] Tony Stafford deals with genre in invoking the American Pastoral tradition with a nod to the relationship between animals and humans. [5] In “Getting Albee’s Goat: ‘Notes toward a Definition of Tragedy,’” Kuhn argues that, with The Goat , “Albee’s definition of tragedy reaches an intricate fullness.” [6] I, too, make this argument, but Kuhn and I argue it in different ways. Kuhn carefully shows how The Goat fits within the model of Aristotelian tragedy. Kuhn makes seven key points: 1) “Calamity couples with heroic achievement in a tragedy”; 2) Martin is a falling hero whose behavior threatens the heroic acts of a lifetime; 3) the play is a “double tragedy” for both Martin and Stevie; 4) Martin and Stevie’s hubris was “blinding pride”; 5) the play has a classic structure; 6) Albee clearly had the ancient tragedies in mind as he references the “Eumenides” and includes phrases like “tragic farce” and “flaw,” and Martin the hero is always onstage; and 7) “The play generates intellectual and moral insight.” [7] Kuhn further argues that “Philosophically, the Absurd is that existential disconnect between cause and effect which both Stevie and Martin describe: ‘nothing has anything to do with anything.’” [8] Elsewhere I have suggested that the plays of the so-called “Theatre of the Absurd” are ethical parables that guide the viewer to make meaning of his or her own life, which, I later call “absurd tragicomedy.” [9] Kuhn and I have different takes on the absurd in Albee’s early, “most substantial tragedies,” as Kuhn calls them. [10] In The Zoo Story , even though it seems irrational to Peter, Jerry makes sense of his murder-suicide. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) George and Martha are in an absurd situation: they want children, but the world will not give them children. But the play is not (solely) tragic as George and Martha, ultimately, make sense out of their situation and realize that they have each other and that that might be enough. Here, I disagree with Kuhn and want to elaborate on my previous observations. I argue that The Goat is a tragic parable because Albee created a situation, too absurd , too hopeless, out of which meaning cannot be made , moving beyond contradictions that can be resolved, and, thus, the characters live with an unresolved tragic situation. Just like at the end of “The Prodigal Son”—when the father’s answer to his elder son does not rectify the feelings of unequal treatment—in The Goat , the situation cannot be resolved, even with the death of Sylvia. Albee’s play is not only a commentary on social mores and contemporary views of sexuality and the limits of those views, but The Goat also forces us to re-evaluate the parable, which is possibly the most influential piece of short literature in the Western world. But while this article will spend some time re-interpreting this biblical parable, it does so to help us understand, not necessarily “The Prodigal Son,” but to further illuminate Albee’s tragic parable in The Goat and his conception of tragedy. Shedding light on how the parable is tragic reveals how Albee similarly sees the story as tragedy in The Goat . “The Prodigal Son,” or The Elder Brother: Notes toward a Definition of Tragedy In Interpreting the Parables , Craig L. Blomberg summarizes the three main approaches scholars have used in analyzing the parable of “The Prodigal Son” or “A Certain Man Had Two Sons.” First, there are those—especially Wilcock and Arndt—that argue that there is one point coming out of the parable: sinners should repent regardless of the gravity of their sins. Second, scholars such as Danker and Talbert understand the end of the parable as an argument that one needs to celebrate the salvation of others. Third, in what Blomberg contends is the most common interpretation, Thielicke, Schweizer, and Marshall suggest that the parable speaks to the power of the father’s love and patience for both sons. [11] Brad H. Young, in The Parables: Jewish Tradition and Christian Interpretation , reads the parable as a “crisis of broken relationships”: By dramatizing a family tragedy the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) focuses on the crisis of broken relationships between a human being and God. A person living without God is like the younger son running away to a far country. But the elder brother living at home with his father is no better off. He is much like a religious person who misunderstands the divine nature and lacks a meaningful relationship with God. The elder son does not show love for his father and struggles, perhaps unsuccessfully, to forgive his brother. He cannot share the joy of his father over the return of the runaway. [12] Young is right that this is indeed “a crisis of broken relationships,” but he places the blame on the wrong family member. He assumes that it is the elder brother who “misunderstands the divine nature.” However, is it not the father who grants the prodigal son his request, symbolically creating two “dead” beings? As David Wenham argues in The Parables of Jesus: Their Art and Use , since the son is “dead” and has lost his “sonship,” the prodigal son’s return is a rebirth: he is “born again,” which accounts for the joy at the return of the prodigal son. [13] What neither Wenham nor Young consider is that the return of the son is also the return of the father. [14] Because the allocation of a person’s belongings is usually saved for after his death—thus, the father commits a symbolic suicide [15] —the return of one’s progeny re-establishes the father as a father. The father, to use Wenham’s language, is symbolically “born again,” as well. The rebirth of the father solves the connective problem between the first and second parts of the parable and provides a cause and effect. The father symbolically declares himself “dead” when he gives away half of his goods and dies not just for his younger son, but for his elder son, as well. As the elder son explains, “Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment; and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends” (Luke 15:29). His father, in other words, was no father to him. The play on words with “kid” furthers this idea. In other words, thou never gavest me, not just a goat to eat, but you never gave me a brother to love and enjoy with my friends. The elder son did not know love from his own father, so how, in turn, can the father expect the elder son to love his younger brother, a “dead” son ? The elder son certainly did not bask in his father’s love, but in his father’s “commandments.” The rebirth of the father, with the return of the prodigal son, transformed the father from a law-abiding (or, rather, commandment-abiding) Pharisee to an open-armed and loving Christian. The key to this lies in the father’s symbolic “death” and “rebirth.” One wonders what exactly transpired during the father’s “death.” The elder son suggests that the father set up a series of commandments to be obeyed (“thy commandments”). The death of the fatherly impulse—the impulse to nurture—resulted in the birth of a Pharisaic being. Diverging from Young, then, this would suggest that it was the father who “[misunderstood] the divine nature.” The elder son, then, merely mirrors what he had seen and experienced. The parable raises the question of how one should rectify a bad situation. The standard interpretation of the parable’s answer to this question is through compassion and forgiveness. [16] However, the ending—the elder son’s silence—suggests that compassion and forgiveness do not solve all problems, and in cases such as this, create others. Forgiveness is not the be-all and end-all and responsibility is the foundation on which Christianity is built. In other words, forgiveness is a patch, but responsibility builds solid foundations. The younger son is irresponsible in kind with his youth. The father lacks foresight and, in turn, irresponsibly bestows enormous wealth upon a youth; he enables his son to become a profligate. Symbolically, both father and son become “dead” through the father’s bequeathment of his son’s inheritance. The prodigal son should have contrasted his father; instead, he mirrored him. When the younger son leaves, the father’s actions only confirm his own irresponsibility. If one chooses to be a father, he must accept the responsibility of nurturing his offspring, which the father never does. He never rewards the elder son for his good behavior. “The Prodigal Son” is a cautionary and tragic parable. The father’s irresponsibility causes two deaths: the prodigal son is reborn as a profligate and the father is reborn as a Pharisee. It took the younger son’s “rebirth” to jolt the father into responsibility. It is the younger son who first acts responsibly when he finds himself out of options and goes home and repent. The father simultaneously 1) greets the rebirth of his younger son through repentance and 2) is reborn himself by changing from a Pharisee to a loving Christian. The tale is cautionary in that because the father was not always ready to greet God (or the second coming—the rebirth—of his “son”), his elder son is affected by the father’s Pharisaic ways and may never be able to forgive first and experience the same rebirth that his younger brother and father experienced. Though both prodigal son and father are “born again,” the elder brother remains the parable’s lingering casualty because he has yet to be reborn. From Absurdity to Tragedy: Billy Goats, or Martin’s Two kids, or “Getting one’s goat” There are a number of possible allegorical readings of The Goat : one such possible reading being that, like Judas, Ross betrays of Martin’s confidence and friendship; Sylvia represents Jesus, as she dies for man’s (Martin’s) sins at the end of the play; and Stevie, similar to Pontius Pilate, crucifies Sylvia (Jesus). Of course, there is also a potential non-biblical allegorical reading which equates the forbidden love of a goat with a man’s once forbidden love of another man. As interesting as these allegorical readings are, they do little to help us better understand the play and, more specifically, understand tragedy, which is invoked in the subtitle of Albee’s play (i.e., Who is Sylvia? or [Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy] ). Instead, I suggest that the intellectual thrust of The Goat and “A Certain Man had Two Sons” are similar, and that the nature of these plays is tragic. The Goat starts out, in typical Albee fashion, with a series of relatively mundane questions which are only answered by a roundabout and circuitous dialogue. And, of course, much like many of his plays, it takes place in “ A living room .” [17] Why is the living room significant here? I have recently argued that Albee comes from a line of great American living room tragedians (e.g., Hellmann, O’Neill, Miller, Williams, etc.), with Albee’s innovation being that he introduced the tragicomic worldview to this classic living room tragedy particularly in his 1962 play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? [18] If we think back to this play, the talk and ethos of the living room in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is clearly tragicomic, much like the dialogue and ethos of this living room in The Goat . Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is sort of a reversal of the Oedipal complex, where the “son” is killed off by the father, in order for him to sleep with/love the mother. This death of the “son” allows George and Martha to produce happiness, or at the very least, a new world that is based on reality. In Albee’s plays, sacrifice—especially with religious overtones—is prominent, which produces an effect of absurd tragicomedy . In The Zoo Story (1958) Jerry is a Jesus-like savior who runs into the knife, killing himself to wake Peter up from his bourgeois illusion of comfort, hoping to yield enough knowledge and awareness in Peter for him to live a better and more meaningful life. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the “son,” or the “kid”—like Jesus—is sacrificed and dies for the sins of George and Martha, allowing for the rebirth, not of the son, but their marriage and life together. While there is pain from the sacrifice, it is for their souls, as there is now hope for salvation, or at least, for saving and/or salva(ging) their marriage. The end is painful, and Martha is scared and experiences emotional pain, but the sun is also rising, and it is both literally and figuratively a new day for George and Martha. The tragicomic ethos that has produces both laughter and pain throughout the night appropriately produces a bittersweet ending: sad, uncertain, but also filled with new possibilities. In contrast, in having sexual intercourse with Sylvia, it is not Martin who dies—his wife, Stevie, mentions numerous times how she is going to kill him—but his sexual death is accompanied by Sylvia’s actual death at the hands of Stevie. The bloody stage at the end of the play is more typical of a Greek tragedy. Here, Stevie kills off the “kid” to attempt to save/salvage her own marriage, but with this animal sacrifice, everyone involved loses innocence, and all are irrevocably changed, but unlike George and Martha and Nick and Honey in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Peter in The Story , without any redemption or hope of a better future. Martin’s Death and Rebirth Martin first becomes a father through a sexual death with Stevie. Billy is the resulting son, the kid, who is at the pivotal age of seventeen—the last year before adulthood and, presumably, leaving for college. Billy, his kid, is not “prodigal” in the traditional sense of the word as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary : he is neither “extravagant; recklessly wasteful of one’s property or means” nor a “reckless or wayward person; a returned wanderer.” But Martin, and certainly Ross, approach Billy’s homosexuality with a mindset from another era, believing that he may grow out of his sexuality: ROSS: Passing phase. Have you had the old serious talk?MARTIN: The “You’ll get over it once you meet the right girl” lecture? Nah, I’m too smart for that, so’s he, so’s Billy. I told him to be sure. Says he’s sure; love it, he says. [19] There is an implication here that Billy is having sex, and a lot of it. Here, Billy is at fault for the two maxims—“nothing to excess” and “surety brings ruin”—that follow the famous inscription, “Know thyself” at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. But, here, Billy does know himself. Apollo is the judge and features prominently in the Eumenides and within one page of the first mention of “Eumenides,” Albee riffs on the famous inscription at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, “Know thyself”: ROSS: OK? Ready? Ready Martin; here we go; just…be yourself.MARTIN: Really?ROSS ( A tiny bit testy ): Well, no; maybe not. Put on your public face. [20] This has the same tenor as a famous Jewish joke: A man goes to a psychiatrist and says, “Doctor, I am so unhappy, I just do not know what to do. Can you give me some advice?” The doctor replies: “Just be yourself. Unless you’re a schmuck, though, then be someone else.” In the Eumenides , Orestes is being driven mad and wants the agony to stop: “I sing this song over the sacrificial victim, a frenzied, wild, song, injurious to the phrên , the hymn of the Furies [Erinyes], a spell to bind the phrenes , a song not tuned to the lyre, a song that withers mortals. Relentless destiny spun out our fate…” [21] Unlike Orestes, though, Martin does not want it to stop, and in many ways, the agony only really starts for Martin at the end of the play when Sylvia becomes the “sacrificial victim.” But with the death of the “kid,” Billy, the other kid in the play, no longer has competition and Martin is, in a sense, reborn as a father who can focus his attention on his single son. But the tragedy is two-fold: Martin appears to be a broken man and there needs to be a “sacrificial victim” for Martin to become a better father. In The Goat , the murder of Sylvia is tragic, and the tragedy of the act breeds further unhappiness for everyone. Nothing is going to improve, and every character is worse off. Unlike the deaths of the other so-called children in Albee’s plays, namely the “son” in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and “the baby” in The Play About the Baby (2000) which bring an end to illusions that obscure reality, Sylvia’s death in The Goat does not accomplish anything but death. There are loose ends, though: how will Martin, Stevie, and Billy function afterwards? But unlike in The Zoo Story , Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , or The Play About the Baby , neither the characters nor the audience learn anything from the death of Sylvia, and, thus, Sylvia’s death is meaningless. To Albee, it seems as though suffering can make sense, but only if it yields a newfound rationality to approaching life and the world. While the ending of The Goat provides no way to grow or learn from the tragedy—which makes the play is a tragic parable—for much of the play, Martin is simultaneously the most logical and most illogical character. Architecture happens, initially, by imagining the immaterial in one’s head, before transforming the immaterial to a material reality; builders and construction workers deal in the material, but Martin deals in the immaterial. Martin’s status as the youngest Pritzker Prize winner ever, indicates that Martin is something of a precocious genius. Martin’s youth (i.e., for a Pritzker Prize winner and for someone who thinks they may have Alzheimer’s), and his naiveté about his situation with Sylvia suggest that Martin is immature for his age. An immature male who deals in immaterial realities, however, describes most teenage boys, like Martin’s son, Billy, and Ross’s son, Todd, but does not often describe a 50-year-old man at the height of his career. Prior to the unraveling of the familial unit, Martin appears able to logically compartmentalize and understand all of the love and affection that he can dole out. This ability to bracket one’s emotions in a logical manner is a sign of nuanced thinking and maturity. Martin sees no contradiction in loving both Stevie and Sylvia. For Martin Stevie and Sylvia are not mutually exclusive lovers, not because he is polyamorous, but because Stevie and Sylvia are not in competition with one another. Each of his two lovers provides entirely different sorts of affection and worth. Stevie is a traditional spouse in that she is Martin’s best friend and lover. As Martin quips in a backhand compliment, Martin does not replace Stevie with someone else: STEVIE ( Quite matter-of-fact ): If you are seeing that woman, I think we’d better talk about it.MARTIN: ( Stops. Long pause; matter-of-fact ) If I were …we would .STEVIE ( As offhand as possible ): If not the dominatrix, then some blonde half your age, some…chippie, as they used to call them…MARTIN: …or, worst of all, someone just like you? As bright; as resourceful; as intrepid; …merely…new? [22] Sylvia is not a replacement; she supplements what Stevie does provide. Stevie gives Martin all the love, support, and intellectual stimulation that Martin needs. Sylvia, however, satisfies Martin’s love of female goats. Stevie will never be able to offer Martin what Sylvia provides; as Stevie rightfully observes later, “But I’m a human being; I have only two breasts; I walk upright; I give milk only on special occasions; I use the toilet.” [23] And the tragedy is Stevie is right. Though Martin believes that he and Sylvia fell in love with one another when they first locked eyes (“…and there she was, looking at me with those eyes…” [24] ), Martin and Sylvia are unable to lock eyes during their intimate acts. Martin is oddly correct when he says to Ross, “I’m seeing her.” [25] Sylvia, however, does not see Martin or any of this intimacy; Martin only sees the intimacy and not Sylvia. [26] While Martin believes that he and Sylvia are consensual partners—because Sylvia supposedly backs up into him, and not vice versa—during sexual intercourse, Martin (literally) can see only Sylvia’s backside, as she faces the opposite direction. The tragedy is that while everyone is jealous of Sylvia, Sylvia cannot even appreciate the love; she has no idea what love even is. This only adds insult to injury. Everyone is jealous of a goat, a being that cannot even process (or see) what she has. Conclusion In “A Certain Man had Two Sons,” Jesus tells a parable of the ultimate display of forgiveness through a father’s deep love of his son. Albee creates a parable that displays the capacity to immensely love, not just humans but any two beings who feel mutually seen by one another. But Martin misreads or, like a Greek tragic hero, blind himself to the situation: Martin never considers the base and simple emotion of jealousy. It is important that Billy is an only child, as until now, he has been the sole object of parental attention. But now there is another “kid” in the house, and everyone is jealous. Stevie is jealous of Sylvia. Billy is jealous of Sylvia. Even Ross may be jealous of Sylvia (since he loses his best friend because of her). Martin may be the smartest guy in the room, but he misses the most basic things (e.g., he forgets the name of his best friend’s son; he never even sat in the chair sitting right in his living room, etc.). So, too, our “certain man” justifies giving his younger son his inheritance and shows mercy is mercy by forgiving his son and welcoming him with open arms, but just like Martin, he never accounts for jealousy. The “certain man” of the parable cannot seem to fathom why his elder son is not excited by his brother’s return despite his failure to address the concerns of his elder. And the elder brother cannot imagine why the father does not understand his feelings because he twice asks why he has not been rewarded. And this is the tragedy of both parables: a display of love and attention begets jealousy. The greatest joy on earth, love, cannot exist without enacting pain on someone else, and this is the greatest tragedy of all: free love is never free. References [1] John Kuhn, “Getting Albee’s Goat: ‘Notes toward a Definition of Tragedy,’” American Drama 13, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 5. [2] Ibid. [3] Deborah Bailin, “Our Kind: Albee’s Animals in Seascape and The Goat: Or, Who is Sylvia?,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 18, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 5. [4] Brenda Murphy, “Who is Sylvia?: Anthropomorphism and Genre Expectation,” in Edward Albee and Absurdism, ed., Michael Y. Bennett (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 174-185. [5] Tony Jason Stafford “Edward Albee and the American Pastoral Tradition,” in Edward Albee and Absurdism, ed. Michael Y. Bennett (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 95-110. [6] Kuhn, “Getting Albee’s Goat,” 2. [7] Ibid., 3-29. [8] Ibid., 25. [9] See Michael Y. Bennett, Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Michael Y. Bennett, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). [10] Kuhn, “Getting Albee’s Goat,” 1. [11] Michael Wilcock, The Savior of the World: The Message of Luke’s Gospel (Leicester and Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1979), 149-57; William F. Arndt, The Gospel According to St. Luke (St. Louis: Concordia, 1956), 350. Craig L. Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables (WestPoint, InterVarsity Press, 2012), 172; Frederick W. Danker, Jesus and the New Age: A Commentary on St. Luke’s Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 275; Charles H. Talbert, Reading Luke (New York: Crossroads, 1982), 147; Blomberg 172-3; Helmut Thielicke, The Waiting Father (London: J. Clarke; New York: Harper Bros., 1959), 17-40; Eduard Schweizer, The Good News According to Luke (Atlanta: John Knox; London: SPCK, 1984), 247-8; Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke (Exeter: Paternoster; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), 604; Blomberg 173. Working from the scholarship of Cadoux (A. T. Cadoux, The Parables of Jesus: their Art and Use [London: J. Clarke, 1930; New York: Macmillan, 1931], 123.) and Stock (Alex Stock, “Das Gleichnis vom verlorenen Sohn,” Ethische Predigt und Alltagverhalten, ed. Franz Kamphaus and Rolf Zerfass (München: Kaiser; Mainz: Grünewald, 1977), 82-6.), Blomberg argues that the parable makes a separate point with each character: 1) With the “prodigal son,” one can always return home and repent one’s sins, 2) The father is like God in that he forgives anyone as long as they are willing to accept it, 3) The older brother should have rejoiced in his brother’s “reinstatement.” Those “who claim to be God’s people” should take joy in the fact that God extends his grace to the “undeserving” (174). As Blomberg argues, parables, and this one in particular, have allegorical meanings. The characters are allegorical in that “each character clearly stands for someone other than himself” (Blomberg 175). [12] Brad H. Young, The Parables: Jewish Tradition and Christian Interpretation (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, LLC, 1998), 130. [13] David Wenham, The Parables of Jesus (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1989), 111. [14] This surface-level reading which poses the question: “Should children be given their inheritance when they are young?”—opens the story and leads us to deeper meanings. First, this question works as extended metaphor: it is a question of what a parent owes a child, when a parent owes a child, what a child deserves from a parent, and when a child deserves something from a parent. With this request, a practically impossible situation arises for both the son and the father. The exchange of money is possible. What is impossible is that the father can no longer give his son something when he dies. This is also a reversal of expectations and a paradox, at least in our culture. Fathers usually give to their sons (money, wisdom, love, etc., which is not to say that the sons do not return love to their parents); there is an implied hierarchy. Therefore, when the father gives half of what he has to his son, part of him will no longer exist after that he gives the money away. The balance of capital changes the balance of power. It also changes the burden of responsibility. The father can no longer be financially responsible for his son. This practical quandary raises an ontological quandary. In the end, the father decides to throw a feast for his returned son. This is when his other son gets angry: “Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment; and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends” (Luke 15:29). The father has been thrown into an impossible situation; how do you please one son while not offending the other, or how do you shower one child with affection when there is another child waiting to receive an equal amount of affection? How can a father be a loving parent and please two children at once? This question, like in many parables, is never answered. We are left with the moral injunction to forgive those who have sinned, but the question of how to love is still left up to the reader. The reader must decide how the father should act in this case, or how they should act with their children. [15] Bernard Brandon Scott argues that “The son’s division of the property kills the father” (Hear then the Parable: A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989], 111). Again, I see it more as a suicide since, although the idea was planted in his head by the son, it was the father who carried out and executed the plan. [16] In suggesting that “A Certain Man had Two Sons” is a tragic parable, I am not arguing the parable does not praise forgiveness: one only has to look to “The Unmerciful Servant” (Matthew 18:21-35) and “The Two Debtors” (Luke 7:41-43). What I am arguing is that in “The Prodigal Son,” Jesus says that forgiveness is necessary, but that responsibility is mandatory. If the father was responsible, neither son nor father would have been “dead.” And, maybe more importantly, the elder son would not have adopted the Pharisaic nature of the father. Though, of course, “The Prodigal Son” is closely aligned, thematically, with “The Unmerciful Servant” and “The Two Debtors,” this new reading also aligns “The Prodigal Son” with “The Ten Virgins” (Matthew 25:1-13), “The Faithful and Unfaithful Steward” (Luke 12:42-48; Matthew 24:45-51), and “The Householder and the Thief” (Matthew 24:43-44; Luke 12:39-40). These three parables focus on how one must be ready and responsible, so that one will be able to be judged well when God comes at his unexpected hour. [17] Edward Albee, “The Goat: or, Who is Sylvia? (Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy)” in The Collected Plays of Edward Albee: 1978-2003 (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2005), 538. [18] Michael Y. Bennett, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (London: Routledge, 2018). [19] Albee, “The Goat,” 551. [20] Albee, “The Goat,” 552. [21] Aeschylus, Eumenides, trans. Hebert Weir, rev. Cynthia Bannon, rev. Gregory Nagy, n.d., https://uh.edu/~cldue/texts/eumenides.html. [22] Albee, “The Goat,” 546. [23] Albee, “The Goat,” 575. [24] Albee, “The Goat,” 568. [25] Albee, “The Goat,” 568. [26] This does raise the question of whether or not Martin rapes Sylvia, as consent, for numerous reasons, is impossible to obtain from a goat. While it may be pertinent to some readings of the play, this question is beyond the scope of this essay. Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Theatre of Isolation “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Derek Munson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 3 Visit Journal Homepage Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Derek Munson By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017; Pp. 198. Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre is the first book-length study to chronicle Ellen Stewart’s exceptional contributions to twentieth and twenty-first century theatre. Written by expert in U.S. theatre Cindy Rosenthal, the book is ambitious in scope and stays true to the idiosyncratic tenets of avant-garde theatre that made Ellen Stewart famous. Rosenthal began research for the project in 2006 when TDR commissioned her to write a comprehensive article about La MaMa. Until this point, Ellen Stewart had been fiercely guarded about her privacy and determined that no book would be written about her or La MaMa. However, Rosenthal’s article pleased Stewart, so she agreed to a manuscript with the caveat that Rosenthal approach the book through the lens of La MaMa’s vast poster collection and through the words of the artists who had passed through La MaMa’s doors since its inception in 1961. The result is a historical narrative of colorful anecdotes, archival photographs, and rare posters that examine La MaMa’s longevity as the foremost Off-Off-Broadway venue. Ellen Stewart Presents is primarily an archival and ethnographic study that is organized into five chronological chapters beginning with the 1960s and ending in 2011, shortly after Stewart’s death at the age of ninety-one. Over the course of a decade, Rosenthal interviewed numerous artists and spent countless hours engaged with La MaMa’s vast collection of show business ephemera. Rosenthal tells the story of La MaMa’s early years, when the theatre was tucked away in a little basement in the East Village. She tells the story of playwrights like Lanford Wilson and Harvey Fierstein who began their careers at La MaMa and went on to achieve commercial success while other artists like Split Britches and Yara Arts Group remained committed to their downtown roots. She tells the story of the birth of the Off-Off-Broadway movement, which was instrumental in the development of avant-garde theatre in the United States. And she tells the story of print posters and how the medium arose, particularly in relation to La MaMa. But where Rosenthal excels is in the telling of the stories about Stewart’s theatre “babies,” artists who were nurtured with love and affection and enjoyed Stewart’s hands-off approach to producing (9). One such person is “Multidisciplinary artist, composer, filmmaker, and choreographer Meredith Monk” who, in 1976, created what John Killacky claims is “one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century,” the opera Quarry (67). A meditation on World War II, Quarry is characteristic of the avant-garde movement with its innovative narrative and “audience-as-set” convention. After a successful limited engagement, the opera was scheduled again a few months later, but La MaMa’s doors were closed for yet another building code violation (Stewart’s troubles with the city are chronicled in Hillary Miller’s Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York). Monk fondly remembers being with Stewart after La MaMa was shuttered, asking “What producer would be sitting there, crying with you?” (67) Quarry eventually moved to the Brooklyn Academy of Music and won an Obie Award, and Monk later brought the opera back to La MaMa in 1986. Ellen Stewart Presents features two of the posters from the original production of Quarry designed by Monk and Monica Moseley. Monk recalls that Stewart gave La MaMa artists complete freedom with poster designs, and she appreciates why Stewart finally approved a book about her life’s work: “Posters do it better than photographs. It’s hard to show in one photo what a play is about because a photograph capture[s]… a specific moment in time… a visual artist can distill one powerful image in a poster that can represent a production—and that is why she wanted to tell the story that way” (19). Indeed, Rosenthal selected more than one hundred posters from La MaMa’s archive of approximately twenty-five hundred posters (many now available online) to create a work that is as much a visual journey as it is an oral history. Ellen Stewart Presents functions on multiple historical levels—perhaps too many for a single volume—with glowing reviews and few critical detractors. Rosenthal celebrates Ellen Stewart as a force of nature who was instrumental in shaping the course of the American stage. Perhaps Stewart’s greatest legacy is the freedom she gave to theatre artists from all over the world, the freedom to innovate and explore with less constraint than commercial theatre. Today, under the new artistic leadership of Mia Yoo, La MaMa is a thriving international arts institution that includes the Umbria International workshop that gathers each summer outside of Spoleto, Italy. With so much more to tell about its subject, Ellen Stewart Presents opens the door to further scholarship about one of the most important theatre visionaries of the twentieth century. Meredith Monk remembers that if Stewart liked an idea and said, “do it,” the artist had found a new home: “Ellen was totally about love… And that’s La MaMa” (71-72). Derek Munson University of Missouri The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical Introduction: Embodied Arts "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance History, Musicals, and the Americas Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

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

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

Ryan Donovan Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 3 Visit Journal Homepage "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Ryan Donovan By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF Introduction Casting director Craig Burns worked on Broadway’s Hairspray (2002) from its first workshops, and it remains his favorite production because of the opportunity to cast people who “weren’t normally considered for leads in a show, and now all of a sudden these girls are getting a chance because we need a fat girl. There was so much joy in that.”[2] Katrina Rose Dideriksen was one such woman given the chance to play Hairspray ’s Tracy Turnblad on Broadway and on tour. She remembered feeling excited to play Tracy because she “is the ingénue, she wins the guy, she saves the day . . . she’s funny and she’s lovable and all those things, but in this very real-girl way.” Dideriksen then noticed a “weight clause” in her contract: “It was really this underlying pinch to realize that subconsciously I was being told I was still wrong for it, that there was something I had to fix. . . I don’t think they realized how hurtful, and how anti- Hairspray it really was for them to be like, ‘Lose 20 pounds.’”[3] Apart from a few roles (including Tracy), fat women are almost never cast in roles beyond the comedic sidekick or best friend in commercial theatre. The casting of Broadway musicals reproduces aesthetic values from the dominant culture, especially the notion that thin bodies—ones that conform to these values—are superior to other bodies, especially fat ones.[4] The aesthetic values placed on bodies are gendered, especially relative to size. Author Roxane Gay explains, “most girls are taught—that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society.”[5] Society informs fat women that they are unfeminine and undesirable, which in turn determines everything from how fat women are represented to how and where they work. In her memoir, Lindy West notes the material effects of these values, writing, “As a fat woman, my body is also lampooned, openly reviled, and associated with moral and intellectual failure. My body limits my job prospects, access to medical care and fair trials, and—the one thing Hollywood movies and Internet trolls most agree on—my ability to be loved.”[6] When a fat female actor walks into an audition, these sociocultural strictures delimit her presence and reception there. While all actors are often told they aren’t the “right fit” because of their appearance, fat women confront a double standard: one actor I interviewed was bluntly told, “You’re not fat enough to be our fat girl.”[7] For fat women, the inability of the industry to think inclusively about body size proves a major barrier to employment. Fat is typically hurled as an insult rather than claimed as an identity position in the United States. It is something seen as needing to be eliminated, which sociologists Samantha Kwan and Jennifer Graves argue is due to the “fashion-beauty complex,” in which “advertisements remind us that unwieldy, loose, and jiggly fat must be tamed. The taut body . . . then becomes a reflection of moral fortitude, perseverance, and bodily mastery.”[8] Advertising exhorts women to be the right kind of consumers—purchasing products that help one achieve thinness. The word fat itself can be discomfiting, and in order to neutralize stigma associated with the word, fat studies scholars have reclaimed and repurposed fat .[9] Fat studies scholar Marilyn Wann explains, Casting notices are rife with euphemisms to avoid saying fat , admitting the stigmatization of fatness while aiming not to offend. Hairspray star Marissa Jaret Winokur notes, “People don’t want to say the word ‘fat.’” She kept a record of the words used to avoid describing her as fat when she was starring in the musical on Broadway; these included “‘chubby,’ ‘hefty,’ ‘dumpling-shaped,’ [and] ‘dimple-kneed.’”[11] The disconnected, tentative relationship between language and fat corporeality is thus reproduced in theatre from casting to reception. Casting necessarily includes processes of disqualification, yet the lack of opportunities for fat actors reveals that size-based discrimination remains so widespread on Broadway that it is accepted as natural and, crucially, neutral. By examining casting practices, this article combats what theatre scholar Brian Eugenio Herrera terms the “mythos of casting,” namely the discourse around casting practices masking “how an actor’s labor is (and is not) valued as a commodity.”[12] To extend Herrera’s formulation, I suggest that the mythos of casting also masks how the actor’s body becomes a commodity in the theatrical marketplace. In the closed economy of Broadway musicals, this mythos provides cover for the operation of ideologies espousing bodily conformity (e.g., the plethora of articles about “Broadway Bodies” on Playbill.com ).[13] Musicals celebrate performative excess while disciplining other kinds of excess: differences of ability, gender, race, size, and sexuality. This essay centers on the casting, production, and reception of Hairspray in order to demonstrate how stigma determines how fatness has been employed in Broadway musicals since the 1980s. The aesthetics and politics of casting Tracy Turnblad provide a history of body shame and questionable labor practices spanning from the early 2000s to today. Musicals embody how and where Broadway (and, by extension, U.S. society) expects fat women to sound, to move, to behave, and to labor; class, gender, race, and sexuality further impact these expectations. Fat Stigma in/and Casting Broadway Musicals Dreamgirls and Hairspray are the only hit Broadway musicals of the past fifty years where fatness is sometimes a prerequisite for playing the female lead. Hairspray (2002) was the first Broadway musical to star a fat woman since Jennifer Holliday starred as Effie White in Dreamgirls (1981). Bonnie Milligan’s casting as Princess Pamela in Head Over Heels (2018) is arguably the first Broadway musical to star a fat woman in a role where the character’s size is not mentioned in the libretto, and the role could have gone to a traditional ingenue-type instead.[14] Milligan explains how Head Over Heels differs from previous treatments of fat female characters in musicals: “This world celebrates her! And it’s not just her. It’s everyone on stage who calls her beautiful. That’s part of the intention.”[15] Jeff Whitty conceived the role expressly for Milligan, who played Pamela in every iteration of the musical on its way to Broadway.[16] Milligan’s casting and Pamela’s narrative reflect contemporary attitudes toward body positivity just as Dreamgirls and Hairspray represent then-contemporary stances toward fat women. These roles (Effie White, Tracy Turnblad, and Princess Pamela) are unique because they give fat actors the chance to play a full range of emotions beyond self-deprecation. Fat women in Broadway musicals are always considered in terms of their bodies and fitness in very specific ways; being considered plus-sized isn’t usually a plus for women on Broadway. Sometimes the stigma is overt: casting notices for the 2016 City Center Encores! production of The Golden Apple repeatedly stated, “We are not looking for heavy character actresses.”[17] Discrimination in casting and enforcement of bodily norms exists in all arenas of theatre from amateur to professional. Men do not face the same kinds of body scrutiny—Nathan Lane has regularly played leading roles where the guy gets the girl during the time span covered by this article, and The Book of Mormon has regularly cast fat men in the leading roles of Elder Cunningham following original star Josh Gad. John Waters hoped the musical adaptation of his film Hairspray would be a hit because “there will be high school productions, and finally the fat girl and the drag queen will get the starring parts.”[18] Part of Hairspray ’s power comes from the fact that Tracy is portrayed as feminine and desirable while also being fat and being okay with that. Hairspray ’s onstage narrative intersects with offstage narratives of casting its Broadway production, a process that often made a spectacle of young women hoping, like Tracy, for a big break. Hairspray exemplifies Broadway’s ambivalence toward casting nonconforming bodies. Even ostensibly fat-positive musicals like Dreamgirls and Hairspray became complicit in labor practices contributing to fat stigma. Stigma has been grounded in bodily difference since, as sociologist Erving Goffman explains, ancient Greeks coined the term “to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier.”[19] Stigma rests on a paradox of visibility, because certain bodies become invisible due to the very visible attributes that stigmatize them—fat people may be stared at but not seen, or viewed as having uncontrollable appetites. The social psychology of stigma indicates that “‘visibility’ and ‘controllability’ are the most important dimensions of stigma for the experience of both the stigmatizer and the stigmatized person.”[20] In other words, fat people are perceived to have shirked the mandate of personal responsibility that undergirds neoliberal capitalism.[21] Weight is seen through a moralistic lens equating fatness with failure; this perceived failure being the inability to control behaviors and appetites or to conform to dominant aesthetic body standards. As theatre and fat studies specialist Jennifer-Scott Mobley summarizes, “Fat people go against our collective social, political, and economic ethos.”[22] This is despite the fact that “more than two-thirds of American women [were] classified as overweight or obese.”[23] Despite vague and indeterminate meanings of “overweight” and “obese” (and their pathological implications), the vast majority of American women inhabit nonconforming bodies. The systemic, structural nature of the value placed on the minority of conforming bodies becomes further clarified by the data. U.S. culture attends to bodies centrally through weight-based discourse. Fatness, according to American studies scholar Amy Erdman Farrell, has historically been used to determine who fits where in society, in which venues one is allowed to participate, and what kind of labor one’s body performs.[24] Many of the roots of contemporary fat stigmatization can be traced to the nineteenth century and the growing industrialization and urbanization of America, which changed the kinds of bodies capital needed for labor. Fatness went from being a sign of wealth to a sign of excess, self-indulgence, laziness, moral failure, and lower-class status.[25] Conceptions of ideal bodies increasingly tilted toward thinness during the twentieth century, to the point that what once was considered average is now considered fat, and weight loss carries its own kind of cultural capital. The growing power of the fit body as a physical and moral standard marked fat as other despite its statistical prevalence. In the U.S. workforce, fat women today face an additional economic burden simply from being fat in a society restricting their earning power—being just thirteen pounds “overweight” reduces a woman’s annual earnings by an average of $9,000.[26] At the same time that fat women in the early twenty-first century are more economically disadvantaged, the U.S. economy relies upon consumer spending on diet, exercise, and weight loss products devoted to eliminating fat, and “spending money on becoming thin is the perfect solution for both neoliberal subjectivity and neoliberal capitalism more broadly.”[27] This is on top of the wage penalty for being a woman, placing fat women in a catch-22. Farrell explains that thinness then becomes “a strategy [employed] to mitigate against the identity of ‘female,’ which poses so many risks of discrimination and inferior status.”[28] According to fat studies scholar Kathleen LeBesco, “a fat person’s only shot at citizenship comes if he or she gratefully consumes the panoply of diet and fitness products made available by industry and government.”[29] Thus, Tracy Turnblad is simultaneously a good consumer (of beauty products) and a failed one (by not only being fat but celebrating it). A “Big Girl Now”: Performing Tracy Turnblad Tracy stands out in a sea of theatrical representation that clearly articulates the devaluation of fat people and reveals uncomfortable truths about what kinds of bodies are valued in the U.S., where the fat body is actually the most common kind of body. The tendency to view fat people as somehow less-than is revealed by the number of leading roles continually cast with conforming bodies, even when the script or character description does not mention weight. Broadway has not cast a fat Annie Oakley or Eliza Doolittle—even though there is nothing about these roles inherently requiring a specific body type; to do so would be to concede that fat women can play and experience the full range of representation readily available to thin people. Broadway musicals thus admit, through exclusion, which bodies are valued as they attend to the imperatives of neoliberal consumption. That Hairspray is named after a beauty product makes it almost the perfect commodity, save for its body positivity. Hairspray deliberately subverts the gap between representation and reality. Filmmaker John Waters openly wanted “to make sure that Tracy will be fat, not just plump. When was the last time you saw two fat girls as stars of a Broadway musical who also get the guy?”[30] Waters based his 1987 film on a local Baltimore television show from his youth, though he noted, “The one thing that was pure fiction in [ Hairspray ] was the idea that a fat girl could have gotten on that show. A fat girl never would have gotten on ‘The Buddy Deane Show.’ Even in segregated Baltimore, a black girl would have had more chance.”[31] For Waters, Hairspray ’s fairy tale aspect was precisely why it was empowering: “It’s about the teenage white girl who gets a black guy. The fat girl gets a straight guy, and her mother’s a man who sings a love song to another man.”[32] Apart from Waters, Hairspray ’s creative team embraced Tracy’s fatness but also employed humor undermining its fat-positive stance; the film includes numerous jokes about the appetites of its fat women. As Edna sings in the show’s finale, “You can’t stop my happiness/’Cause I like the way I am/And you just can’t stop my knife and fork/When I see a Christmas ham.”[33] While Hairspray works hard to be in on the jokes, it also subtly subverts the identities it means to celebrate by laughing not only with but sometimes at its characters. Hairspray ’s setting in 1960s Baltimore speaks to social change and body image as mediated on television. When Tracy’s mother, Edna, hears of Tracy’s desire to dance on the local television station’s The Corny Collins Show , she says, “They don’t put people like us on TV—Except to be laughed at.”[34] Tracy breaks the mold of fat girl as doormat, victim, or comic relief as she is the musical’s self-possessed, exuberant, romantic leading lady who can “shake and shimmy” with the best of them. The plot centers around her drive to dance on Corny Collins and win the love of its resident heartthrob, Link Larkin—this musical is about casting, too. She remains acutely aware of how her desires are viewed; in “I Can Hear the Bells,’” she sings, “Everybody says/That a girl who looks like me/Can’t win his love/Well, just wait and see.”[35] Tracy ends up winning a place on the show when Collins spots her dancing at her sophomore hop. The show’s tongue-in-cheek tone extends to social issues like segregation. Paralleling Tracy’s ambition to dance on television is her drive to racially integrate the Collins show. She inspires a protest to integrate the program and goes to prison as a result. Tracy ultimately wins Link’s love, makes a jailbreak, and is crowned “Miss Teenage Hairspray 1962” as the Collins show is racially integrated in the musical’s finale. Fat, in Hairspray , is both specific and universal; its creators explain, “Tenacious Tracy Turnblad, lovable as she is, is fat, and all of us, lovable as we are, are somehow, metaphorically, fat.” They describe Tracy’s fatness as a metaphor for being “skinny, clumsy, new in town, female, foreign, black, Jewish, gay, naïve, brainy, too short, too tall, overeager, shy, poor, left-handed, over-freckled, pyrokinetic (like Carrie ), scissor-handed (like Edward ), or musical-comedy-loving.”[36] Tracy never lets dominant cultural views of fatness stop her and does not view herself as inferior—a new narrative for a fat female character in a Broadway musical. Such supreme self-esteem was certainly not represented in Dreamgirls ’s narrative arc; Effie had to admit “I Am Changing” to find success in a thinner body. Tracy’s narrative arc “implodes the myth of the unlovable fat woman” (as Head Over Heels too would go on to do) at the same time that, according to social psychologist JuliaGrace Jester, “it gives unrealistic representations of the ease with which Tracy is both accepted by others and how she accepts herself.”[37] The show functions as a fantasy for the very real reasons Jester critiques it: its alternative world of empowerment and wish fulfillment sidesteps actions toward real fat acceptance. Hairspray instead creates its own myths in which struggle and injustice are resolved through song, black people and white people are assimilated into a community through dance, and all are linked through being consumers (of music, television, and beauty products). Tracy uses her consumption of hairspray to break the rules of what 1960s white girls are supposed to look like, teasing and spraying her hair into a bouffant, while challenging how she was prohibited from moving by dancing with the black kids. Casting Hairspray for Broadway presented challenges, beginning with choosing the language used in the casting breakdowns. Despite Waters’s comfort with fat , the casting breakdown for Tracy scrupulously avoided using it. Telsey Casting decided on “heavyset” instead: Burns explains that the word choices were made “because . . . you don’t want to offend anybody in a breakdown.” He went on to add that initially they knew “you need a fat girl. It’s like, ‘that’s the role’ . . . But it was definitely set up at the beginning, that on the breakdown, that we would always use ‘heavyset.’”[39] Size was of course only one element under consideration for potential Tracys. Broadway actor Kathy Deitch was brought in to audition for Tracy several times over a period of four years, never getting cast because she read as “too sophisticated” for the role. She remembers, “Just because I’m chubby, everyone assumed that I would be Tracy.”[40] Being the right body “type” alone is not enough, though it helps the actor get an audition. The height requirement noted in the breakdown further limited the applicant pool, in addition to the specific 1960s-inflected vocal style and dance ability required. Winokur played Tracy in all of Hairspray ’s readings before she was contracted to originate the role on Broadway. Telsey Casting launched a national casting search in Baltimore to find unknowns to play Tracy while Winokur was rehearsing the role for the final reading in New York.[41] Burns notes this was not, as was reported, about replacing Winokur before the opening, but rather was about finding understudies and future replacements: “We knew we were going to need to start finding these girls, so I think it was about starting early.”[42] Casting replacements effectively began before the musical even opened in New York. When the production held auditions in New York the month after its Broadway opening, hundreds of hopefuls showed up, including many who saw playing Tracy as their chance to break through. “The role is something that I can play, because I can never be Eponine in Les Misérables . I’ve struggled with this for a long time, because on stage it doesn’t matter what you look like, but what you weigh,” relates Tracy-hopeful Lisette Valentine.[43] Casting director Bethany Berg notes, “These girls are real people; they’re what most of America looks like, and we’re looking for those people that are happy and confident.”[44] Berg’s language acknowledges fat women as real people as well as explicitly nods to what actual American bodies look like—implicitly admitting the composition of the musical’s audience. However, even when acknowledging the progressive elements of casting a fat female lead, the press was still unable to resist weight- and size-related puns and metaphors. The title of the article referenced above, for example, is “Sizing Them Up.” Despite (or perhaps because of) Hairspray ’s fat positivity, the press felt licensed to write numerous feature stories commenting on the body of the actor playing Tracy in addition to emphasizing her diet and exercise routine. Fat became a punchline for headline writers: a typical headline was Variety ’s “‘Hairspray’s’ Full-Figured Tony Tally.” To a degree, the production itself encouraged this kind of winking treatment; its advertising tagline was “Broadway’s Big Fat Musical Comedy Hit.” A New York Times feature on Winokur repeatedly made the point that she was breaking “conventional wisdom” about how fat women should act and what they should wear: “Heavyset women are expected to wear their clothes long and loose-fitting. Ms. Winokur likes her skirts short and her T-shirts tight.”[45] Winokur noted the significance of her opportunity as Tracy, saying, “Here I am, the young character actress . . . I’m the lead this time.”[46] She was positioned as transgressive for doing things considered normal by thin women. It was not just the press who focused on the body of the actors playing Tracy though; the production team had its eyes on those bodies as well. Winning the Role and Weighing In Hairspray stands out for its celebration of size, and yet its costume design and contractual weight clauses undermined its fat-positivity.[47] The show promoted fat acceptance as it simultaneously mandated weigh-ins for cast members, a practice much more common in ballet companies. The irony is that Tracy is essentially a dance lead—the show’s structure bears this out, as she is not even given the traditional leading lady spots for her songs (Maybelle sings both the eleven o’clock number and the act one finale). Dideriksen, initially a standby Tracy, discovered at her first backstage weigh-in that she was not alone in having her weight monitored; the actress regularly playing Tracy was also contractually obligated to maintain a certain weight, whereas Dideriksen was told to lose 20 pounds. A member of the production’s wardrobe team would round the scale’s number up or down accordingly out of kindness. She remembers the weigh-ins as “sending us into panics” over whether their contracts would be terminated if the scale moved in the wrong direction, even though both actors wore fat suits.[48] Burns said the fat suits were not an issue as far as he knew during the casting process: Whether the young women cast as Tracy knew before they signed the contract does not mitigate the complexity of feelings stirred by being padded and/or weighed, the ambivalence of the simultaneous burden and privilege of playing Tracy, or the fact that many understood this was their only shot to play a lead. The use of fat suits emblematizes this ambivalence because fat suits exacerbate the bind of inhabiting a fat body: being perceived as excess and lack, simultaneously too much and not enough. Yet using fat suits is more complicated than simply exercising artistic license. The fat suit itself reinforces stigma because it can be put on and taken off at will, an act unavailable to the fat person perceived as morally suspect for their inability to take off the weight.[50] At the same time, it is the literal embodiment of the myth that inside every fat person is a thin person who is somehow more “real.” Fat suits, and fat itself, then are seen as a performative embodiment. If the creative team and producers were so invested in maintaining the weight of the actors playing Tracy, then why bother with fat suits at all? [caption id="attachment_3191" align="alignnone" width="413"] LAS VEGAS, NV - FEBRUARY 15: Actress Katrina Rose Dideriksen (L) as the character Tracy Turnblad and actor Harvey Fierstein as the character Edna Turnblad perform during the opening night of the Broadway musical "Hairspray" at the Luxor Hotel & Casino February 15, 2006 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)[/caption] One plausible reason why the production used padding is because Tracy’s physicality was so demanding. Tracy dances so intensely throughout the show that the creative team was afraid actors would lose too much weight. The New York Post reported, “Winokur has lost weight—enough to send a frantic theater crew bringing candy and chocolate shakes to her dressing room. As the chunky star of ‘Hairspray’ . . . [Winokur] needs to stay plump to play the Ricki Lake role.”[51] The article’s headline, “Worth the Weight,” raises the question of what is worth the weight—Winokur? The chocolate shakes and candy? Starring on Broadway? The seesaw of being told to maintain your fitness while being “fed”? As the production was trying to fatten up its leading lady, it was also pressuring her to exercise and increase her stamina. For the creative team, Tracy’s weight was always a concern during casting. Employment law scholar and fat activist Sandra Solovay details stereotypes concerning fat people’s employability: “They are not fit so they should not be in any position that requires strength, speed, stamina, or other significant physical demands.”[52] In the New York Times , “Jack O’Brien, the director of ‘Hairspray,’ said he never doubted that Ms. Winokur was right for the role, only whether she had the stamina for it. ‘Did she have the chops to do eight shows a week?’”[53] Winokur had previously appeared on Broadway in a revival of Grease and regularly performed eight shows a week without apparent issue. Concerns about stamina and ability significantly contribute to fat stigma in general. On Broadway they added pressure to an already-tough job. Hairspray was the first time many actors playing Tracy were asked to carry a show, let alone a Broadway production, and they had more than their weight to worry about. Winokur was bluntly informed during the show’s Seattle tryout that she was “carrying a ten and a half million dollar show.”[54] Keala Settle explained the pressure of playing Tracy: Some candidates for Tracy were sent to “Tracy Camp,” a training program for actors whom the creative team determined needed more vetting before being offered a contract.[56] Dideriksen went to “Tracy Camp” with no promise of future employment.[57] Burns notes “Tracy Camp” was borne out of practical considerations to keep the various productions up and running smoothly, because it was a struggle to cast the role. He explains, “They had to be really special, so we found them all but it wasn’t like we had twenty people in our back pocket that we could go to . . . We definitely had to go out there and train and find the really special ones.”[58] Yet “Tracy Camp” was arguably as much about seeing whether the fat women’s bodies were fit enough as it was teaching the role. Dideriksen describes her perspective on the process: Burns backs up Dideriksen’s assessment of the particular demands of this role: “I remember Jerry Mitchell saying what the girls would have to . . . be really good at cardio to dance the show, and he was like, ‘I need you to do 45 minutes on the bike and then you’ll have a milkshake.’”[60] Kathy Brier, Broadway’s first replacement Tracy, told Newsday , “It’s a weird kind of a thing. You’re supposed to be this chubby girl, and yet the show is so active you have to train to be an athlete.”[61] Tracy had to be fit and fat in order to perform the role, which are not contradictory demands despite popular misconceptions including those of the musical’s creative team. As much as getting cast as Tracy was an opportunity, it often came with a price once the contract was over. Dideriksen played Tracy on Broadway and opposite Harvey Fierstein in Las Vegas but details how after she left the show, “There was this stigma of still seeing me having Tracy on my resumé.”[62] No actor who played Tracy during Hairspray ’s nearly eight-and-a-half year Broadway run has since appeared in another leading role on Broadway.[63] Winokur herself has maintained her celebrity status by becoming associated with weight loss. She was a contestant on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars and hosted a cable television weight loss competition show called Dance Your Ass Off . In 2009, she wrote a blog series for People magazine titled “Calling in Fat,” aimed at taking readers along on her “weight loss journey.”[64] Winokur’s notion that one could “call in fat” to work emphasizes the relationship of fat stigma to labor issues. The inability to be cast in leading roles after playing Tracy exists for those who played the role on Broadway as well as actors who have played the role in regional theatres. Personal trainer Geoff Hemingway regularly trains performers, including a client who played Tracy: “When she started she was like, ‘I just played Tracy Turnblad in this regional production of Hairspray . That was my dream role, and now I’ve done it and I don’t want to be fat anymore.’ Since coming in to Mark Fisher [Fitness], she’s shed about fifty pounds and is now being seen for ingénue roles.”[65] Tracy, of course, is an ingénue role, but her fat body prevents her from being seen as such. This anecdote underlines the internalization of fat stigma within the industry and its relation to actors’ legitimate concerns regarding employability. Broadway Cares? The lack of fat actors cast in leading roles belies Broadway’s vision of itself as a fully inclusive institution, and the use of fat suits and contractual weight clauses has perpetuated fat stigma. Stated simply, if you are fat, you will rarely be considered for a leading role in a Broadway musical because of how your body looks—being fat means being seen for fewer roles, which translates into less work. Ethnographer D. Soyini Madison exhorts us to remember that the stakes of representation are not merely about who is seen: “representation has consequences: how people are represented is how they are treated.”[66] Casting contains the possibility to alter these consequences and make an immediate, visible impact because it reveals which bodies are considered fit for Broadway.[67] Casting directors can bring diverse, nonconforming bodies into auditions, but they are still bound to the small army of decision makers comprised of the creative team and multiple producers. Power over what and who makes it to the stage remains in the hands of those controlling the money. Commercial theatre’s profit motive materially effects the lives of all actors, especially fat actors who will not be considered or seen for leading roles—the highest paying ones. When asked whether he had been able to cast anyone who played Tracy in another leading role, Burns demurred: “That’s a good question. . .There have been other opportunities, but I don’t know. I still think it’s definitely a type, and it’s harder to find roles that are right for these girls.”[68] Finding the right roles proved tough not just for the Broadway Tracys but also the stars of Hairspray ’s film and television adaptations, Nikki Blonksy and Maddie Baillio respectively, who have worked sporadically in featured roles since playing Tracy. What would happen if fat women were recognized as deserving of the full range of representation given to women with conforming bodies? It might look something like Head Over Heels . During the show’s brief run, Milligan tweeted, “We are serving amazing body positivity at @HOHmusical, where I get to play the most beautiful girl in the land, who has a love story, and nothing about my weight!!”[69] Audience members would wait for Milligan at the stage door to tell her what seeing her onstage meant to them. She explains, Unlike Dreamgirls and Hairspray , Head Over Heels struggled to find an audience and closed after just 188 performances. The presence of a show like Head Over Heels on Broadway might seem to precipitate casting practices becoming more inclusive, yet Broadway’s recent history indicates that, despite economic imperatives to return investors’ money, the financial success of inclusively cast, albeit conflictedly-so, musicals does not automatically beget more inclusivity. If we recognize the twenty-one-year gap between Dreamgirls and Hairspray and the sixteen-year gap from Hairspray to Head Over Heels , then we must confront the fact that money must not be the sole concern: Dreamgirls and Hairspray were both long-running, award-winning, financially lucrative successes that proved stories about fat women starring fat women are viable money-makers. While Head Over Heels was a financial flop, it nevertheless marks important progress in the representation of fat women on Broadway. The presence of only these three roles, along with the handful of supporting roles in musicals like Escape to Margaritaville (2017) and Waitress (2015), demonstrates how fat stigma operates on Broadway from conception to casting. LeBesco explains, “the stigma attached to being fat is a control mechanism which supports a power structure of one group of people over another.”[71] By not casting fat women outside of prescribed roles, Broadway musicals enforce a system of gendered bodily norms that police how all women act, consume, and labor in the U.S. A few months before Dreamgirls opened, Bennett described his view of that musical’s central conflict in three questions summing up the lens through which Broadway, and arguably US society itself, continues to understand representation: “[I]t’s about, are you marketable? Is it saleable? Will it make money?”[72] Despite the smash hit status of Dreamgirls and Hairspray and the progress made by Head Over Heels , Broadway continues to say no to most fat women. Ryan Donovan received his PhD in Theatre and Performance from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. His research on casting and identity examines the inclusion of stigmatized and non-normative bodies in contemporary Broadway musicals. Ryan is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Musical Theatre and the special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre (13.1) on dance and musical theatre. He would like to thank everyone he interviewed for this research. ryan-donovan.com [1] Ira J. Bilowit, “Hairspray,” Back Stage , January 31, 2003. [2] Craig Burns (casting director), in discussion with the author, September 2017. [3] Katrina Rose Dideriksen (actor), in discussion with the author, April 2017. [4] The framing of bodies as either conforming or non-conforming is drawn from Kathleen LeBesco, Revolting Bodies?: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), and Samantha Kwan and Jennifer Graves, Framing Fat: Competing Constructions in Contemporary Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013). [5] Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (New York: Harper Collins, 2017), 13. [6] Lindy West, Shrill (New York: Hachette Books, 2016), 67-68. [7] Dideriksen, discussion. [8] Kwan and Graves, Framing Fat , 28-29. [9] The interdisciplinary field of fat studies’ beginnings can be traced to the 1980s, though it emerged from movements for fat acceptance that began in the 1960s and 1970s. By the turn of the twenty-first century, scholars were publishing fat studies monographs and collections and Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society was established in 2012. Marilyn Wann, foreword to The Fat Studies Reader , edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York: NYU Press, 2009), x-xi. [10] Ibid., xii. [11] Joe Dziemianowicz, “Baby, You’re a Big Curl Now,” New York Daily News , August 14, 2002. [12] Brian Eugenio Herrera, “The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 27, no. 2 (Spring 2015), available at http://jadtjournal.org/2015/04/24/the-best-actor-for-the-role-or-the-mythos-of-casting-in-american-popular-performance/. [13] A prime example of this kind of article is Richard Patterson, “The Secrets to Broadway Bodies: How “Theatrical Ninjas” Stay Trim, Toned, and Tight for 8 Shows a Week,” Playbill.com, January 31, 2015, http://www.playbill.com/article/the-secrets-to-broadway-bodies-how-performers-stay-trim-toned-and-tight-com-340312. [14] Dreamgirls , Head Over Heels , and It Shoulda Been You (2015) could be considered ensemble musicals as opposed to Hairspray , in which Tracy is very clearly the leading lady. While Jennifer Holliday won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical, Jennifer Hudson won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing the same role in the film adaptation of Dreamgirls . [15] Bonnie Milligan, interview by Holly Rosen Fink, Women and Hollywood (blog), September 25, 2018, https://womenandhollywood.com/bonnie-milligan-talks-representation-female-empowerment-in-broadways-head-over-heels/. [16] Raven Snook, “Big, Blonde and Beautiful in Her Broadway Debut,” TDF Stages (blog), July 24, 2018, http://bway.ly/4o61zu/#https://www.tdf.org/stages/article/1960/big-blonde-and-beautiful-in-her-broadway-debut. [17] Michael Gioia, “Heavy Character Actress Need Not Apply? Women Get Real on Casting,” Playbill , August 25, 2016, http://www.playbill.com/article/heavy-character-actresses-need-not-apply-women-get-real-on-casting. [18] John Waters, “Finally, Footlights on the Fat Girls,” New York Times , August 11, 2002. Head Over Heels complements Waters’ ideas about casting and LGBTQ+ representation: it featured the first trans-woman, Peppermint, in a Broadway musical in addition to the fact that Pamela is fat and comes out as a lesbian in the musical, replete with a kiss. [19] Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 1. [20] John F. Dovidio, Brenda Major, and Jennifer Crocker, “Stigma: Introduction and Overview,” in The Social Psychology of Stigma , edited by Todd F. Heatherton, Robert E. Kleck, Michelle R. Hebl, and Jay G. Hill (New York: The Guildford Press, 2000), 6. [21] See also Jennifer Crocker and Diane M. Quinn, “Social Stigma and the Self: Meanings, Situations, and Self-esteem,” in Ibid . , 153-183. [22] Jennifer-Scott Mobley, Female Bodies on the American Stage: Enter Fat Actress (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 24. [23] Deborah A. Christel and Susan C. Dunn, “Average American women’s clothing size: comparing National Health and Nutritional Examination Surveys (1988-2010) to ASTM International Misses & Women’s Plus Size Clothing,” International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education 10, no. 2 (2017), 129. [24] Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 18. [25] Laura Fraser, “The Inner Corset: A Brief History of Fat in the United States,” in The Fat Studies Reader , edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 12. [26] Jennifer Bennett Shinall, “Occupational Characteristics and the Obesity Wage Penalty,” Vanderbilt Law and Economics Research Paper 16-12 (2015), available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2379575. [27] Julie Guthman, “Neoliberalism and the Constitution of Contemporary Bodies,” in The Fat Studies Reader , 193. [28] Farrell, Fat Shame , 115. [29] LeBesco, Revolting Bodies , 57. [30] Patrick Pacheco, “Water’s ‘Hairspray’ Is Beginning to Gel,” Newsday , December 20, 2001. [31] Chris Jones, “Welcome to the ‘60s,” Chicago Tribune , January 18, 2004. [32] Mark O’Donnell, Thomas Meehan, Marc Shaiman, and Scott Wittman, Hairspray: The Roots (New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2003), 12. [33] Mark O’Donnell, Thomas Meehan, Marc Shaiman, and Scott Wittman, Hairspray: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Hit Broadway Musical (New York: Applause, 2002), 123. [34] Ibid., 14. [35] Ibid., 24-25. [36] O’Donnell et al., Hairspray: The Roots , 5. [37] JuliaGrace Jester, “Placing Fat Women Center Stage” in The Fat Studies Reader , 250. [38] Craig Burns, email message to the author, September 2017. [39] Burns, discussion. [40] Kathy Deitch (actor), in discussion with the author, April 2017. [41] “Spotlight: Hairspray ,” Variety , April 21-27, 2003. [42] Burns, discussion. [43] Elena Malykhina, “Sizing Them Up,” New York Newsday , September 23, 2002. [44] Ibid. [45] Robin Pogrebin, “Big Hair and Personality to Match; For a Young Actress’s Career, A Bouffant Moment in ‘Hairspray,’” New York Times , August 21, 2002. [46] Ibid. [47] Dideriksen, discussion. [48] Ibid. [49] Ibid. [50] Fat suits have been widely used in contemporary theatre, notably in musicals like Dreamgirls but also in plays like Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig (2004) and Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale (2012). [51] Farrah Weinstein, “Worth the Weight,” New York Post , August 8, 2002. [52] Sandra Solovay, J.D., Tipping the Scales of Social Justice: Fighting Weight-Based Discrimination (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 160-161. [53] Robin Pogrebin, “Big Hair and Personality to Match; For a Young Actress’s Career, A Bouffant Moment in ‘Hairspray,’” New York Times , August 21, 2002. [54] O’Donnell et al., Hairspray: The Roots , 39. [55] “Keala Settle,” Theater People 31, podcast audio, February 8, 2015, https://www.buzzsprout.com/19639.rss. [56] Hairspray was one of the first musicals to groom potential cast members this way, followed by Billy Elliott (2008), Jersey Boys (2005), and Hamilton (2015), among others. [57] Dideriksen, discussion. [58] Burns, discussion. [59] Dideriksen, discussion. [60] Burns, discussion. [61] Kathy Brier, interview by Gordon Cox, Newsday (New York), September 28, 2003. [62] Dideriksen, discussion. [63] Two exceptions are Tracy understudies Shoshana Bean and Donna Vivino, who went on to play or understudy Elphaba in Wicked . [64] Staff, “Marissa Jaret Winokur: I Had to Call in Fat,” People , August 25, 2009, available at http://people.com/bodies/marissa-jaret-winokur-i-had-to-call-in-fat/. [65] Patterson, “The Secrets to Broadway Bodies.” [66] D. Soyini Madison , Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2012), 4. [67] Scholars have largely studied casting’s power dynamics by focusing on race and ethnicity. See Brandi Wilkins Catanese, The Problem of the Color[Blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011); Donatella Galella, “Being in ‘The Room Where it Happens’: Hamilton , Obama, and Nationalist Neoliberal Multicultural Inclusion,” Theatre Survey 59, no. 3 (2018): 363-385; Brian Eugenio Herrera, “Looking at Hamilton from Inside the Broadway Bubble,” in Historians on Hamilton : How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past , edited by Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018); and Angela C. Pao, No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity and Nationality in American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). [68] Burns, discussion. [69] Milligan, Bonnie, Twitter Post, September 6, 2018, 1:18 pm, https://twitter.com/beltingbonnie/status/1037752011335376896?s=11. [70] Snook, “Big, Blonde and Beautiful.” [71] LeBesco, Revolting Bodies , 63. [72] Michael Bennett, interview with John Gruen, After Dark , (unpublished manuscript, October 2, 1981), MGZMT 3-1038, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 'Must Be Heavyset': Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies" by Ryan Donovan ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: "Introduction: Embodied Arts" by Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson "'Must Be Heavyset': Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies" by Ryan Donovan "Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville" by Jennifer Schmidt "Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis " by Shilarna Stokes "Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis 'Tightrope' Dance" by Dana Venerable www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 by Ryan Donovan The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center “We need a young girl who is—what shall we say—chubby/fat/big. But a healthy version of a fat girl, because she is dancing her ass off for two hours.” —Bernard Telsey, casting director[1] Introduction Casting director Craig Burns worked on Broadway’s Hairspray (2002) from its first workshops, and it remains his favorite production because of the opportunity to cast people who “weren’t normally considered for leads in a show, and now all of a sudden these girls are getting a chance because we need a fat girl. There was so much joy in that.”[2] Katrina Rose Dideriksen was one such woman given the chance to play Hairspray’s Tracy Turnblad on Broadway and on tour. She remembered feeling excited to play Tracy because she “is the ingénue, she wins the guy, she saves the day . . . she’s funny and she’s lovable and all those things, but in this very real-girl way.” Dideriksen then noticed a “weight clause” in her contract: “It was really this underlying pinch to realize that subconsciously I was being told I was still wrong for it, that there was something I had to fix. . . I don’t think they realized how hurtful, and how anti-Hairspray it really was for them to be like, ‘Lose 20 pounds.’”[3] Apart from a few roles (including Tracy), fat women are almost never cast in roles beyond the comedic sidekick or best friend in commercial theatre. The casting of Broadway musicals reproduces aesthetic values from the dominant culture, especially the notion that thin bodies—ones that conform to these values—are superior to other bodies, especially fat ones.[4] The aesthetic values placed on bodies are gendered, especially relative to size. Author Roxane Gay explains, “most girls are taught—that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society.”[5] Society informs fat women that they are unfeminine and undesirable, which in turn determines everything from how fat women are represented to how and where they work. In her memoir, Lindy West notes the material effects of these values, writing, “As a fat woman, my body is also lampooned, openly reviled, and associated with moral and intellectual failure. My body limits my job prospects, access to medical care and fair trials, and—the one thing Hollywood movies and Internet trolls most agree on—my ability to be loved.”[6] When a fat female actor walks into an audition, these sociocultural strictures delimit her presence and reception there. While all actors are often told they aren’t the “right fit” because of their appearance, fat women confront a double standard: one actor I interviewed was bluntly told, “You’re not fat enough to be our fat girl.”[7] For fat women, the inability of the industry to think inclusively about body size proves a major barrier to employment. Fat is typically hurled as an insult rather than claimed as an identity position in the United States. It is something seen as needing to be eliminated, which sociologists Samantha Kwan and Jennifer Graves argue is due to the “fashion-beauty complex,” in which “advertisements remind us that unwieldy, loose, and jiggly fat must be tamed. The taut body . . . then becomes a reflection of moral fortitude, perseverance, and bodily mastery.”[8] Advertising exhorts women to be the right kind of consumers—purchasing products that help one achieve thinness. The word fat itself can be discomfiting, and in order to neutralize stigma associated with the word, fat studies scholars have reclaimed and repurposed fat.[9] Fat studies scholar Marilyn Wann explains, In fat studies, there is respect for the political project of reclaiming the word fat, both as the preferred neutral adjective (i.e., short/tall, young/old, fat/thin) and also as a term of political identity. . . Seemingly well-meaning euphemisms like “heavy,” “plump,” “husky,” and so forth put a falsely positive spin on a negative view of fatness.[10] Casting notices are rife with euphemisms to avoid saying fat, admitting the stigmatization of fatness while aiming not to offend. Hairspray star Marissa Jaret Winokur notes, “People don’t want to say the word ‘fat.’” She kept a record of the words used to avoid describing her as fat when she was starring in the musical on Broadway; these included “‘chubby,’ ‘hefty,’ ‘dumpling-shaped,’ [and] ‘dimple-kneed.’”[11] The disconnected, tentative relationship between language and fat corporeality is thus reproduced in theatre from casting to reception. Casting necessarily includes processes of disqualification, yet the lack of opportunities for fat actors reveals that size-based discrimination remains so widespread on Broadway that it is accepted as natural and, crucially, neutral. By examining casting practices, this article combats what theatre scholar Brian Eugenio Herrera terms the “mythos of casting,” namely the discourse around casting practices masking “how an actor’s labor is (and is not) valued as a commodity.”[12] To extend Herrera’s formulation, I suggest that the mythos of casting also masks how the actor’s body becomes a commodity in the theatrical marketplace. In the closed economy of Broadway musicals, this mythos provides cover for the operation of ideologies espousing bodily conformity (e.g., the plethora of articles about “Broadway Bodies” on Playbill.com).[13] Musicals celebrate performative excess while disciplining other kinds of excess: differences of ability, gender, race, size, and sexuality. This essay centers on the casting, production, and reception of Hairspray in order to demonstrate how stigma determines how fatness has been employed in Broadway musicals since the 1980s. The aesthetics and politics of casting Tracy Turnblad provide a history of body shame and questionable labor practices spanning from the early 2000s to today. Musicals embody how and where Broadway (and, by extension, U.S. society) expects fat women to sound, to move, to behave, and to labor; class, gender, race, and sexuality further impact these expectations. Fat Stigma in/and Casting Broadway Musicals Dreamgirls and Hairspray are the only hit Broadway musicals of the past fifty years where fatness is sometimes a prerequisite for playing the female lead. Hairspray (2002) was the first Broadway musical to star a fat woman since Jennifer Holliday starred as Effie White in Dreamgirls (1981). Bonnie Milligan’s casting as Princess Pamela in Head Over Heels (2018) is arguably the first Broadway musical to star a fat woman in a role where the character’s size is not mentioned in the libretto, and the role could have gone to a traditional ingenue-type instead.[14] Milligan explains how Head Over Heels differs from previous treatments of fat female characters in musicals: “This world celebrates her! And it’s not just her. It’s everyone on stage who calls her beautiful. That’s part of the intention.”[15] Jeff Whitty conceived the role expressly for Milligan, who played Pamela in every iteration of the musical on its way to Broadway.[16] Milligan’s casting and Pamela’s narrative reflect contemporary attitudes toward body positivity just as Dreamgirls and Hairspray represent then-contemporary stances toward fat women. These roles (Effie White, Tracy Turnblad, and Princess Pamela) are unique because they give fat actors the chance to play a full range of emotions beyond self-deprecation. Fat women in Broadway musicals are always considered in terms of their bodies and fitness in very specific ways; being considered plus-sized isn’t usually a plus for women on Broadway. Sometimes the stigma is overt: casting notices for the 2016 City Center Encores! production of The Golden Apple repeatedly stated, “We are not looking for heavy character actresses.”[17] Discrimination in casting and enforcement of bodily norms exists in all arenas of theatre from amateur to professional. Men do not face the same kinds of body scrutiny—Nathan Lane has regularly played leading roles where the guy gets the girl during the time span covered by this article, and The Book of Mormon has regularly cast fat men in the leading roles of Elder Cunningham following original star Josh Gad. John Waters hoped the musical adaptation of his film Hairspray would be a hit because “there will be high school productions, and finally the fat girl and the drag queen will get the starring parts.”[18] Part of Hairspray’s power comes from the fact that Tracy is portrayed as feminine and desirable while also being fat and being okay with that. Hairspray’s onstage narrative intersects with offstage narratives of casting its Broadway production, a process that often made a spectacle of young women hoping, like Tracy, for a big break. Hairspray exemplifies Broadway’s ambivalence toward casting nonconforming bodies. Even ostensibly fat-positive musicals like Dreamgirls and Hairspray became complicit in labor practices contributing to fat stigma. Stigma has been grounded in bodily difference since, as sociologist Erving Goffman explains, ancient Greeks coined the term “to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier.”[19] Stigma rests on a paradox of visibility, because certain bodies become invisible due to the very visible attributes that stigmatize them—fat people may be stared at but not seen, or viewed as having uncontrollable appetites. The social psychology of stigma indicates that “‘visibility’ and ‘controllability’ are the most important dimensions of stigma for the experience of both the stigmatizer and the stigmatized person.”[20] In other words, fat people are perceived to have shirked the mandate of personal responsibility that undergirds neoliberal capitalism.[21] Weight is seen through a moralistic lens equating fatness with failure; this perceived failure being the inability to control behaviors and appetites or to conform to dominant aesthetic body standards. As theatre and fat studies specialist Jennifer-Scott Mobley summarizes, “Fat people go against our collective social, political, and economic ethos.”[22] This is despite the fact that “more than two-thirds of American women [were] classified as overweight or obese.”[23] Despite vague and indeterminate meanings of “overweight” and “obese” (and their pathological implications), the vast majority of American women inhabit nonconforming bodies. The systemic, structural nature of the value placed on the minority of conforming bodies becomes further clarified by the data. U.S. culture attends to bodies centrally through weight-based discourse. Fatness, according to American studies scholar Amy Erdman Farrell, has historically been used to determine who fits where in society, in which venues one is allowed to participate, and what kind of labor one’s body performs.[24] Many of the roots of contemporary fat stigmatization can be traced to the nineteenth century and the growing industrialization and urbanization of America, which changed the kinds of bodies capital needed for labor. Fatness went from being a sign of wealth to a sign of excess, self-indulgence, laziness, moral failure, and lower-class status.[25] Conceptions of ideal bodies increasingly tilted toward thinness during the twentieth century, to the point that what once was considered average is now considered fat, and weight loss carries its own kind of cultural capital. The growing power of the fit body as a physical and moral standard marked fat as other despite its statistical prevalence. In the U.S. workforce, fat women today face an additional economic burden simply from being fat in a society restricting their earning power—being just thirteen pounds “overweight” reduces a woman’s annual earnings by an average of $9,000.[26] At the same time that fat women in the early twenty-first century are more economically disadvantaged, the U.S. economy relies upon consumer spending on diet, exercise, and weight loss products devoted to eliminating fat, and “spending money on becoming thin is the perfect solution for both neoliberal subjectivity and neoliberal capitalism more broadly.”[27] This is on top of the wage penalty for being a woman, placing fat women in a catch-22. Farrell explains that thinness then becomes “a strategy [employed] to mitigate against the identity of ‘female,’ which poses so many risks of discrimination and inferior status.”[28] According to fat studies scholar Kathleen LeBesco, “a fat person’s only shot at citizenship comes if he or she gratefully consumes the panoply of diet and fitness products made available by industry and government.”[29] Thus, Tracy Turnblad is simultaneously a good consumer (of beauty products) and a failed one (by not only being fat but celebrating it). A “Big Girl Now”: Performing Tracy Turnblad Tracy stands out in a sea of theatrical representation that clearly articulates the devaluation of fat people and reveals uncomfortable truths about what kinds of bodies are valued in the U.S., where the fat body is actually the most common kind of body. The tendency to view fat people as somehow less-than is revealed by the number of leading roles continually cast with conforming bodies, even when the script or character description does not mention weight. Broadway has not cast a fat Annie Oakley or Eliza Doolittle—even though there is nothing about these roles inherently requiring a specific body type; to do so would be to concede that fat women can play and experience the full range of representation readily available to thin people. Broadway musicals thus admit, through exclusion, which bodies are valued as they attend to the imperatives of neoliberal consumption. That Hairspray is named after a beauty product makes it almost the perfect commodity, save for its body positivity. Hairspray deliberately subverts the gap between representation and reality. Filmmaker John Waters openly wanted “to make sure that Tracy will be fat, not just plump. When was the last time you saw two fat girls as stars of a Broadway musical who also get the guy?”[30] Waters based his 1987 film on a local Baltimore television show from his youth, though he noted, “The one thing that was pure fiction in [Hairspray] was the idea that a fat girl could have gotten on that show. A fat girl never would have gotten on ‘The Buddy Deane Show.’ Even in segregated Baltimore, a black girl would have had more chance.”[31] For Waters, Hairspray’s fairy tale aspect was precisely why it was empowering: “It’s about the teenage white girl who gets a black guy. The fat girl gets a straight guy, and her mother’s a man who sings a love song to another man.”[32] Apart from Waters, Hairspray’s creative team embraced Tracy’s fatness but also employed humor undermining its fat-positive stance; the film includes numerous jokes about the appetites of its fat women. As Edna sings in the show’s finale, “You can’t stop my happiness/’Cause I like the way I am/And you just can’t stop my knife and fork/When I see a Christmas ham.”[33] While Hairspray works hard to be in on the jokes, it also subtly subverts the identities it means to celebrate by laughing not only with but sometimes at its characters. Hairspray’s setting in 1960s Baltimore speaks to social change and body image as mediated on television. When Tracy’s mother, Edna, hears of Tracy’s desire to dance on the local television station’s The Corny Collins Show, she says, “They don’t put people like us on TV—Except to be laughed at.”[34] Tracy breaks the mold of fat girl as doormat, victim, or comic relief as she is the musical’s self-possessed, exuberant, romantic leading lady who can “shake and shimmy” with the best of them. The plot centers around her drive to dance on Corny Collins and win the love of its resident heartthrob, Link Larkin—this musical is about casting, too. She remains acutely aware of how her desires are viewed; in “I Can Hear the Bells,’” she sings, “Everybody says/That a girl who looks like me/Can’t win his love/Well, just wait and see.”[35] Tracy ends up winning a place on the show when Collins spots her dancing at her sophomore hop. The show’s tongue-in-cheek tone extends to social issues like segregation. Paralleling Tracy’s ambition to dance on television is her drive to racially integrate the Collins show. She inspires a protest to integrate the program and goes to prison as a result. Tracy ultimately wins Link’s love, makes a jailbreak, and is crowned “Miss Teenage Hairspray 1962” as the Collins show is racially integrated in the musical’s finale. Fat, in Hairspray, is both specific and universal; its creators explain, “Tenacious Tracy Turnblad, lovable as she is, is fat, and all of us, lovable as we are, are somehow, metaphorically, fat.” They describe Tracy’s fatness as a metaphor for being “skinny, clumsy, new in town, female, foreign, black, Jewish, gay, naïve, brainy, too short, too tall, overeager, shy, poor, left-handed, over-freckled, pyrokinetic (like Carrie), scissor-handed (like Edward), or musical-comedy-loving.”[36] Tracy never lets dominant cultural views of fatness stop her and does not view herself as inferior—a new narrative for a fat female character in a Broadway musical. Such supreme self-esteem was certainly not represented in Dreamgirls’s narrative arc; Effie had to admit “I Am Changing” to find success in a thinner body. Tracy’s narrative arc “implodes the myth of the unlovable fat woman” (as Head Over Heels too would go on to do) at the same time that, according to social psychologist JuliaGrace Jester, “it gives unrealistic representations of the ease with which Tracy is both accepted by others and how she accepts herself.”[37] The show functions as a fantasy for the very real reasons Jester critiques it: its alternative world of empowerment and wish fulfillment sidesteps actions toward real fat acceptance. Hairspray instead creates its own myths in which struggle and injustice are resolved through song, black people and white people are assimilated into a community through dance, and all are linked through being consumers (of music, television, and beauty products). Tracy uses her consumption of hairspray to break the rules of what 1960s white girls are supposed to look like, teasing and spraying her hair into a bouffant, while challenging how she was prohibited from moving by dancing with the black kids. Casting Hairspray for Broadway presented challenges, beginning with choosing the language used in the casting breakdowns. Despite Waters’s comfort with fat, the casting breakdown for Tracy scrupulously avoided using it. Telsey Casting decided on “heavyset” instead: [TRACY TURNBLAD] Female, Caucasian, 5’3” or shorter, to play high school age. Must be heavyset. Outgoing, unstoppable, goodhearted with a vibrant, lovable, spirited personality. Loves to dance. Becomes a teen heroine. Strong pop belt singer and great mover. LEAD.[38] Burns explains that the word choices were made “because . . . you don’t want to offend anybody in a breakdown.” He went on to add that initially they knew “you need a fat girl. It’s like, ‘that’s the role’ . . . But it was definitely set up at the beginning, that on the breakdown, that we would always use ‘heavyset.’”[39] Size was of course only one element under consideration for potential Tracys. Broadway actor Kathy Deitch was brought in to audition for Tracy several times over a period of four years, never getting cast because she read as “too sophisticated” for the role. She remembers, “Just because I’m chubby, everyone assumed that I would be Tracy.”[40] Being the right body “type” alone is not enough, though it helps the actor get an audition. The height requirement noted in the breakdown further limited the applicant pool, in addition to the specific 1960s-inflected vocal style and dance ability required. Winokur played Tracy in all of Hairspray’s readings before she was contracted to originate the role on Broadway. Telsey Casting launched a national casting search in Baltimore to find unknowns to play Tracy while Winokur was rehearsing the role for the final reading in New York.[41] Burns notes this was not, as was reported, about replacing Winokur before the opening, but rather was about finding understudies and future replacements: “We knew we were going to need to start finding these girls, so I think it was about starting early.”[42] Casting replacements effectively began before the musical even opened in New York. When the production held auditions in New York the month after its Broadway opening, hundreds of hopefuls showed up, including many who saw playing Tracy as their chance to break through. “The role is something that I can play, because I can never be Eponine in Les Misérables. I’ve struggled with this for a long time, because on stage it doesn’t matter what you look like, but what you weigh,” relates Tracy-hopeful Lisette Valentine.[43] Casting director Bethany Berg notes, “These girls are real people; they’re what most of America looks like, and we’re looking for those people that are happy and confident.”[44] Berg’s language acknowledges fat women as real people as well as explicitly nods to what actual American bodies look like—implicitly admitting the composition of the musical’s audience. However, even when acknowledging the progressive elements of casting a fat female lead, the press was still unable to resist weight- and size-related puns and metaphors. The title of the article referenced above, for example, is “Sizing Them Up.” Despite (or perhaps because of) Hairspray’s fat positivity, the press felt licensed to write numerous feature stories commenting on the body of the actor playing Tracy in addition to emphasizing her diet and exercise routine. Fat became a punchline for headline writers: a typical headline was Variety’s “‘Hairspray’s’ Full-Figured Tony Tally.” To a degree, the production itself encouraged this kind of winking treatment; its advertising tagline was “Broadway’s Big Fat Musical Comedy Hit.” A New York Times feature on Winokur repeatedly made the point that she was breaking “conventional wisdom” about how fat women should act and what they should wear: “Heavyset women are expected to wear their clothes long and loose-fitting. Ms. Winokur likes her skirts short and her T-shirts tight.”[45] Winokur noted the significance of her opportunity as Tracy, saying, “Here I am, the young character actress . . . I’m the lead this time.”[46] She was positioned as transgressive for doing things considered normal by thin women. It was not just the press who focused on the body of the actors playing Tracy though; the production team had its eyes on those bodies as well. Winning the Role and Weighing In Hairspray stands out for its celebration of size, and yet its costume design and contractual weight clauses undermined its fat-positivity.[47] The show promoted fat acceptance as it simultaneously mandated weigh-ins for cast members, a practice much more common in ballet companies. The irony is that Tracy is essentially a dance lead—the show’s structure bears this out, as she is not even given the traditional leading lady spots for her songs (Maybelle sings both the eleven o’clock number and the act one finale). Dideriksen, initially a standby Tracy, discovered at her first backstage weigh-in that she was not alone in having her weight monitored; the actress regularly playing Tracy was also contractually obligated to maintain a certain weight, whereas Dideriksen was told to lose 20 pounds. A member of the production’s wardrobe team would round the scale’s number up or down accordingly out of kindness. She remembers the weigh-ins as “sending us into panics” over whether their contracts would be terminated if the scale moved in the wrong direction, even though both actors wore fat suits.[48] Burns said the fat suits were not an issue as far as he knew during the casting process: It didn’t really come up, because I think everybody just knew . . . You look at the costumes and they just want a certain shape. A girl could be heavy, but they might need padding somewhere else to just give that Tracy-kind-of-shape that [the creative team] wanted. So, it really wasn’t something that we said, “Oh, you’re gonna need to be padded,” it just went with the territory, and girls just accepted that.[49] Whether the young women cast as Tracy knew before they signed the contract does not mitigate the complexity of feelings stirred by being padded and/or weighed, the ambivalence of the simultaneous burden and privilege of playing Tracy, or the fact that many understood this was their only shot to play a lead. The use of fat suits emblematizes this ambivalence because fat suits exacerbate the bind of inhabiting a fat body: being perceived as excess and lack, simultaneously too much and not enough. Yet using fat suits is more complicated than simply exercising artistic license. The fat suit itself reinforces stigma because it can be put on and taken off at will, an act unavailable to the fat person perceived as morally suspect for their inability to take off the weight.[50] At the same time, it is the literal embodiment of the myth that inside every fat person is a thin person who is somehow more “real.” Fat suits, and fat itself, then are seen as a performative embodiment. If the creative team and producers were so invested in maintaining the weight of the actors playing Tracy, then why bother with fat suits at all? LAS VEGAS, NV - FEBRUARY 15: Actress Katrina Rose Dideriksen (L) as the character Tracy Turnblad and actor Harvey Fierstein as the character Edna Turnblad perform during the opening night of the Broadway musical "Hairspray" at the Luxor Hotel & Casino February 15, 2006 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images) One plausible reason why the production used padding is because Tracy’s physicality was so demanding. Tracy dances so intensely throughout the show that the creative team was afraid actors would lose too much weight. The New York Post reported, “Winokur has lost weight—enough to send a frantic theater crew bringing candy and chocolate shakes to her dressing room. As the chunky star of ‘Hairspray’ . . . [Winokur] needs to stay plump to play the Ricki Lake role.”[51] The article’s headline, “Worth the Weight,” raises the question of what is worth the weight—Winokur? The chocolate shakes and candy? Starring on Broadway? The seesaw of being told to maintain your fitness while being “fed”? As the production was trying to fatten up its leading lady, it was also pressuring her to exercise and increase her stamina. For the creative team, Tracy’s weight was always a concern during casting. Employment law scholar and fat activist Sandra Solovay details stereotypes concerning fat people’s employability: “They are not fit so they should not be in any position that requires strength, speed, stamina, or other significant physical demands.”[52] In the New York Times, “Jack O’Brien, the director of ‘Hairspray,’ said he never doubted that Ms. Winokur was right for the role, only whether she had the stamina for it. ‘Did she have the chops to do eight shows a week?’”[53] Winokur had previously appeared on Broadway in a revival of Grease and regularly performed eight shows a week without apparent issue. Concerns about stamina and ability significantly contribute to fat stigma in general. On Broadway they added pressure to an already-tough job. Hairspray was the first time many actors playing Tracy were asked to carry a show, let alone a Broadway production, and they had more than their weight to worry about. Winokur was bluntly informed during the show’s Seattle tryout that she was “carrying a ten and a half million dollar show.”[54] Keala Settle explained the pressure of playing Tracy: Truth be told, every Tracy had that [pressure]. They went through the same thing . . . Each of us got shot out of a cannon, expected to become this torch for their company, and for everybody around them, producers. That’s what it was. I can’t even describe what that feels like or how to even deal with it because I didn’t deal with it so great. But if I was asked to live it again, you bet . . . I would do it again.[55] Some candidates for Tracy were sent to “Tracy Camp,” a training program for actors whom the creative team determined needed more vetting before being offered a contract.[56] Dideriksen went to “Tracy Camp” with no promise of future employment.[57] Burns notes “Tracy Camp” was borne out of practical considerations to keep the various productions up and running smoothly, because it was a struggle to cast the role. He explains, “They had to be really special, so we found them all but it wasn’t like we had twenty people in our back pocket that we could go to . . . We definitely had to go out there and train and find the really special ones.”[58] Yet “Tracy Camp” was arguably as much about seeing whether the fat women’s bodies were fit enough as it was teaching the role. Dideriksen describes her perspective on the process: It was really this challenge of feeling they needed this extra preparation, also worrying bigger girls weren’t as coordinated . . . that’s what it seemed like, because we had this extra week of dance that was just dance rehearsal, and a lot of talk about getting our stamina up, and how to last . . . It’s a lot of dancing and singing at the same time, it would be a lot for anyone, but they were especially concerned that this was supposed to be a bigger girl on top of it.[59] Burns backs up Dideriksen’s assessment of the particular demands of this role: “I remember Jerry Mitchell saying what the girls would have to . . . be really good at cardio to dance the show, and he was like, ‘I need you to do 45 minutes on the bike and then you’ll have a milkshake.’”[60] Kathy Brier, Broadway’s first replacement Tracy, told Newsday, “It’s a weird kind of a thing. You’re supposed to be this chubby girl, and yet the show is so active you have to train to be an athlete.”[61] Tracy had to be fit and fat in order to perform the role, which are not contradictory demands despite popular misconceptions including those of the musical’s creative team. As much as getting cast as Tracy was an opportunity, it often came with a price once the contract was over. Dideriksen played Tracy on Broadway and opposite Harvey Fierstein in Las Vegas but details how after she left the show, “There was this stigma of still seeing me having Tracy on my resumé.”[62] No actor who played Tracy during Hairspray’s nearly eight-and-a-half year Broadway run has since appeared in another leading role on Broadway.[63] Winokur herself has maintained her celebrity status by becoming associated with weight loss. She was a contestant on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars and hosted a cable television weight loss competition show called Dance Your Ass Off. In 2009, she wrote a blog series for People magazine titled “Calling in Fat,” aimed at taking readers along on her “weight loss journey.”[64] Winokur’s notion that one could “call in fat” to work emphasizes the relationship of fat stigma to labor issues. The inability to be cast in leading roles after playing Tracy exists for those who played the role on Broadway as well as actors who have played the role in regional theatres. Personal trainer Geoff Hemingway regularly trains performers, including a client who played Tracy: “When she started she was like, ‘I just played Tracy Turnblad in this regional production of Hairspray. That was my dream role, and now I’ve done it and I don’t want to be fat anymore.’ Since coming in to Mark Fisher [Fitness], she’s shed about fifty pounds and is now being seen for ingénue roles.”[65] Tracy, of course, is an ingénue role, but her fat body prevents her from being seen as such. This anecdote underlines the internalization of fat stigma within the industry and its relation to actors’ legitimate concerns regarding employability. Broadway Cares? The lack of fat actors cast in leading roles belies Broadway’s vision of itself as a fully inclusive institution, and the use of fat suits and contractual weight clauses has perpetuated fat stigma. Stated simply, if you are fat, you will rarely be considered for a leading role in a Broadway musical because of how your body looks—being fat means being seen for fewer roles, which translates into less work. Ethnographer D. Soyini Madison exhorts us to remember that the stakes of representation are not merely about who is seen: “representation has consequences: how people are represented is how they are treated.”[66] Casting contains the possibility to alter these consequences and make an immediate, visible impact because it reveals which bodies are considered fit for Broadway.[67] Casting directors can bring diverse, nonconforming bodies into auditions, but they are still bound to the small army of decision makers comprised of the creative team and multiple producers. Power over what and who makes it to the stage remains in the hands of those controlling the money. Commercial theatre’s profit motive materially effects the lives of all actors, especially fat actors who will not be considered or seen for leading roles—the highest paying ones. When asked whether he had been able to cast anyone who played Tracy in another leading role, Burns demurred: “That’s a good question. . .There have been other opportunities, but I don’t know. I still think it’s definitely a type, and it’s harder to find roles that are right for these girls.”[68] Finding the right roles proved tough not just for the Broadway Tracys but also the stars of Hairspray’s film and television adaptations, Nikki Blonksy and Maddie Baillio respectively, who have worked sporadically in featured roles since playing Tracy. What would happen if fat women were recognized as deserving of the full range of representation given to women with conforming bodies? It might look something like Head Over Heels. During the show’s brief run, Milligan tweeted, “We are serving amazing body positivity at @HOHmusical, where I get to play the most beautiful girl in the land, who has a love story, and nothing about my weight!!”[69] Audience members would wait for Milligan at the stage door to tell her what seeing her onstage meant to them. She explains, It’s been really lovely meeting so many women who are moved and say, “Thank you! You don’t know what it means to have a big girl up there being joyful and pretty and dancing.” I understand how important and beautiful it is because I never saw that, so I’m happy to oblige. I don’t think we talk enough about size diversity in casting. I very much want to be a template.[70] Unlike Dreamgirls and Hairspray, Head Over Heels struggled to find an audience and closed after just 188 performances. The presence of a show like Head Over Heels on Broadway might seem to precipitate casting practices becoming more inclusive, yet Broadway’s recent history indicates that, despite economic imperatives to return investors’ money, the financial success of inclusively cast, albeit conflictedly-so, musicals does not automatically beget more inclusivity. If we recognize the twenty-one-year gap between Dreamgirls and Hairspray and the sixteen-year gap from Hairspray to Head Over Heels, then we must confront the fact that money must not be the sole concern: Dreamgirls and Hairspray were both long-running, award-winning, financially lucrative successes that proved stories about fat women starring fat women are viable money-makers. While Head Over Heels was a financial flop, it nevertheless marks important progress in the representation of fat women on Broadway. The presence of only these three roles, along with the handful of supporting roles in musicals like Escape to Margaritaville (2017) and Waitress (2015), demonstrates how fat stigma operates on Broadway from conception to casting. LeBesco explains, “the stigma attached to being fat is a control mechanism which supports a power structure of one group of people over another.”[71] By not casting fat women outside of prescribed roles, Broadway musicals enforce a system of gendered bodily norms that police how all women act, consume, and labor in the U.S. A few months before Dreamgirls opened, Bennett described his view of that musical’s central conflict in three questions summing up the lens through which Broadway, and arguably US society itself, continues to understand representation: “[I]t’s about, are you marketable? Is it saleable? Will it make money?”[72] Despite the smash hit status of Dreamgirls and Hairspray and the progress made by Head Over Heels, Broadway continues to say no to most fat women. Ryan Donovan received his PhD in Theatre and Performance from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. His research on casting and identity examines the inclusion of stigmatized and non-normative bodies in contemporary Broadway musicals. Ryan is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Musical Theatre and the special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre (13.1) on dance and musical theatre. He would like to thank everyone he interviewed for this research. ryan-donovan.com [1] Ira J. Bilowit, “Hairspray,” Back Stage, January 31, 2003. [2] Craig Burns (casting director), in discussion with the author, September 2017. [3] Katrina Rose Dideriksen (actor), in discussion with the author, April 2017. [4] The framing of bodies as either conforming or non-conforming is drawn from Kathleen LeBesco, Revolting Bodies?: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), and Samantha Kwan and Jennifer Graves, Framing Fat: Competing Constructions in Contemporary Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013). [5] Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (New York: Harper Collins, 2017), 13. [6] Lindy West, Shrill (New York: Hachette Books, 2016), 67-68. [7] Dideriksen, discussion. [8] Kwan and Graves, Framing Fat, 28-29. [9] The interdisciplinary field of fat studies’ beginnings can be traced to the 1980s, though it emerged from movements for fat acceptance that began in the 1960s and 1970s. By the turn of the twenty-first century, scholars were publishing fat studies monographs and collections and Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society was established in 2012. Marilyn Wann, foreword to The Fat Studies Reader, edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York: NYU Press, 2009), x-xi. [10] Ibid., xii. [11] Joe Dziemianowicz, “Baby, You’re a Big Curl Now,” New York Daily News, August 14, 2002. [12] Brian Eugenio Herrera, “The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 27, no. 2 (Spring 2015), available at http://jadtjournal.org/2015/04/24/the-best-actor-for-the-role-or-the-mythos-of-casting-in-american-popular-performance/. [13] A prime example of this kind of article is Richard Patterson, “The Secrets to Broadway Bodies: How “Theatrical Ninjas” Stay Trim, Toned, and Tight for 8 Shows a Week,” Playbill.com, January 31, 2015, http://www.playbill.com/article/the-secrets-to-broadway-bodies-how-performers-stay-trim-toned-and-tight-com-340312. [14] Dreamgirls, Head Over Heels, and It Shoulda Been You (2015) could be considered ensemble musicals as opposed to Hairspray, in which Tracy is very clearly the leading lady. While Jennifer Holliday won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical, Jennifer Hudson won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing the same role in the film adaptation of Dreamgirls . [15] Bonnie Milligan, interview by Holly Rosen Fink, Women and Hollywood (blog), September 25, 2018, https://womenandhollywood.com/bonnie-milligan-talks-representation-female-empowerment-in-broadways-head-over-heels/. [16] Raven Snook, “Big, Blonde and Beautiful in Her Broadway Debut,” TDF Stages (blog), July 24, 2018, http://bway.ly/4o61zu/#https://www.tdf.org/stages/article/1960/big-blonde-and-beautiful-in-her-broadway-debut. [17] Michael Gioia, “Heavy Character Actress Need Not Apply? Women Get Real on Casting,” Playbill, August 25, 2016, http://www.playbill.com/article/heavy-character-actresses-need-not-apply-women-get-real-on-casting. [18] John Waters, “Finally, Footlights on the Fat Girls,” New York Times, August 11, 2002. Head Over Heels complements Waters’ ideas about casting and LGBTQ+ representation: it featured the first trans-woman, Peppermint, in a Broadway musical in addition to the fact that Pamela is fat and comes out as a lesbian in the musical, replete with a kiss. [19] Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 1. [20] John F. Dovidio, Brenda Major, and Jennifer Crocker, “Stigma: Introduction and Overview,” in The Social Psychology of Stigma, edited by Todd F. Heatherton, Robert E. Kleck, Michelle R. Hebl, and Jay G. Hill (New York: The Guildford Press, 2000), 6. [21] See also Jennifer Crocker and Diane M. Quinn, “Social Stigma and the Self: Meanings, Situations, and Self-esteem,” in Ibid., 153-183. [22] Jennifer-Scott Mobley, Female Bodies on the American Stage: Enter Fat Actress (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 24. [23] Deborah A. Christel and Susan C. Dunn, “Average American women’s clothing size: comparing National Health and Nutritional Examination Surveys (1988-2010) to ASTM International Misses & Women’s Plus Size Clothing,” International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education 10, no. 2 (2017), 129. [24] Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 18. [25] Laura Fraser, “The Inner Corset: A Brief History of Fat in the United States,” in The Fat Studies Reader, edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 12. [26] Jennifer Bennett Shinall, “Occupational Characteristics and the Obesity Wage Penalty,” Vanderbilt Law and Economics Research Paper 16-12 (2015), available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2379575. [27] Julie Guthman, “Neoliberalism and the Constitution of Contemporary Bodies,” in The Fat Studies Reader, 193. [28] Farrell, Fat Shame, 115. [29] LeBesco, Revolting Bodies, 57. [30] Patrick Pacheco, “Water’s ‘Hairspray’ Is Beginning to Gel,” Newsday, December 20, 2001. [31] Chris Jones, “Welcome to the ‘60s,” Chicago Tribune, January 18, 2004. [32] Mark O’Donnell, Thomas Meehan, Marc Shaiman, and Scott Wittman, Hairspray: The Roots (New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2003), 12. [33] Mark O’Donnell, Thomas Meehan, Marc Shaiman, and Scott Wittman, Hairspray: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Hit Broadway Musical (New York: Applause, 2002), 123. [34] Ibid., 14. [35] Ibid., 24-25. [36] O’Donnell et al., Hairspray: The Roots, 5. [37] JuliaGrace Jester, “Placing Fat Women Center Stage” in The Fat Studies Reader, 250. [38] Craig Burns, email message to the author, September 2017. [39] Burns, discussion. [40] Kathy Deitch (actor), in discussion with the author, April 2017. [41] “Spotlight: Hairspray,” Variety, April 21-27, 2003. [42] Burns, discussion. [43] Elena Malykhina, “Sizing Them Up,” New York Newsday, September 23, 2002. [44] Ibid. [45] Robin Pogrebin, “Big Hair and Personality to Match; For a Young Actress’s Career, A Bouffant Moment in ‘Hairspray,’” New York Times, August 21, 2002. [46] Ibid. [47] Dideriksen, discussion. [48] Ibid. [49] Ibid. [50] Fat suits have been widely used in contemporary theatre, notably in musicals like Dreamgirls but also in plays like Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig (2004) and Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale (2012). [51] Farrah Weinstein, “Worth the Weight,” New York Post, August 8, 2002. [52] Sandra Solovay, J.D., Tipping the Scales of Social Justice: Fighting Weight-Based Discrimination (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 160-161. [53] Robin Pogrebin, “Big Hair and Personality to Match; For a Young Actress’s Career, A Bouffant Moment in ‘Hairspray,’” New York Times, August 21, 2002. [54] O’Donnell et al., Hairspray: The Roots, 39. [55] “Keala Settle,” Theater People 31, podcast audio, February 8, 2015, https://www.buzzsprout.com/19639.rss. [56] Hairspray was one of the first musicals to groom potential cast members this way, followed by Billy Elliott (2008), Jersey Boys (2005), and Hamilton (2015), among others. [57] Dideriksen, discussion. [58] Burns, discussion. [59] Dideriksen, discussion. [60] Burns, discussion. [61] Kathy Brier, interview by Gordon Cox, Newsday (New York), September 28, 2003. [62] Dideriksen, discussion. [63] Two exceptions are Tracy understudies Shoshana Bean and Donna Vivino, who went on to play or understudy Elphaba in Wicked. [64] Staff, “Marissa Jaret Winokur: I Had to Call in Fat,” People, August 25, 2009, available at http://people.com/bodies/marissa-jaret-winokur-i-had-to-call-in-fat/. [65] Patterson, “The Secrets to Broadway Bodies.” [66] D. Soyini Madison, Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2012), 4. [67] Scholars have largely studied casting’s power dynamics by focusing on race and ethnicity. See Brandi Wilkins Catanese, The Problem of the Color[Blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011); Donatella Galella, “Being in ‘The Room Where it Happens’: Hamilton, Obama, and Nationalist Neoliberal Multicultural Inclusion,” Theatre Survey 59, no. 3 (2018): 363-385; Brian Eugenio Herrera, “Looking at Hamilton from Inside the Broadway Bubble,” in Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past, edited by Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018); and Angela C. Pao, No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity and Nationality in American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). [68] Burns, discussion. [69] Milligan, Bonnie, Twitter Post, September 6, 2018, 1:18 pm, https://twitter.com/beltingbonnie/status/1037752011335376896?s=11. [70] Snook, “Big, Blonde and Beautiful.” [71] LeBesco, Revolting Bodies, 63. [72] Michael Bennett, interview with John Gruen, After Dark, (unpublished manuscript, October 2, 1981), MGZMT 3-1038, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. "'Must Be Heavyset': Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies" by Ryan Donovan ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: "Introduction: Embodied Arts" by Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson "'Must Be Heavyset': Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies" by Ryan Donovan "Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville" by Jennifer Schmidt "Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis" by Shilarna Stokes "Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis 'Tightrope' Dance" by Dana Venerable www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical Introduction: Embodied Arts "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance History, Musicals, and the Americas Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Joan Thompson 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 Acting in the Academy Jennifer Joan Thompson By Published on June 4, 2017 Download Article as PDF Acting in the Academy: The history of professional actor training in US higher education. Peter Zazzali. London, New York: Routledge, 2016; Pp. 219. In Acting in the Academy, Peter Zazzali marshals some rather grim employment data provided by Actors Equity Association to argue that it is now harder than ever to be a stage actor in the United States (9). This is not only due to the decreasing number of jobs in theatre, but also to the increasing number of graduates of professional BFA and MFA programs entering the field every year. In light of this imbalance, Zazzali conveys the urgent need for educators within these programs to ask whether it is efficacious, and indeed, ethical, to continue training large numbers of actors for the stage. Acting in the Academy thus functions as a systemic critique of the current acting profession told through a history of mid-twentieth and twenty-first century actor training in US higher education and, ultimately, an argument for training programs to better address the realities of the current profession and equip students to transform it. Zazzali locates the origin of the imbalance in the acting job market in the historical relationship between regional theatre and actor training programs in US higher education. He traces this history through the formation, decline, and legacy of the League of Professional Theatre Training Programs—an organization established to develop curriculum, set standards, and hold accountable participating MFA and BFA programs training actors for professional theatre careers. He examines how the curriculums of League schools developed to meet the demands of regional theatres for resident companies of actors and charts how these programs and their pedagogies continued to proliferate, despite the eventual decline of these regional companies and the displacement of employment opportunities from stage to screen. In light of the shifting demands of the profession, Zazzali argues that training programs ought to embrace an “entrepreneurial” model aimed at giving actors the skills to create their own work and put themselves at the center of their careers. Though there have been many studies on the history and theory of US actor training, as well as a handful of studies on US not-for-profit theatre by practitioners and scholars such as Robert Brustein (2009) and Donatella Galella, Zazzali’s is unique in tracing the relationship between the two. Additionally, his work builds on projects such as Ellen Margolis and Lisa Tyler Renaud’s collection of essays, The Politics of American Actor Training (2011), which examines the socio-politics of actor training, by situating these questions within a historical context and grounding them in archival and testimonial data. By employing sociocultural and institutional perspectives, Zazzali thus poses an important intervention into scholarship on actor training that has ramifications for the current state of the field Although the majority of Zazzali’s investigation is historically grounded in the life of the League and its constituent programs (1965-1987), the long-term implications of his work are underscored by the study’s structure, which is bookended by chapters on the current state of the profession and actor training. In chapter one, Zazzali employs sources including employment statistics and interviews with actors, educators, and casting directors to argue that many programs perpetuate a training model that no longer equips students to navigate the realities of the profession. Saddled by debt and trained primarily for the stage, graduates confront a profession dominated by television, film, and celebrity. Though many of the educators he interviews thoughtfully seek to adapt their programs to better prepare students for these realities, they acknowledge that there is a kind of systemic crisis at hand (11). Zazzali proceeds to situate this crisis in the history of the League and its constituent training programs (chapters two through four). Arguing that the League is the “most important development in US actor training since the Group Theatre” (5), he contextualizes its emergence within the culture boom of the 1960s and the regional theatre movement that sought to employ an ensemble of actors capable of performing works in repertory. To meet these demands, universities established BFA and MFA programs, several of which organized to form the League in 1971. With financial support from the NEA, the League set standards of recruitment and developed a “psychophysical” pedagogical template—a combination of elements of Stanislavsky’s method with rigorous physical and vocal training that remains dominant in programs today. Zazzali’s study demonstrates that much of today’s training pedagogy emerged from the specific needs of regional theatres and the institutional structure of the League. However, Zazzali notes that the task of vocational actor training was not always a symbiotic match for bureaucratic university systems. Departing from W. McNeil Lowry’s assertion that they existed in “an uneasy dichotomy” (64), Zazzali examines the fraught field of institutional dynamics that shaped the development of these programs. In the third chapter, Zazzali focuses on three case studies in particular—Carnegie Tech, Juilliard, and the American Conservatory Theatre—to explore how administrative policies, funding structures, and bureaucratic infighting had an impact on these programs and their pedagogies Chapters five and six return to the profession. Zazzali examines the League’s dissolution alongside a consideration of the careers of alumni from each of the three case studies. Through the lens of these individual careers, Zazzali explores how the shift in job opportunities from stage to screen emerged in tandem with an increasing commercialization of the profession overall, including an emphasis on celebrity and a pressure for actors to “brand” themselves. Actors increasingly sought work in television and film—positioning their careers in a medium that required very different skills than had been provided by their psychophysical training. In the concluding chapter, Zazzali examines the ways in which former League schools have equipped actors to navigate this new landscape. Of particular interest to Zazzali are Juilliard’s initiatives to connect students and their work to community service organizations, as well as curricular modules—such as at Carnegie Mellon and NYU—that encourage students to cross disciplinary boundaries and create their own work. Deeming this an “entrepreneurial” approach, Zazzali posits that it can put actors at the center of their careers. The success of PigPen Theatre—which emerged out of CMU’s Playground program—is a testament to the long-term ramifications of this work on graduates’ careers. Acting in the Academy is both an institutional and sociocultural history of US actor training beginning in the mid-twentieth century, as well a systemic critique of the current profession. Ultimately, Zazzali argues that programs ought to embrace an entrepreneurial model that “promotes self-reliance, innovation, initiative, and most crucially, serving society” (184). This social focus is essential, he argues, because it could generate an increased demand for what actors do, and provide them with the tools to reshape the state of the profession. Though a shift in actor training alone will likely not create a wholesale restructuring of the profession, challenge the dominance of television and film, or reverse the industry’s commercialization, Zazzali makes an urgent and ethical case for training programs to respond to the changing demands of the profession and to give actors the tools to shape that profession themselves. This book will thus be of interest to historians of actor training and twentieth century US theatre, as well as anyone involved in the education of actors. Jennifer Joan Thompson The CUNY Graduate Center The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 2 (Spring 2017) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Acting in the Academy The Theatre of David Henry Hwang Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines Directing Shakespeare in America Writing, Acting, and Directing Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson, Guest Editors Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 3 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction: Embodied Arts Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson, Guest Editors By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. by Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center This American Society of Theatre and Drama special issue of JADT offers four essays that reconsider the contours of the study of U.S. American performance through centering embodiment as the site where aesthetic values are developed, mobilized, and contested. Though all of the arts are arguably embodied, this special issue, by isolating “The Embodied Arts,” features scholarship about forms that foreground the body as the primary meaning maker. Our CFP was inspired by Nadine George-Graves’s proposal in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater (2015) that performance research might productively adopt an overarching rubric of “performative embodiment” to explain performance phenomena.[1] In coining this phrase, George-Graves sought to bridge what Kate Elswit calls “[t]he artificial divisions between the thing most often called ‘theatre’ and the thing most often called ‘dance’ in both academic and artistic spheres.”[2] Drawing on current scholarly energies around this interdisciplinary (or in George-Graves’s essay, “intradisciplinary”) concern, one of our central questions was: What might emerge as a coherent area of scholarly inquiry were disciplinary divisions forsaken in favor of metrics of legibility that arise not from genre but from the materials of performance phenomena themselves? The four essays featured in this issue demonstrate the efficacy of performative embodiment as a new metric to understand a diversity of performance events. The resultant collection of essays does much more than probe or surmount the generic academic divide between dance and theatre studies; it also offers a breadth of methodologies drawn from dance, theatre, and performance studies. The sites investigated by these four authors -- Broadway, vaudeville, pageantry, and music videos -- have historically incorporated both choreographed movement and mimetic action. As such, these sites are situated in the center of a proverbial venn diagram of performative embodiment. In a welcome shift, the four essays that compose this special issue refocused our initial call away from academic genre toward a more expansive examination of bodies in motion. The essays share a scholarly commitment to elucidating the interrelationships between body-based performances and what Susan Leigh Foster has termed “bodily theorics,” or a given historical moment’s normative and resistant modes of embodiment.[3] A focus on historically situated power dynamics emerges when these essays are examined collectively. Rather than evidencing an ideological project that equates identity politics with embodiment, this focus develops from a primary physics of choreography, wherein time and energy produce the power required to activate movement repertoires. All movement happens within sets of constraints; here, our authors consider U.S. American norms of bodily comportment as socio-cultural constraints that frame the choreographies their subjects generate and complicate. The essays therefore comment on the hierarchies of power embedded in embodied performances, opening up conversations about race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and size. All four essays engage with popular representations that challenge traditional aesthetic values about bodies in motion. Each essay articulates and argues against an ideal U.S. American form: the trim, athletic, disciplined, white body. Through their discussions of thin and fat bodies, bodies that trouble ideas of femininity, oppositional aesthetics of white and indigenous bodies, and the legacy of black female embodiment, the authors show how performing artists describe, interpret, and subvert established norms of bodily comportment through their embodied performances. Additionally, the authors’ serendipitous shared focus on forms of popular entertainment reveals a wide range of social and cultural implications of embodied performance. We interpret this emphasis on “popular” (though not always commercial) rather than “concert” performance as affirmation of the degree to which theories of embodiment structure the bodily lives of everyday people. Ryan Donovan’s investigation of Broadway casting practices in relation to body size and the widespread commodification of thinness opens our issue. “‘Must Be Heavyset’: Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies” contributes to a growing and compelling body of scholarship at the intersection of performance studies and fat studies, as well as the current and lively conversation on casting within performance studies. Utilizing an archive comprised of original interviews and voluminous press seen through theories of fat embodiment and performativity, Donovan carefully describes the process of workshopping and producing Hairspray for Broadway, a process wherein allegedly inclusive aims were hamstrung by commercial imperatives. Contextualizing Hairspray within historical and contemporary Broadway productions reveals an unsurprising yet critical emphasis on women’s body size and a concomitant mandate of thinness in order for female romantic desires to be culturally legible and, importantly, profitable. Donovan’s attention to not only the representational dynamics of these productions but also their pragmatics, including the language of fat stars’ contracts and the use of prosthetics, broadens his critique to include Broadway’s means of production as well as its narrative content and form. Donovan concludes that “The lack of fat actors cast in leading roles belies Broadway’s vision of itself as a fully inclusive institution, and the use of fat suits and contractual weight clauses has perpetuated fat stigma,” and, moreover, “[B]y not casting fat women outside of prescribed roles, Broadway musicals enforce a system of gendered bodily norms that police how all women act, consume, and labor in the U.S.” In “Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville,” Jennifer Schmidt demonstrates how female comics on the vaudeville stage used their embodied caricatures to fight against the superficialities of feminized consumer culture found in the theatre and print media of the late nineteenth century in the U.S. Schmidt places the performances of female mimics Cissie Loftus, Elsie Janis, and Gertrude Hoffmann in a critical conversation with the embodiment of femininity emblematized by the Gibson Girl and the women of Florenz Zeigfield’s Follies. For instance, Hoffmann’s burlesque of the Gibson girl included an exaggerated “kangaroo walk” which satirized the embodied impact of that “ideal” on the female form. Through rich archival details of their physical performances, Schmidt argues that these mimics, through their mockery of both feminine and masculine figures, brought attention to the manufactured nature of womanhood at the turn of the twentieth century. The women additionally disrupted the audience’s expectations of gender, by maintaining their “girlishness” even when creating caricatures of figures like President William McKinley. Schmidt demonstrates that, through these embodied forms of reproduction, Loftus, Janis, and Hoffmann created critical space which allowed them to comment on the representations of women in the celebrity culture of their time. Through a detailed examination of their repertories, Schmidt’s essay reveals the cultural and political potentials of embodied performance, by showing how the moving body can be a tool for creating critical parodies of popular culture. Shilarna Stokes’s essay “Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis” reveals how Percy MacKaye’s symbolist pageant reinforced the processes of civilizing, and thereby Americanizing, both participants and observers through mass embodied practices of dance, gesture, and pantomime. In MacKaye’s view, the “emblematic design elements, allegorical plots, and figurative choreographies” he created in the masque were an essential element of what he called the “rituals of democracy.” Stokes shows how the hundreds of thousands of everyday people involved in the creation of MacKaye’s embodied performance, “were able to generate performative arguments about civic engagement, citizenship, and democracy” through their participation in the pageant. Through Stokes’ close analysis of the Masque, including a wealth of new archival research, she demonstrates how the pageant shaped St. Louisans’ conceptions of collectivity and directly influenced the newly expanded white population of the city. In her reading of the Masque, Stokes identifies three distinct choreographic modes of embodiment. She analyzes the pageant’s two modes of “playing Indian,” one which she terms “the ritualized” and the second “the savage,” arguing that these embodiments showed audience and performer alike “the difference between rational forms of collective self-organization and wild expressions of collective fervor.” The contrast between the two modes of “playing Indian” pointed St. Louisans’ toward acceptable forms of civic organization. The third mode she identifies, “playing pioneer,” modeled an ideal citizen who conformed to the “political and economic vision of city officials.” Through her detailed analysis, Stokes critically parses the fraught legacy of the Masque, revealing both MacKaye and the city officials’ aims for the piece as well as the impact of the pageant on the city and its citizenry. Finally, Dana Venerable’s essay “Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe The Memphis ‘Tightrope’ Dance” considers contemporary popular performance as a site of critical intervention in the daily repertoires of constrained embodiment experienced by black U.S. Americans. Venerable provides a detailed close reading of the popular music artist Janelle Monáe’s instruction of the “Tightrope,” a dance to accompany Monáe’s 2010 hit of the same name. Venerable locates Monáe in a genealogy of black female performance makers and theorists, emphasizing Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston, who share a project of performance as collective healing for marginalized black U.S. American communities. This genealogy is placed in conversation with contemporary theories of black experience developed by Arline Geronimus and Christina Sharpe that posit “weathering” as quotidian strategies for living in a climate of anti-blackness. Venerable argues that the “Tightrope” “acknowledges in its name and choreography the physical risk of black embodiment in the U.S. and enacts strategies of emotional stability, physical balance, spontaneity, and support as navigational tactics.” Her analysis is rooted in the moment of 2010 and she reads the “Tightrope” as responsive to both local dance scenes, particularly in Memphis, Tennessee, and national narratives of racialized embodiment activated by the Obama presidency. Venerable’s essay offers alternative lineages of influence that cross “high” and “low” dance and posit that distinctions in cultural production are secondary to tracking the omnipresence of the hostile environment within which black U.S. Americans live and create. These seemingly disparate essays, which interrogate entirely different landscapes and forms, create generative conversations about performance when gathered under the rubric of embodiment. By foregrounding disciplinary concerns in our CFP, we unwittingly replicated the generic binary of dance and theatre. Donovan, Schmidt, Stokes, and Venerable instead highlight the work which already takes place at the boundaries of what performance is and can be. In this way, the “Embodied Arts” issue gathers scholarship evidencing Elswit’s observation that “Once presumptions about form are suspended, even temporarily, all sorts of histories in the borderlands begin to emerge, and with them larger ecosystems of practice.”[4] By drawing on theoretical frames that consider embodiment as epistemological as well as historical, lived social choreographies, these authors raise the stakes of their respective analyses to include both representational and experiential dimensions of performative embodiment. This special edition ultimately seeks to spur a conversation around the proposal that we might do more to probe the cultural relevance of performance in the Americas thinking through, but not within, genre distinctions and disciplinary divides. This conversation has benefitted enormously from the guidance of Dorothy Chansky, President of the American Theatre and Drama Society, from the mentorship of JADT editors Naomi Stubbs and James Wilson, and from the members of our Editorial Board, who tirelessly and generously devoted their time and energy to furthering this discussion. We hope readers will engage the scholarship within this issue as they continue to reimagine the histories and theories of American performance. Editorial Board for Special Issue: David Bisaha Meredith Conti Leah Lowe Inga Meier Robert Vorlicky Lezlie Cross is an Assistant Professor at the University of Portland. Her published articles and book reviews appear in Theatre History Studies, Theatre Annual, Shakespeare Bulletin, The Journal of American Drama and Theatreand Theatre Survey as well as the book projects Women on Stage, Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom and Performing Objects and Theatrical Things. Lezlie is also a professional dramaturg who works at regional theatres across America. Ariel Nereson is Assistant Professor of Dance Studies at the University at Buffalo - SUNY where she teaches across the MA, PhD, and MFA programs in Theatre Dance. Her current book project, Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past, theorizes choreo-historiography as a method of understanding how movement makes, conveys, and reimagines historical narratives of race and nation. Her essays on movement and embodiment across dance and theatre can be found in American Quarterly, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Studies in Musical Theatre, and in JADT, amongst others. [1] Nadine George-Graves, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater (New York: Oxford University Press), 2015: 5. [2] Kate Elswit, Theatre Dance (London: Palgrave), 2018: 2. [3] Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 1995: 8. [4] Elswit (2018), 28. "Introduction: Embodied Arts" by Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: "Introduction: Embodied Arts" by Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson "'Must Be Heavyset': Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies" by Ryan Donovan "Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville" by Jennifer Schmidt "Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis" by Shilarna Stokes "Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis 'Tightrope' Dance" by Dana Venerable www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical Introduction: Embodied Arts "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance History, Musicals, and the Americas Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Kristyl D. Tift Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. Kristyl D. Tift By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF Soyica Diggs Colbert’s Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry (2021) adds to the discourse on Black Radical Thought through its examination of the life and art of Lorraine Hansberry. This biography establishes her masterpiece A Raisin in the Sun (1959) as only part of Hansberry’s story. With its focus on a black family’s dream to acquire the fruits of capitalism, the play countered pervasive stereotypes of black people by humanizing the black nuclear family. Due to the play’s popularity and the conservatism of the 1950s, however, Hansberry is not widely considered a black radical writer. Colbert, however, proves that she was. The author’s in-depth analysis of Hansberry’s writings (published and unpublished) helps to tell a layered story of the playwright’s intersectional identity, radical activism, artistry, politics, and personal life. Colbert argues that Hansberry’s lifelong effort to “become free” in spite of racism, sexism, and homophobia has been overshadowed by her public persona as a pretty, passive, liberal, heterosexual, housewife compelled to tell the story of a black family’s struggle. Relying on archival materials, this book fills in gaps of the mainstream public’s perception of Hansberry. The introduction to this book highlights three significant events in Hansberry’s life—her father’s death (1945), the opening of A Raisin in the Sun (1959), and her divorce from Robert Nemiroff (1964). Notably, Colbert ascribes Hansberry’s personal growth and identity formation; political and artistic development; and commitment to the collective pursuit of freedom for black people, women, and queer people in the U.S. and abroad as processes of “becoming free.” This notion is further explored in Chapter 1 as Colbert establishes that Hansberry’s writerly practice was an act of becoming free. Taking as evidence the ideas and images in Hansberry’s short and longform writings in the decade before Raisin, Colbert unpacks the influence of mid-twentieth century leftist thought, existentialism, feminist materialism, and black internationalism on her politics. Hansberry’s work as a reporter for Freedom and for the Sojourners for Truth and Justice (STJ)—a woman-centered organization that situated black women’s experiences of oppression and resistance—are key. The author argues that Hansberry’s use of realism in her writing serves as an opportunity to represent everyday happenings while imagining change. Hansberry’s letters published in the The Ladder are offered as examples of her investment in her era’s gay and lesbian rights movement. Persuasively, Colbert asserts, “Analyzing Hansberry’s writing as both a practice of self-articulation and a political practice produces more nuanced and intersectional understanding of how to cultivate freedom and the self” (64). In Chapter 2, the author traces Raisin from idea to production. Colbert also addresses its critical reception. By providing ideological context for Hansberry’s playwriting choices, and by examining repeated instances in which she was misquoted in interviews, the author counters misinterpretations of the play and Hansberry’s intent—including Harold Cruse’s assertion that her positionality as a middle-class black woman in an interracial relationship led her to incorporate the theme of integration to forward a universal representation of the black family for white audiences. Revealing Hansberry’s pro-Black and Marxist thought, as established in other writings and interviews, Colbert argues that Hansberry’s focus on a black working-class family aimed to show the negative effects of racism on black economic growth and legacy, regardless of class. Chapter 3 foregrounds Hansberry’s boredom with Raisin and desire to resist the private and public (race, gender, sexual, economic, political) constraints that came with its success. Colbert writes, “In the three years following A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry created work that sought to invigorate once-degraded identities (Black, woman, lesbian) with potential. Her pursuit had personal consequences, as she continued to learn to live with her competing desires and commitments” (100). An analysis of the screenplay, The Drinking Gourd (1959), follows as an example of Hansberry’s critique of colonialism. The film was never produced because executives wanted to avoid controversy. While Hansberry’s success made it difficult to assert her political voice, she continued her activism. Hansberry’s active involvement in the Civil Rights Movement provides the focus of Chapter 4. Her work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) put her “commitment to mass and collective movement[s] for change” front and center (137). Hansberry and the SNCC created a photo essay called The Movement to show the horrors of American racism and the trappings of American exceptionalism for black people. Being a humanist and a radical, Hansberry believed that black people should pursue freedom at all costs while working across racial and class differences. The author shows how she experimented with these ideas and other existential questions in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964). Chapter 5 recognizes Hansberry’s hope and despair as she fought cancer in 1964 at the age of 33. Having delved into her diary entries with a careful eye and critical ear, the author captures the stress of cancer, treatment, and the possibility of death that loomed over Hansberry. All this as she completed Les Blancs (produced posthumously in 1970), a play which features Tshembe, who must choose between diplomacy and revolutionary action. Colbert asserts, “The position Hansberry faced at the end of her life, confronting the failures of the civil rights movement (a movement that made her life worth living), the shortcomings of independence movements, and her impending death, mirrors Tshembe’s impossible position, teetering between violent and nonviolent action or some combination therein” (205-6). The author closes the chapter with a comparative analysis of Les Blancs with Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (1947) and After the Fall (1964) to highlight the similarities and differences in these post-War narratives. It seems fitting to position these two American Theatre masters of realism in conversation with one another. In the inspiring epilogue, the author asserts that by envisioning acts of fugitivity, self-determination, and transgression for racialized, queer, and gendered persons in her work, Hansberry was essentially “writing herself into being” (226). This book, reviewed by The New York Times, is a necessary addition to interdisciplinary discourse and contemporary re-evaluations of Hansberry. Like Imani Perry’s award-winning biography, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (2018), Radical Vision looks to Hansberry’s writing practice as a reflection of her radical, intersectional worldview. It contributes significantly to African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, Feminist Studies, Queer Studies, and Theatre Studies by presenting Hansberry as an artist and activist whose realist work reflected an ongoing process of “movement.” Colbert argues that Hansberry’s art and activism reflected a desire to put focus on and ultimately change the state, communities, and cultures for the better. In this critical biography, Colbert effectively shows that Hansberry’s politics are written into the fabric of her writing; one need only read those works closely and intertextually to hear a black radical voice. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Kristyl D. Tift Vanderbilt University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Theatre of Isolation “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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.

David Coley Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Theatre of David Henry Hwang David Coley By Published on June 4, 2017 Download Article as PDF The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. The work of David Henry Hwang represents an intersection of many of the most prominent concerns of late 20th century and early 21st century drama. His plays tackle numerous facets of identity politics, such as race, gender, sexuality, and ancestry. Esther Kim Lee’s extensive survey of Hwang’s theatrical output traces all of these themes through his successes, failures, and participation in cultural discourse. Combining her own work with that of three other scholars in the final chapter, Lee’s work functions as history, analysis, and criticism, providing a portrait of one of American theatre’s most notable dramatists. Hwang is best known for his Tony Award-winning play M. Butterfly, and though it does occupy its own chapter, much more room in this text is devoted to his other works, some of which are rather obscure. This attempt at a comprehensive survey is somewhat undercut by the relative absence of discussion of his work on musicals, most of which, with the exception of Flower Drum Song, are summed up in a couple of pages. Hwang’s position on these projects as a script doctor, rather than as primary author, may contribute to the scant attention Lee pays to them. Still, despite some gaps, Lee deftly covers most all of Hwang’s plays in an accessible and thorough manner. Lee’s approach with each text is to summarize the major plot points, but then delve into the subtext of each work and how it connects with the overall concerns of Hwang as a dramatist. She starts with a trio of plays from the beginning of Hwang’s career that reflect his early grappling with some of the themes listed above as well as the culture of his home state of California. FOB (an acronym for Fresh Off the Boat) shows Hwang exploring different types of immigrant and minority experiences in America through two contrasting Chinese American characters. Lee explores the influence of Sam Shepard on this work, as well as Hwang’s wrestling with the “dilemma of assimilation” (12). The other two plays in that first (informal) trilogy, The Dance and the Railroad and Family Devotions see Hwang dramatizing the immigrant experience through its dual challenges: fitting into a new culture while maintaining one’s own. Lee follows Hwang as he expands his thematic vision to include other cultures and ideas, incorporating Japanese stories and settings in The House of Sleeping Beauties and The Sound of a Voice. The reason for this is not just a sense of interculturalism, but also to explore gender. As Lee writes, “The Japanese tradition provides the cultural underpinnings for more rigid gender divisions, which Hwang uses to examine how gender is embodied and performed in the game of power and love” (38). She also discusses Rich Relations, one of Hwang’s notable failures that saw him turn from ethnicity as a theme before returning to it in his most famous play, M. Butterfly. Lee spends the entirety of her third chapter on that text, reviewing the scholarly, critical, and commercial responses to the play. The play would launch Hwang to a new level of prominence that would drive his career in unexpected ways. The book chronicles how Hwang’s notoriety led to him being drawn into protests over whitewashing in the casting of the Broadway musical Miss Saigon. His experiences with that controversy would make its way into his play Yellow Face, which Lee covers in the fifth chapter. Before that, the fourth chapter is devoted to Hwang’s 1990s output, consisting of Bondage, Face Value, another notable failure which closed during Broadway previews, Trying to Find Chinatown, and his successful return to Broadway in Golden Child. In his recent works, Hwang has continued to explore the intersecting concerns of race, gender, and globalization, as Lee notes, in texts that draw on the personal experiences of himself and his family. Hwang’s metatheatricality evolves to provide multiple perspectives on a given plot or character, with the combination of fiction and nonfiction exemplifying his style in several of his plays. Golden Child and Yellow Face, in particular, manifest this tendency. Lee writes that in Yellow Face, “…the characters wear multiple masks, and it is impossible to tell which mask is the ‘real’ one, or whether ‘realness’ exists at all” (114). The last two productions Lee covers, Chinglish and Kung Fu, a play about Bruce Lee, both deal with travel and communication between the United States and China, though the former brings together most all of the themes present in Hwang’s work more potently than the latter. After Lee reaches the end of Hwang’s oeuvre, she brings in three other scholars to give further critical analysis on previously discussed texts. The final chapter contains three short essays in which Josephine Lee compares Hwang’s 2001-updated script of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song to its 1958 original, Dan Bacalzo examines multiple versions of Golden Child, and Daphne Lei explores the globalized context of Chinglish. Esther Kim Lee’s prose deftly mixes biographical information with textual analysis, crafting a highly readable study that should be useful to both new and seasoned scholars. The breadth of the textual analysis is impressive, with the authors analyzing multiple versions of certain texts to trace Hwang’s evolution as an artist. Those interested in Hwang’s work will find plenty to enrich their understanding, while those studying Asian American theatre will find his work placed within that discourse. Details about specific productions are also found throughout, though the focus remains on the written texts. Those hoping for a larger analysis of production aesthetics and the ways in which Hwang’s texts have inspired particular design choices may find it lacking, but the book will certainly lead devotees of the author to further study of his contributions to the American stage. David Coley St. Gregory’s University The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 2 (Spring 2017) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Acting in the Academy The Theatre of David Henry Hwang Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines Directing Shakespeare in America Writing, Acting, and Directing Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Natalie Tenner Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 1 Visit Journal Homepage Affective Performance and Cognitive Science Natalie Tenner By Published on December 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being. Edited by Nicola Shaugnessy. London: Bloomsbury, 2013; Pp. 300. Although Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being serves as an introductory text, its usefulness is not in the structured and fixed definitions and equations a novice might desire, but instead in the illustration of the disagreements and instability that necessarily come with an interdisciplinary approach. The twelve essays utilize a range of methodologies as well as different writing styles that model the variety of ways cognitive science and affect theory can be applied to performance studies. The book is clearer in its use of cognitive science than in affect theory, in that the authors often explicitly state which aspects of cognitive theory they are employing while the inclusion of affect theory is subtler. This illustrates accurately the disagreements still surrounding how to define and use affect, and how affect, emotion, and feelings differ. The elements of cognitive science appear more consistently throughout the work, although not without some variation, and many of the essays provide examples of applying popular cognitive science approaches such as mirror neurons, conceptual metaphor theory, embodied cognition, and distributed cognition. In the introduction to the first section, “Dances with Science”, Evelyn B. Tribble and John Sutton suggest some of the difficulties of interdisciplinary work but also introduce commonly used aspects of cognitive science in the study of performance. The essays that follow outline different ways of structuring this cross-disciplinary dance. Matthew Reason and his co-authors describe an empirical study to determine a spectator’s response to watching dance. The chapter focuses mostly on the collaboration of artists and neuroscientists, highlighting the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach, but also the challenges. Anna Furse also writes on dance, and though she suggests that empirical analysis is forthcoming, the essay itself focuses on a theoretical concept of historical identity located within the body. She describes her plans to retrace her steps, both figuratively and choreographically, with her partner Esther Linley, in order to determine “what happens in the act of retrieving a forgotten or atrophied learnt embodied action, that also carries with it emotional significance?” (57). In the section’s final chapter, Erin Hood discusses the difficulty of representing pain and understanding it in others. Using the performance piece Sssshh...Succour, in which the solo performer cuts herself in a methodological fashion, Hood introduces a theme that is repeated in later essays in this book, that the presence of the body onstage reminds the spectator that the body is not separate from cognition and affect, but instead they are essentially connected. The next section, introduced by Amy Cook, focuses on embodied cognition in more traditional performances. Cook provides the first extended introduction to affect theory in this section and also introduces metaphor and conceptual blending theory as a way of relating text and cognition. Affect theory is an important concept for the first essay in this section, in which Natalie Bainter considers the many blushing faces in Thomas Heywood’s play, A Woman Killed with Kindness. The blush helps to illustrate that affect is not simply an individual bodily response, but is relational. John Lutterbie suggests in his essay that language is a dynamic system and that gesture, instead of supporting language, helps create and shape it. Language is not, then, created simply in one’s mind, but instead is embodied. Naomi Rokonitz continues to examine this relationship between text and body by considering the dying bodies in Wit and 33 Variations. Though the protagonists in both plays cultivate their minds more than their bodies, it is their bodies that we see fall apart and suffer. Again, the body on stage provides an affective experience that leads to empathy. In the third section, “The Multimodal Actor,” Rhonda Blair provides an overview of cognitive science history and two different approaches to affect theory. These essays consider the embodied cognition of the actor. Neal Utterback considers the relationship between gesture and memory. He provides an example of an empirical study and concludes “Clearly gestures are valuable tools for actors. ... Gestures have a profound effect on our ability to memorise text and construct meaning” (155). Martin Welton, like Furse, gives an early overview of a performance as experiment before it has been completed. He also makes use of affect and another recurring idea, James Gibson’s “affordances”, to discuss the relationship between cognition and the feeling of one’s feet on the ground. Gabriele Sofia finishes out this section by describing the benefit performance studies can provide to cognitive scientists. She discusses the “performative body schema” actors must create, based off of their individual body schemas, and relates this to a benefit seen in Parkinson’s disease patients who attended theatre workshops. Sofia suggests that “theatre’s peculiar strength lies in providing another reality that makes it possible to work on the ability of creating relationships” (179). In the final section, Bruce McConachie suggests that actors and spectators, like children in a sandbox, have an active relationship with each other as well as with the environment that affords them opportunities. The essays that follow in this section discuss interactive performance, which relies on the active cooperation of the spectators. The first two articles discuss the solo audience experience of the production Rotating in a Room of Images.Josephine Machon examines her experience based on the cognitive idea of synaesthesia, in which multiple senses are stimulated simultaneously from one trigger. Machon describes her experience of the immersive theatrical performance as (syn)aesthetic, as being both cerebral and corporeal. Adam Alston’s analysis of the same performance looks at it instead through the lens of risk perception, affect, and emotion, and suggests that “[w]hen considered as an affective presence, my relationship to risk was political given the influence it exerted; it controlled as much as spurred on thought and action”(227). The final essay of the collection describes the effects interactive and immersive performance had on autistic children who participated in Imaging Autism. Melissa Trimingham suggests that the children’s opportunities to touch and interact with objects, costumes, and set pieces allow them a momentary participation in a world in which “objects are steeped in meanings” which “seems to pass autistic people by” (232). Nicola Shaughnessy introduces this book by discussing the performance Schrödinger, which provides an entry point into her discussion of “intermediary spaces” (19), which is where the many disciplines in this text come together. As in the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, the essays in this book can “exist in simultaneous multiple states” (2): as studies of science and performance, as examples of cognitive and affective theories, as empirical approaches and personal journeys. The variety of approaches and topics provide multiple entry points for those interested in applying cognitive theories to their work and for those who are looking for solid examples of the relevancy of cognitive and affect theories to performance studies. Natalie Tenner University of Mary Washington The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 1 (Fall 2016/Winter 2017) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle Affective Performance and Cognitive Science Kitchen Sink Realisms Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience Everything Plus the Kitchen Sink Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Benjamin Miller Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 3 Visit Journal Homepage Twisting the Dandy: The Transformation of the Blackface Dandy in Early American Theatre Benjamin Miller By Published on November 12, 2015 Download Article as PDF When George Washington Dixon took to the stage in 1834 to perform “Zip Coon,” his latest incarnation of a blackface dandy, he most likely bent his knee a little more than in his previous portrayals of the dandy, garbled his speech a little more, and added some garish costume accessories. Dixon was twisting the dandy into something new and alien. The twisting of the dandy was a theatrical response to the real black dandies who had been present in the urban centers of America for several decades, and who provoked debates about racial classifications, white and black freedoms, and the American class system. Dixon’s participation in these debates—through the bending, distorting character changes he made—continued a process of transformation of the blackface dandy in early American theatre. The exact nature of this course of alteration, and the reasons for the blackface dandy's remodelling over time, are debatable, due to the array of influences on the character, contradictory primary texts and contemporary reviews of blackface performance, and contentious methodologies for investigating blackface entertainment. This article will draw on minstrel studies to analyse the character of the blackface dandy in three iconic songs of early American blackface theatre, “My Long Tail Blue,” “Jim Crow,” and “Zip Coon.” Arguably, the earliest popular representations of black dandyism on the American stage contained features and characteristics designed to diminish any threat posed by real black dandies to the white working class’ imagined white superiority, and these features were quickly amplified in the following years to repress the perceived challenge posed by discourses and performances of black liberty. The rapid transformation of the blackface dandy entrenched a narrative of white liberty that undercut any potential arguments for cross-racial working-class solidarity, abolition, cross-racial sexual relationships, or black rights. Within a decade of the first blackface dandy treading the boards in America, a destructive discourse of blackness—exemplified in the character of Zip Coon—eliminated the possibility that early blackface theatre could provide a theatrical response to social transformations in America that might champion the causes of equality and black liberty. Exactly how these discourses and causes are investigated has been brought into question lately. Recent methodological shifts in studies of blackness have provided an important intervention within minstrel studies, providing the occasion to reassess the figure of the blackface dandy and the role of such a figure within discourses of blackface theatre, blackness, and American liberty more generally. Methodological Shifts: The Four Stages of Minstrel Studies For nearly a century, minstrel scholars have debated the role of racial discourses in blackface performance. Mikko Tuhkanen has categorized minstrel scholars into three periods, with more recent work potentially constituting a fourth shift in approaches to minstrel studies. A common feature within twentieth-century blackface minstrelsy studies, so argues Tuhkanen, is the “repetitive dismissals of earlier studies as biased, insubstantial, or politically motivated.”[1] In the 1930s Carl Wittke and Constance Rourke theorized blackface as a process of “cultural borrowing” where white performers used performance styles of black people in creating a uniquely American form of cultural expression.[2] Responding to this reading of minstrelsy, from the 1950s through the 1970s Ralph Ellison, Nathan Huggins, and Robert Toll dismissed studies such as Wittke’s and Rourke’s, claiming they focused too intently on national formations and failed to understand the harmful racial ideologies circulating in blackface entertainment; for Ellison, Huggins, and Toll blackface was “a reflecting surface” in which white anxieties about race and politics are resolved through harmful racial stereotypes of blackness.[3] Thirdly, Eric Lott pioneered a revival in minstrel studies, followed by authors such as W.T. Lhamon, Dale Cockrell and William Mahar, attempting to balance the approaches of the first two periods of minstrel studies.[4] In Love and Theft Lott argued that Ellison, Huggins and Toll were “representative of the reigning view of minstrelsy as racial domination,” suggesting their work performs a “necessary critique [that] seems somewhat crude and idealist,” and that, instead, minstrel studies should present a “subtler account of racial representations” that reads blackface minstrelsy as a “distorted mirror, reflecting displacements and condensations and discontinuities . . . multiple determinations” of whiteness and blackness.[5] The third group condemn earlier critics who claim blackface performance to be “an unequivocally racist, antiblack practice, both in intentions and effects,” and instead, insist on a more nuanced reading strategy, one that highlights the multiple determinations of identity and political issues, intentional and unintentional, that lead to the possibility of both crosscultural affinity and antiblack sentiment in blackface performance.[6] The complication of intentionality is a feature of this third group of scholars, who re-animate rebellious, anti-bourgeois themes in blackface performance, and prioritize these themes over the oppressive, racist consequences of blackface. Tuhkanen remains neutral in the debate, concluding that the development of minstrel studies “like blackface performance itself . . . has evolved with the twists and turns of its own ‘lore cycle.’”[7] Since Tuhkanen’s 2001 article, a group of scholars have taken issue with the approaches and findings of the third group. In other words, to Tuhkanen’s genealogy of blackface minstrel studies can be added a fourth turn: scholars including Daphne Brooks, Tavia Nyong’o, and Douglas Jones who question the methodologies of previous studies in order to emphasize the way black people—audiences, artists, activists, and everyday people—shaped and responded to blackface performance over time.[8] Presenting an intervention that informs the approach taken to the analysis of blackface dandies in this article, the fourth turn in minstrel studies advocates for a methodological re-orientation that reveals historical blind spots in earlier histories and suggests ways to prioritize black experiences in an analysis of white performances of blackness. Brooks’ theorization of black performance after 1850 suggests that blackface stage characters can be read as responses by white performers to challenges issued by black people arguing against white authority and control. Brooks, in identifying how late nineteenth-century black performers intent on social, cultural and political transformation inhabited and transformed the stereotypes of blackness created by the early white minstrels, urges scholars to consider minstrelsy’s “strategy of alienating the body and ‘blackness’” and “how the practice of alienation participated in the making of a dissident theatrical figure that travelled the stage in the mid-to-late nineteenth century and found itself at the center of both hegemonic and resistant social and cultural ideologies.”[9] Brooks, that is, suggests that the racial stereotypes created in early blackface performance styles were used for both oppressive and liberatory discourses of blackness. The term “alienation,” for Brooks, refers to the “white minstrel performer’s production and navigation of a violently deformed black corporeality”—a physically and representationally twisted and gnarled form of blackness—that “shored up white supremacist ideology . . . grotesquely exposing the mutual constitution” of whiteness with blackness.[10] Such a stance reiterates the concerns of the scholars in the third turn of minstrel studies—such as Lott, who advocated for an analysis of how political and social concerns of the white performers and audiences (the constitution of whiteness) energized blackface performance—while emphasizing the fusion of social and racial themes in minstrelsy to create a unique discourse of blackness that ultimately asserts white superiority. But, importantly, Brooks adds another paradigm for analysis, examining how, particularly later in the nineteenth century, the discourse of blackness was re-appropriated and transformed by black performers, critics, and authors with an interest in black liberty. An exemplary demonstration of the methodological shift advocated by Brooks is Nyong’o’s study Amalgamation Waltz, which incorporates the performances, perspectives and responses of black people into an understanding of blackface theatre. Nyong’o recounts how an editor of the Colored American, Samuel Cornish, attacked blackface minstrelsy and chastised black members of the audiences at such performances. In 1841, recounting a friend’s experience of attending a blackface show, Cornish complained: he never saw so many colored persons at the theatre in his life, hundreds were there, and among whom were many very respectable looking persons. O shame! paying money, hard earned, to support such places and such men, to heap ridicule and a burlesque upon them in their very presence, and upon their whole class.[11] While Cornish’s attempts to convince black patrons to boycott such venues may not have been entirely successful, Frederick Douglass, in 1848, clearly thought the intended audience of blackface entertainment was white, and labelled blackface performers “the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of the white fellow-citizens.”[12] Nyong’o’s methodological re-focussing—bringing contemporary black voices into a consideration of blackface performance—highlights historical inaccuracies in earlier studies of blackface, the blind spots in what has been labelled an “orthodox division of minstrelsy into an early radical phase followed by its co-optation by commercial and middle-class interests by the 1850s.”[13] The radical phase, according to scholars such as Lott, Cockrell, Lhamon and Mahar, occurred from the 1820s to the 1840s as blackface performers engaged in and promoted cross-racial solidarity—even amalgamation—in the hope of uniting a working class that opposed exploitation by the upper classes.[14] The commercial stage, according to such scholars, occurred as blackface minstrelsy transformed into a form of entertainment for white audiences, where working-class audiences would enjoy criticisms of the upper class and both working-class and upper-class white audiences shared enjoyment in an oppressive discourse of antiblack racism.[15] Suggesting this orthodox historical view “merely transposes the desire for mongrel authenticity onto the mythic origins of a popular style,” Nyong’o reviews early blackface performance through the lens of black critics.[16] Early blackface performers are repositioned as capitalising on anxieties over racial amalgamation, leading to responses by black activists and abolitionists, whose criticisms of blackface performers’ attacks on black dignity demonstrated “concerns over respectability that animate black responses to the amalgamation panic.”[17] The methodological prioritization of black experience in the work of Nyongo, and others such as Brooks, has the potential to improve understandings of, and theories about, early blackface performance. Drawing directly on the methodological shift promoted by Nyong’o, Jones breaks with earlier groups of blackface scholars to theorize what can be termed the “expropriationist twist” of early blackface performance. Jones reinterprets black performance traditions—such as the slave performers who danced, sang and joked for money and goods at Catherine Market near Brooklyn during the 1820s—that Lhamon has shown to have influenced early blackface performers.[18] While Lhamon reads the lines of influence, from black to white performers, as an example of cross-racial solidarity, Jones reads the exchange differently.[19] Taking Fred Moten’s theorization of the black avant-garde—which identifies a “liberty awaiting activation, the politico-economic, ontological, and aesthetic surplus” in work by black artists and about “blackness”[20]—Jones questions the consequences of white would-be blackface entertainers appropriating the liberatory surplus of black performance. Jones describes this theft as “a cutting, ultimately ghastly, twist” in the historical development of blackface performance: Call it the turn of expropriation: those who donned burnt cork and crafted minstrelsy recognized the potentiality of the surplus of black performance and used it to activate their “liberty waiting.”[21] The expropriationist twist theorized by Jones explains the ideological dimensions of what Brooks referred to as “alienation.” The deformed corporeality enacted by white performers in an attempt to alienate blackness from the source of its original black expression did more than separate blackness from black concerns, it transformed blackness into an object used to present white, working-class concerns, particularly concerns to do with white working class freedom from labor exploitation. This twist in the performance of blackness is mirrored in minstrel studies that ignore the role of black people in provoking and responding to blackface performance. A reorientation of blackface criticism along the lines suggested by Jones, Nyong’o, and Brooks redresses the twist in studies of blackness, a twist typified by the ignorance of black voices and concerns in re-telling blackface history. For Jones, the “vast majority of the literature on early minstrelsy” uphold the orthodox historical view of minstrelsy criticized by Nyong’o; the orthodox view is the result of a methodology whereby “scholars borrow the model of those who crafted minstrelsy itself by refusing black people except when they are advantageous to one’s particular narrative.”[22] In other words, Jones escalates the need for a methodological change by likening earlier blackface scholars to the exclusionary blackface performers they study. Jones demonstrates the new methodology by examining how “an increasingly assertive free black community in the North” agitated for social change in the 1820s and 1830s, where for anxious white communities “blackface became one way to regulate and attenuate” such pressures.[23] Such an analysis reveals how “Minstrelsy emerged as a conduit of white assertion and a buffer against black protest.”[24] Beginning with a close analysis of an early blackface dandy that utilized blackness to present white concerns on stage, and examining both how this early dandy figure was transformed as blackface entertainment’s popularity bloomed and black responses to blackface theatre’s popularity, this article examines the twisting of the dandy in a way that begins to redress the twisting of minstrel studies. Central to blackface performance’s responses to white anxieties about transformations in American culture was the figure of the black dandy. In her history of black dandyism, Monica Miller states that black dandies emerged in response to several changes in American society and culture, including the end of festivals where black people had used fancy dress in parodying upper class whites, the end of the international slave trade and the abolition of slavery in various states at different times.[25] According to Miller, newly freed black people and their families or communities were accumulating modest amounts of wealth as a result of more economic freedoms and began to use fancy dress to announce their arrival as a new American demographic. The arrival of the black dandy into America’s urban centres was almost immediately followed by attacks and criticisms: “Attempts to control the perceived impertinency of these newly emboldened, newly fashionable blacks ranged from the subtle to the outrageous. Excessive responses included ripping the new clothes off the backs of those blacks dressed beyond what whites could bear.”[26] More subtle responses occurred on American stages. The blackface dandy is a stage character developed and refigured from the 1820s on to respond to the actual emergence of black dandies in American society as well as other social and cultural concerns. Given that the advent of black dandyism coincided with the use of typically upper-class clothing by white Americans who used elaborate suits and accessories to distinguish American identity, society and culture from Europe, the history of the black dandy as an argument about class and race restrictions is entangled with the history of the white dandy as an argument about American nationalism. For Miller, blackface dandies, as caricatures, “became part of a cultural critique of perceived white decadence that becomes increasingly difficult to parse from concerns about black ‘striving.’”[27] Themselves the product of various traditions, including clowning, commedia dell’arte, and burlesque, the blackface dandy developed as a stage character that was embroiled with these theatrical traditions as much as with the various social and cultural traditions that had led white and black Americans to use refined ways of dressing as embodied forms of argument in the first place. Black dandies, and associated stage representations, are the product of multiple traditions and critiques and, thus, must be analyzed as indeterminate or multiplicitous: In his adaptability, the dandy figure is firmly ensconced within the flow of African American history, linking African traditions and black recognition and subversive play with white power in the colonial period to black statements of respectability and individuality in freedom. Blackface minstrelsy and other caricatures fought against this mobility even as they acknowledged the ability of the figure and its real-life counterparts to reinvent themselves.[28] Importantly, the blackface dandy can be read as an acknowledgement of the power and rebellious force of real black dandies and, simultaneously, as an attempt by white performers to redress the arguments made by real black dandies against racial and social norms. The transformations of the blackface dandy in the early 1830s reveal the tensions between acknowledgement and neutralization of black resistance in American society and culture. An Early Blackface Dandy: Long Tail Blue The best-known performer of blackface dandyism in the period of early blackface was Dixon, born to a poor family in Richmond, Virginia, probably in 1801. Of what little is known about his early life, Cockrell describes how a circus manager noticed Dixon’s potential as a vocalist at the age of 15 and he was apprenticed to West’s traveling circus as an errand boy; also, it is likely he first used blackface as a clown in the circus.[29] Citing the various formal influences on early blackface, Lott mentions the American clown, as well as the harlequin of commedia dell’arte and the burlesque tramp, as overlapping traditions “tending more or less toward self mockery on the one hand and subversion on the other.”[30] Such diverse traditions influenced the formation of the blackface dandy character. A proponent of the self-mockery and subversion typical of blackface clowning and commedia dell’arte, Dixon became known for his performances of the blackface song “My Long Tail Blue” as early as 1827.[31] Of Dixon’s “My Long Tail Blue” the S. Foster Damon songbook—Series of Old American Songs (1936)—states: “it remained for half a century one of the standard burnt-cork songs.”[32] Given it is rare to find versions of “My Long Tail Blue” with a post-1830 publication date (where they are provided), or in post-1840 song sheet collections, it is unlikely the popularity of “My Long Tail Blue” lasted more than a decade. Nevertheless, “My Long Tail Blue” did popularize the character of the black dandy, which certainly proved to be an enduring presence, though continually altered and adjusted to respond to white concerns and black responses and challenges, in blackface entertainment over the rest of the century. In a description of some of Dixon’s performances in 1829, Cockrell points to the constituency of the audience in early blackface performance: during a three-day, late-July span, [Dixon] appeared at the Bowery Theatre, the Chatham Garden Theatre, and the Park Theatre and at all three sang in blackface . . . performing for “crowded galleries and scantily filled boxes,” a solid indication of the heart of his audience.[33] Ticket prices ensured that, generally, working-class crowds populated the gallery and upper-class audiences patronized the boxes. Cornish’s concerns in the early 1840s about black audience members in blackface shows suggest Dixon’s audience may have included black and white workers.[34] In any case, Dixon’s blackface routines appear to have been disliked by upper-class people, but delivered him success through the general approval of working-class, gallery audiences. The story narrated in “My Long Tail Blue” reveals what it is that appealed to these working-class audiences. “My Long Tail Blue” tells the story of a black dandy who courts women and flouts authority. The narrator of the song describes his blue jacket with long tails, a mark of respectability and class. The dandy—named Blue—wears his blue jacket on Sundays, while (religiously) pursuing women. While audiences enjoyed hearing about the character’s sexual pursuits, they also wished to see the upwardly mobile dandy brought down a peg or two. The song doesn’t disappoint, describing an encounter between Blue and Jim Crow.[35] In “My Long Tail Blue,” Crow is an escaped black slave who is found courting a white girl named Sue when Blue intrudes. As Blue intervenes and Crow sneaks away, Blue is arrested and his jacket is torn in a scuffle with the authorities. Blue has his jacket mended upon his release from jail and the song concludes with him advising the audience to go and buy a jacket so they too can be like him, winning the ladies’ hearts, flouting authority, and rising up the social hierarchy. Many aspects of the performance—from the costume to the lyrics, to the advertisements and musical style—represent the first moves by a white performer to alienate the black dandy in the creation of a blackface dandy. In her article “Daddy Blue: The Evolution of the Dark Dandy,” Barbara Lewis reads Blue as a dignified character (unlike the more loathsome characters that would dominate the following decades). Further, Lewis states that Blue represented the condition of some black Americans in reality: Blue’s handsome, dignified image, the epitome of rationality and reserve, reflected the situation for a sizable and growing segment of [upwardly mobile] African Americans. . . . Blue emblematically expressed the assurance and achievement of this group.[36] Lewis bases her reading of Blue as a somewhat authentic representation of actual, well-dressed black men on the lyrics, but also on a lithograph of Blue that was printed on the front page of an early publication of the song’s sheet music. Regardless of whether “My Long Tail Blue” faithfully reproduced or radically altered the figure of the black dandy, Dixon’s portrayal and his audience’s endorsement were provoked by the presence of refined, dignified black men in American public life. The lithograph for the sheet music provides a glimpse into how Dixon’s performance was framed and received. Given the aspects of the image mentioned in her analysis, Lewis is likely referring to the lithograph published by Atwill’s and reproduced here in Fig. 1. Another typical lithograph published by Firth has been reproduced in Fig. 2. While Lewis reads Blue as a dignified and respectable man of property who is ready to put his equal citizenship with white men to the test by taking his place in a “teeming metropolis,”[37] she misses some revealing details in the lithograph of Blue, details that are amplified when compared with the second lithograph. It is true, as Lewis states, that Blue appears to be dignified and wealthy; however, he is also demonized. In the Atwill’s lithograph Blue’s hat brim curls upwards at either end, simulating devil’s horns (Fig. 1).[38] In the Firth lithograph Blue’s moustache provides the devil’s curls, while the tail of his jacket flows away from his body into sharp points, mimicking something snake-ish or devilish (Fig. 2).[39] In both lithographs Blue’s eyes are squinted and shifty; they bring his character further under suspicion. These details bring into question the authenticity of Blue as a representation of real black dandies, instead offering support to the suggestions of Nyong’o and Jones that the twisting of blackness for white purposes in early blackface performance may have occurred more rapidly than the orthodox retelling of blackface history presumes. Arguably, the fact that Lewis misses these details allows her to idolize the character—perhaps in an effort to find an accurate cultural representation of the real black dandies of the period, who were bravely challenging social boundaries and confronting the often violent treatment of dignified black people. The missed details might result from an over-reliance on orthodox readings of minstrel history that place “My Long Tail Blue” in an early, radical stage of the form’s development. And yet, the lithographs need not be read as accurate portraits of actual dandies in order to recognize the agency of black dandies at the time. As Miller suggests, while the elaborate costume of real black dandies was “a symbol of a self-conscious manipulation of authority,” it was tempered by the corresponding representations of blackface dandyism, “an attempted denigratory parody of free blacks’ pride and enterprise.”[40] In comparing the lithographs, then, Blue should not be read as an accurate representation of real black dandies, but as an early response to the anxieties white society felt toward real black dandies. The demonization, brought about by the embodied arguments of black dandies, reveal the expropriative twist enacted by white performers who would go on to craft various determinations of blackness to alleviate their own concerns throughout the rest of the century. Figure 1: “My Long Tail Blue” (New York: Atwill’s, c.1827). The character of a dandy, Blue, with horned top hat, shifty eyes, and a straight, dignified stance. Image courtesy of John Hay Library, Brown University. Figure 2: “My Long Tail Blue” (New York: Firth, c.1827). The character of a dandy, Blue, with tailed coat, spiked moustache, shifty eyes, and a formal stance. Image courtesy of John Hay Library, Brown University. The liberatory surplus of real black dandies was transformed through Dixon’s portrayal into an argument for increased white working-class freedoms. For example, Blue’s blackness serves as a synonym for social transgression. Blue does not obey rules; for this he is a character that many in the predominantly white audience—with desires to escape social regulations—would have admired. His pursuit of women was also appealing to white audiences, but any association of white audience members with black freedoms needed to be controlled. Lott reads the phallic “long tail” of Blue’s coat as representing “white man’s obsession with a rampageous black penis . . . invoking the power of ‘blackness’ while deriding it, in an effort of cultural control.”[41] Further, as Nyong’o powerfully argues, the affect of cross-racial sexuality was particularly important in the first debates throughout the 1830s over racial equality, abolition and amalgamation.[42] Any boisterous delights to be taken in Blue’s sexual exploits were accompanied by concerns about crossracial relationships and their political associates, equal rights and freedom. As such, the sexual freedoms and any suggestion of equality and amalgamation are closed down in the narrative of the song by a fantasy of black-on-black violence (Crow versus Blue), that resolves the tension and allows audiences to re-assume their position as civilized, restrained white men differentiated from the violent black buffoons in the song’s narrative. The cultural control of Blue’s crossracial freedoms occurred through his alienation, his demonization, released the uncomfortable realization of shared liberatory interests with a black character at the same time as it addressed the animosity many whites felt towards the class of real black dandies populating the urban centers of America. To demonstrate the animosity working-class white people felt toward real black dandies, Lewis describes riots in Philadelphia during 1828 when “white ruffians” (whose “mobocratic tactics” were endorsed by local papers) physically assaulted and verbally insulted many elegant and well-dressed black people who attended balls and dances.[43] The social presence among white workers of genuine animosity toward black dandies and strongly held beliefs in an essential difference between white and black people led performers to respond with racial characterizations that differentiated white audiences from troubling presences such as Blue so that audiences could feel both socially and culturally secure. The alienation of Blue, then, suggests the expropriation and twisting of blackness to white ends occurred, albeit more subtly than in later performances, in the earliest blackface shows. Dixon’s “My Long Tail Blue” signalled the emergence of the professional blackface entertainer, and in doing so paved the way for an almost ubiquitous expropriation of blackness in decades to follow. In fact, it was the regional folk character of Jim Crow, named in “My Long Tail Blue,” who became the most famous character of early blackface theatre. While Dixon was having success with “My Long Tail Blue,” Rice began composing a song and dance about Jim Crow to which Dixon would respond in turn. Rice’s “Jim Crow” displayed a particular brand of animosity toward black dandies that would become a feature of blackface performance for decades to come. Attacking the Dandy: Jim Crow and Zip Coon Rice was born around 1808 and grew up “in New York’s most ethnically mixed neighborhood—the Seventh Ward—along the East River docks.”[44] After time spent working as a carpenter’s apprentice, by the mid-1820s Rice had turned to acting and was appearing in “supernumerary roles” in plays and by 1828 he was on the road full-time with a performance troupe, still performing bit-parts in various plays.[45] It was not long before Rice had stolen the show in his minor roles at the Park theatre in New York during 1828, drawing criticism from his senior actors who felt he distracted audiences from their shows, and by late 1828 Rice was on playbills for comic songs during interludes.[46] In 1830 Rice debuted a routine involving a catchy song and a quirky dance, possibly learnt from black performers at Catherine Market before Rice adapted it to the stage. The routine defined his career. By 22 September 1830, he was listed on a playbill for his performance of “Jim Crow,” a song Cockrell claims to have been instantly popular.[47] Two years later Rice was headlining with “Jim Crow” in New York. Between 1836 and 1841 Rice performed the song to acclaim in England, Ireland, Scotland, and France, returning several times to the United States, each time more popular than before.[48] While Rice’s popularity should not be underestimated—he is often incorrectly described as the first blackface performer, Jim Crow is the most well-known character from the period, and various versions of “Jim Crow” remained in the repertoire of blackface performers and folk bands for over a century—his popularity needs to be contextualized. In Cornish’s boycott call of blackface theatres he mentioned Rice by name and described him as “that most contemptible of all Buffoons,” and claimed, according to Nyong’o, that Rice’s trans-atlantic success had garnered support among Europeans for the US slave industry.[49] In other words, Rice’s popularity was not absolute and his routine was not as enlightened as scholars such as Lhamon believe. In fact, the persuasiveness of Rice’s racism may have been enabled by the slipperiness—the open-endedness—of the textual traces of his performances. There are a number of versions of “Jim Crow.” Lhamon, in his collection of songs and plays performed by Rice, reproduces a version of “The Original Jim Crow” published in New York in 1832 (hereafter referred to as version A).[50] The version has no less than forty-four short, four-line verses, each followed by the chorus: “Weel about and turn about and do jis so, / eb’ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.”[51] Another version, published in Philadelphia in the same year, contains nineteen verses (hereafter referred to as version B), only some the same as version A. Version B is subtitled “A Comic Song (Sung by Mr. Rice at the Chestnut Theatre).”[52] In both versions the chorus is the same, yet the verses differ. Early blackface songs were highly improvised and adapted to current affairs and the place of performance. There were, however, some constants in the performance, including the chorus, followed by a lengthy musical “turn around” in which the famous hopping and spinning dance-step would be performed, the twisted knee of the character, the raggedy costume, and the oscillation between stumbling soft-shoe shuffles and energetic, bounding leaps. The wheeling and spinning nature of Jim Crow suggests that the song is playing with themes of racial inversion. The chorus—which could constitute half the performance—is an obvious example. Version A contains several verses where Jim Crow pities white people because they are not black: Kase it dar misfortune, And dey’d spend ebery dollar, If dey only could be Gentlemen ob colour. It almost break my heart, To see dem envy me, An from my soul I wish dem, Full as black as we.[53] The narrator of version A continually slips between referring to the audience as white people (“I’m glad dat I’m a niggar, / An don’t you wish you was too”), and as black people (“Now my brodder niggars,” and, above, “as black as we”).[54] Version B—recalling Blue’s invitation to follow suit—invites the (white) audience to become (black) Jim Crows: Den go ahed wite fokes Don’t be slow, Hop ober dubble trubble Jump Jim Crow.[55] While these various audience affiliations are indicative of both black and white audience members, it is also an indication of how audiences were actually invited to simultaneously associate and disassociate with blackness, or, to cite Huggins: “one could almost at will move in or out of the blackface character.”[56] This dis/association is, arguably, essential to an expropriation of black liberty—a taking hold, and removal, of the aesthetic of freedom. Like the narrative of “My Long Tail Blue,” the antics described in “Jim Crow” invite white working-class audiences to envy black freedom, despise the bourgeois, and enjoy violence toward black dandies. The lithographs on the front covers of song sheets for “Jim Crow” show the character with one bent, twisted knee, emphasising a deformed version of masculinity that served to alienate blackness and differentiate it from the ideals of white manliness held by the predominantly white, working-class audience (see, for example, Fig. 3).[57] Far from any hint of dignity shown in the character of Blue, the physical deformity of Crow acts simultaneously to explain his strange, leaping dance and to mark blackness as physically inferior to the white working-class audiences of the time. “Jim Crow” is among the earliest cultural texts that are openly hostile to black dandies (a feature of Jim Crow’s character). In version A of “Jim Crow,” three verses relate Jim Crow’s encounter with a black dandy: I met a Philadelphia niggar Dress’d up quite nice and clean . . . . So I knocked down dis Sambo And shut up his light, . . . . Says I go away you niggar Or I’ll skin you like an eel.[58] The acclamation of such violence rests uneasily against the actual violence that was being directed against well-dressed black people at the time. And yet the jokes continued as Rice’s rocketing popularity led to his own star-vehicle play Oh! Hush! Or, the Virginny Cupids. Rice’s Oh! Hush! sees the character of a black dandy, Sambo Johnson, discovering the affair of his sweetheart when he enters the kitchen where she works (and where his rival suitor, Gumbo Cuffee, has hidden). Cuffee, played by Rice, was a veritable Jim Crow: an upstart, dandy-hating, field-working, anti-authoritarian man. No script of the original performance remains, though Lhamon has edited a later adaptation by Charles White. For the purposes of this discussion, the following joke from Oh! Hush! is certainly in the spirit of “Jim Crow”: CUFF: Excuse my interrupting you for I see you am busy readin’ de paper. Would you be so kind as to enlighten us upon de principal topicks ob de day? JOHNSON: Well, Mr. Cuff, I hab no objection ‘kase I see dat you common unsophisticated gemmen hab not got edgemcation yourself, and you am ‘bliged to come to me who has. So spread around, you unintellumgent bracks, hear de news ob de day discoursed in de most fluid manner. (He reads out some local items.) Dar has been a great storm at sea and de ships hab been turned upside down. CUFF: (looks at paper): Why, Mr. Johnson, you’ve got the paper upside down! (All laugh heartily).[59] The joke is clearly on the pretentious, unintelligent, black dandy, and Cuff (a.k.a Jim Crow) is his foil. The dandy, now transformed into a despicable figure, represents a turn to what Lott labels as the scapegoating of the black dandy, a character embodying “the amalgamationist threat of abolition” and allegorically revealing “the class threat of those who were advocating for it [abolition].”[60] Such attacks on black dandyism reveal how “anticapitalist frustrations,” such as animosity toward upper-class social reformists and the abolitionist bourgeoisie, “stalled potentially positive racial feelings” to uncover “the viciously racist underside of these frustrations.”[61] That is, the dandy represented working-class bosses as well as the educated elite, some of whom had become leaders of the abolitionist movement and raised the possibility that worried white working-class people: that amalgamation and equality could eliminate racial difference among workers. To hate the dandy was to hate white reformers, black reformers, and black workers. And Jim Crow most certainly hated dandies. Through his immense success, the figure of the black dandy had been transformed. Whether Rice’s extreme popularity forced a change in Dixon’s portrayal of the black dandy, or Dixon was a keen judge of social attitudes toward blackness, Dixon’s next song continued to alienate blackness with a performance that would strip the dignity of Blue completely. In 1834, Dixon first performed the song “on which his renown finally came to rest.”[62] It is debatable whether Dixon wrote the song, or whether various little-known singers had performed it for many years before, but, undoubtedly, it was Dixon who made “Zip Coon” the only song of the 1830s to compare in popularity with “Jim Crow.” “Zip Coon” is a monstrous song that mimics certain elements of “Jim Crow.” The lyrics are often nonsensical, with the chorus consisting of “Oh, zip a duden duden duden, zip a duden day” repeated four times.[63] The opening verse leads to the chorus with the line: “Den over dubble trubble, Zip coon will jump.”[64] This line echoes Jim Crow’s insistence that white people “hop ober dubble trubble / Jump Jim Crow,” just as other lines in the song appropriate other elements of “Jim Crow.”[65] Both songs, for example, reference the 1814 battle of New Orleans, where the working-class hero of the late 1820s and early 1830s, President Andrew Jackson, had previously defeated the British forces led by Major General Edward Packenham. In the lithographs for the two songs, too, Zip mimics Crow (See Fig. 3 and Fig. 4).[66] Zip’s bent knee and arms are almost exact copies of Crow’s, and despite the obvious costume differences, Zip’s costume, like Crow’s, is exuberant and disorderly, superfluous and mis-matched. Zip, the lithograph and various appropriations within the text suggest, is Blue with a twist of Crow. Zip mimicked Crow’s invocation of popular, working-class nationalism. Perhaps Zip, as he jumped “over dubble trubble,” even incorporated a spinning leap similar to the one that Rice had made famous. Figure 3: “The Original Jim Crow” (Riley, c.1832). The character of an escaped slave, Jim Crow, with bent knee and foot and ragged clothes. Image courtesy of John Hay Library, Brown University. Figure 4: “Zip Coon” (Hewitt, c.1834). The character of a buffoonish dandy, Zip Coon, with gnarled limbs in a stance similar to typical portrayals of Jim Crow. Image courtesy of John Hay Library, Brown University. The representation of blackness in “Zip Coon” is just as disjointed as in “Jim Crow,” where the narration continually oscillates between descriptions of and association with blackness. This disarray is present in the narrative voice, which slips from the first to the third person. Sometimes it is a narrator talking about meeting Zip Coon, or describing him; sometimes it is Zip himself talking about politics, his mother or a girl who loves him. The sexual pursuits and freedoms of Blue and Crow remain, but the disassociation is made all the easier by Coon’s more obvious buffoonery. As with the previous songs, “Zip Coon” allowed audiences to seize the liberties of a wealthy, sexually active, luxuriant dandy, envy those freedoms and release them with a narrative of racial deformity. The presumed political injustice of racial equality and amalgamation, then, is derided allowing white working-class audiences to fantasize about their own importance as the most manly and necessary national type. It was a belief that motivated many to protest against abolition. The twisting of the dandy—from Blue through Crow to Coon—was near absolute by the time anti-abolitionist rioters stormed a church, ransacked houses, and took siege of a theatre to disrupt a ritzy performance by renowned tragedian Edwin Forrest in 1834. Actors were driven off stage and the rioters threatened to destroy the premises until the theatre manager thought to subdue them by staging an impromtu performance catering to their ideals. He brought out an actor to sing none other than “Zip Coon.”[67] As the first three groups of minstrel scholars would have it, this riot and blackface resolution occurred at a time when early blackface performance was rebellious, encouraging cross-racial solidarity. And yet minstrelsy is here, as early as 1834 and just six years after Dixon revolutionized American theatre with “Long Tail Blue,” co-opted into an antiblack, anti-amalgamation pogrom. What was it about a blackface dandy that so calmed the crowd? Certainly not the suggestion of cross-racial affiliation. In fact, what the analysis of the blackface dandy in this article has shown is that, from the earliest representations on the blackface stage, the dandy was incorporated into a process of alienating blackness. And the dandy was rapidly twisted into a grotesque effigy to calm the minds of anti-abolitionist rioters. As Nyong’o and Jones have forcefully argued, the discourse of blackness under blackface saw the theft of potential narratives of black freedom and its transformation—disfigurement—into narratives to support white working-class freedoms.[68] But, following this expropriation and alienation, what of the potential “liberty awaiting activation”? The changes in representation of the dandy from “My Long Tail Blue,” through “Jim Crow,” to “Zip Coon” indicates a much broader shift in the representation of blackness between 1828 and 1834. The distortion of the characterization of blackness stripped the black dandy of subversive potential and had a significant impact in real life for some early nineteenth-century Americans. Lewis reads firstly Jim Crow and then Zip Coon as figures growing out of white working-class hostility towards dignified black people who were slowly accumulating wealth: If Crow served as the antithesis to Blue, Coon mixed their individual elements into a scoundrel composite, the gangling servant dressed in the master’s clothes. Coon combined the original and its reverse into a mockery of the former.[69] Lewis effectively maps the evolution of the dandy figure as it related to attitudes towards blackness in Jacksonian America. Testing Lewis’ argument, it can be seen that Lewis is correct to imply racist characters mirrored (perhaps even provoked) real violence that was occurring against black people at the time (be it through direct physical intimidation or the institution of slavery). But the analysis in this article shows that Crow was not simply the “reverse” of Blue, but a heightened form of the animosity towards black people that was actually inherent in the portrayal of Blue. Such an analysis, in tandem with Lewis’ and Miller’s analysis of the history of real black dandies, refutes claims that blackface performance was revolutionary and radical despite (or besides) its racism. Even as blackface entertainment articulated the desires of the white working class or arguments against white dandies and class traitors, blackface also represented the broader shift occurring in white social attitudes toward blackness. Seen clearly in the shift from Blue to Zip, between 1828 and 1834 the iconography of racism that permeated the popular imagination of working-class Americans amplified subhuman, demonic and grotesque features, and it did so to ease white audiences’ concerns about abolition, amalgamation and other discourses of black freedom. The figure of the blackface dandy became a cornerstone of professional blackface minstrelsy from the 1840s onward, and even into the nostalgic vaudevillian revivals of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The ways that the blackface dandy allowed for working-class animosity of the upper classes, for upper-class self-mockery, and for general mockery of black people proved popular for a more economically diverse audience than the rowdy working-class crowds of early blackface. For Lott, the diverse appeals of professional minstrelsy—many of them embodied in the character of the black dandy—closed down any cross-racial affiliation potentially inspired by blackface performance: Energies directed against the state apparatus might too easily join those focused on black people. . . . Class straits may energize interracial cooperation, but they are also often likely to close down the possibility of interracial embrace.[70] And yet, the re-readings of blackface minstrel history to account for black influences upon and responses to early blackface—applied in this paper to the blackface dandy—bring into question whether there was ever the potential for a social, inter-racial embrace with the blackface dandy as a catalyst. In fact, as the work of Brooks, Miller, and Barbara Webb show, it was not until black performers and activists such as George Walker and W.E.B. DuBois inhabited and transformed the blackface dandy stereotype that any possibility of overcoming, in a productive and unifying way, the white animosity toward black freedoms was possible.[71] Despite the best efforts of white performers to twist and alienate blackness, and despite the devastating impact of narratives of white supremacy staged through blackface performance for half a century, the surplus of black liberty was, and arguably still is, awaiting activation in these stage types, responses, and texts. Recognizing this is an essential step toward undoing the white racial privilege created in early minstrel representations. And framing early blackface texts and characters as responses to narratives of black freedom will expose them for what they are: illusions of white control. Benjamin Miller is a lecturer in the School of Letters, Art and Media at the University of Sydney. His research examines the relationship between representations of race in the US and Australia. He completed his PhD thesis in 2010 on representations of blackness and Aboriginality in American and Australian culture and has published on representations of Aboriginal people in Australian theatre, cinema and literature, and on the writing of Aboriginal author David Unaipon. [1] Mikko Tuhkanen, “Of Blackface and Paranoid Knowledge: Richard Wright, Jacques Lacan and the Ambivalence of Black Minstrelsy,” Diacritics 31, no. 2 (2001): 13. [2] See Carl Wittke, Tambo and Bones: A History of the American Minstrel Stage (Durham: Duke University Press, 1930); Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931). [3] Tuhkanen, “Of Blackface,” 16. See also Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” [1958], in Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1964), 45-59; Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). [4] Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). See also W.T. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); William Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Ante-bellum American Popular Culture (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1999). [5] Lott, Love and Theft, 7-8. [6] Tuhkanen, “Of Blackface,” 16. [7] Ibid., 13-14. [8] Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (London: Duke University Press, 2006); Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Douglas Jones Jr., “Black Politics but Not Black People: Rethinking the Social and ‘Racial’ History of Early Minstrelsy,” TDR: The Drama Review 57, no. 2 (2013): 21-37. [9] Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 28. [10] Ibid., 27-28. [11] Quoted in Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 120. [12] Quoted in Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 123. [13] Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 8. [14] W.T. Lhamon Jr., Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 8. According to Lhamon, “The [early blackface] scripts had enough play to make them particularly useful for organizing heterogeneous publics. In flocking to see Jim Crow, disparate types discovered their mutual affinities. Around Jim Crow’s mask the dispersed riffraff of a quickening industrialism began to act out their own parts in a new play in which the insubordinates were mixing among themselves but not melding with the previously dominant” (8). [15] Cockrell, Demons, 161. For Cockrell, as early blackface transformed into minstrelsy around 1843, “Caught in the middle, between class and race, white common people had to devise both upward and downward processes and rituals” (161). [16] Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 8. [17] Ibid., 8-9. [18] Lhamon, Raising Cain, 34. [19] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 30. Lhamon suggests that the blackface characterization of Jim Crow provided the “template” for a “transracial affiliation [that] was virtually unprecedented” (30). [20] Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 41. [21] Jones, “Black Politics,” 25. Emphasis in original. [22] Ibid., 27-28. [23] Ibid., 17. [24] Ibid. [25] Monica Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 101. [26] Ibid., 102. [27] Ibid., 101. [28] Ibid., 105. [29] Cockrell, Demons, 96. [30] Lott, Love and Theft, 22. [31] Barbara Lewis, “Daddy Blue: The Evolution of the Dark Daddy,” in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Minstrelsy, ed. Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 257. [32] Quoted in ibid. [33] Cockrell, Demons, 96. [34] Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 120. [35] As an aside, it should be noted that the Jim Crow character here was drawn from regional, oral folk tales that had been circulating for decades before the character was appropriated and adapted into the exemplar early blackface character performed by T.D. Rice. Lhamon, Raising Cain, 180. [36] Lewis, “Daddy Blue,” 259-60. [37] Ibid., 258-9. [38] “My Long Tail Blue” (New York: Atwill, c.1827). [39] “My Long Tail Blue” (New York: Firth, c. 1827). [40] Miller, Slaves to Fashion, 81. [41] Lott, Love and Theft, 25-26. [42] Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 72. [43] Lewis, “Daddy Blue,” 264. [44] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 1. [45] Cockrell, Demons, 62. [46] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 32-33. [47] Cockrell, Demons, 64. [48] Ibid., 65-66. [49] Nyong’o, Amalgmation Waltz, 121. [50] “The Original Jim Crow,” (New York: Riley, c.1832), republished in Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 95-102. [51] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 96. [52] “Jim Crow: A Comic Song (Sung by Rice at the Chestnut St Theatre),” (Philadelphia: Edgar, c.1832). [53] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 99. [54] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 98. It is also important here to make a note about the language of the sources I am quoting. I quote some hateful words in this article. In choosing to include these words I am following the argument of Jabari Asim in The N Word: “the word ‘nigger’ serves . . . as a linguistic extension of white supremacy, the most potent part of a language of oppression that has changed over time from overt to coded.” For Asim, the “N word” and other derogatory words are hurtful, but open identification of such language helps to identify moments of racism while also acknowledging the close relationship between language and privilege. For more, see Jabari Asim, The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why (New York: Houghton, 2007), 4. [55] “Jim Crow: A Comic Song,” stanza 18. [56] Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 257. [57] “The Original Jim Crow,” n.p. [58] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 98. [59] Ibid., 150. [60] Lott, Love and Theft, 134. [61] Ibid., 135. [62] Cockrell, Demons, 99. [63] “Zip Coon: A Favorite Comic Song (Sung by G.W. Dixon),” (New York: Hewitt, 1834). [64] Ibid., stanza 1. [65] “Jim Crow: A Comic Song,” stanza 18. [66] “The Original Jim Crow,” n.p.; “Zip Coon,” n.p. [67] Lott, Love and Theft, 132-3. [68] Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 122; Jones, “Black Politics,” 25. [69] Lewis, “Daddy Blue,” 259. [70] Lott, Love and Theft, 237. [71] Brooks, Bodies, 207-17; Miller, Slaves to Fashion, 137-45; Barbara Webb, “The Black Dandyism of George Walker: A Case Study in Genealogical Method,” The Drama Review 45, no. 4 (2001): 7-24. "Twisting the Dandy: The Transformation of the Blackface Dandy in Early American Theatre" by Benjamin Miller ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 27, Number 3 (Fall 2015) ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Jim Bredeson Editorial Assistant: Kyueun Kim Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Bill Demastes Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “Twisting the Dandy: The Transformation of the Blackface Dandy in Early American Theatre” by Benjamin Miller “West of Broadway: the Rockefeller Foundation and American Theatre in the 1930s” by Malcolm Richardson “Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China” by Wu Wenquan, Chen Li, and Zhu Qinjuan www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Twisting the Dandy: The Transformation of the Blackface Dandy in Early American Theatre West of Broadway: the Rockefeller Foundation and American Theatre in the 1930s Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Rachel E. Bauer and Kristen M. Kalz Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the “Toxic Mound Tours” Rachel E. Bauer and Kristen M. Kalz By Published on May 21, 2020 Download Article as PDF On a chilly day in early April 2018, a group of sixteen people and one lovable dog met at a coffee house in St Louis, Missouri, in anticipation of the “Toxic Mound Tour.” Online, the tour was advertised as a performance art piece and an “educational field trip” to “see the realities of the landfill and other contaminated places west of the city.” [1] When our tour guide, performance artist Allana Ross, arrived, she was easy to spot in her khaki colored park ranger clothing, even without the “Toxic Mound Tours” sign she held. As we gathered around, she quickly introduced herself, then introduced her assistant and their dog, both of whom were outfitted in matching green jackets for the occasion. Before the tour began, the performer passed out tour brochures and white face masks to the group gathered around her. Most of us in the audience looked at each other with slightly worried expressions before she admitted that we did not need to wear masks for our safety, as our stay in each of the five locations would be brief. Even still, they served as a constant reminder of where we were going and the gravity of the area’s toxic legacy. As the contaminated areas we planned to visit were spread out across the greater St. Louis area, we were encouraged to introduce ourselves to one another and carpool. And just like that, we traveled to the first destination on our toxic tour. In her book, Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States , Jan Cohen-Cruz states, “A community-based production is usually a response to a collectively significant issue or circumstance. It is a collaboration between an artist or ensemble and a ‘community’.” [2] The source is not the artist, but the community that surrounds the artist. [3] For Ross, community is defined in two ways: the people and the environment. In part, the community is defined by the suburban areas south and west of St. Louis and the residents who lived or live in/around the areas affected by contamination. Ross’s community-based work is “less about homogeneous communities and more about different participants exploring a common concern together,” [4] the common concern being the past, current, and future impacts of the toxic sites on the people who reside nearby. However, Ross’s performance not only elevated the significance of place/environment but also stressed the importance of being in each space—to explore it and experience it—as central to her approach. In her artist statement, she writes: I am questioning our relationship to nature itself—the culture of nature that we teach to each other through museum diorama, through titillating landscape calendars and all-expense-paid eco-adventures. A public tour of the mounds is a method of activating the viewer outside of the gallery setting as a participant in the re-invention of the culture of nature. [5] Ross grounded her performance in place, reaffirming Cohen-Cruz’s definition of community-based performance as “a local act in two senses: a social doing in one’s particular corner of the world and an artistic framing of that doing for others to appreciate.” [6] Ross privileged the environment itself and the lasting effect(s) that humans have had on the ecosystem(s) of the area. Her piece worked within the realm of environmental activism, which brought attention to the human consumption of nature and its subsequent contamination. [7] Additionally, she questioned notions of the “individual” in communities, as the environment affected people in different ways. Seemingly separate individuals become connected through location and the sense of belonging in a community. To explore toxic places, we are asked to think about the surrounding community and to consider what it must be like living there. In this essay, we explore how Ross’s performance uses place and environment, as well as a historical understanding of the sites, to illuminate the lasting impacts of environmental contamination and the very real effects it has had on local communities through the five sites on her Toxic Mound Tour. Since the 1960s, performance scholars including Richard Schechner, Una Chaudhuri, Elinor Fuchs, Wendy Arons, Stephen Bottoms, Ric Knowles, and Theresa May, among others, have theorized the practice of performance known as environmental theatre and site-specific performance, as one rooted in the place, and perhaps even the community, in which the performance occurs. [8] Tim Cresswell describes place as: constituted through reiterative social practice—place is made and remade on a daily basis. Place provides a template for practice—an unstable stage for performance. Thinking of place as performed and practiced can help us think of place in radically open and non-essentialized ways where place is constantly struggled over and remained in practical ways. [9] Furthermore, as Nick Kaye writes, site-specific art is the “exchange between the work of art and the places in which its meanings are defined.” [10] “Key to this,” as Baz Kershaw states, “becomes understanding how performance is an integral part of global ecology and eco-systems.” [11] Looking at the scholarship of Nicola Shaughnessy and Laura Levin as lenses through which to examine toxic tours allows us to further contextualize the importance of each tour site as both the set and setting. Shaughnessy looks at the possibility of “place as an event” through which the “[s]ite and place are also integral to visual and live arts practices which have moved beyond the quiet curbs of gallery spaces, to question who art is for, where it can be staged and to explore the experience of spectatorship.” [12] Ross’s attempt to “[activate] the viewer outside of the gallery setting” [13] is thus attempting to “contribute to the process of making space meaningful through practices which explore (and challenge) how we experience the environment we inhabit.” [14] Ross’s work can be also interpreted through Laura Levin’s concepts of “environmental unconsciousness” and her discussions of camouflage. Levin’s discussion of place-based, environmental performance engages with the idea that environment becomes a part of the performance that cannot be overlooked: “recognizing the independence of the non-human is not simply a philosophical project but also a political one … This framing of site-specificity provides access to … ‘environmental unconscious,’ rendering perceptible those aspects of environment that we habitually engage but routinely overlook.” [15] As such, Ross’s tour invited us into these spaces that are overlooked, whether because they have been remediated into consumable spaces or because they were so unassuming that no one realizes their significance. In recent years, there has been greater public interest in ecoadventure and ecotourism, which seek to counteract or eliminate the wastefulness of traveling by combining experiences with environmentally friendly and/or sustainable practices. [16] From a performance perspective, Scott Magelssen’s scholarship highlights recent trends in the tourism industry that “[implement] attractions that privilege explicitly performative participation by immersing tourists in living, fictive scenarios.” [17] This move towards more “authentic” experiences of tourism includes participants taking on a character and getting into the action, a move away from the passive tourism experiences that ask visitors to see and observe and then to depart without much interaction with the location. [18] For a group of strangers to take a toxic tour, we had to be willing to confront and interrogate our own ideas of health and safety, and take on, even for a few hours, the environmental risk that others are asked to undertake every day. Here, the place is central, and rather than being given a part to play, people on toxic tours are not in simulated environments; they are asked to navigate action as it comes. Contaminated places are most often found in low income and minority communities, existing away from and outside of the dominant culture, and as such, they have been referred to as sacrifice zones where both people and waste are pushed to the margins and seen as dirty, undesirable, contaminated, and/or not valuable. [19] Phaedra Pezzullo argues toxic tours typically “are noncommercial expeditions into areas that are polluted by toxins,” and are often led by community members, many of which may be sick, in hopes that doing so will raise awareness and lead to social change. [20] By willingly entering places that may be harmful, toxic tours not only challenge traditional notions of tours and/or being a tourist, which is most often associated with travel, beauty, pleasure, but they also blur the lines between “nature” and “culture,” acknowledging the ways in which each influence one another. [21] To take Ross’s toxic tour, then, is to use performance to subvert existing ideas of toxic tours as well as place and location. First, Ross did not take on the persona of someone who was sick, but instead took on the role of an authoritative outsider. She took on the dress and authority of a park ranger or nature guide, a figure generally understood as one tasked with expertise, but also one with knowledge of historical significance of place and the importance of the connection between humans and the land that sustains them. Assuming the role of expert was a particularly meaningful move in part because of our culture’s reliance on experts to help define what is safe/unsafe. Her character acted as our guide not only in traveling to each location, but also in guiding the audience through the experience: where to walk, where to look, the important features worth noting, and the site’s historical background, as it was often difficult to determine the significance of each place without her expert eye. Her character was, in fact, the only “artificial” part of the performance; the audience and the locations we visited were very much real. Second, the tour took us to sites in various stages of remediation; in some cases, the very notion of toxicity and contamination remained contested, as there were widespread disagreements about the safety of the sites, but in other cases a former contaminated site had been transformed into a park for public enjoyment. At each location she interwove local history into her performance, gathered from both official government documents and the stories of residents. Finally, rather than being in marginalized communities and spaces, the tour stops were in predominately white and/or working-class neighborhoods. This is notable because unlike typical cases of environmental uncertainty, these sites have gained greater attention simply because these communities are thought about as safe, clean, and respectable places. Almost all in attendance were from the greater St. Louis area and most lived in communities relatively close to a specific site and attended the tour because they had not actually physically visited the sites. Everyone learned about the tour through an advertisement in a local Facebook group that discusses issues of community, toxicity, health, and safety, so attendees brought with them varying degrees of knowledge. The stops on the tour are public and can be visited independently, but Ross provided the background and historical significance of place which is so often hidden. Additionally, her performance as an expert, which was informative as much as it was paternalistic, provided a feeling of protectiveness, as the group explored these largely unknown to them sites. OUR GUIDE Unlike the audience members who wore basic, contemporary clothing, bundled in coats and scarves for the chilly, rainy day, Ross donned a wide-brimmed hat and an olive-khaki button-up shirt tucked into khaki pants. A wide brown belt and hiking boots completed her ensemble. While not exact in its replica, it was culturally recognizable as a costume reminiscent of those worn by park rangers in a US context. However, Ross called herself an “urban ranger” because it was not the vast wilderness or sprawling desert she guided us through; it was the suburban space around us. Instead of the park insignia or flags that adorn the uniforms of federal park workers, Ross’s “uniform” had only two embroidered patches: a colorful taco in front of a variation of the nuclear atom symbol and a skull with a ranger’s hat similar to the one worn by Ross herself. Given the hazardous and dangerous history that surrounded the sites on the tour ahead, the patches spoke not only to the macabre reality of touring such locations, even if for the purpose of raising environmental awareness, but also to Ross’s personality. As a ranger is tasked with the protection and preservation of lands for public use, Ross tasked herself with raising local awareness “[b]y inviting the audience to consider the history of these sites in a safe space removed from their threats—to peruse a brochure, to grab a postcard, to plan a visit.” [22] In doing so, she asked that we “reconsider [our] consumption of nature,” both in terms of the way these sites were contaminated by human interference and now, as nature had reclaimed, albeit artificially, the land for parks and recreation. [23] As there was considerable distance between sites, Ross created a Spotify playlist for the drive, entitled “Atomic Musical Collection.” The playlist, which played in the background, served as an intermission of sorts where the audience could reflect on the tour as it progressed. [24] Like a true guide, Ross provided a map with the “attractions” clearly marked, and we started an approximately five-hour tour organized in a caravan, all following Ross’s white SUV with a large sign on each side emblazoned with “Toxic Mound Tours” and the signature atomic star that adorned all of her materials. STOPS ALONG THE WAY Like many industrial cities in the U.S., the greater St. Louis area has a long and contested history of sites contaminated from a wide breadth of industrial activities. Four out of the five sites on the tour corresponded to St. Louis’ involvement with WWII and Cold War weapons production. Site #1 : Times Beach, MO The first stop on our tour was Route 66 State Park, formerly Times Beach, MO, a small resort town about thirty miles outside of St. Louis. In the early 1970s, the entire town became contaminated when its twenty-three miles of roads were sprayed with dioxin-contaminated waste oil, and it later became one of the nation’s first Superfund sites. [25] In the early 1980s, Congress passed “The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act” (CERLA), most commonly referred to as the “Superfund,” which created a tax on the chemical and petroleum industry. [26] The money generated by this tax was then used to clean up abandoned hazardous waste sites across the nation. In 1982, Times Beach was evacuated and residents were permanently relocated due to the high-level of contamination. Just a few short years later, the city was deemed uninhabitable and disincorporated by the state. As remediation was underway, all houses and buildings in the town were demolished and buried under a large mound at the park. Now, all that is left of this once thriving community is a large grassy mound, the faint outline of streets and roads hardly visible in parts of the park, and the last remaining building which now serves as the park’s visitor’s center. [27] The Superfund program has been met with widespread criticism since its inception from both industries and communities. As a result, in 1995, the tax was not renewed and “significant limits were put on EPA’s [Environmental Protection Agency] ability to perform cleanup work itself, and an increasing percentage of cleanups [were] being performed by PRPs [Potentially Responsible Parties]. EPA focused activity during this period and onward on ensuring that PRPs perform most of the cleanups, thus, saving dwindling public funding for government oversight of private actions.” [28] The former Times Beach town is now Route 66 State Park, and visitors use it as a recreational space for biking, walking, and running, among other activities. Save for a few informative signs at the entrance of the park, the history of this location and community has mostly been erased. Upon arrival, we laughed nervously in the safety of the parking lot, struggling to reconcile the location versus our safety: it did not look harmful. From where we stood, we could see a bathroom building near the park entrance and a wooden sign with site information, including guidelines for dogs on leashes and a map of the “Inner Loop Trail.” Ross gathered us around to give an overview of the site before we officially visited the mound. The mound was to our left as we entered, but Ross had to point it out to the tour. It was an unassuming hill covered in the shoots of early-spring grass, not as we expected. It could be easily ignored by visitors who were unaware that the contents of a town were buried underneath. Our guide instructed the group to walk to the top of the small hill, which turned out to be deceptively long. We gathered there as Ross provided information on how the dioxin-contaminated waste was introduced into the area and the amount of waste that was under our feet. On the far end, Ross pointed out a small fenced-in area with various pipes coming out of the ground, which many of us missed and/or did not know what it was. Ross explained that it was a gas extraction well for the buried waste at the site. Here, Ross’s performance speaks to Levin’s idea of the “environmental unconscious,” which “[renders] perceptible those aspects of environment that we habitually engage but routinely overlook.” [29] It was easy to overlook our environment and the significance of a location like Times Beach, as it was the oldest site and had been nearly completely erased into its new form: a park. The mound that contains the Dixon-contaminated town is just a hill. Thus, Ross’s performance, retelling of the history, and authoritative approach as “urban ranger” reconstructed the town for her audience, so that we engaged with the location as more than its park exterior. She brought our environmental unconsciousness to the fore in order to restore the site, in our imaginations, and challenge our initial perceptions of the space. The site is open to visitors daily from dawn to dusk, and many visitors take advantage of the trails, many of which are parts of the old roadways, the same ones that were once sprayed with dioxin. Many may not recognize that the uninhabitable nature of this area for day-to-day community life resulted in its transformation into a park which poses little risk for temporary visitors. Instead, we were faced with nature as it has been remade, as Ross said, as all evidence of the contamination was buried, out of sight, in the mound. [30] What was once a place where people lived is now a place for visitors to walk their dogs, gawk at the history of the town if they happened to stop by one of the parks signs, and then leave, almost without a trace. As such, we had to be taught to see the park for both what it once was and what it is today. Site #2 : Coldwater Creek The second stop on the tour was a combination of several sites with ties to Cold War era weapons production. Radioactive material made its way to the St. Louis area during the 1940s when Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, a downtown company, was commissioned to be a part of the top-secret Manhattan Project. [31] The project’s ultimate aim was to create the world’s first atomic weapon, and Mallinckrodt was tasked with purifying uranium. The project was unlike any task undertaken by the State, and to complete the work quickly and away from prying eyes, it had a top-secret security clearance which circumvented typical democratic decision making mechanisms by merely removing the project from public scrutiny. [32] Many of the workers themselves were unaware of the material they were working with and many would later develop cancer and other related diseases. [33] As the project was underway, a great deal of radioactive and/or hazardous materials were used, and much waste was generated. With limited space to store the materials and waste downtown, a property west of the city was used. [34] The property, referred to today as the St. Louis Airport Site (SLAPS), was a twenty-one acre tract of land near the St. Louis Lambert International Airport. [35] The western edge of the property bordered Coldwater Creek, a fifteen-mile creek that snakes through the backyards of various neighborhoods, before emptying into the Missouri River. [36] The site stored “mountains” of radioactive and hazardous waste in open air conditions for almost two decades. [37] As a result, radioactive waste made its way into the creek before it was later sold to a company from Colorado, which dumped whatever materials were deemed not valuable enough to transport into the local West Lake Landfill. [38] Our second tour location was near the airport and the creek. However, on the way, Ross brought us to the building housed by government officials of Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP). In 1974, the federal government created FUSRAP, which was tasked “to identify, investigate and clean up or control sites throughout the United States that became contaminated as a result of the Nation’s early atomic energy program during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.” [39] In addition to the creek, landfill, and Weldon Springs location, there are over 100 identified contaminated sites around the St. Louis Area recognized by the Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA. [40] While the EPA and Army Corps have remediated many of the sites, there are still some that either still need remediation and/or are contested. Regardless, the EPA maintains that these sites are safe, [41] including the landfill, but many residents believe they are experiencing negative health impacts and have created a Facebook group to share information and contest expert claims of health and safety. It was in this Facebook group that our “toxic tour” was advertised. Once arrived, we parked our caravan of cars along the side of the road, which was lined mostly by warehouse buildings in proximity to the St. Louis Airport. Here, Ross spoke about the significance of FUSRAP in the area and provided details on what became of the creek’s cleanup operation. While there, a Hazelwood police officer approached in a car. The arrival of a law enforcement officer made the audience members nervous; this was an unplanned portion of the tour. Keeping with her character, Ross introduced herself as an urban ranger to the officer, who was curious why a group such as ours was in the area. The officer seemed interested, told us to be safe, and left the scene without causing a disruption to the audience. Here, the location of the FURSAP building is reminiscent of Cresswell’s concept of place, where we can “think of place in radically open and non-essentialized ways where place is constantly struggled over and remained in practical ways.” [42] The location of the FURSAP building is indeed a place made and remade by history and perception. With the creek remediation considered complete, the weathered steel building that houses FUSRAP seemed to blend into the warehouse buildings surrounding it. Our perception was altered, remade, by Ross’s expert navigation of the site, however the building’s history had not been erased as with the previous site, and thus it was easy for our group to see and understand the significance as Ross directed our attention and shared the history of the location. The meaning of the place is, as Cresswell argues, “performed and practiced” [43] through our interaction with the guide outside of the chain-link fence that surrounds it. As such, without being on the tour with us, the Hazelwood officer had a different concept of the place’s significance than those of us who listened intently to Ross’s guidance, even though we were just down the road from the mouth of the infamous Coldwater Creek. However, the presence of authority outside of the FUSRAP location felt significant, as it was a reminder that the place we inhabited during the performance is also a part of the larger ecosystem of the area. Figure 1. FUSRAP site, April 8, 2018, (Photo by author) Soon after this interruption, the audience members were back in their cars, as we traveled—briefly this time—to our next location: Coldwater Creek. Like the FUSRAP location, this site had not been reimagined and fully transformed into a park or something else. This space was not inviting; there were no sidewalks, no facilities, and nowhere to park, and the mouth of the creek was unassuming and littered with garbage. We would not have known it was a location of significance without our guide to inform us of such, but it was easy to imagine it as a contaminated space. As with the FUSRAP building, the meaning of place is “constantly struggled over and remained.” [44] Those living along the creek have a clear perception of place while those simply driving may not upload that same definition of place. However, the performance at this location is pushed further when applying Shaughnessy’s lens of location-based performance. Shaughnessy argues that approaches such as Ross’s tour, “engage in the making of place and spatiality … Thus in site responsive work, where space is made meaningful as place through encounters between performers and spectators/participants, there is a potential to transform our perceptions of the performed environment.” [45] Ross’s interactions with the audience at this site—encouragement to explore accompanied by careful warnings of caution that pointed out debris and her now established convention of beginning with the historical significance of the site—assisted in solidifying the meaningful nature of the site for the group gathered around. Thus, Coldwater Creek was indeed transformed into a place made meaningful through Ross’s responsive performance. Large cement barriers, like those used to direct traffic on highways during construction, guarded the creek, prohibiting us from getting too close. There was a sense of nervousness among participants while approaching the creek. We were all aware of the historical contamination of the area, but did not expect to come into contact with the discarded things of today, like broken glass, scraps of paper, and discarded plastic bags. We peered into the murky water, knowing that it had been decontaminated, but the lasting uneasiness was still there for the audience members. Some climbed over the barriers, but not for long, before coming back over to the side that felt “safe.” Once gathered around, our guide talked about how it looked like a place to avoid, though it borders many people’s backyards and was once a place where children played. Before people knew it was contaminated with radioactive waste, the creek, which was prone to flooding, was thought of as a nuisance when rising water entered basements and yards. Now both former and current residents worry, and in some cases believe, that they were exposed to harmful contaminates which have negatively impacted their health. Under FUSRAP, the creek underwent, and continues to undergo, remediation, but cleanup was not extended beyond the creek into the private properties along the creek’s edge. While seemingly unremarkable, the location exudes a negative atmosphere, so much so that this was the only stop on the tour that audience members whispered to each other and refrained from openly talking at the site. While the town of Times Beach was given renewed purpose after the cleanup project was completed—an opportunity for renewed recreation—the same could not be done for the miles of this creek that remained mistreated and contaminated, at least in this area, hidden from sight unless you know where to look or were/are affected by it. Site #3 : Carrollton The next stop on our tour was the former Carrollton subdivision in Bridgeton, MO. Once one of the largest subdivisions in the area, the community was bought out in the 1990s to make room for a new runway at the airport. [46] However, the airport expansion fell through and the community was demolished anyway. Former residents now question if there were other explanations as to why their homes were destroyed, as it is now known that the subdivision was located between a radioactive creek and a radioactive landfill. Entering the area that used to be Carrollton was surreal. The tree-lined streets of the community were inhabited not long ago, and the remnants of human consumption of the land were everywhere. The roads that moved through the area were complete with turnoffs, driveways, and sidewalks, as if the homes were lifted from the earth without a trace. The area was also littered with trash, mattresses, furniture, and beer cans, showing that people had been there recently and/or used Carrollton as a dumping ground. After driving deep into the once-vibrant community, we parked just on the other side of a steel gate, complete with a sign that read, “Road Closed. No Trespassing. Property of the City of St. Louis.” Once we stepped out of our cars, the evidence of human intervention was even more present. We were careful not to step too near an open, uncovered sewer. Telephone poles and electric wires still stood along the street. Ross led us on foot to a clearing, which once was a yard, where the group took a break to talk and to decompress after the first half of the tour. Here, we gathered around a blanket for snacks of cookies, clementines, and hot tea that she prepared. We spent the time talking with the other audience members and walking around the general area; we were especially struck by the non-native plants clearly planted as landscaping, including a wall of bamboo, yucca plants that decorated the ends of what used to be driveways, and carefully placed evergreens that had outgrown their hedge-like purpose. By this point in the tour, we had developed a level of comfort with Ross and the rest of the audience members present. We had existed in “dangerous” spaces together and embodied a shared experience with each other and with our host, reflecting Shaughnessy’s idea that environmental theatre’s exchange between performer and audience allows for “a transfer of bodily sensations … which affects the participants, creating a felt exchange, an embodied experience.” [47] We had shared the experience up to this point, and that experience lead to trust, not simply assumed authority, in our guide. Figure 2. Picnic at the Carrollton Subdivision site, April 8, 2018, (Photo by author) After a bit, Ross stood up and talked to the group about Carrollton, which included a discussion of some of the rumors as to why the subdivision was evacuated. The space transformed for us, as we imagined the homes that once stood on this land, not too long ago. After all, “in site responsive work … there is a potential to transform our perceptions of the performed environment,” [48] as this too was a location that needed a bit of reconstruction through Ross’s guidance. While the driveways and sidewalks still existed, the outlines of residences that once were, Ross’s expert perspective helped us to reimage a space that was once a bustling community not that long ago. Our perspective shifted from viewing the area as a dumping ground to recognizing the lives that once centered on the suburban streets of the Carrollton subdivision. Unlike the historical distance between ourselves and the residents of Times Beach, it was easy to imagine the homes, the gardens, and the cars in the driveways. Thus, the meaning of this location was much easier to grasp than some of the others. Perhaps most ominous was a solitary light pole, long disconnected from its electric source. Ironically, Ross pointed out a current public park, built directly adjacent, that could be seen from our resting place. No fence or structure divided the park from the property where we sat, save some overgrown bushes. There was nothing to keep us in, or out, or to delineate the danger, real or fabricated, of the area of Carrollton from the recreational space next to it. Site #4 : West Lake Landfill The second to last stop on the tour was by all accounts the most well-known site on the itinerary: the West Lake Landfill. In 2010, the West Lake Landfill became the focus of national attention when it was discovered that a portion of the site was experiencing what experts called a “subsurface smoldering event,” referred to locally as an “underground fire.” [49] To make matters worse, the landfill was already known to contain illegally dumped radioactive waste. In 1973, a local company mixed 8,700 tons of radioactive waste, containing seven tons of uranium, with 3.5 times as much soil, and illegally dumped it into a local, unlined landfill. [50] In the 1990s, the landfill became a Superfund site and was added to the National Priorities List, and anti-nuclear activists had been fighting for the complete remediation of the site since the early 1970s. [51] Today, the landfill contains both radioactive waste and an underground fire. While the EPA maintains that the site is safe, residents believe they have been experiencing a variety of different health problems. [52] While much is known about this site, many residents, even those who live relatively close and those curious, have not physically gone to it. For many of the residents in the surrounding communities, the first indication that something was amiss and that they even lived near a landfill, was the presence of a chemical-like odor in the air. [53] The landfill’s existence likely went unnoticed by residents, in part by design, as landfills and industrial sites are strategically placed away from typical routes and neighborhoods. [54] But in this case, the waste was illegally dumped in a landfill in a densely populated area, and unlike many cases of toxic dumping, [55] the landfill is surrounded by predominantly white, working class neighborhoods. With greater access to resources, residents have in many ways garnered more media attention than other sites of toxicity. We felt great anticipation as we drove our car to a stop along a road that ran parallel to the edge of the landfill. Right away, we were met with a warning: “Posted. No trespassing. Keep out.,” informing us to remain on our side of the chain-link and barbed wire fence that ran the perimeter of the site. There were cameras along the fence offering constant surveillance of the area, which alerted the site’s security that our group of tourists was in the area. As we stood gazing across the expanse of the landfill, a pick-up truck pulled up just on the other side of the fence and while it never stopped, it crept slowly by us; clearly, we were being watched. Unlike Pezzullo’s definition of toxic tours that invite people into these spaces to educate the public, the operators at the landfill wanted us to keep out. [56] Here, we did not struggle with Levin’s environmental unconscious of the more unassuming sites, as the location was current and alive: we actually experienced it firsthand. This was the only point in the trip where we felt wearing the cheap, white masks may actually be necessary. While the smell was not apparent at first, it soon wafted our direction. Group members remarked on the smell and asked if it was safe to breathe the air. Our guide led the audience along the fence, providing the history of the mound we were here to explore. Not many people would go there given its status as an active landfill, even without the smoldering event that has attracted public attention. From a performance perspective, Levin argues: In environmental performance, the perspectivalism of the proscenium stage ostensibly falls away, the action no longer enframed within the confines of a single scenic picture; the staging takes place throughout a found or transformed environment. While the traditional spectator is positioned outside of the stage’s pictorial field, s/he is now placed inside of the theatrical picture. [57] Being there, we were inserted into the location and could grasp what it would be like to live at the border of the landfill, gaining an understanding of the community’s plight. Ross positioned the tour attendees in the frame of the performance by carefully “staging” the place through dictating where to stand and directing the audience’s attention through the added element of past and present knowledge, thus allowing the audience to engage fully in the setting of her performance. We felt safer in this place under her guidance and because of the authority of the character she curated. We were all fascinated by the visceral experience of standing next to the landfill. The mound seemed to breathe as if it was a living organism, given the pipes and mechanisms that allowed for the release of gasses from beneath its surface. It was hard not to be distracted by the seemingly living mound next to us, and we commented to one another that we were almost waiting for it to move. At this the fourth stop on Ross’s tour the impact of human consumption was palpable. This location is still “alive;” it has not yet faced the remediation efforts of the U.S. government and other forces. It was hard to believe that this site exists in the middle of suburbia, with residences on all sides. Figure 3. Allana Ross Overlooking the Landfill Site, April 8, 2018, (Photo by author) Before we left, Ross led the audience back up the road, past our cars, to a higher point in elevation that overlooked the landfill. Here, even though we could not see the landfill in its entirety, Our tour guide pointed out different features at the site to help us more fully grasp the gravity of the situation. Ross talked more specifically about the smoldering event, pointing to an area in the landfill where the “fire” is believed to be. We stood looking over the vast expanse of the mound, the green tarp and grass covered areas, and a seemingly endless system of pipes running in and across the surface. As Ross pointed out, it may be jarring to think of this site as alive, but that is part of the issue: the earth is alive, we just do not always treat it as such. Site #5 : Weldon Springs Most of our group left the tour after the landfill, leaving only about a third of the original participants. Pulling into a largely empty parking lot, save for only one other car, we had the final stop mostly to ourselves. While the West Lake Landfill gave the impression that every inch of the place was being closely observed and managed, the Weldon Springs site had the effect of being a world set apart, desolate, and otherworldly. Unlike the other sites of the day, which largely blended into their local environments and felt mundane, this site was intended to be a spectacle. Rising out of the largely flat terrain sat what can only be described as a mountain, covered in white-grey boulders. This mound is also a burial site of sorts, but in this case, it contains hazardous and radioactive waste. After WWII, the U.S. expanded its nuclear weapons programs. In St. Louis, production was moved to a 220-acre facility thirty miles from downtown. [58] The plant was in operation from 1957-1966, and in that time, it too generated an expansive amount of radioactive and hazardous waste, which was often stored in pits and quarries on the 17,000-acre property. The site was later remediated by the Department of Energy, and like Route 66 State Park, it was deemed uninhabitable but safe for recreational visitors. [59] For our tour group, the mound was immediately visible, rising high out of the earth. Today, the forty-five acre and seventy-five foot high mound is a tourist attraction that contains roughly “1.48 million cubic yards of PCBs, mercury, asbestos, TNT, radioactive uranium and radium, and contaminated sludge and rubble.” [60] The site includes a single story metal building which houses the “Weldon Springs Interpretive Center,” a museum and “exhibition hall preserving the legacy of the site, cleanup activities, and natural environment.” [61] Additionally, the site includes the “Nuclear Waste Adventure Trail,” which consists of a path leading to steps to climb the mound. The mention of nuclear waste is the only major connection to its past. Visitors to the mound are invited to explore, to climb to the peak and oversee their surroundings. Weldon Spring has become a local attraction, and it is now the highest peak in St. Charles County. Unlike the West Lake Landfill from where we had just come, this location invited visitors. Even though it was getting late in the day and the cold was starting to settle in past our coats, we noticed one other person in the park biking along the nature trail that wound its way around the large mound at the park’s center. In this act of bringing environment into the fore, Levin argues that the concept of camouflage of the environment engages “the spatial process by which we engage with and adapt to our material surroundings.” [62] Performance that engages the environment in which it is taking place uses camouflage to “[highlight] the non-human site as itself a performing entity, reminding us that the communication between self and setting is rarely unidirectional.” [63] Here, at Weldon Springs, the mound became the central character of the performance. It was quite a hike up a long staircase built into the side of what seemed like an endless mound of boulders. Just when we thought we were at the top, the path kept going to a central area. Ross encouraged us to walk the strange terrain, and we spent some time traversing the boulders, looking out over the edge, before heading to the highest peak. At the top, there was an area with benches and metal plaques describing the location, the history, and the cleanup of the area. There was also a diagram of the mound and details as to how it was constructed, including its dimensions. Again, this park is located within a highly populated, residential area with a local high school visible in the distance, closer than one would hope. Yet, with expanses of trees on all sides interrupted only briefly by buildings, it felt like the mound was secluded in nature. This unnatural place houses such potential danger, and yet we consumed it, temporarily, by being there. Figure 4. The surface of the Weldon Springs mound, April 8, 2018, (Photo by author) Both Shaughnessy and Levin highlight an important distinction in Ross’s performance: Ross does not engage her audience with a traditionally staged and scripted performance in these chosen spaces. On the tour, she evoked the sites of contamination, but still framed her performance as a tour of these locations, which could change based on the day, time, and audience present in creating her community. Thus, it is important to revisit Magelssen’s discussion of tourism when considering Ross’s performance. He observes that immersive tourism experiences “are tapping into the potential energies offered by inviting the audience to step through the fourth wall.” [64] Magelssen’s exploration of tourism and second-person interpretation [65] explores the ways spectators inherently become a part of the performance for the purpose of partaking in an immersive experience outside of their own lived experience. With Ross, however, we did not become a character in her performance through the means of Magelssen’s second-person interpretation. Rather, we became a part of the community built through performance and empowered by a renewed commitment to the environment/community, as we were not, in fact, complete outsiders to begin with. We said goodbye to our guide, and kept the knowledge of our experience at the forefront of our minds during the almost two-hour drive home. For a little more than five hours, a group of strangers gathered for Ross’s performance as she challenged our perception of these sites as they were consumed, and then reified, after human impact had contaminated the land. Through her tour, Ross asked us to engage with parts of our community that are outside of our everyday experiences, to know “the history of these sites in a safe space removed from their threats,” the unassuming danger that sits silently in the open among the housing developments, quiet streets, schools, and strip malls of suburban St. Louis. [66] Ross encouraged us to confront these lands: I think that it is important to repurpose the land because we depend on it and are connected to it. There is a limited amount of land and we can’t just trash it and abandon it … if we abandon these places we don’t feel the consequences, we don’t see that this is a repetitive pattern of behavior that comes from thinking we are separate from the land…so I think reckoning with the disastrous, contaminated, places that we have created is ultimately more beneficial than abandoning them for short term safety. [67] Part of our tour, then, was to confront the historical legacies of place and to see how some of these properties are now being used. Ross’s performance connected her audience to places within our community but that are still distant to many residents. Her performance brought attention to the issue of contaminated sites in the areas west of the city. Ross still hosts tours, advertised on local St. Louis-area Facebook groups, that focus on the landfill, Coldwater Creek, and current cleanup efforts. While she carried a brochure and notes containing historical facts and details on each location, Ross did not have a set script. Thus, the performance can change based on the community members present for the experience, guided by where they are able to go, how long they want to stay, and even the weather. The impact of the tour is lasting, as the sensory experience encourages participants to hold onto the images, smells, and sounds of each of the five sites, allowing Ross to achieve her goal of bringing awareness to the contamination of land in the place she too calls “home.” References [1] Allana Ross. 2017. “West Lake Landfill Facebook Page.” Facebook , March 26, 2017. https://www.facebook.com/groups/508327822519437/. [2] Jan Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 2. [3] Ibid., 2. [4] Ibid., 3. [5] Allana Ross, “Artist Statement—Allana Ross,” Allana Ross, 2017, https://allanaross.com/Statement-1. [6] Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts , 13. [7] Ibid., 5. [8] Richard Schechner, “6 axioms for environmental theatre.” ( The Drama Review: TDR 1968): 41-64.; Richard Schechner, Environmental Theater . (Hal Leonard Corporation, 1994).; Una Chaudhuri, Staging place: The Geography of Modern Drama . (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997).; Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri, eds., Land/scape/theater . (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002).; Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May, eds., Readings in Performance and Ecology . (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).; Stephen Bottoms and Matthew Goulish, eds., Small acts of repair: Performance, ecology and Goat Island . (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013).; Ric Knowles, The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning . (Montreal, CA: ECW Press, 1999). [9] Tim Cresswell, Place: An Introduction , 2nd ed. (Chichester, UK: J. Wiley & Sons, 2015), 39. [10] Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation . (New York, NY: Routledge, 2000), 65. [11] Baz Kershaw, Theatre ecology: Environments and performance events . (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 14. [12] Nicola Shaughnessy, Applying Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre and Affective Practice. (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 114; 102. [13] Ross, “Artist Statement — Allana Ross.” [14] Shaughnessy, Applying Performance , 113. [15] Laura Levin. Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage, and the Art of Blending In. (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 105-6. [16] David A Fennell and Ross Dowling, Ecotourism Policy and Planning , 3rd ed. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003), 1; 4. [17] Scott Magelssen. “Tourist Performance in the Twenty-first Century.” In Enacting History , edited by Scott Magelssen and Rhona Justice-Malloy. (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2011), 174.; Scott Magelssen. Living History Museums: Undoing History through Performance . (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007). [18] Magelssen, “Tourist Performance,” 177. [19] Robert Bullard, ed, Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots . (Boston MA: South End Press, 1993).; Steven Lerner, Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure . (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). [20] Phaedra Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice. (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 5. [21] William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England . (New York, NY: Hill & Wang, 2003). [22] Ross, “Artist Statement — Allana Ross.” [23] Ibid. [24] Allana Ross, Interview of Allana Ross of Toxic Mound Tours, interview by author, May 17, 2018. [25] U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “TIMES BEACH Site Profile,” EPA’s Superfund Site Information for TIMES BEACH, n.d., https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.cleanup&id=0701237. [26] OLEM US EPA, “Superfund: CERCLA Overview,” Overviews and Factsheets, US EPA, 9 September 2015, https://www.epa.gov/superfund/superfund-cercla-overview. [27] Jennifer Sieg, “General Information: Down the ‘Mother Road’ Route 66 State Park,” Text, 6 February 2011, https://mostateparks.com/page/54997/general-information. [28] Thomas Voltaggio and John Adams, “Superfund: A Half-Century of Progress” (EPA Alumni Association, 1 March 2016), 6, https://www.epaalumni.org/hcp/superfund.pdf. [29] Levin. Performing Ground , 105-6. [30] Ross, “Artist Statement — Allana Ross.” [31] Fleishman-Hillard, Inc., “Fuel for the Atomic Age: Completion Report on St Louis- Area Uranium Operations, 1942-1967,” 30 September 1967, Environmental Archives, http://environmentalarchives.com/download/1967-09-30-mallinckrodt-fuel-atomic-age-report-st-louis-area-uranium-processing-operations/. [32] Seantel Anais and Kevin Walby, “Secrecy, Publicity, and the Bomb: Nuclear Publics and Objects of the Nevada Test Site, 1951-1992,” Cultural Studies 30, no. 6 (2016): 949–68. [33] Cheryl Wittenauer, “Woman Crusades for Ailing Nuclear Workers, Families,” Los Angeles Times , 29 February 2004, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-feb-29-adna-daughter29-story.html. [34] U.S Atomic Energy Commission, “1959-04-11 – AEC – Manhattan Project – History of the St Louis Airport Site” (U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 11 April 1959), Environmental Archives, http://environmentalarchives.com/download/1959-04-11-aec-manhattan-project-history-of-the-st-louis-airport-site/. [35] Ibid. [36] Ray Hartmann, “The Poisoned Children of Coldwater Creek Finally Get a Break,” St. Louis Magazine , 3 August 2018, https://www.stlmag.com/api/content/3f24000c-975f-11e8-b5a5-12408cbff2b0/. [37] Robert Alvarez, “West Lake Story: An Underground Fire, Radioactive Waste, and Governmental Failure,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 11 February 2016, http://thebulletin.org/west-lake-story-underground-fire-radioactive-waste-and-governmental-failure9160.; Keith Schneider, “Mountain of Nuclear Waste Splits St. Louis and Suburbs,” New York Times , 24 March 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/24/us/mountain-of-nuclear-waste-splits-st-louis-and-suburbs-888.html?pagewanted=all. [38] James Allen, “1974-05-16-AEC- Investigation of Cotter Corporation Illegal Dumping at Latty Avenue,” 17 May 1974, Environmental Archives, http://environmentalarchives.com/download/1974-05-16-aec-investigation-of-cotter-corporation-illegal-dumping-at-latty-avenue/.; Mary Freivogel, “Confusion Over Dumping of Radioactive Waste in County,” St Louis Post Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), 30 May 1976; Mary Freivogel, “Radioactive Materials Checks Called Faulty,” St Louis Post Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), 1 June 1976. [39] U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, “FUSRAP,” n.d., 1, https://www.usace.army.mil/Missions/Environmental/FUSRAP/ [40] U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, “St. Louis District > Missions > Centers of Expertise > Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program,” FUSRAP, n.d., https://www.mvs.usace.army.mil/Missions/Centers-of-Expertise/Formerly-Utilized-Sites-Remedial-Action-Program/. [41] Karl Brooks, “EPA Is Working toward a Remedy at West Lake Landfill,” Stltoday.Com , 20 February 2014, http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/epa-is-working-toward-a-remedy-at-west-lake-landfill/article_ff60744d-2c35-5439-b857-111705da97d5.html. [42] Cresswell, Place, 39. [43] Ibid. [44] Ibid. [45] Shaughnessy, Applying Performance , 113. [46] Carolyn Tuft, “Carrollton Was Once a Quiet Subdivision but Now It’s a Noisy Community in Limbo,” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), 7 July 1995. [47] Shaughnessy, Applying Performance , 113. [48] Ibid. [49] Véronique LaCapra, “There’s A Burning Problem at The Bridgeton Landfill – It Stinks but Is It Unsafe?,” St. Louis Public Radio, 29 March 2013, http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/theres-burning-problem-bridgeton-landfill-it-stinks-it-unsafe. [50] Carolyn Bowers, Louis Rose, and Theresa Tighe, “A Miracle with A Price,” St Louis Post Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), 12 February 1989. [51] Inc. Republic Services, “Bridgeton Landfill Timeline,” Website, 2014, http://www.bridgetonlandfill.com/bridgeton-landfill-timeline. [52] Brooks, “EPA Is Working toward a Remedy at West Lake Landfill.”; Veronique LaCapra, “Confused about the Bridgeton and West Lake Landfills? Here’s What You Should Know,” St. Louis Public Radio , 2 March 2014, http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/confused-about-bridgeton-and-west-lake-landfills-heres-what-you-should-know. [53] Jeffrey Tomich, “Hot Spot and Fumes Prompt Concern at Bridgeton Landfill,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), 30 October 2012. [54] Andrew Hurley, “From Factory Town to Metropolitan Junkyard: Postindustrial Transitions on the Urban Periphery,” Environmental History 21, (2016): 3–29. [55] Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality , 3rd ed. (Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 2000).; Melissa Checker, Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2005). [56] Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism, 5. [57] Levin, Performing Ground, 68. [58] Fleishman-Hillard, Inc., “Fuel for the Atomic Age: Completion Report on St Louis- Area Uranium Operations, 1942-1967.” [59] Susan Davis and Puro, Steven, “Patterns of Intergovernmental Relations in Environmental Cleanup at Federal Facilities,” In Publius 29, no. 4 (1999), 33–53. [60] Doug Kirby, Ken Smith, and Mike Wilkins, “Nuclear Waste Adventure Trail, Weldon Spring, Missouri,” Roadside America, 1, accessed 25 October 2019, https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/14614. [61] DOE – Office of Legacy Management, “Weldon Spring Site Interpretive Center and Educational Opportunities,” Energy.gov, August 2019, 1, https://www.lm.doe.gov/Weldon/Interpretive_Center/. [62] Levin, Performing Ground, 97. [63] Ibid. [64] Magelssen. “Tourist Performance,” 174. [65] Ibid., 175. [66] Ross, “Artist Statement — Allana Ross.” [67] Ross, Interview of Allana Ross of Toxic Mound Tours. Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography Introduction: Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship “La conjura de Xinum” and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the “Toxic Mound Tours” Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Philip Wiles 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 Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Philip Wiles By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF APPLIED IMPROVISATION: LEADING, COLLABORATING, AND CREATING BEYOND THE THEATRE. Edited by Theresa Robbins Dudeck and Caitlin McClure. London: Methuen Drama, 2018; Pp. 304. More than forty years since Keith Johnstone published Impro and more than sixty years after Viola Spolin’s seminal Improvisation for the Theater , there remains a paucity of literature concerned with either “impro” or “improv.” In this context, the scholarly rigor in Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre , a collection of essays by practitioners/facilitators as edited by Theresa Robbins Dudeck and Caitlin McClure, is refreshing. “Applied Improvisation,” here, refers to the use of the theories, techniques, and teachings of Spolin and Johnstone (and quite a bit of Augusto Boal) as applied outside of traditional theatrical performance contexts — often with the goal of training intrapersonal skills. While it might commonly be considered a subcategory of the broader “applied theatre,” an explicitly stated goal of this collection “is to establish AI as a field of study worthy of independent investigation” (3). While the viability of “AI” as an acronym for something other than Artificial Intelligence may be questionable in a post-ChatGPT world, the book does provide a foundation for further inquiries and can serve as a resource for practitioners and educators. As in the practice of improvisation, this collection emerges from the disparate contributions of a diverse set of practitioners and scholars. The book begins with a foreword by improvisers Phelim McDermott and Lee Simpson, and an introduction by editors Dudeck and McClure that gives a brief history of the theory and practice of improvisation. Dudeck returns in the concluding chapter, moderating a conversation between comedian Neil Mullarkey and creativity and learning expert Keith Sawyer. The body of the book consists of autoethnographic essays; each chapter functions essentially as a postmortem of an applied improvisation project reflecting on successes, limitations and discoveries. Except for the introduction and conclusion, every chapter ends with a “workbook” detailing instructions for between one to three of the exercises referenced in that chapter. Application remains the editors’ central concern, and thus the book is tailored for practice in the field. The collection is divided into four parts that highlight the diversity of this field. The first, “Bringing Brands Back to Life,” consists of two essays describing how improvisation techniques were used to develop intrapersonal skills amongst service workers at a Pacific Northwest fast food chain, and to enliven market research in Karachi, Pakistan. Part 2, “Resilience and Connections,” looks at applications of improvisation in more humanitarian contexts: training resilience amongst Baltimorean oncology nurses, juvenile refugees in San Antonio, and in the wake of a typhoon in the Philippines. Part 3, “Leadership Development,” returns to a corporate environment with contributions describing how improvisation was used to modify the management culture at Tiffany & Co., coach executives in leadership skills in Hong Kong, and shake-up the organization of a real estate agency in Portland, OR. Part 4 “Higher Education,” includes chapters detailing the use of applied improvisation within the academy, including to facilitate conflict resolution at Portland State University, social justice initiatives at the Catholic University of America and communication with non-academics at Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis and the Indiana University School of Medicine. The contributors to the collection are all knowledgeable about and committed to the theory and practice of applied improvisation. However, readers should be forewarned that many of the authors have continuing relationships with their corporate clients and sometime their prose can slip into what is essentially ad-copy. “Charles Lewis Tiffany would have been amazed that 174 years after founding his stationery and small goods store in New York City, the name Tiffany & Co. would still be synonymous with quality, craftsmanship, and extravagance…” (141). That passage from Caitlin McClure’s “Tiffany & Co. Says Yes, And,” comes from one of the stronger contributions to the collection, despite a handful of sentences that read like advertisements. In her case study, McClure details how she used techniques and exercises developed by Johnstone as part of a broader effort to shift Tiffany’s management team from a theory of an “organizational culture” to an “organizational climate .” While such a distinction might appear inane, McClure ably identifies how this shift in management theory mirrors the practice of improvisation and illustrates how her workshops helped to facilitate a meaningful shift in behavior at the company. It is a highlight of the collection. Both McClure and Dudeck are heavily influenced by Johnstone—Dudeck has written a biography of Johnstone and is his literary executor—but other contributors draw on the work of Spolin, Boal and other improvisation theorists, often mixing and matching across these different and distinct traditions of improvisation. As scholarship, the book misses an opportunity to flesh out these separate genealogies and explicate how discrete strains of improvisation practice circulate and intertwine in contemporary workshops. Instead Dudeck and McClure flatten history and blur the distinctions between Spolin, Johnstone and Boal. They argue that the terms “impro” (the title of Johnstone’s book) and “improv” (closely associated with Chicago theatres like The Second City) are interchangeable (10). Neither their reasoning, nor the Facebook survey they marshal to support their claim is convincing. It is disappointing that a collection that aims to establish a new field of study would inadvertently erase complexity from that same field. Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre will interest practitioners of applied improvisation who are looking to see the cultural, practical and global range of the field as well as educators who want to demonstrate the uses of improvisation beyond theatre. The contributing essays are all written in a readable style and function as essays independent of the collection; this makes the volume easily digestible by undergraduate students. The exercises at the end of every chapter are thoroughly explained and should be easy to reproduce in studio classrooms. For these reasons and more, this volume very well may establish itself as a mainstay on the shelves of improvisation instructors. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre. Edited by Theresa Robbins Dudeck and Caitlin McClure. London: Methuen Drama, 2018. Footnotes About The Author(s) Philip Wiles is a scholar/actor/improviser from Houston, Texas who comes to the CUNY Graduate Center by way of Oklahoma and Los Angeles. In addition to his scholarly pursuits, he maintains his improv practice in the various improv comedy theatres sprinkled through the city. He holds a BFA in Drama from the University of Oklahoma, and an MA in Performance Studies from NYU. 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! 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