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JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 37 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 2 Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction David Bisaha and Pria Ruth Williams EDITORIAL Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 Nic Barilar ARTICLE The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Donia Mounsef ARTICLE Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Pria Ruth Williams, Claire Syler, Amy Hughes, Karen Jean Martinson, David Bisaha ARTICLE Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship Rowan Jalso ARTICLE How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK Patrizia Paolini ARTICLE The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Benjamin Gillespie QUEER VOICES Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Benjamin Gillespie QUEER VOICES Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Megan Stahl BOOK REVIEW Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Samantha Briggs BOOK REVIEW Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Erika Guay BOOK REVIEW Fauci and Kramer Janet Werther PERFORMANCE REVIEW Our Town I. B. Hopkins PERFORMANCE REVIEW Frankenstein Melissa Sturges PERFORMANCE REVIEW Issue 1 Editorial Introduction Bess Rowen and Benjamin Gillespie EDITORIAL A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Catherine Heiner ARTICLE Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov Alisa Zhulina ARTICLE “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Thomas Keith ARTICLE Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” Allan Johnson ARTICLE “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein James F. Wilson QUEER VOICES Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames Bess Rowen QUEER VOICES The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Jane Barnette BOOK REVIEW Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Nicholas Orvis BOOK REVIEW Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Zach Dailey BOOK REVIEW Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Sebastián Eddowes-Vargas BOOK REVIEW Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. Kelly I. Aliano BOOK REVIEW New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 Stuart J. Hecht, (former) Editor in Chief, New England Theatre Journal NEW ENGLAND THEATRE JOURNAL New England Theatre in Review Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, (former) Editor, New England Theatre in Review NEW ENGLAND THEATRE REVIEW American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Stephen Kuehler Harvard University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 Steven Otfinoski Fairfield University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Tom Grady. Bristol Community College SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Paul E. Fallon. Cambridge, Massachusetts SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 Jan Mason Western Connecticut State University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Paul E. Fallon Cambridge, Massachusetts SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Karl G. Ruling Milford, Connecticut SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Megan Grumbling University of New England, Southern Maine Community College SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Steven Ofinoski Fairfield University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Tom Grady Bristol Community College SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Angela Sweigart-Gallagher St. Lawrence University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, emerita Fairfield University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 14 Spring 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat By Sami Ismat Published: May 1, 2023 Download Article as PDF Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Review: Mother Courage adapted and directed by Alison Shan Price Review of Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt written by Sonali Pahwa Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber “Indigenous Avant-Gardes”: The Shiraz Arts Festival and Ritual Performance Theory in 1970s Iran Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Review: Playwright Showcase, New Arab American Theater Works Two Giants of Egyptian Theatre: Conversations with Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny and Lenin El-Ramly Crossing Borders: A Theatre Practitioner’s Odyssey, An Interview with Hassan El Geretly On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh Performance Review: A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED Performance Review: BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL Performance Review: HOOTA. By Amer Hlehel Performance Review: LITTLE SYRIA Book Review: ACTING EGYPTIAN Book Review: MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY Previous Next Attribution:

Rachel Merrill Moss and Gary Alan Fine Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging Rachel Merrill Moss and Gary Alan Fine By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF The night before Independence Day in 1933, something unprecedented occurred. [1] As part of Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition, “Jewish Day” was celebrated, culminating in a record-breaking performance that garnered an audience of between 125,000 and 150,000 spectators crammed into Chicago’s Soldier Field, causing massive traffic jams before and after. [2] While some of Chicago’s other immigrant ethnicities were represented as part of the Expo, Jewish Day and its show-stopping finale were the most notable ethnically-oriented events of the entire fair. So impactful was the performance, The Romance of a People , that not only did it receive twelve columns of coverage in the Chicago Tribune the following day, but an encore performance was sponsored by the Tribune three nights after the initial performance. Ultimately a bold Zionist affair, raising money for creating the would-be Jewish refuge of Palestine, The Romance of a People combined spectacle and politics in a remarkably successful performance as Hitler was coming into power. A decade later, in the midst of World War II, another Jewish pageant of massive scale graced the city, but after ten years of atrocities, the motives and emotions were much different. Well into wartime, 1943 brought the New York-originated pageant, We Will Never Die , to Chicago as part of a nationwide tour. While still promoting the increasingly insistent need for a government-sanctioned nationhood (the demand which transformed Palestine into Israel five years after the Chicago performance), the pageant, as evidenced by its title, spoke to the threat to Jewish life and identity by the Nazis. Even more than in The Romance of a People, We Will Never Die carried the fear of genocide. A somber tone and a tocsin of impending death replaced the patriotic and inclusive hunger for recognition evident in The Romance of a People . Another decade later, as series of smaller individual performances were organized as part of a nationwide Jewish-American celebration: the American Jewish Tercentenary. Commemorating three hundred years of Jewish presence in America, the year-long event was held from 1954 through 1955, and boasted “forums, exhibitions, pageants, musical festivals, and public dinners organized by local committees in at least four hundred cities and towns.” [3] While these three decades of pageants bore similarities in theme and in production elements, their execution and tone differ drastically, speaking to the radically different times in American history for Jews and America’s relationship to the Jews. In our examination of these pageants, we understand them to be historically contingent, site-specific, and temporally-bounded events. Each of these Jewish-American pageants relied on its historical specificity and locale, while these elements also contributed to their lack of performance longevity. But it is in their nuanced, culturally-reflective status that we find these pageants compelling—they are historical artifacts that didactically perform their own contextually-contingent ideologies. Furthermore, as we focus on each of the three decades of pageants in the paper that follows, we contend with the ways in which their varying degrees of site-specificity are also intricately bound within a broader American network, reflective of both Jewish American microcosms and the macro-national level. Pageants and Politics We use twentieth-century Jewish pageants to argue that the pageant form of theatre is an ideal forum by which to make claims about citizenship and political engagement. While these pageants differ from traditional theatre in terms of their fluid scripting, grand scale, and limited potential for extended performance runs, they nonetheless resemble normative theatre in that they are specific, performed events with beginnings and endpoints, they feature performers enacting a narrative upon a stage, and they rely heavily on the audience-performance dynamic that is live theatre’s hallmark. That said, however, by virtue of the extent of its stagecraft, audience, and ambition within the public sphere, the pageant form, as distinct from the routinely-performed play, expresses the perspective of a segment of the population. This was particularly important from the end of the Civil War to the 1960s, a period of extensive immigration, during which the issue of accepting and integrating ethnic immigrants was salient and “patriotic pageants became a popular form for promoting the assimilation of the immigrant into American society.” [4] Pageants reached their apogee in the first half of the twentieth century, playing off the desire to solidify an American tradition, but this was necessary precisely because of the migrants who had to demonstrate that, despite diverse customs, religions, and beliefs, they belonged to—and were fervently patriotic towards—the American nation. Explicating this sentiment, albeit baldly, Esther Willard Bates describes this integration in her pageantry how-to guide, The Art of Producing Pageants from 1925: “pageantry is more than an end; it is also a means. . . . It teaches our late-comers the story of the nation in an imaginative manner, and when they act [as] our fore-fathers and speak their very words, they become part-owners in our traditions.” [5] The ethnic pageant, and in this case the Jewish-American pageant, was designed to meet this need but was also situated in light of the political needs of the community, as defined by organizations with the resources and authority to create extensive performances, requiring personnel, locations, and the activation of audiences. Pageants are not merely a means of displaying nationalism and tradition but also an occasion on which community resources are expended to set a political agenda. America’s longstanding tradition of using spectacle and pageantry for the formation and assertion of “Americanness” can be traced back to the earliest years of the American republic. Colorful, boisterous, and clear in message, pageants of early American history fostered community among America’s ethnic, religious, and social groups, simultaneously unifying them under a single banner of American identity and mobilizing as a vehicle for hybrid American-ethnic identity formation. S. E. Wilmer traces this long history of America’s theatricalized nationalism in Theatre, Society and the Nation . “Particularly in times of national crisis,” he states, “the theatre has served as a political and ideological tool to help reconfigure the [American] nation,” defining or challenging “national values and the notion of the nation,” and “reformulating concepts of national identity” that even predate Germany’s nationalistic theatrical Romanticism. [6] While the American-Jewish relationship to pageantry reflects these community—and nation-building—protocols, by the twentieth century pageants changed in their focus. Pageants became strategic attempts at persuasion, both within the community and beyond. American perceptions of Jews, both American and international, have also altered greatly over the course of the twentieth century, and the changing approaches to Jewish-American pageantry are as much a reflection of this shift in perception as of the changing relationship of American Jews to both America and assimilation. In American Historical Pageantry , David Glassberg describes the legacy of early American pageantry, its heyday in the first decades of the twentieth century, and its ultimate decline after the late-1920s. In its prime, historical pageantry played a major role in American celebrations and festivals, showcasing “the belief that history could be made into a dramatic public ritual through which the residents of a town, by acting out the right version of their past, could bring about some kind of future social and political transformation.” [7] Reiterating both American pride and the possibilities of growth of the town, neighborhood, or ethnic association, these productions presented an idealized vision of past and future through “the use of historical imagery to discover or invent an appropriate tradition in support of reform.” [8] In addition to Glassberg’s and Wilmer’s book-length studies on historical American pageantry, from early to mid-century American works, Richard M. Fried’s The Russians Are Coming! The Russians are Coming!: Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America examines national patriotic activity and efforts executed through theatrical pageantry and ritual, implemented through federal-level initiatives, as a means of reasserting national identity during troubling political times, particularly focusing in on Cold War-era “patriotic and civic pageantry.” [9] While the book does not focus closely in on them, Fried also acknowledges the plethora of more localized, group-specific pageant performance traditions from the turn-of-the-century onwards. Additionally, a number of articles focus specifically on minority-driven American political pageants, including those by Stephen J. Whitfield, Robert Skloot, and Lauren Love, that individually explore two of the pageants discussed within this article, examining the pageants’ “civic purpose” and ability to activate Jewish solidarity. [10] Likewise, in “Performing the Polish-American Patriot,” Megan E. Geigner similarly examines theatrical pageant performances that serve to reiterate hyphenated other-American identity as a means of galvanizing patriotic kinship. [11] In this same vein, Martha S. LoMonaco’s work on nineteenth-century Mormon pageants looks at historical pageantry as creating a foothold in American historical narrative through performance. [12] Taken together, recent scholarship displays a clear interest – albeit a diffuse one – in the performance practices of minority groups in America who used pageantry as a means of articulating their hyphenated American identity. While this article seeks to add to this body of literature, our goal is also to further that discussion by including the ways in which mid-century Jewish-American pageants built upon such an American tradition, while, conversely, discussing how we can use these past pageants as a way to explore the turns in performance practices in moments where Jewish and American-Jewish identity are in jeopardy. Our approach offers a macro view of how pageants were utilized as a means of identity production and group unification spanning three decades. Despite the overall decline in popularity of the pageant form across America, the mid-century Jewish pageants we discuss display a continuation of those same ideologies fostered by the American pageant tradition, but with particular, persuasive goals sensitive to the situation of American and global Jewry. While small towns no longer emphasized the performance of patriotism, this became increasingly important for urban Jews. For the Jewish community, the pageant both energized the community and spoke to the wider American public through the media representations of the large gatherings. Though the American pageant form by this point had morphed into the “folk play, the restored museum village, or the annual historical festival . . . depict[ing] the past as a separate world from the present,” Jewish American pageants before, during, and after the Second World War successfully bridged the gap between the ethnic enclave and the Christian public. [13] Employing familiar techniques and tropes that were long central to American civil religion, [14] these pageants continued the American pageantry legacy while utilizing the theatrical form as a successful way to assert an overtly didactic message: Jews are a unique and worthy people, they lack a homeland ( Romance of a People ), they are threatened with destruction from un-American enemies ( We Will Never Die ), and they share core American values while contributing to national history (the Tercentennial pageants). Each moment of pageantry had its own agenda, but the overall message—the insistence that Jews were worthy and patriotic Americans—remained throughout. By performing these Jewish narratives within but not eclipsed by an American narrative, these pageants performed Jewish difference, thereby drawing attention to specifically Jewish issues before Jewish and broader audiences. Furthermore, these pageants also represent a unique moment in the American pageantry legacy, as they also interpolate its historical tradition of ethnic subsumption into a homogenous (Anglo-)American, nationalist narrative. These three mid-twentieth-century pageants allow Jews to represent themselves (i.e. prominent Jews in American history) while still arguing for their Americanness and adopting a stance that hybridizes the American aesthetic and American nationalism. Additionally, we examine the ways in which these Jewish-American pageants are responsive to their contemporary moment in explicit and didactic ways that limit their potential for longevity but that offer themselves up to historians as illuminating points of reference into their cultural and political contexts. We examine each of these pageants, describing their content and how they situated the Jewish community in light of contemporary issues that a large, well-attended performance could address. 1933: The Romance of a People The Romance of a People was a three-hour pageant of epic proportions: a program “which symbolize[d] four thousand years of colorful history—history high in its drama, packed with pathos, terrible in tragedies, glorious in its victories.” [15] The pageant featured 3,500 cast members, including singers and dancers reminiscent of a Greek Chorus on a massive scale, nearly all of whom were local residents of Chicago and members of the Jewish community. [16] To prevent chaos and cacophony from the humongous cast, director Isaac Van Grove opted to amplify mechanically the speeches and songs of the cast from a room hidden beneath the stage. Covered in a Chicago Daily Tribune article that ran the day after the initial performance, columnist Virginia Gardner’s discussion of the methods utilized by Van Grove for the production, and the fact that it merited newspaper coverage at all, provides evidence of its remarkable execution. “The control room and amplifying system made possible what Van Grove described as ‘the effect of an intimate theater two blocks long.’” [17] The marriage of artistry and technology not only assisted in executing the mass theatre in which Van Grove openly believed, but also aligned with the Century of Progress mission to promote technology unimaginable in the previous hundred years. [18] Van Grove is credited for pioneering amplified sound for a theatrical production, as he did in The Romance of a People . [19] Across all press reports and published material about The Romance of a People , it is evident that the public reception was strong. The word “colorful” appears a dozen times throughout the pageant’s press coverage, as do accolades about the audiences’ upturned faces and positive Jewish attitudes and self-opinion, such as in David and Goliath allegories. [20] The positive perception of the extravagance at Soldier Field is clear but seems largely to pertain to the material only aesthetically. While the production aimed to educate for the purposes of the Zionist cause, Van Grove and his producers spared no expense to generate entertainment and to immerse the audience in the spectacle. Six months earlier in December 1932, Chicago audiences had an early taste when a massive Chanukah holiday pageant, also directed by Van Grove (and similarly produced by Meyer Weisgal), was staged at the Chicago Stadium, entitled “Israel Reborn.” [21] Though the cast size and audience numbers were more than doubled for The Romance of a People , the previous Jewish “theatrical spectacle” was heralded as a performance that “one sees once in a generation.” [22] Van Grove knew going into the colossal Soldier Field production what had worked so triumphantly only half a year prior for a similar Chicago audience. Van Grove was a staunch believer in the opportunity to create theatrical impact that “mass spectacle” afforded. [23] To Van Grove, the possibilities for emotional gravitas were substantially higher when utilizing pageantry and grand-scale spectacle, rather than realism that he considered “passé.” [24] It was the power of thousands of bodies in coordinated movement that Van Grove believed could elicit the vital response The Romance of a People needed. While the pageant aimed to garner support and attention for the Zionist cause, it also allowed an emotional appeal to non-Jewish audience members. The pageant strove to engage Jews and Christians alike, so much so that it was commented on in nearly all reviews of the pageant production. Perhaps the Chicago Daily News reporter, S. J. Duncan-Clark, put it most poignantly in his pageant review that ran 5 July 1933, highlighting the community forged through pageantry: There was laughter and weeping among the thronging spectators for the floodtide of emotion had been released. Christians and Jews grasped hands with a new sense of spiritual kinship. There were thousands of Christians present. All Christian creeds had joined in approving and promoting the magnificent project of their Jewish neighbors.[25] While Duncan-Clark recognizes the pageant’s message of Jewish distinctiveness in order to highlight the specific plight of its people, he rightly points to the pageant’s goal of community orientation—attempting to bring others into the fight for Jewish lives abroad. Regardless of, or perhaps due to, the diversity of the audience, the pageant itself was both a dramatic and edifying affair, chronicling notable events in Jewish history. The pageant depicted “forty centuries of religion” in the form of six episodes with two interludes, starting with a dramatization of the religion’s formation. [26] A 27-foot idol of the god Moloch surrounded by 500 slaves and worshippers set the scene for Judaism’s rejection of the false god, thereby depicting “the birth of true religious concepts.” [27] Furthermore, this attempt at monotheistic universality is mentioned in the pageant’s program “Greeting and Tribute” penned by producer and script-writer Meyer Weisgal. Hailing the presumed diversity of the crowd, Weisgal declaimed, “Among you are representatives of all the races and creeds which are incorporated in the structure of the American Republic. The composition of this assembly bears equal witness, therefore, to the spirit of fellowship and mutual respect among diversities of faith and race.” [28] While his program greeting closes with a reminder of the pageant’s Zionist cause, Weisgal’s preamble anticipates what would later be the American Jewish Tercentenary’s purpose: realigning Jewishness within an American historical context and within a multiethnic community. The pageant consisted of a prologue, six episodes, and two “interludes” (performed transitions) that outlined widely-known moments from “biblical and historical records,” from ancient to present times. [29] Beginning with “The Creation,” a scene depicted the first lines of the Torah (the Jewish Bible) and the creation of humanity, using chaotic lights and sound to represent “the morning of Creation, the freshness of the world as it came from the hand of the divine Artificer.” [30] This scene was followed by the aforementioned birth of Judaism and Abraham’s covenant with God after denouncing the impending sacrifice to a false god, the escape from slavery in Egypt, the building of the first temple and its subsequent destruction, exiles wandering in search of a new homeland, and finally, deliverance to a new Israel. Part of the pageant’s power comes not from the scenes depicted, but rather the sheer scale of the production itself. The thousands of bodies onstage before gigantic scenery, depicting, at turns, false idols, the temple in Jerusalem, and finally the future homeland, constituted a remarkable spectacle. The use of amplified sound enabled giant choreographed movement onstage to take place without worry about carrying noise, while the stereophonic voice-acting of forty or so actors depicting The Voice of God, Abraham, and other significant figures were hidden beneath the stage, merging media and performance technologies to enable unimpeded spectacle. The production set for the pageant was claimed to be “unquestionably the most elaborate stage ever built” at Soldier Field. [31] A “mammoth” four level, 200-foot long, 150-foot wide set filled much of the stadium. “Fashioned to look like stone, the set, on the one hand, suggested the use of ancient materials, substantial enough to endure for thousands of years into the future. On the other hand, solid but blank, this place’s history was waiting to be inscribed.” [32] The tiered stage accommodated a chorus of 1,500 and an orchestra on a single level, with ample room left for the action of the performance, [33] with the temple at stage center, adorned with a Star of David. [34] Advanced coverage in the Chicago Daily Tribune raved of the pageant’s precedent-breaking visual spectacle, including embedded floor lighting, four 35-foot lighting towers, and a giant glass “curtain” (35 feet long by 25 feet high) onto which colorful light effects would be projected. [35] These lights were used with great dramatic effect for the final stage picture: a single light blazed from darkness to illuminate the temple’s star, as the sung prayer “Shema Yisrael/Hear, O Israel” brought the pageant to a close. [36] The production’s playbill also reflected the high level of community interest and involvement. Featuring advertisements and well-wishes from organizations and businesses citywide (both Jewish and secular), the program itself enacted a coherent community voice vouching support of the production, albeit a commercially motivated one. [37] The program serves as a material testament to the city’s vested interest in the Jewish community’s patronage. The range of pageant-specific advertisements include a message in handwritten Yiddish from Sophie Tucker of The 225 Club, a note to the “Jews of Chicago” from D. L. Toffenetti of the Triangle Restaurants franchise, and an ad from Flashtric Sign Works, creators of “One of the Most Outstanding Features of Jewish Day,” the illuminated Star of David used in the production. [38] The playbill, therefore, performed the same integrated community mentality that the pageant itself asserted and reflected a desire for its success from community supporters. In his history of Soldier Field, Liam T. A. Ford notes that “rather than promoting assimilation into America’s melting pot, [ The Romance of a People ] helped make pride in being Jewish more acceptable to non-Jewish Chicagoans and at the same time, helped define what being Jewish would mean for generations of American Jews.” [39] Ford’s assertion as to the pageant’s reverberating impact on public performances of Jewishness in America in the generations to come certainly rings true when considering the next generation’s overlapping uses of spectacles for asserting Jewish-American acceptance. That said, the pageants in the decades that follow The Romance of a People differ in important ways, reflecting their altered political and cultural circumstances. 1943: We Will Never Die World War II created a new context for Jewish-American pageantry. A decade after The Romance of a People , the fate of European Jews was desperate, survival in the balance, while at the same time the might of the American military was arrayed against their tormentors. Though, perhaps, saving Jews was not a prime motivator of American military involvement, the vicious anti-Semitism of the Nazis was used to justify the war effort, leading to sympathy for Jews and a rejection of the more overt forms of prejudice in the United States.' The 1943 pageant, We Will Never Die , was produced at a moment in which wartime patriotism was linked to a hatred of anti-Semitism, and the pageant built on this connection. We Will Never Die premiered at New York’s Madison Square Garden, emphasizing that preserving Jewish culture and community was consistent with American values, and it featured a laundry list of theatre-celebrity involvement, including direction by Moss Hart, script by Ben Hecht, music by Kurt Weil, and was produced by Billy Rose. As their titles suggest, the decade between Romance of a People and We Will Never Die dramatically altered the substance of these theatrical narratives. While both pageants featured distinctly Jewish narratives, The Romance of a People represented hope and galvanization, whereas 1943’s We Will Never Die , facing the grim realities of Nazi crimes, presented a desperate plea for Jewish safety and mobilization to assure it. Both pageants were attended by both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences, [40] and each addressed the future of Jewish inclusion and preservation. While We Will Never Die was more didactic, both pageants played off ethnic distinctiveness—Jews as a special category of “Americans”—in gaining the attention of an audience that accepted the legitimacy of that difference. Perhaps the pageants had limited effects in changing American policy, but in performance, they made the case that Jewish interests were American interests. We Will Never Die , performed on 9 May 1943 at the Chicago Stadium, proffered similar themes as The Romance of a People , but with darker, more somber tones. The pageant was a “memorial to the 2,000,000 Jews” that the producers stated had already been murdered in Europe, and was penned by acclaimed Jewish-American playwright and screenwriter, Ben Hecht. [41] We Will Never Die used vastly disparate tactics from The Romance of a People , and was credited as the first wide-scale dramatic presentation of the destruction of the Jews in Europe. [42] Contrary to the optimism of the 1933 pageant, We Will Never Die threw violent, gory details at audiences, hoping to make viewers incensed at the slaughter, rather than to convince the crowds of the goodliness and godliness of the Jewish people. We Will Never Die featured a cast of 1,000 and garnered a Chicago audience between 15,000 to 20,000. [43] It was treated as a critical step in advancing the cause of the Jewish people. The Chicago Daily Tribune titled their review, “Pageant Stirs 15,000 to Vow: Jew Must Live.” [44] Using high praise, the Tribune reviewer, Edward Barry, wrote, From a majestic stage flanked by representations of the tablets of the law and the star of David, 1,000 American Jews last night delivered a plea to an audience of 15,000, and thru these 15,000 to the world, to heed the plight of the Jews of Europe before the last remnants of the race there are sacrificed to the Nazi fury.[45] In contrast to the 1933 review by James O’Donnell Bennett, who reviewed The Romance of a People , Barry does not differentiate the Jews and gentiles in the audience, perhaps indicating the unifying, humanist appeal of the material. Unlike the historical epic of The Romance of a People , We Will Never Die opted for relative naturalism in the script. Though the production set consisted of “two towering Tablets containing the Ten Commandments loom[ing] at the back of the stage,” much of the dialogue is realistic and personable, albeit didactic, and often gruesomely so. [46] The show begins with the Kol Nidre chant from Yom Kippur, [47] a shofar is blown, and a rabbi emerges from between the two tablets to introduce and honor the plight of “the two million who have been killed in Europe.” [48] The rabbi gives the stage over to two narrators who begin a series of short episodes, each addressing the Jewish plight. The first of four episodes begins with a “roll call” of important Jewish contributors to American and global life—somewhat foreshadowing the Tercentenary narratives—including a disparate collection of individuals, such as Luis Ponce de Leon, Benjamin Disraeli, Marcel Proust, and Samuel Gompers. The second episode chronicles one Jewish-American soldier’s wartime experience and urgent telegraph home on the brink of his death during American defeat in the Philippines. Episode Three chronicles the struggle and uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, [49] and the pageant closes with an episode entitled, “Remember Us,” consisting of the dead announcing their gruesome ends at the hands of the Nazis, while beseeching the audience not to forget them. Closing with two narrators urging American involvement in the Jewish plight, the pageant used the rhetoric of the American ethic: We [Americans] have brave soldiers who are fighting to victory. But the massacre of the unarmed civilians is beyond the reach of their guns. The desert and the Mediterranean are the battle front and they are honorably engaged on it. The massacre in Europe is our battle front—and we are not honorably engaged on it.[50] Then, making a greater, global claim, a second narrator decries, “the crime of Europe calls for the mobilization of every shred of righteousness and spiritual power left in the world.” [51] While We Will Never Die offered a persuasive cry for a cohesive front and fight against the Axis and Nazism in order to rescue the remaining European Jewry, support from American Jewish organizations was spotty. Though Ben Hecht, the pageant’s scriptwriter, presented a work-in-progress to garner financial support from the Jewish community, “with representatives of nearly three-dozen Jewish organizations,” the groups “could not agree to work together in support of the forthcoming pageant. Even when Hecht . . . offered to withdraw the formal endorsement of the controversial Committee for a Jewish Army and to work only behind the scenes, the others declined to sponsor We Will Never Die .” [52] Furthermore, the pageant attempted not only “[t]o heighten concern for doomed coreligionists . . . it was also targeted at public opinion and at the nation’s capital. Hecht and his collaborators . . . wanted to stimulate a change in policy.” [53] This ambitious goal was also ultimately unattainable. As Whitfield argues in “The Politics of Pageantry, 1936-1946”: Perhaps none of these pageants was great enough, soaring enough, memorable enough . . . but there is a more likely explanation. It asks too much of art to expect it to halt the juggernaut of tyranny. Nazism and fascism were too powerful for that. . . . Neither masterpieces nor spectacles could influence geopolitics; and the lesson that many Jews learned is that, while art can enhance and illuminate and expose power, only countervailing force can effectively confront it. . . . That realization meant consolidating a sense of peoplehood, instilling in American Jewish audiences a sense of transatlantic solidarity.[54] While transatlantic solidarity was important during the war years due to the threat to Jewry in Europe, other issues took priority during the 1950s as Jews attempted to demonstrate their bona fides as “Americans.” Whitfield points toward what would become the strategy of the yearlong American Jewish celebration to follow a decade after We Will Never Die . 1954-55: A Return to Different Roots After the war, like so much else, the politics of American-Jewish pageants were indelibly altered. During the 1950s, rather than reaching outward, emphasizing a “transatlantic solidarity,” the 1954-55 Jewish-American Tercentenary pageants focused inwards, emphasizing the particularly Jewish role in the development of American life and culture over the past 300 years. These pageants were intended to incorporate Jews into American collective memory, perhaps given the concern about seeing Jews as Communists. [55] With the existential threat to Jewish life resolved in Europe, the next challenge for American Jewry was to demonstrate to fellow citizens questioning their patriotism that Jews had long been integral to American life. American-Jewish pageantry turned to its local soil to advance a narrative of Jewish “Americanness,” which became further emphasized as the Cold War tensions increased and questions of loyalty became salient. Post-war Jewish-American pageantry presented a narrative of long-standing Jewish commitment to America since its founding, no longer suggesting that the United States must do something for Jews, but instead that Jews have done something for America. The culmination of this assimilationist, hybrid-identity of Jewish-American status was the year-long American Jewish Tercentenary celebration, occurring from September 1954 through May 1955. Celebrated nationwide, the 300 th anniversary of Jewish American presence was memorialized through publications, celebratory events, television and radio formats, and pageant spectacles. The Tercentenary was well-timed for this assertion of the embeddedness of Jews in American life. The specter of Communism conjured a need to perform a non-threatening—solidly American—Jewish identity, and a choice was made to create a celebration that publicly proclaimed this allegiance. Unlike the massive spectacles in the 1930s and ‘40s, these Tercentenary pageants were on a smaller scale, [56] a function surely of a decline in large-scale pageants, and perhaps a reaction to large-scale rallies in Germany and the Soviet Union. These pageants were performed in cities across the country but with more modest casts and in smaller venues. With their local orientation, these pageants had a different position in creating public awareness and perception than the highly successful mass pageants that had taken place previously and were centered mainly in Chicago and New York, with subsequent tour stops at other urban centers, including Detroit and Washington D.C. Although hints of the post-war assimilationist movement could be seen in sporadic pageants and publications from the immediate post-war years through the early nineteen-fifties, the Jewish Tercentenary was distinct: it hoped to include every Jewish community, large or small, in the national celebration of Jewish influence on American life and democracy. Founded in 1953, the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee (AJTC) was formed to promote and establish the commemoratory year of anniversary celebrations, building on the tercentennial theme of “Man’s Opportunities and Responsibilities Under Freedom.” To this end, numerous pamphlets were published under the auspices of the organization, created to aid and encourage Jewish communities and organizations taking part across the country. Explicit in their intended goals, the materials from the AJTC provided a clear set of instructions to follow for all manner of anniversary celebration attempts nationwide. In their clarity, these instructional booklets asked that a certain ideal narrative be followed and performed across all related performance platforms. That narrative not only asserted the early and unchanging importance of Jews in America but also their unceasing dedication to the American way of life, emphasizing democratic governance. In the numerous texts published by or with the support of the AJTC, American democracy is central. The texts didactically indicate Jewish involvement through centuries of American politics and patriotism, including one text referencing Oscar Straus’s contention that the “Hebrew Old Testament” influenced America’s foundational democratic ideals. [57] What is abundantly clear in this heavy-handed commentary is that the Jewish organization saw a need to counter the association of Jews and Communism, a perspective widely accepted in the Depression years but receding in the post-war period. [58] The culmination of the Tercentenary celebration contributed to delinking Jewishness from Communist associations in the minds of the American public, despite the continuing presence of Jews in the shrinking Communist movement. Even prior to the Tercentenary celebration, the American Jewish Committee was laying the groundwork for the later message of Jewish-American involvement in foundational American democracy. A pamphlet published in 1950, written by David De Sola Pool, chairman of the American Jewish Historical Society provisional committee for planning the tercentenary project, addresses these themes. In the pamphlet’s culminating page, De Sola Pool lists the “Fruits of the Tercentenary Celebration,” providing insight into his, and presumably the committee’s, goals for the tercentenary celebration year. Heralding the coming reinvigoration of Jewish presence within American society, De Sola Pool states that the tercentenary celebration “carried out in this broad national way will make vivid for all Americans, Christians and Jews alike, how deep and centuried is the stake of the Jews in the United States,” and furthermore, that the tercentenary “will further devotion to the Hebraic ideals of democracy that have helped to mold American democracy.” [59] In 1954, a reissue of the 1905 events of the 250 th anniversary was published by the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, seemingly as another means of naturalizing the occurrence of the 300 th . In 1905, the 250 th Anniversary of Jewish settlement in the US was celebrated on Thanksgiving Day, in an effort to “make the celebration a truly national event,” underscoring the centrality of American secular holidays and nationalism within Jewish-American identity. [60] The official celebratory proceedings for the opening event included addresses from the Catholic Bishop Coadjutor of New York, David Greer, as well as secular figures such as former president, Grover Cleveland, governor of New York State, Frank Higgins, and Mayor of New York City, George McClellan. The ceremony closed with an audience rendition of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” [61] This pan-religious, nationalist service was designed to establish Jewish Americans’ place within the cornucopia of American identities. However, the vast historical distance between the 250 th anniversary and the tercentenary couldn’t possibly have been anticipated, and the Tercentenary events had to take into account the changes in America and globally that had occurred during the past half-century. Within her pamphlet outlining Tercentenary pageant guidelines, Adele Gutman Nathan echoes the linking of Jews and early American democracy: “From the time the Jewish pilgrims arrived in 1654 at the little port of New Amsterdam . . . Jews as individuals and as groups have participated dramatically in each step of the creation of our nation, in its never-ending search for true democracy.” [62] With one small exception, [63] she fails to mention the enormous Jewish pageants of the past two decades within her description of previous American pageantry, though she mentions other popular productions from the time. This lack of connection between the Tercentenary and earlier pageants highlights their profound ideological and aspirational differences. While The Romance of a People , We Will Never Die , and the Tercentenary pageants all fall into the pageantry category, utilizing particular features of narration, spectacle, anti-realism, and episodic structures, their similarities end with that. As Nathan’s pamphlet outlined, the Tercentenary pageants strove to integrate Jewish historical presence in the United States in the grander American narrative, therefore establishing loyal Jewish “Americanness” in the post-war period. Just as earlier American historical pageants, such as the 1914 Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, [64] aimed to create an optimistic future by crafting an idealized past, the Tercentenary pageants strove for the same goal. Conversely, The Romance of a People and We Will Never Die performed Jewish difference to assert their message, while the Tercentenary performed proudly assimilationist narratives. With communities permitted either to purchase ready-made scripts (offering titles such as Faith and Freedom , The Lamp of Liberty , and We Came to an Island [65] ) or to pen their own community-oriented pageants, towns and cities across America performed their own local renditions of American Jewish history. These pageants simultaneously asserted contemporary (and historical) Jewish presence alongside Jewish integrity and ingenuity throughout American history. The basic narrative entailed several narrators framing a number of short episodes that featured notable figures through introduction or initial verbal reenactment of the scene by the narrators. For example, the 1955 pageant, The Quilt , written by Mae Clement Perley for the Louisville, Kentucky Tercentenary celebration, includes episodes describing Jewish ties to Abraham Lincoln, community ties to Louis Brandeis, and dramatized peacemaking amongst Jews and the previous Native American dwellers of Kentucky, all being reenacted in order to educate two Louisville youth about their community’s illustrious history. [66] Highly didactic, the narrative of Jewish impact on American life and society is clear. Though specific to Kentucky history, Perley’s script bears strong resemblance to more generic pageant scripts available for purchase, written to be performed across the country, and available in formats either broad enough to suit any local setting, or able to be shaped to include local events and memories. The Golden Door , penned by Norman Corwin for the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, is an example of the former, that could be tailored to any community and offered an American narrative, depicting a broad Jewish-American history. Featuring numerous short monologues from notable public figures attesting to positive Jewish-American presence, the script is comprised of short, didactic vignettes. Monologues are delivered from figures as diverse as George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Levi Strauss, and the voice of God, among many others. Another alternative was a that enabled portions of the play script to be personalized for local performances. This was the case of Faith and Freedom , written by Marc Siegal for the Tercentenary committee. The script is comprised of the same narrated episodic format, and attends to both local and nationwide Jewish-American history, even including a pre-written but optional scene, available for use if the community possessed an esteemed member who had been “an eyewitness to the growth of [the] Jewish community since 1880.” [67] If so, such a person could have been featured in a scene in conversation with the narrator, Dr. Goldman, as an integral part of the plot and pageant’s mission. This potential character, “Mr. Blank,” could deliver a monologue on the hardships of early Jewish settlement in the local area, including needing to move frequently as the Jewish neighborhoods changed. Additionally, the character emphasizes the increased community engagement and local involvement in the present time: “Around (blank year) we elected our first (name of public office), (name of person). There was real excitement when he won.” [68] Much like The Golden Door , This is Our Home , written by I. Goldberg and Yuri Suhl for the Committee for the 300 th Anniversary of Jewish Settlement in the U.S., similarly enabled personalization, though also incorporated Yiddish into the core script, with nearly 50% of dialogue in Yiddish. Unlike other Tercentenary pageant scripts, this suggests a different Jewish community, one in which assimilation had not entirely erased Yiddish-language usage, potentially indicating a more recently immigrated community audience and/or one more interested in maintaining a more visible Jewish presence in a secularizing nation. In spite of its Yiddish components, however, This is Our Home almost verbatim follows the formulaic model of incorporating a Jewish thread into known nationalistic, American narratives. With four episodes and voice-overs by Albert Einstein, Chaim Zhitlowsky, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the play begins with a rendition of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” followed by English and Yiddish preambles that echo each other’s statement of the shared heritage of American and Jewish-American beginnings. This performative tactic, which extends beyond the presentation of Jewish presence in early America, led to grander statements of Jewish exemplification of true American democratic ideals. This juncture was ripe for classic American pageantry techniques, “at the intersection of progressivism and antimodernism [that] placed nostalgic imagery in a dynamic, future-oriented reform context.” [69] As was the case with the two previous pageant moments, the Tercentenary responded to contemporary political conditions. Ultimately, while the American Jewish Tercentenary celebration seems to have aided the strengthening of Jewish public image in America, the festivities, tributes, and commemorations of 1954-55 were less frequently or substantially reported in newspapers and made a less significant mark on public memory. Unlike the earlier massive-scale pageants, the Jewish Tercentenary was about blending in to the standing American narrative, erasing radical associations, naturalizing patriotism and nationalist contributions, and asserting neighborliness. Politics of Pageants Each of the pageants we examine in this essay assert Jewish significance in their individual performances; either pushing toward redefining the group’s investment in broader Jewish issues, or by insisting upon Jewish importance in early and foundational American narratives. These pageants came about during such “times of crisis” in which the necessity of American interest and involvement in Jewishness needed to be emphasized, galvanized, and supported. [70] As previously discussed, each of these mid-century pageants did so in its own manner specific to the cultural and political contexts in which they emerged, but collectively they performed Jewishness in a broader American context and in that way similarly reinvented Jewish-Americanness in their respective decades. Furthermore, each performance discussed pageants as the appropriate mode of performance by building upon America’s long history of pageantry as a means for ethnic communities’ performed articulation and redefinition of their own hybrid identities. Pageants are both theatrically significant and historically situated. That is their purpose and their charm: they uncover the themes of a community and the challenges that are being faced. As performances, they attempt to persuade their audiences about those issues that are currently engaged. These three decades of pageants, produced at distinct historical moments, demonstrate that the idea of a “Jewish pageant”—or for that matter any pageant—must be contextualized. Even more than most forms of theatricality, the pageant attempts to inspire or to rouse a public that sees itself as belonging together and sharing common assumptions and desires. The pageant form is, in some sense, the most communal of all dramatic genres: this is true not only because of its massive production values, the fact that the performers are often members of the same community as the audience, and that the authors have deep local roots, but also because the themes and the morals build a sense of unity. The pageant provides a nexus of the study of theatre, history, and sociology. While these three mid-century Jewish-American pageants each present didactic accounts of ethnic history, they do so with markedly different agendas, each a presentation of and response to Jewish-American needs and interests at the time. Beginning with the start of the worldwide Jewish crisis in 1933 as Hitler took power in Germany and spanning through the post-war period of critical ethnic assimilation, each of these pageants served to both attract broad-scale interest through the mass-appeal of spectacle and sought to channel nationwide Jewish-American interest into a singular political performance (or set of performances), thereby powerfully enacting a desired outcome, from recognition to rescue to the reconstitution of Americaness. While each pageant utilized Jewish history and linked it to the present, each depended on a different set of values and historical events, shaping collective memory for specific purposes. For this reason, too, each pageant may itself offer fruitful insight into the moment in which it emerged. Because of their questionable literary authority and their focus on events of the moment, it is understandable that, unlike canonical drama, pageants will not be reprised over time, and, as a result, few scholars have focused on examples of the form as signals of current civic concerns and ethnic worries. These three Jewish-American pageants, however, demonstrate that such historically contingent productions have value as indicators of the state of society. The community provides a stage that these dramas fill. For all their local interest, pageants reveal the world. References [1] The authors thank Megan Geigner and Grace Overbeke for comments on an earlier version of this paper. [2] Earl Mullin, “Holiday Throng at Fair Nears Monday Record,” Chicago Daily Tribune (5 July 1933): 1. The current capacity is only 61,500. For the 1933 pageant, seating spilled from the stadium seating onto the stadium green, with makeshift seating filling the playing area all the way up to the stage. (Lauren Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood: The Romance of a People at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair,” TDR: The Drama Review 55, no. 3 (2011): 61.) [3] Arthur A. Goren, The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 196. [4] S. E. Wilmer, Theatre, Society, and the Nation: Staging American Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 108. [5] Esther Willard Bates, The Art of Producing Pageants (Walter H. Baker Company: Boston, 1925), 240. [6] Wilmer, Theatre, Society, and the Nation , 11. [7] David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 4. [8] Ibid., 4. [9] Richard M. Fried, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians are Coming!: Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 122. [10] For reference, see Stephen J. Whitfield, “The Politics of Pageantry, 1936-1946,” American Jewish History 84, no. 3 (September, 1996): 221-250.; Robert Skloot, “We Will Never Die”: The Success and Failure of a Holocaust Pageant,” Theatre Journal 37, no. 2 (May, 1995): 167-180.; and Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood,” 57-67. [11] Megan Geigner, “Performing the Polish-American patriot: civic performance and hyphenated identity in World War I Chicago,” Theatre History Studies 34 (2015): 59-78. [12] Martha S. LoMonaco, “Mormon Pageants as American Historical Performance,” Theatre Symposium 17 (2009): 69-83. [13] Ibid., 288. [14] Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no.1, (1967): 1-21. [15] “The Romance of a People.” Official World’s Fair Weekly: A Century of Progress International Exposition Week Ending July 8 th (Chicago: The Cuneo Press Inc., 1933), 6. [16] Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood,” 63. [17] Virginia Gardener, “Unseen Actors Supply Sound at Jewish Pageant: Sing, Play and Speak in Hidden Room,” Chicago Daily Tribune (4 July, 1933): 4. [18] Ibid., 6. [19] Garfield discusses the use of amplified sound in The Romance of the People in his article about the pageant, arguing that Van Grove’s use of amplification in this context was totally unique for theatrical performances in the US. “The ‘binaural, electro-acoustical system,’ as it was called, was a highly innovative sound set-up – probably the first public use in the United States of what has since come to be known as stereophonic sound.” David Garfield, “The Romance of a People,” Educational Theatre Journal 24, no. 4 (1972): 440. [20] James O’Donnell Bennett, “125,000 Witness Jewish Spectacle: Mighty Drama Traces History Back 4,000 Years; Climax of Jewry’s Day at Fair,” Chicago Daily Tribune (4 July, 1933): 2. [21] “The Romance of a People,” Official World’s Fair Weekly: A Century of Progress International Exposition , 6. [22] Ibid., 6. [23] Garfield, “The Romance of a People,” 436. [24] Ibid., 436. [25] S. J. Duncan-Clark, “Jewish ‘Romance of a People’ Kindles Thrill of Faith in 150,000 Spectators,” The Chicago Daily News (5 July, 1933). [26] Rev. John Evans, “Jewish pageant to depict 40 centuries of religion,” Chicago Daily Tribune (9 June, 1933): 10. [27] Ibid., 10. [28] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People” pageant program reprint from 1933 (Chicago: Chicago Jewish Historical Society, 2000), 1. [29] Ibid., 17. [30] Ibid., 18. [31] Liam T. A. Ford, Soldier Field: A Stadium and its City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 157. [32] Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood,” 60. [33] Edward Moore, “Stage Effects at Jewish Fete to Make History: Lighting Arrangements to be Feature,” Chicago Daily Tribune (17 June, 1933): 6. [34] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People,” 18. [35] Moore, “Stage Effects at Jewish Fete to Make History,” 6. [36] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People,” 19. [37] While the Pageant program includes Exposition-wide advertisements, it also contains numerous “Jewish Day” specific advertisements and messages from sponsors. [38] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People,” 56. [39] Ford, Soldier Field: A Stadium and its City , 155. [40] While audience statistics are not known to be available, the sheer numbers of spectators that attended both events render ethnic and religious homogeneity highly unlikely. In the first performance, The Romance of a People performed in front of anywhere between 125,000 and 150,000 people, depending on the source. We Will Never Die performed before an estimated 15,000-20,000 (for the opening Chicago performance). Furthermore, We Will Never Die had a significant tour around the US, including a stop in Washington, DC, where President Roosevelt sent First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in his stead, as well as numerous cabinet, Supreme Court, and Congress members (See Medoff 2002). [41] We Will Never Die Official Program from Madison Square Garden 9 March, 1943 (New York: Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, 1943), cover. [42] certainyl ESexecuted this through loosa, 2002.”ers in attendance that night included First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, all the way Rafael Medoff, Militant Zionism (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2002), 85. [43] Edward Barry, “Pageant Stirs 15,000 to Vow Jew Must Live,” Chicago Daily Tribune (20 May, 1943): 1. [44] Ibid., 1. [45] Ibid., 1. [46] Ben Hecht, We Will Never Die: A Memorial Dedicated to the 2,000,000 Jewish Dead of Europe Pageant Script (New York: Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, 1943), 11. [47] The Jewish Day of Atonement. [48] Hecht, We Will Never Die, 11. [49] The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is generally considered to have begun on April 19, 1943. The original production of We Will Never Die occurred in New York on March 9 th prior to the start of the Uprising, as did the Washington DC performance on April 12 th , but Hecht later incorporated an additional scene entitled “The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto,” which was performed in Los Angeles on July 21, 1943. The date written in the script for the start of the uprising was March 17, 1943 (Hecht, We Will Never Die , 29). [50] Ibid., 39. [51] Ibid., 39. [52] Whitfield, “The Politics of Pageantry, 1936-1946,” 239. The Committee for a Jewish Army had been proposed by the Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, and was designed to create a fighting force against Hitler, but which would also support the aspiration for a Jewish-led Palestine. [53] Ibid., 239. [54] Ibid., 251. [55] Aaron Beim and Gary Alan Fine, “The Cultural Frameworks of Prejudice: Reputational Images of the Postwar Disjuncture of Jews and Communism,” The Sociological Quarterly 48, no. 3 (2007): 376. [56] On the larger-end of cast size, Chicago’s main Tercentenary pageant featured 1,000 performers, compared to The Romance of a People ’s 3,500. [57] David De Sola Pool, Planning for the Tercentenary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States in 1954-55 (New York: American Jewish Historical Society, 1950). [58] Beim and Fine, “The Cultural Frameworks of Prejudice,” 375. [59] De Sola Pool, Planning for the Tercentenary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States in 1954-55 , 414. [60] Judith Friedman Rosen, “In Search of… Earlier American Jewish Anniversary Celebrations: 1905 and 1954,” American Jewish History 92, no. 4 (2004): 481. [61] American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, Exercises in the celebration of the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States, 1655-1905 original pamphlet reprint (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, 1954). [62] Adele Gutman Nathan, Producing Tercentenary Pageants (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, 1954), 7. [63] Nathan mentions a single Jewish themed pageant/play from wartime, The Eternal Road (1937), though only to use it as an example of what not to do: don’t use “canned music” (Ibid., 9). [64] “St. Louis officials desperately sought to present a different civic image to the nation. They felt that a successful historical pageant would not only cleanse the city’s tarnished reputation nationwide, but also advance a single civic identity around which the various people sand classes could rally to enact reforms at home.” Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry , 159-60. [65] Listed in American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, Program Materials for the American Jewish Tercentenary (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, 1954). [66] Mae [Maie] Clement Perley, The Quilt (Louisville: Jewish Tercentenary Committee of the Conference of Jewish Organizations, December 1954). Written for presentation in Louisville on March 8, 1955. [67] Marc Siegel, Faith and Freedom: A Dramatic Presentation (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary, 1954), 20. [68] Ibid., 21. [69] Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry , 5. [70] Wilmer, Theatre, Society, and the Nation , 11 Footnotes About The Author(s) Rachel Merrill Moss is a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama at Northwestern University and a 2018-2019 Fulbright grantee to Poland. While earning her MA in Theatre History and Criticism from CUNY Brooklyn College, she worked in New York as a theatre critic and dramaturg. Rachel has presented work at the American Society for Theatre Research, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and the Polish-Jewish Studies Working Group. Gary Alan Fine is James E. Johnson Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, a member of the faculty of the Interdisciplinary Program in Theatre and Drama, and a former theatre critic. He is the author of numerous articles and book, including most recently, Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education . He writes extensively on reputations and scandals in art worlds and in politics. 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David Bisaha Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 2 Visit Journal Homepage Blue-Collar Broadway David Bisaha By Published on May 25, 2016 Download Article as PDF Blue Collar Broadway: The Craft and Industry of American Theater . By Timothy R. White. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015; Pp. 275. Blue-Collar Broadway: The Craft and Industry of American Theater adds a refreshing urban studies point of view to the increasingly interdisciplinary body of work on Times Square, alongside Marlis Schweitzer’s When Broadway was the Runway , Lynne Sagalyn’s Times Square Roulette , and Steven Adler’s On Broadway . Timothy White’s study is a history of the “craftspeople and proprietors” of theater-related business from approximately 1875-1980, including in this categorization scenery and costume shop workers, dance shoe and wig vendors, and rehearsal space managers, among others. The book is most successful in its deployment of methods particular to urban studies. For White, economic development is best measured by the number and proximity of theater-related businesses, an argument supported by useful maps of such businesses over the decades (4-5, 75, 128-133). Using these maps, as well as directories, building ownership records, and business listings, White crafts an engaging history of Broadway’s blocks and the workers walking its streets. The first three chapters support later case studies by discussing foundational developments: the nineteenth-century road company, the consolidation of production under producer-managers such as David Belasco, the establishment of Times Square, the rise of labor unionism, and the effects of theater rental by radio and film companies in the 1930s and ‘40s. On the whole these chapters are more synoptic than argumentative. Nonetheless White uncovers meaningful patterns in details, for instance, in scene shop tenancy on the western side of 47 th street (49). The proximate locations of shops, suppliers, and their customers afforded the informal advantages of an industrial district, maximizing collaborative networks and minimizing transportation costs. Where White keeps focus on individuals’ strategies and practices, such as the then-fading procedure of renting out Broadway houses for auditions and rehearsals during the other productions’ runs (110), the ad-hoc but mutually supportive arrangements between producers/management and craft labor is clearest. Three case studies form the core of the book. In chapter four, Oklahoma! ’s 1943 premiere finds craft artists at peak efficacy, yet this also presages the doom of centralized craft production; the production’s multi-year run actually deprived costume and scenic shops of regular and diverse work, White notes (100). Further analysis of the musical’s development launches his discussion of the century’s trends, such as reliance on Broadway’s “angel” investors, negotiations within costumers’ unions over bought rather than built productions, and the effect of protectionist regulation of truck transportation by the Interstate Commerce Commission. This case study is the most extensive of the book, and effectively explains the obstacles surmounted by Broadway businesses when working within a robust, localized theatre district. Chapter six features a longitudinal case study of the decline in theatrical business activity on the 100 block of West 45 th Street, and the resulting increase in crime and adult-oriented businesses. Through the study of this block in detail, and similar ones in a subsequent summary, White argues that the loss of theatre businesses and their “casual enforcement of sidewalk safety” contributed to Times Square’s transition into a dangerous and licentious landscape. This chapter also calls attention to crime by unearthing obscure news stories from the seventies and eighties, such as the grisly murder of James Eng. Here the connection between business and decline is somewhat overstated. While larger changes to the city, such as its inequitable development priorities, the effects of immigration and white flight, and the end of the postwar boom may not be apparent given White’s more focused methodology, their absence from White’s analysis of the “slide from craft to crime” puts inordinate blame on the reorganization of the theatre economy toward a resident and regional model. Chapter seven’s case study of Evita ’s 1979 New York transfer illustrates a globalizing production market. This production encountered difficulties in securing audition and rehearsal space, mastering sound and lighting, and the increased burden of designing, ordering, and shipping production components from a distance, which White explains in detail. It also provided a model for funding a global hit musical at the expense of local craft laborers, breaking what White identifies as the “feedback loop” of Broadway. This concept connects the three studies. Intact, the loop incentivized local producers to support nearby businesses, and to occasionally invest capital in necessary offstage spaces, such as Michael Bennett’s purchase of the mixed-use rehearsal, studio, and office space at 890 Broadway (210). Strained by the regional theaters, the loop finally broke when the globalized musical ( Evita , Les Miserables , Cats ) pivoted to internationally constructed components. Worse, “absentee” producers’ profit would not return to Broadway’s shops. This broken loop became the new normal, White notes, citing Maurya Wickstrom’s observation that Disney has also not invested in independently managed space or support for craft (226). The most engaging portions of this book identify individual workers and use their actions as telling indicators of larger shifts. For example, costumer Barbara Karinska and lighting designer Eddie Kook’s salaried employment at Lincoln Center illustrates the blow dealt to the industrial district by hiring in-house labor, a reduction in workers’ flexibility only compounded as jobs arose in resident theatres outside of New York. Another valuable connection made by this book is its discussion of theatre’s relationship to city development plans, first the Regional Development Plan of the 1930s (67-74) and, later, Mayor Lindsay’s establishment of the “Special Theater District” in 1967 (194). While these ideas are mentioned in other histories, White’s approach foregrounds the ways in which municipal policy changes shaped the fates of theatre’s backstage workers. However, due to its emphasis on business listings, the book equates the success of craft workers with a healthy crop of independently owned theatre-related businesses. The workers themselves periodically become lost in this history of business ownership, which cannot effectively track labor performed in larger institutions like regional theatres. More troublingly, the book doesn’t fully interrogate the concepts invoked by its title, using “blue-collar,” “craft,” and “industry” more or less interchangeably. Further research would benefit from investigating the social networks and class position of specific theatre workers. Nonetheless, solid in its understanding of the period and its urban geography, Blue-Collar Broadway is a good resource for scholars interested in Times Square history. By appropriately positioning theater as a small but important part of New York City’s developing economic power, White establishes the usefulness of urban history methods for the study of American theatre’s most influential urban landscape. References Footnotes About The Author(s) David Bisaha Binghamton University, State University of New York Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Blue-Collar Broadway The New Humor in the Progressive Era Stages of Engagement Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

HONORING PAULA COURT presents Prelude 2024 Opening Ceremony at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Prelude 2024 Opening Ceremony HONORING PAULA COURT 4:00 - 4:50pm Wednesday, October 16, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall Lobby RSVP Prelude 2024 begins with an opening ceremony to honor photographer Paula Court with the 2024 Franky Award. Please join us in the Elebash lobby as we toast Paula's work and legacy and kick off the festival! Light refreshments will be served. Named in honor of MESTC Executive Director and Prelude founder Dr. Frank Hentschker, the Franky Award was created to recognize an artist who has made a long-term, extraordinary impact on contemporary theater and performance in New York City. Paula Court has been documenting theater, dance, and music in New York City since 1976. Over many decades, she has photographed the work of the Wooster Group, John Jesurun, Eric Bogosian, Jo Andres, Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Michael Smith, DANCENOISE, and Sarah Michelson. In a 2024 essay on Paula Court for Topical Cream , critic Stella Cilman astutely observed, “Court’s photos access a subterranean psychological space that transcends any particular aspect of a given scene—the single gesture of an actor or a particular architectural detail near them. Her purview emphasizes the gestalt, embracing all the coincidental, chaotic, and awkward natures of people and things as they happen to interact.” Her images can be seen in New York Noise: Art and Music from the New York Underground 1978-88 ; PERFORMA: NEW VISUAL ART PERFORMANCE ; and the forthcoming Broken Clothing: the Costumes of Suzanne Bocanegra. Currently Paula is faced with very serious health issues that require immediate and ongoing assistance. A group of friends have joined with Paula’s family to raise the funds needed to provide Paula with excellent in-home care and the specialized physical therapy she urgently needs. Their goal was to raise $50,000 to support her initial recovery for six months, and they achieved this goal. They continue to fundraise to help see Paula through to the end of 2024 as they work on other ways to generate income from her life's work. As they rightfully note: “Paula has donated endless hours capturing New York’s underground art, dance and music scene, while tirelessly advocating for artists and documenting ephemeral moments to provide us with a collective memory.” If you are able to donate, please do so here . Your contribution is tax deductible and will be directed toward Paula's healthcare costs minus the fees charged through this platform. If you would like to provide a check or wire, please contact Esa Nickle at esa@performa-arts.org . Performa is a 501c3 non-profit organization and is acting as a fiscal sponsor of the preservation fund. LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

Ansley Valentine Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 Ansley Valentine By Published on April 15, 2023 Download Article as PDF Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when all of the theaters closed, many artists moved their work to digital platforms. While many disparaged these efforts, claiming that virtual performance was not legitimate performance, Pandemic Performance : Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times documents the work experience and creativity of primarily American theatre and dance artists who not only moved to digital and other platforms, but who also developed new methods of working through these platforms, thereby sustaining and growing craft through the pandemic. Pandemic Performance includes scholarship in a variety of modes—traditional research alongside artists’ reflections—which makes this book an important record of the field, as well as of myriad artists’ experiences in this time. The range and level of detail given will serve as an important historical record from the inside of the changes in process and communities that artists undertook to maintain their artistry. Pandemic Performance is one of the first books to chronicle “resilience, liveness and protest in quarantine times” so thoroughly. Editors Kendra Claire Capece and Patrick Scorese organize the book around three headings: PART I: America God Damn; PART II: Friction and Encounter; PART III: Building a New Future. In PART I: America God Damn , Capece and Scorese begin with the general societal upheaval that happened with the convergence of Black Lives Matter, Covid-19, and the death of George Floyd, framing how those critical events caused an awakening to systemic injustice in America in general and the performing arts, in particular. PART II: Friction and Encounter examines the difficulties artists and institutions faced as they tried to pivot to make art in different ways. PART III: Building a New Future shares views on how disruption and adaptation created models for sustained artist/community/institution realignment. This book focuses more on individual artists who document their reactions to disruption and how they’ve examined their own praxis. These artists developed performance models to supplement or replace their previous work, as the profession and society experienced crisis. Contributors focus on how artists shifted their relationships with institutions and ultimately became different artistically in light of the shifts in society. In fact, this book seems to be one of the first to gather a variety of sources that address the impact of marked societal shifts on the working artist from the perspective of artists documenting their metamorphosis. There are certainly other resources that highlight data such as the economic impact on the arts in the United States, the number of arts organizations that failed to reopen after the shutdown, and so on. What makes this book unique is its centering on artists’ voices relative to their work, whether written by the artists themselves as in (Re)current Unrest: The Fire This Time (Charles O. Anderson) or gathered through conversations such as Performative Allyship and the Foxes That Drool: In Conversation with Brittany Talissa King (Brittany Talissa King with Kendra Claire Capece and Patrick Scorese). Here, disparate artists share their individual responses to the shutdown, their reaction to the disruption to their work practices and places, but also how they pivoted to make art in a different way. For example, some detail how they discovered ways of making media practice a part of their performance model while trying to maintain the immediacy they found in their previous live performance work. While the idea of mediated live performance is not completely new, the ways these artists experimented with media are new, as are the contexts—and communities engaged, at times—demonstrating resilience. This book makes a cogent argument for the importance and practicality of these performances. Rather than simply being placeholder activities, Pandemic Performance makes a very clear argument for why these works actually discovered and explored new uses of performance theory. By necessity, the means of production were decentralized. In the absence of institutional support, the artists featured found new ways of creating their work. They also explored ways of working as collaborators while remaining in isolation. They took on new ways of using their work and artistry to support the change they saw around them. The result is a book that will appeal to anyone interested in how artists invested in community engagement and social justice, as well as the performing arts, struggled with and adapted to the Covid-19 challenges they faced. On one hand, it validates the experiences of thousands of performing artists who embraced this unstable time as an opportunity to create despite obstacles. On the other hand, this book can serve to challenge those who questioned the legitimacy of virtual performance and whether it was worthy of serious artistic consideration or critique. The volume’s case study chapters give detailed accounts of the processes and experiences of those who joined the digital performance space, determined to create and persevere. The research presented documents methods, analysis, and outcomes of the disparate projects. One should also note that Pandemic Performance shares perspectives of BIPOC artists who found new life and opportunities in the pandemic that had not existed for them before, reimagining the field’s practices and hierarchies. This book is important to the field because it captures in detail the seismic shifts that happened in performance. The writing is largely accessible and often very personal. Pandemic Performance can serve students, artists and scholars in performance studies, social justice, community development, and other disciplines. Some might question its scholarship because of the mixture of analysis and first-person accounts, however the volume is fascinating, instructive and can ground others’ future scholarship. Capece and Scorese critically frame the artists’ contributions effectively, moving from hypothesis to analysis via the Introduction and book structure. To an impressive degree, they also value the unfiltered voices of socially-engaged artists who helped to reimagine performance and work practices, making this an important primary source for scholars now and moving forward. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ANSLEY VALENTINE Indiana University Bloomington 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 Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 14 Spring 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber By George Potter Published: May 1, 2023 Download Article as PDF Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Review: Mother Courage adapted and directed by Alison Shan Price Review of Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt written by Sonali Pahwa Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber “Indigenous Avant-Gardes”: The Shiraz Arts Festival and Ritual Performance Theory in 1970s Iran Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Review: Playwright Showcase, New Arab American Theater Works Two Giants of Egyptian Theatre: Conversations with Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny and Lenin El-Ramly Crossing Borders: A Theatre Practitioner’s Odyssey, An Interview with Hassan El Geretly On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh Performance Review: A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED Performance Review: BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL Performance Review: HOOTA. By Amer Hlehel Performance Review: LITTLE SYRIA Book Review: ACTING EGYPTIAN Book Review: MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY Previous Next Attribution:

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 19, Fall, 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF By Steve Earnest Image Credits: Article The 61st Theatertreffen was the first under the new artistic leadership of Nora Hertlein-Hull, who was appointed on Jan 1, 2024. Numerous changes had taken place in Berlin’s largest and most prestigious theatre festival between 2018 and 2022, including the 50% quota of female directors in 2020 and a complete conversion to mediated viewings during the COVID pandemic crisis. Under the leadership of Yvonne Budenholzer, the festival had achieved a greater sense of inclusion, not only in the nature and style of the productions, but also for those who created and presented the works as well as the characters realized in the works. The recently adjusted rules for selection allowed works that may not have been previously considered a chance to be one of the “Ten Remarkable Productions” chosen by the panel of jurors. The Theatertreffen once again used the Festspielhaus as the central location for the bulk of the performances, with the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, the Volksbühne am Rosa Luxembourg Platz and the Hans Otto Theatre in Potsdam as the other locations for performances. Numbers of performances were kept relatively low again this year as only a few of the invited productions played more than five performances. For example, Nathan the Wise played only two performances and Overweight, Unimportant, and Out of Shape only had three showings. Several productions were seen as many as six times and media coverage aided in the visibility of the Theatertreffen. Four of the invited works were made available on ZBF, again providing a great deal of access to a large population outside of Berlin. Extra Life was a production of DACM/Company Gisele Vienne and listed a total of twenty-one producing partners from numerous countries including Italy, France, Germany and the Netherlands. The only work to play in the Grosses Haus located on the Hans Otto Theatre “compound,” Extra Life centered around the lives of two siblings who recounted and relived critical moments of their lives, including episodes of sexual abuse by an undisclosed family member. Speaking mainly in non-sequitur and poetic reflection, they eventually emerged from their parked vehicle and began to advance into a dreamscape, created by abstract sound and lighting. At one point they were encountered by another figure – a barely visible and unidentified figure. As the work progressed the characters interaction with the third figure shifted into a slow motion, light enhanced movement sequence that defies verbal explanation. Vienne’s slow-motion choreography attempted to blend with numerous elements of light, stage fog, prisms and other elements designed to create new spaces on stage – spaces that (in her words) release the horror and pain experienced by the siblings. The intense slow-motion movement of the siblings was combined with a series of rotating laser style lights whose purpose was to redefine the interior space of the theatre. The lights created numerous internal partitions that became shared spaces between audience and the two performers in timed sequences. The effects used in this performance were extraordinary, but in many ways Extra Life was a highly unusual selection for this festival given the extremely minimal text and considerable focus on the creation of an internal space in which shattering life experiences can be manipulated and felt in theatrical space. An important layer to the production was the original musical design and soundscapes were provided by Caterina Barbieri and Adrien Michel. The resulting experience had the overall effect of a dreamscape defined by a mixture of movement, sound, lights and minimal text. Theater HORA actors and puppets join with actors from Schauspielhaus Zurich in Riesenhaft in Mittelerde Riesenhaft in Mittelerde , a devised retelling of The Lord of the Rings was presented by Theater HORA, Das Helmi Puppentheater and Schauspielhaus Zurich. Directed by a team of four – Nicolas Stemann, Stephan Stock, Florian Loycke and Cora Frost – the work was developed with a team of twenty-four actors and twelve onstage technicians (with about ten more offstage) as the work involved multiple cameras capturing the action and sending it to one of five projection screens. The entire space, the Second Stage of the Festspielhaus had been converted into a multi-stage performance site, featuring projection screens, three stages (one was movable), and numerous other pathways on which vehicles were used to move the action throughout the space. A small orchestra and chorus were included in the performance as were two functioning service areas for bar service and bathroom facilities. The duration of the performance was just under four hours. Co-director Stephan Stock was artistic director of HORA Zurich, Switzerland’s largest and most prominent inclusive theatre company. Twelve members of the inclusive theatre company were paired with twelve members of Schauspielhaus Zurich to form the company of Riesenhaft in Mittelerde . Though the mission of HORA had been slightly altered due to budget cuts, the nature of the student’s participation in HORA projects includes the study of many subjects that can be considered “pop-culture,” and because of the worldwide popularity of the Lord of the Rings films, the Tolkien legend was included in the curriculum. Many of the student actors in this production considered themselves to be experts or superfans in the realm of Lord of the Rings trivia. Prior to the performance each student performer gave a brief (and often moving) testimony regarding the twelve-month journey with their particular role, the skills they learned along the way, how the role had influenced their lives and what they would take away from the performance as they moved forward in their lives and careers. Captured on video and broadcast over all five screens this opening moment set the tone for the journey that would take place in the production. Naturally, only a fraction of the events from the epic story could be realized in this four-hour time span, but the company presented a sequence of scenes to establish the forces of good fighting the forces of evil, battle scenes of both triumph and loss and the all-important scenes regarding possession of the ring itself. Many scenes were highly physical in nature (with consideration for the actors’ limitations) and utilized a “Monty Python-esque” brand of physical comedy. Many prerecorded sequences were also employed to enhance the established visual aesthetic. Life sized puppets, often manipulated by the HORA students, added to the visual spectacle of the work. Riesenhaft in Mittelerde was without doubt a model performance for the 21st Century. The mixture of the HORA student population and seasoned actors from Schauspielhaus Zurich presented in festival atmosphere, and combined with the use of puppets and multimedia elevated the event to a grand spectacle rarely seen in the world of live performance. The individual performances given by all involved achieved a powerful level of authenticity as the highly physical demands of each scene were supplemented by the life investment of the HORA students, who had practically adopted the world of the play as their primary existence. The framing of the work, however, allowed them to step back outside of the play at the end and interact with the audience while saying goodbye to the onstage world of Tolkien. Vaterlosen , based on Chekov’s novel Platanov was produced by München Kammerspiele with stage direction by Jette Steckel, scenic design by Florian Lösche and costumes by Pauline Hüners. The production was realized on the Grosse Bühne of the Festspielhaus complex. Lösche’s vast stage design for Vaterlosen was dominated by the use of hundreds of flexible metal rods inserted into the stage floor in order to create the appearance of something like an immense field of grain. Rear lighting and projections supplemented by basic stage furniture elements made up the minimalist design as space was further defined by light and sound. The play takes place at Anna Petrovna’s country estate where Platonov, a retired school master, manages to awaken the sexual fantasies of three women in one setting. Steckel’s somewhat epic approach included a unique element borrowed from the world of network television. Combined live and video sequences entitled “Dad Men Talking” featured prominent Volksbühne dramaturg Carl Hegemann along with Martin Weigel, a university professor, who engaged in summarizing what had taken place in the work up to that point. Like shows such as “Dead Man Talking” and the similar commentary found for Netflx series Breaking Bad , the commentary really existed on the margins of what was taking place in the story and had more of the “trashy tabloid” feel. As is so often the case with exemplary works of the German stage, primary emphasis was on the human form. Steckel’s human compositions involved a number of scenes that involved Platonov and one of the three women engaged in simulated sex, stood naked in the rain and numerous other erotic moments. However the most memorable physical scene occurred as Platanov, alone on stage, began to uproot the steel rods used as scenery and thrust them underneath his clothing, attaching them to his body – first two poles inserted behind him into the legs of his pants, followed by a third and forth pole inserted across his back through his arm sleeves and then several more poles strategically aligned to exaggerate his physical body, yet at the same time placed severe movement limitations on his ability to engage in simple movements. Because the poles were somewhat flexible (though not limp by any means) some movement and bending was possible. After inserting around ten poles into various areas of his costumed body, Platanov attempted to move around the stage and engage in simple activities, all rendered nearly impossible by the poles. At one point he was able to actually bend over and pick up a glass of beer which resulted in enthusiastic applause from the highly engaged audience. This silent, movement only scene occurred midway through the work and appeared to serve as a visual metaphor for Platonov’s life circumstances and the romantic choices that began to ensnare him. Marina Galic, Stefan Hunstein and Jens Harzer in Schauspielhaus Bochum’s Macbeth . The fourth invited production was Shakespeare’s Macbeth , produced by Schauspielhaus Bochum. Directed by the acclaimed Dutch director Johan Simons, also the company’s artistic director, Macbeth was staged with only three actors – Marina Galic, Jens Harzer and Stefan Hunstein, and utilized a mixture of Shakespeare’s text, some freely adapted textual sequences and some areas of post dramatic narrative that commented on the play’s action from a contemporary perspective. The three actors were relentless in their approaches to over thirty characters. Naturally, the witch scenes provided the central framework for the piece while most other scenes were easily framed with one to three actors and with some exciting twists. For example, Lady Macbeth’s “Unsex Me” monologue was performed in the midst of what appeared to be a threesome; Macbeth’s well known “Dagger” speech done with bloody comic flair. Simons is well known for dark comedic interpretations and his work has been well represented at the Theatertreffen. Previous productions included München Kammerspiele productions of both Müller’s Anatomie Titus Fall of Rome (2004) and Holloubeq’s Elementarteilchen (2005) as well as Kasmir and Karoline AND from Schauspiel Koln in 2010. Artistic director since 2018, Schauspielhaus Bochum was recognized as theater company of the year by THEATER HEUTE in 2022. Simons work is generally characterized by a great deal of physicality and the use of dark clowning and makeup techniques. Falk Richter’s powerful autobiographical work The Silence was the first of two 2024 TT selections produced by the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin. The Silence is essentially a one man show as the narrator – playwright Richter as portrayed by Dimitrij Schaad – recounts his family life with particular emphasis on moments of “silence,” things that were not said, stories that could not be retold and memories that were too painful to recount. The Silence included video segments as Richter conducted interviews with several family members, including his mother. Also directed by Richter, most of the stories revolved around Richter’s relationship with his father, a prisoner of war from WWII and the difficulty of life with a father suffering from severe PTSD. As a young homosexual attempting to emerge from a closeted lifestyle, Richter’s sexuality had also drawn the ire of his father and greatly strained their already painful relationship. Richter noted how the difficulties he faced with his father were also present in his daily social life – he recounted being stalked by a gang of boys who were intent to harm him since his outer appearance suggested homosexuality to them. He recounted a difficult situation as he begged for help from an older woman as the gang moved in on him. He noted how the older woman turned away from him, refusing to offer any assistance for apparently the same reasons. Richter states in the text that he had only been able to break his own personal silence after the death of his father. Upon his death, all of the family silences were ended – the physical violence toward Richter and his mother, the many women (six total) with whom the father had past or ongoing relationships, and finally, the complete revelation of his sexuality. Playing the role of Richter, Schaad spent most of the performance speaking directly to the audience and successful revealed both the pain and humor of Richter’s life as portrayed in THE SILENCE. Including personal video sequences with actual family members added an element of authenticity to the work that approached docudrama. THE SILENCE, like several other works in the festival, included a solid mixture of actual real-life events (interviews) with simulated or “quoted” happenings. Richter has remained a key figure in the repertoire of the Schaubühne for more than a decade. Schlomi Shaban and musicians for Bucket List at Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz. Described by its creators as a “musical hallucination, Bucket List was another unique selection for the 61st Theatertreffen. Composer/Lyricist Schlomi Shaban and Director Yael Ronen had worked together for several years at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin before the development of Bucket List at the Schaubühne. Both Ronen and Shaban were established artists in Israel before their work at the Gorki and Bucket List was their first collaboration on a traditional book musical. The work featured a cast of four as well as a small combo of three musicians. Like Richter’s The Silence , Bucket List also dealt with painful memories as Daniel Regetz/Robert recounts his life, his childhood, love, and relationships all within the scope of an institutional study that is taking place regarding his case. Plagued by recurring PTSD-like symptoms Robert’s painful story was realized as series of vignettes; musical styles varied from standard musical theatre fare, tango, jazz and pop. The characters remained costumed in black throughout the work and numerous references to current and past Middle East clashes were included. One scene saw the characters bending over and pretending to lift and cradle imaginary babies who were casualties of world violence. Several performances of Bucket List were unfortunately marred by anti-Israel protesters as was the case with the pair’s previous collaboration THE SITUATION at Gorki Theatre in 2021. The seventh production, Roland Schimmelpfennig’s monodrama Laios , is the second of the playwright’s five-part series Anthropolis . Directed by Karin Beier with Voxi Bärenklau providing video sequences, Laios consists of a fictitious monologue (supported by ancient sources) by the father of Oedipus, Laios utilizes a complex dramaturgy based in the single perspective of a narrator who steps in and out of the role of Laius while describing the events leading up to his death at the hands of his son Oedipus. As the solo actor and narrator, Lina Beckmann flows in and out of various characters ranging from politicians and warriors to hunters and other figures. Characteristic of Schimmelpfennig’s style, the work was post dramatic narrative; masks were used to help define many of the characters but, as was the case with the hunter character, were also used as accessories to describie the often gory and horrific details of everyday life in Thebes. Beckman’s greatest skill lay in her ability to just describe the (often horrific) stories in a conversational manner and reserved special moments in the work to shift into “acting” or playing other characters than herself. As one of Germany’s most respected contemporary directors, Beier, invited to her third Theatertreffen, realized the work on a mostly bare stage with only Beckman and series of masks and musical instruments. Rarely produced on the German stage is Ubergewicht, Unwichtig, Unform ( Overweight, Unimportant and Out of Shape ) by Austrian playwright Werner Schwab. Since his death in 1996 there have been few realized stagings of Schwab’s controversial works due to extremely graphic content and questions regarding their suitability for live production. Directed by Rieke Süßkow and produced by Staatstheater Nürnberg, Ubergewicht is set in a rural bar as five locals and the bar lady engage in a regular evening of lower-class bar conversation when they all suddenly become fixated on a “beautiful couple” who refuse to engage in their pedestrian banter. After a series of minor verbal exchanges the scene turns physical and the locals eventually carve the couple up and consume them in a cannibalistic frenzy. Süßkow’s visual concept involved a quasi-dollhouse setting with the locals on the bottom floor and the beautiful couple above. The seven local characters were all aligned in frontal, single row display with no real scenery and very limited properties. The locals were costumed as inflatable sex toys, complete with active genitalia, which were used both in comic and serious (sometimes degrading or tortuous) moments. The cartoon like characters that populated Schwab’s world opening discussed their sexual ability and genitalia size, flashed and insulted other characters, and spoke in crude, nihilistic terms about life itself. For example, a married couple, Piggy and Bunny discuss their potential offspring. Piggy notes: “We’ll give the impression that the two of us (Piggy and Bunny) had been through a meatgrinder, and our little Piggybunny had been modeled out of the mincemeat.” Similar commentary, generally much more graphic, was scattered throughout the work but the delivery and style of the work. Company of Overweight, Unimportant and Out of Shape by Staatstheater Nurnberg. The ninth and final production included is Die Hundekot Attacke , a company developed work presented by Theaterhaus Jena in cooperation with Walter Bart and the theatre collective Wunderbaum from Rotterdam In the Netherlands. The devised work was company developed and based on a theme that they had used previously – a company of actors brainstorming about what might be good subject matter for a new work. The subject that was finally chosen by the company dealt with an actual incident involving artistic director Marco Goecke, Intendant of Hannover State Ballet who retaliated against Weibke Hüster, a Berlin critic who had written a scathing newspaper review about his work as a choreographer. The incident, that culminated with Goecke smearing dog faeces across the critics face, had electrified the German and European press. The suspension of the Intendant only further ignited free speech and violence prevention advocates Bart noted that the actual incident was one that was so controversial that many people refused to talk about it – he noted that these types of situations are actually perfect to use in the context of a devised play. The text of Die Hundekot Attacke was realized as a combination of text messages as well as personal conversations among the company – both as a collective and between individual members – that focused on the Goecke/ Hüster, incident. In the eventually realized stage play, the characters used the situation as a springboard to discuss other issues, like freedom of the press, societal as fiscal responsibility of state funded institutions, physical violence by males against females and other issues that were revealed through the process of devising. The formalized staging developed by the company required that the actors sit in a row of chairs lined across the stage with only spare movement used to connect certain characters with one another or to create mini sub-groupings. Die Hundekot Attacke ended with the characters joining together to perform a dance performance modeled on the work of Goecke. At the conclusion of the 61st Theatertreffen numerous awards were given – Die Hundekot Attacke garnered awards for “Production of the Year” as well as the “Best Young Actor” award that was given to Linde Dercon. Like Bucket List , Nathan the Wise , selected from the Salzbug Festival (also producer) was affected by the Israel/Hamas clash in Gaza and performances were limited to two considering the world tensions surrounding the play’s subject matter as well as the logistical problems of transporting Ulriche Rasche’s massive work to Berlin. Unfortunately, Berlin is a often utilized site for political displays and protests due in part to its long history of such events as well as its profile as an important world location in Europe. Still the majority of Theatertreffen performances played to completely or nearly full houses, making the television performances all the more necessary for Berliners unable to get a ticket (as was the case with Laios , which completely sold out). Around 16.900 visitors attended the 40 events hosted by the 19-day festival, the first edition under the direction of Hertlein-Hull. 13.869 people watched 29 performances of the ten remarkable productions at Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz and Hans Otto Theater Potsdam. The overall capacity utilization was 99,95 percent. Approximately 3040 visitors attended the free events: discussions, award ceremonies and the events of the conference BURNING ISSUES at the Festspielhaus. Via the media libraries of 3sat, ZDF and Berliner Festspiele, the recordings of the three “Starke Stücke“ and the further digital offerings achieved over 39,000 views in the period from 2 to 20 May. Under Hull’s leadership a new format has been proposed and the new title would be Ten Treffen (meetings or encounters); a series of ten different transdisciplinary formats of encounters which take place during the entire period of the festival in a variety of formats and include both new events and already existing elements of the festival. This new format would be in force for the 2025 festival and, while it would not affect the selection process of the productions, would help shape the nature of the overall event moving forward. References References About the author(s) Steve Earnest is a Professor of Theatre at Coastal. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Nanjing, China during the 2019 – 2020 academic year where he taught and directed works in Shakespeare and Musical Theatre. A member of SAG-AFTRA and AEA, he has worked professionally as an actor with Performance Riverside, The Burt Reynolds Theatre, The Jupiter Theatre, Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre, The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Birmingham Summerfest and the Riverside Theatre of Vero Beach, among others. Film credits include Bloody Homecoming , Suicide Note and Miami Vice . His professional directing credits include Big River , Singin’ in the Rain and Meet Me in St. Louis at the Palm Canyon Theatre in Palm Springs, Musicale at Whitehall 06 at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach and Much Ado About Nothing with the Mountain Brook Shakespeare Festival. Numer ous publications include a book, The State Acting Academy of East Berlin , published in 1999 by Mellen Press, a book chapter in Performer Training, published by Harwood Press, and a number of articles and reviews in academic journals and periodicals including Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Western European Stages, The Journal of Beckett Studies and Backstage West . He has taught Acting, Movement, Dance, and Theatre History/Literature at California State University, San Bernardino, the University of West Georgia , the University of Montevallo and Palm Beach Atlantic University. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an M.F.A. in Musical Theatre from the University of Miami, FL. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus (W)here comes the sun? Avignon 78, 2024. Imagining Possible Worlds and Celebrating Multiple Languages and Cultures Report from Basel International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL … SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW Fine art in confined spaces 2024 Report from London and Berlin Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. A Problematic Classic: Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, at Home and Abroad Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 17 Spring 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Mothers Challenging the Divine: Ali Al-Zaidi’s Ya Rab! By Amir Al-Azraki Published: May 12, 2025 Download Article as PDF Mothers Challenging the Divine: Ali Al-Zaidi’s Ya Rab! By Amir Al-Azraki Introduction to Ya Rab! (O Lord!) Ya Rab! , written in 2013, premiered in 2015 at the Fine Arts Institute Theatre in Baghdad. It was subsequently performed at the Fine Arts College Theatre in Babylon and was later staged at the National Theatre in Baghdad in 2016. The year of 2013 was marked by the emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), following the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces in 2011. Between 2014 and 2016, ISIS rapidly expanded its control, seizing large swathes of territory, including the major cities of Mosul and Tikrit, as well as critical infrastructure such as hydroelectric dams and oil refineries. By June 2014, the group declared the establishment of a caliphate, with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed as its caliph, claiming leadership over Muslims globally. The group's actions resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians and precipitated a severe humanitarian crisis, displacing hundreds of thousands. That period was defined by escalating terrorism and violence, which incited widespread protests against death and injustice. The protests in Iraq, evolving from the Arab Spring in 2011 to the Tishreen Revolution in 2019, were sparked by issues that included terrorism, national security concerns, unemployment, corruption, displacement, and inadequate public services. Throughout this turmoil, women emerged as crucial figures, leading efforts to advocate for justice and human rights amidst the chaos. Ya Rab! depicts an Iraqi mother who breaches Tuwa Valley, sacred within Islam, to appeal to God; Moses (Musa) appears as an intermediary. The mother demands that God halt the violence and chaos in her country that is causing the death of children, and replace it with love and harmony. She vows that if her conditions are not met, she will put a stop to all prayer, fasting, and other acts of worship. Moses, as God’s intermediary, argues that the earth’s misfortunes are brought on humankind by its own acts, and that her proposition is equivalent to rebellion against God. The mother, however, convinces Moses to leave Paradise to join her on earth in protest against God. It is surprising that the play was staged in a prominent theatre, given its provocative subject; within the conservative religious political ecology of Iraq, the playwright and those involved opened themselves to accusations of sacrilege. More importantly, Ya Rab! critically engages with the role of “mother activism in Iraq,” intertwining Islamic theodicy and themes of divine justice and human suffering, while juxtaposing the sacred and profane within the revered context of the Tuwa Valley, ultimately challenging religious and political authority through the powerful confrontation of a grieving mother with God’s inaction. Mother Activism [1] Ya Rab! explores the emerging role of mother activism in Iraq in recent years. The mother-protagonist embodies a powerful form of mother activism that integrates maternal essentialism with emotionalism to challenge patriarchal, religious, and divine authorities while asserting her political agency. Her protest can be seen an example of “activist mothering”, “maternal activism”, and “political motherhood”. By taking her grief and turning it into a public plea for peace, she reconfigures her maternal identity from a passive, private role into a potent, public force. Her actions are characterized by a powerful performance of maternal dedication that extends beyond traditional caregiving to include political advocacy. Seen through Natalie Wilson’s notion of "activist mothering," the mother is depicted as reasonable, argumentative, outspoken, and confident. She uses her personal experiences of loss and grief as catalysts for political activism. Her public protest against violence demonstrates how personal and emotional experience can be transformed into powerful political statement. The mother’s refusal to accept traditional constraints of motherhood and her engagement in activism underscores the concept of activist mothering, where maternal roles are integrated with political advocacy. Islamic Theodicy Ya Rab! explores themes of divine justice, human suffering, and the relationship between the divine and human actions. Islamic theodicy, the discourse that addresses the paradox of a benevolent and omnipotent God who allows suffering and evil, typically emphasizes the notions of free will, the testing of faith, and the idea that suffering can be a means of spiritual growth or a consequence of human actions. By demanding an end to violence and chaos and threatening to cease all acts of worship if her demands are not met, the mother embodies a profound struggle with the problem of evil and divine silence in the face of suffering. Her insistence on justice and peace reflects a deep sense of moral outrage against the suffering inflicted on innocent lives. Her vow to halt worship signifies a radical protest against what she perceives as divine inaction or complicity in the suffering of her people. This stance brings her into direct conflict with the traditional Islamic understanding that suffering has a divine purpose, whether as a test of faith, a means of purification, or a consequence of human free will and sin. Moses's role as an intermediary is significant. In traditional Islamic theodicy, the belief is that human suffering is often a result of human actions rather than divine arbitrariness. Moses’s argument reflects this view, suggesting that the earth’s misfortunes are a product of human misdeeds rather than direct divine intervention. This aligns with the Islamic perspective that suffering is not always a direct punishment from God but can reflect human moral failings. The dramatic twist which occurs when the mother convinces Moses to leave Paradise and join her in protest challenges both the character's traditional role and the broader theological implications. By persuading Moses—a prophet and a figure associated with divine communication—to side with her protest, the play suggests a radical reinterpretation of the relationship between the divine and human spheres. It implies a form of divine dissatisfaction or disconnection, where even a prophet feels compelled to align with human suffering and injustice. The Sacred and the Profane Set against the backdrop of the Tuwa Valley, a revered site where Moses conversed with God, Ya Rab! portrays the dichotomy of the sacred and profane, in which protest serves as a critique of religious and political powers in Iraq. It challenges established hierarchies and confronts the sanctity of divine authority with compelling urgency and sociopolitical critique. At its heart are revered figures like Moses who, anchored by the omnipresent God, becomes a stage for profound theological inquiry and existential reckoning. The narrative's power lies in its exploration of the profane—the earthly and the maternal—as embodied by the mothers who dare to breach the sacred confines of Tuwa Valley, demanding an end to death and violence with the threat to cease worshiping. Their audacious intrusion disrupts the established order, symbolizing a defiance that challenges the very essence of religious authority. Mirroring Moses's barefoot approach to God as described in the Quran (20:12), the mother’s presence signifies a radical departure from conventional norms, asserting the mothers’ agency in the face of perceived divine injustice. Their dissent extends beyond mere rebellion to a direct confrontation with the divine. They engage Moses in heated dialogue, invoking Quranic verses to justify their grievances and asserting the primacy of their earthly suffering over the sanctity attributed to prophets. Their protest, situated within the socio-political landscape, critiques how those in power manipulate religious rhetoric to justify oppression and maintain control. Moses, embodying religious authority, uses familiar discursive platitudes, such as “God wishes to test your patience” and “death is a law of life” to quell the mother’s anguish and dissent amid violence and death. These statements not only normalize her suffering but also encourage passivity, framing any resistance as a challenge to divine will. By suggesting that her deceased sons are “in paradise,” he offers comfort while dismissing her grief, reinforcing the notion that enduring injustice is part of a divinely ordained fate. He advises her to be patient and strong, pray, and not revolt against God’s will. This rhetoric ultimately serves to maintain the status quo, silencing dissent under the guise of religious reassurance. Breaking Religious Taboos Ya Rab! stirs controversy primarily through its bold interrogation of religious taboos. The play directly challenges divine authority by depicting a grieving mother who confronts God’s perceived inaction regarding her suffering and that of her community. This confrontation is controversial because it deviates from traditional religious reverence, which typically holds God as an omnipotent and untouchable figure. By having the mother threaten to abandon prayer and fasting unless her demands are met, the play questions the efficacy of these sacred practices, which can be seen as an affront to deeply held beliefs. Another contentious aspect is the portrayal of the prophet Moses. Instead of representing Moses as a revered messenger of God, the play uses him as a mediator who struggles to address the mother’s grievances and answer her questions. This depiction potentially diminishes the sanctity and authority of prophetic figures, making it problematic for those who view such portrayals as disrespectful. By showing Moses as somewhat ineffective in negotiating with God, Al-Zaidi disrupts traditional views of the prophetic role and its perceived divine authority. The play’s depiction of divine inaction or detachment is also controversial. Islamic religious traditions teach that God is actively involved in human affairs and responsive to human suffering. Al-Zaidi’s portrayal of a seemingly indifferent or silent God challenges this belief, presenting a divine being that does not intervene in the face of injustice and violence. This representation can be perceived as offensive by those who see it as undermining the concept of a benevolent and involved God. Finally, the play’s reception reflects its controversial nature. Critics praised its daring approach and its critique of how religious and political authorities exploited sacred narratives. The play’s radical approach to sacred themes and figures provoked strong reactions, highlighting the tension between artistic expression and religious respect. [1] In this section, I draw upon the scholarship of Hadeel Abdelhameed and Ghyath Alkinani, who provide a performative model of mother activism in Iraq. For more details, see their work, "Mothering the Protest: Gender Performativity as a Communication Mechanism in the Iraqi Protest Movement," in The Palgrave Handbook of Gender, Media and Communication in the Middle East and North Africa (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Amir Al-Azraki is a playwright, literary translator, Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner, and Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Studies in Islamic and Arab Cultures Program at Renison University College, University of Waterloo. Among his plays are: Waiting for Gilgamesh: Scenes from Iraq , The Mug , and The Widow . Al-Azraki is the translator of Africanism: Blacks in the Medieval Arab Imaginary , author of The Discourse of War in Contemporary Theatre (in Arabic), co-editor and co-translator of Contemporary Plays from Iraq , “A Rehearsal for Revolution”: An Approach to Theatre of the Oppressed (in Arabic), and co-editor and co-translator of Arabic poetry in Consequence , The Common , Poetry Foundation and Talking Writing . Amir Al-Azraki, PhD, (he/him) Program Coordinator, Studies in Islamic and Arab Cultures Associate Professor, Culture and Language Studies Renison University College, affiliated with the University of Waterloo aaliazraki@uwaterloo.ca Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents O Lord! By Ali Abdel-Nabi Al-Zaidi Mothers Challenging the Divine: Ali Al-Zaidi’s Ya Rab! The 31st Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre. September 1-11, 2024. ARTIFICIAL HEART. By Mohammad Basha and Firas Farrah. LEILI & MAJNUN. Written and directed by Torange Yeghiazarian SHAHADAT (THE TESTIMONIES) Adapted by Fouad Teymour Review: TO THE GOOD PEOPLE OF GAZA: THEATRE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 18, Fall, 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Report from London (December 2022) Published: November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF By Dan Venning Image Credits: Article My last theatre-going trips to London were in 2018 and 2019, before the COVID pandemic swept across the globe, shuttered theatres, and transformed theatre-going after the world began to reopen. In the reports I wrote for European Stages after those trips, I identified several major trends that ran through many of the productions I saw. In 2018, numerous productions engaged, in one way or another, with the global #MeToo movement, acknowledging the assaults and microaggressions faced by women and AFAB (assigned-female-at-birth) people. At the end of 2019, only a few months before the pandemic struck, Britain was gearing up for a national snap election that was, in some respects, a sort of second referendum on Brexit. In this particular moment, many of the productions I saw dealt with Britain’s place (often as a former imperial power) in global politics, or the marginalized people within British society. In December 2022, I once again spent nearly a month in London, taking twenty students from Union College in Schenectady, NY to see shows across the city. As in my previous trip, I selected shows eclectically to show my students just some of the many sorts of theatrical productions available in London: West End musicals ( Cabaret ), works at the National ( Hex and Othello ), shows in Shakespeare’s Globe’s indoor candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse ( Hakawatis and Henry V ), new works ( My Neighbour Totoro at the Barbican, Baghdaddy at the Royal Court, The Doctor and Orlando on the West End), and long-running mainstays ( The Woman in Black and Heathers ). In addition to the productions I saw with my students, I separately attended As You Like It at the new @sohoplace theatre; my first West End panto, Mother Goose ; the long-running & Juliet on the West End in advance of its Broadway transfer; and A Streetcar Named Desire at the Almeida, which had sold tickets so quickly that I could not book for my large student group. While my previous London reports consisted of similarly diverse shows, in this iteration, I found few thematic links running through the content or staging of these works. If there was a link between these shows, it was the truism that artists and audiences are rediscovering how to engage with theatre in the post-COVID landscape. Indeed, COVID continued (and continues) to affect how theatre is made and seen. About half of the audience members were masked at every performance (I was always masked). Several members of my term abroad contracted COVID while in London and had to quarantine for five days and miss performances. I had booked tickets to Tammy Faye at the Almeida, a new musical (with music by Elton John, lyrics by Jake Shears, and book by James Graham, featuring superstar Andrew Rannels among others, based on the life of evangelist Tammy Faye Messner), but several performances, including ours, were cancelled due to illnesses in the cast. I booked another show to make up for the cancellation: the solo piece One Night Stand with E.V. Crowe and friends at the Royal Court… and then that was also cancelled due to illness (thankfully Orlando , which I booked at that point, was not cancelled!). And yet throughout the theatres, there was palpable joy—even in the grimmest productions—that artists and audiences were once again able to come together in the same space. Because I found few concrete links beyond the ways COVID continues to inflect theatre-going, I discuss the productions irrespective of the order in which I saw them, but in ways that allow me to draw links between particular shows. Both the first ( Cabaret , 1 December 2022) and final ( A Streetcar Named Desire , 23 December 2022) productions I saw were directed by Rebecca Frecknall, Associate Director for the Almeida Theatre. Frecknall is an unabashedly feminist director who reimagines classic dramatic works—often American—for the contemporary stage and her work desperately needs to be seen on major stages in the United States. Her Summer and Smoke in 2018 was haunting in its simplicity and Patsy Ferran justifiably won the Olivier for her luminous performance; unfortunately Frecknall’s 2019 The Duchess of Malfi featuring Lydia Wilson was less so, sapping the play of its disturbing power in a bland, ultramodern staging that seemed to focus more on the men than the titular Dutchess. I’m glad to say that both of her productions I saw in 2022 were stellar. Cabaret was staged at the Playhouse Theatre on the West End, which was rechristened The Kit Kat Club. Audience members entered through the stage door and wound their way through the basement halls of the theatre, as if we were entering the venue depicted in the show. Stickers were placed over our cell phone lenses to prevent photographs and everyone was given a shot of vodka. Cast members of various genders dressed in vaguely BDSM sexual garb made eyes with us and danced provocatively. Three separate bars were set up in each lobby level and a half hour before curtain an elaborately staged dance number by the “boys and girls” of the Kit Kat Club was executed on the bar of the main lobby (Julia Cheng’s choreography was impressive throughout the show, but particularly here). The show had swept the 2022 Olivier Awards but by the time I saw it all the stars who had won acting awards had rotated out. The Emcee was played by understudy Matthew Gent at this performance and Sally Bowles by swing/alternate Emily Benjamin (both of whom would take over the roles as main cast in 2023), yet this cast was spectacular. Of particular note were Michelle Bishop as Frӓulein Kost (and the Kit Kat girl Fritzie), Vivien Parry as Frӓulein Schneider, and Benjamin as Sally Bowles. Parry seemed to channel the spirit of Lotte Lenya with her rendition of “So What” and Bishop, under Frecknall’s direction, brought genuine pathos to the role of Kost. As a prostitute at the bottom of the social hierarchy, we could understand how Kost would embrace Naziism to find anyone she could denigrate in response to the way society had rejected her. At the end of the show, Benjamin’s rendition of “Cabaret” was among the strongest musical numbers I’ve seen live, surpassing, to my mind, recordings of Liza Minelli: the upbeat lyrics paired with her personal despair had much of the audience in tears. Sid Sagar as Cliff Bradshaw was less successful, but this may be because he seemed to have been directed to be emotionless throughout, preventing any sort of audience empathy with the character who was the analogue of Christopher Isherwood, the queer author of the stories on which the musical is based. Tom Scutt’s stage was almost in the round and his costumes implicated the audience in the rise of fascism that Kander, Ebb, and Masteroff’s show depicts. The Emcee rose from the stage gleefully with a tiny party hat for “Wilkommen” as everyone reveled together in the celebration we were attending; by “Money” he was dressed in a neo-fascist demonic outfit, and at the end of the show he and the boys and girls of the Kit Kat Club wore simple, sexless brown outfits, evoking Hitler’s brownshirts a century ago in the 1920s. Yet in the final moments as they marched in a circle carrying suitcases, Isabella Byrd’s lighting turned the set to a stark gray, making them look like photos of men and women with suitcases on their way to trains to concentration camps. Collaboration would save no one. Thankfully, Frecknall’s production (with original star Eddie Redmayne as the Emcee) is transferring to Broadway in 2024, when the August Wilson Theatre will temporarily become the Kit Kat Club. Cabaret . Photo: Marc Brenner. Of all the shows I saw in London, Frecknall’s version of A Streetcar Named Desire was the strongest—easily the best Tennessee Williams I have ever seen—despite the fact that it was in previews with the actor playing Blanche holding her script throughout. The production sold out within hours of tickets going on sale, but Lydia Wilson, who had been cast as Blanche, dropped out of the production for health reasons two weeks before performances began. The first week of performances were cancelled and Wilson was replaced by Patsy Ferran, who had been such a revelation as Alma in Summer and Smoke four years earlier. On the preview I attended, after barely two weeks of rehearsal, Ferran carried her script, occasionally glancing quickly at it at the beginning of each scene, but never looking at it again. Also at the performance I attended on 23 December, Frecknall herself stepped into the role of Eunice (without a script). Seeing her onstage in her own production was a marvelous experience. Madeleine Girling’s set was a nearly bare square with a few scattered props (and periodic rain effects) and Frecknall’s production raced through the words at the beginning of Williams’s script at lightning pace so that the action could effectively open with Blanche’s arrival in New Orleans. Yet this production was less about the conflict between Blanche and Stanley than about toxic masculinity and patriarchal abuse. Blanche was certainly traumatized, but never for a moment portrayed as “crazy,” and Stanley’s violence towards her throughout the play had little to do with any hatred for her per se. Instead, Stanley wanted complete control over his victimized wife Stella—and his clearest path to getting this, as for any abuser, was to isolate Stella from anyone with whom she could find mutual love or care, particularly her sister. The actor who played Stanley, Paul Mescal, was not a hulking brute but appeared to be an attractive, soulful, young husband with a somewhat silly mullet. Yet in spite of this physical attractiveness, Mescal played Stanley as a profoundly ugly man on the inside: consumed with jealousy, self-pity, and white male rage, taking out his anger most clearly on his abused wife, her sister, and his supposed “friend” Mitch. In this color-conscious production, Stella was played by the British-Indian-Singaporean actor Anjana Vasan (so she and Blanche were clearly not full biological siblings, but loved one another no less) and Mitch by Black actor Dwane Walcott. Walcott’s scenes with Blanche and Stanley took on particular resonances—as Stanley viciously notes that Mitch will never achieve his own career successes, or when Blanche asks Mitch if he has been on the titular streetcar and Mitch does not respond. One of many revelations was that Frecknall’s production made it seem as if Mitch must have always been written for a Black actor. Her feminist version of A Streetcar Named Desire (which won an Olivier for Best Revival, and for which Vasan and Mescal also took home Oliviers), even in previews and with Ferran holding her book-in-hand, will make it hard for me to read or see Williams’s play in the same light again. A Streetcar Named Desire . Photo: Marc Brenner. Nearly as successful were two new adaptations of older works: Robert Icke’s The Doctor and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s My Neighbour Totoro . Icke, the former Associate Director for the Almeida (the position Frecknall now holds) created this production at that theatre before it transferred to the West End where I saw it on 8 December 2022. Like his earlier revelatory adaptations Oresteia and Hamlet , The Doctor has since been presented at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. The Doctor is Icke’s loose adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s play Professor Bernhardi , a work about anti-Semitism in early twentieth-century Europe. While holding fast to most of the events in Schnitzler’s plot—which hinges on a leading doctor’s refusal to admit a priest to deliver last rights to a young girl dying of a botched abortion and the ways in which that Jewish doctor is punished by society—Icke’s adaptation is strikingly contemporary, engaging with identity and perception in today’s world. His script notes that “Actors’ identities should be carefully considered in the casting of the play. In all sections except for [an onstage debate], each actor’s identity should be directly dissonant with their character’s in at least one way […] the acting should hold the mystery until the play reveals it. The idea is that the audience are made to re-consider characters (and events) as they learn more about who the characters are” (viii). For example, when a priest (who we later learn is Black) enters in Act I, the stage direction reads “ The FATHER is played by a white actor .” Hardiman, a particularly chauvinistic white male doctor, was played by the female Afro-Jamaican actor Naomi Wirthner. The central character, Dr. Ruth Wolff, was played by Juliet Stevenson, an actress who does not “look Jewish” at all. Wolff claims to see only talent and facts, never race or sex, and the audience is forced to engage with what actually not seeing these palpable facts about identity would feel like. In one particularly affecting moment, Ruth’s neighbor Sami, played by cis woman actor Matilda Tucker, is revealed to be a trans girl who appears masculine to most people who can see her within the world of the play. We periodically see flashbacks to Ruth’s conversations with her deceased partner Charlie, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, the disease Ruth seeks to cure. Charlie was played by the Black woman actor Juliet Garricks, but Icke never lets us learn Charlie's “actual” gender or race within the world of the play. Hildegard Bechtler’s simple and evocative set and costumes (the set was simply a slowly rotating white room) contributed to all these effects. Icke’s challenging production forced audiences to engage with what they can, cannot, or will not see. The Doctor . Photo: Manuel Harlan. The RSC’s My Neighbour Totoro (7 December 2022) was another stellar adaptation. It won Olivier awards for Best Entertainment or Comedy Play as well as for Phelim McDermott’s direction, Joe Hisaishi’s music as orchestrated and arranged by Will Stuart, Jessica Hung and Han Yun’s lighting design, Tony Gayle’s sound design, Tom Pye’s set design, and Kimie Nakano’s costume design. Also certainly deserving of an award—although an Olivier category does not exist—were Bail Twist’s puppet designs, which were created by the Jim Henson Creature Shop, Significant Object, and Twist’s own Tandem Otter Productions. The production was a faithful adaptation by Tom Morton-Smith of Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 Studio Ghibli animated film My Neighbor Totoro , about two sisters who move with their father to the rural Japanese countryside in 1955 so that they can be closer to their mother who is in a specialized hospital. In the countryside, the sisters—Mei, aged four, and Satsuki, aged ten—discover mythical creatures from Japanese folklore, including soot spirits, “Totoros” (kind and intelligent furry forest creatures varying in size from tiny to immense), and a giant cat that is also a bus in which the creatures ride. The sisters see tiny sprouts grow into giant trees overnight. Miyazaki’s masterful animated film is a paean to childhood, Japanese folk culture, and imagination, made even more powerful through Hisaishi’s unforgettable score. A cartoon, with all its impossible magic and music, was brought to life onstage through astounding performances by an entirely Asian cast, including twenty puppeteers in Bunraku-style black outfits, singer Ai Ninomiya, and the award-winning designers. Adult actors Mei Mac (Mei), Ami Okumura Jones (Satsuki), and Nino Furuhata (Kanta, a young neighbor boy) empathetically played young children in a way that contributed to the affective power of the production. During the curtain call, the puppeteers swiftly demonstrated how they had manipulated some of the puppets, from the hand-and-rod chickens to the immense King Totoro and Cat-Bus. Notably, production press photos never show the Totoros; they have to be seen to be believed (the production is being revived in 2023 in London and I have no doubt it will tour worldwide considering its success there). My Neighbour Totoro . Photo: Manuel Harlan. Coincidentally, another production I attended was also an adaptation of a film released in 1988: Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe’s Heathers , based on the cult film written by Daniel Waters and directed by Michael Lehmann (13 December 2022). The musical adaptation of Heathers has similarly achieved cult status with young musical theatre aficionados, despite never having been staged on Broadway. It opened off-Broadway in 2014 at New World Stages, then premiered in the UK (with a few rewritten songs) at the off-West End venue The Other Palace in 2018, transferred to the West End later that year, transferred back to The Other Palace after the pandemic in 2021, and closed in 2023. All of these productions were directed by Andy Fickman. Heathers is set in Westerberg High School in the 1980s and centers on Veronica, a girl who manages to gain acceptance from the popular clique of Heather Chandler, Heather McNamara, and Heather Duke, at the cost of her friendship with the unpopular Martha Dunnstock. Veronica begins a relationship with a new boy at school, the soulful outsider J.D., who reveals himself as a full-fledged sociopath, poisoning the lead Heather and murdering two jocks who try to sexually assault Veronica. Veronica goes along at first—penning a fake suicide note from Heather Chandler that takes the school by storm and later helping to stage the killings of Ram and Kurt as a murder-suicide as if the two were closeted gay lovers. But when J.D. decides to blow up the entire school, Veronica finally takes the initiative and stops his murderous rampage. At the off-West End Other Palace, Fickman’s production as designed by David Shields lacked any technical spectacle but the energetic performances by young actors Erin Caldwell (Veronica), Nathanael Landskroner (J.D.) and Maddison Firth (Heather Chandler) brought the mostly young audience to their feet. O’Keefe and Murphy’s songs from the show are superb, particularly Veronica’s joyously sexual “Dead Girl Walking,” Kurt and Ram’s Dads’ “My Dead Gay Son,” J.D.’s “Our Love is God,” the Heathers’ show stopping poppy “Candy Store,” and the eleven o’clock number “Seventeen,” an ode to high school life. While Heathers had a significant run on- and off- the West End, it pales in comparison to The Woman in Black , which opened in London in 1989 (only one year after the original films of Heathers and My Neighbor Totoro were released), closing in March 2023 after running thirty-three years on the West End. Scores of actors have played the roles of Arthur Kipps and the young unnamed Actor who endeavors to bring Kipps to life (as well as the uncredited ghost role) and playwright Stephen Mallatratt died in 2004 less than halfway through the show’s immensely long run (Dame Susan Hill, from whose 1983 novel Mallatratt adapted the play, is still alive and still writing). I was especially glad to see the show on 6 December 2022 only months before it ended its historic run. It has made its way into numerous British school curriculums and part of the audience was filled with teenagers in school uniforms who had been bussed in to see the show on the West End. Robin Herford’s production, simply designed by Michael Holt, takes place “in this Theatre in the early 1950s” and begins when Arthur Kipps (Julian Forsyth, when I saw it) attempts, poorly, to tell his haunted ghost story for the stage. With a few simple props, the young Actor (Matthew Spencer) takes on the role of the young Kipps, while Kipps himself plays every other character (save the ghost) from his past. Through the power of the imagination, affecting performances, one uncredited woman actor, and a few carefully placed jump scares facilitated by Kevin Sleep’s lighting design and Sebastian Frost’s sound design, the audience is transported from a bare stage into a small seaside town and its haunted house on the moors. Rumors abound of ghosts in London’s theatres—including the murdered actor William Terriss at the Adelphi and the 18 th Century “Man in Gray” at Drury Lane—and if such ghosts do exist, I expect the Fortune Theatre will be a stage haunted by The Woman in Black for some time to come. The Woman in Black . Photo: Mark Douet. In contrast to the simplistic power of imagination celebrated in that show, Hex at the National Theatre (5 December 2022) demonstrated the ways in which spectacle—and powerful performances—cannot save a thoroughly misconceived production. Staged in the National’s massive Olivier Theatre, with its marvelous gigantic drum revolve stage, Hex , a musical adaptation of the Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, is obviously a pet project for Rufus Norris, the artistic director and chief executive of the National. Norris, who directed the production, also wrote the lyrics and developed the concept along with Katrina Lindsay. The convoluted book for Hex is by Tanya Ronder and music is by Jim Fortune. Lindsay’s set and costume designs are spectacular, including a castle that descends from the upstage wall, three flying fairies who deliver their performances while suspended midair, and numerous other delightfully staged creations, including bumblingly misogynistic princes who wish to wake the sleeping beauty, a chorus of poisonous thorns, and many more fantastical effects. The plot centers on the “low” Fairy (the marvelous singer Lisa Lambe), who loses her powers after accidentally “hexing” the young princess Rose (Rosie Graham) and putting her into a sleep until she can find a true love’s kiss. Fairy wants to regain her powers and join the effervescent “High Fairies” (Kate Parr, Olivia Saunders, and Rumi Sutton), so seeks a prince to undo the curse; she finds him in Bert (Michael Elcock), the half-human son of Queenie (another superb singer, Victoria Hamilton-Barritt), an ogress who has turned vegetarian in order to resist her urges to consume human flesh. After a convoluted plot that also involves generations of stewards named Smith and Smith-Smith (Michael Matus), Fairy sneakily preventing Queenie from eating her grandchildren (Rose and Bert’s children Duncan and Dyllis), and much more, Fairy succeeds and is elevated to “high fairy” status—renouncing her lifelong goal only seconds later to rejoin her earthbound friends. Tone shifts abound—the show was billed for ages eight and up, but in addition to fairy-tale hijinks it includes a baby-eating ogress, graphic descriptions of animal slaughter, and a “comic” song from the princes about sexual coercion. Even worse is the music: Fortune’s tunes and Norris’s lyrics are sometimes earworms precisely because of their banality (Bert cannot stop singing about his name in “Prince Bert,” impressively and athletically choreographed by Jade Hackett; Rose and Bert’s romantic duet “Hello” consists mainly of the words “Hi, Hi, Hello”). Of the twenty-eight songs, eight are reprises (with one song reprised twice). Hex aspired to be a creative retelling of fairy tales along the lines of Sondheim’s Into the Woods , instead it demonstrated what happens when an artistic director of a major theatre is too enamored of his own project. Hex . Photo: Johan Persson. The other production I saw at the National, Clint Dyer’s staging of Othello (16 December 2022), was far more successful. Othello is a deeply troubling play, written by a white man over four hundred years ago but engaging with the charged issues of racism and spousal abuse and murder. Probably my favorite analyses of this play come from the Black British actor Hugh Quarshie (see “Is Othello a Racist Play on YouTube).and Ayanna Thompson’s new intersectional feminist introduction to Arden revised edition (2016)both of which acknowledge the ways in which the play remains strikingly painful today, especially for Black or woman/AFAB readers and audiences. Dyer’s production, in the National’s smaller proscenium Lyttelton Theatre, with a set designed by Chloe Lamford that looked like some sort of public forum, began with a stagehand sweeping the stage as images were projected on the upstage wall showing the long and troubling production history of this play. In Dyer’s production, almost every character, from ensemble members to Cassio (Rory Fleck Byrne), Bianca (Kirsty J Curtis), Montano (Garteth Kennerley), or the Duke of Venice (Martin Marquez) was also credited as “System”—in other words, these people were part of a system of oppression that would lead to Othello and Desdemona’s deaths. Only three characters were not also listed as “System”: Othello (Giles Terera), the Black man oppressed by systemic racism, Desdemona (Rosy McEwen), his white wife who rejects the system to love a Black man, and Iago (Paul Hilton, who was as superb in this as he had been in the benevolent roles of Walter and Morgan in The Inheritance ), who manipulated the system to destroy Othello and Desdemona. Notably, during the trial in Act I, Iago sat to the side alongside Roderigo/System (Jack Bardoe), making a noose out of a long rope. Iago and Roderigo assumed that the trial would be perfunctory and Othello would be executed—and they might have been right, had the Turkish invasion of Cyprus not required Othello’s military leadership. But perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the production was how Dyer conceived of the role of Emilia/System (Tanya Franks): throughout the production, one of her arms was in a cast and she had a massive black eye. She was obviously being abused by her husband Iago, yet no one commented or even subtly acknowledged this fact. Dyer effectively communicated that systems encourage horrific cruelties (towards women by men, towards Black people by white society) and react violently not to abuse but instead to those who dare to oppose these oppressions. Othello . Photo: Myah Jeffers. Another successful and contemporary staging of a Shakespearean play was Josie Rourke’s gorgeous intersectional production of As You Like It (15 December 2022), the second play to be staged at the new @sohoplace theatre, an ultramodern complex that is London’s first purpose-built West End theatre to open in fifty years. Staged in the round, Robert Jones’s set consisted mainly of a large piano center stage where Michael Bruce played underscoring for the action and accompaniment to the songs (Bruce also composed all the music) throughout the show. When the characters entered Arden, leaves fell from above, covering the stage in an autumnal tapestry. At that point, Jones and Poppy Hall’s Elizabethan-style costumes gave way to more contemporary, rustic attire. Particularly noteworthy was the casting: Leah Harvey (a Black nonbinary female-presenting actor who uses they/them pronouns) played Rosalind—and Harvey was not the only nonbinary actor in the cast: Cal Watson (they/them) played Le Beau and the second de Bois brother. Several of the actors and their characters were deaf, including Rose Ayling-Ellis, who played Celia, and Gabriella Leon, who played Audrey. These identities mattered in the play: Celia and Audrey communicated using a mixture of British Sign Language (BSL) and sign-mime, and most of the characters communicated with them in this way. But the vicious Duke Frederick (Tom Edden) refused to communicate with his daughter in sign, forcing her to lip read and to speak orally to him. Duke Frederick also used his daughter’s disability against her: turning his back to her as he spoke in anger, so that she could not read his lips and understand what he was saying. The play’s scenes of reconciliation and love at the end were particularly moving because of these intersectional identities. Instead of returning in “women’s weeds,” Harvey’s Rosalind simply walked offstage and back on, and then Alfred Enoch’s Orlando recognized them. Ben Wiggins’s Oliver demonstrated his reformation by struggling to learn BSL so that he could communicate with Celia, with whom he had fallen in love. In fact, the American actor Martha Plimpton, always excellent in Shakespeare, despite a solid performance as a female Jacques, with the famous “All the world’s a stage” speech, was one of the least compelling parts of the production. Rourke’s staging demonstrated that Shakespeare’s fictionalized Forest of Arden can allow us to imagine and visualize a world where everyone can be celebrated, no matter their race, gender identity or expression, or disabilities. As You Like It . Photo: Manuel Harlan. The same day I saw Othello at the National in the evening (16 December 2022), I had also attended a matinee of Henry V at the nearby Shakespeare’s Globe, meaning that I saw three Shakespearean productions in London within two days. Unfortunately, Holly Race Roughan’s staging of Henry V was the least inspiring of any of the productions I saw during my time in London, including the misconceived Hex . Roughan had a clear concept: that war and power could corrupt even the most well-intentioned leader and that brutally violent men can come to be revered as heroes. Over the course of the play, her Henry (Oliver Johnstone) transformed from an optimistic, well-intentioned ruler to a dangerous psychopath, raging at his people, ordering executions without a second thought, and killing the Dauphin at Agincourt in retribution for the insult that helped spark his war. Henry’s scene with Katherine had not a single spark of romance, but was the culmination of his violence as he demanded her hand in an overtly political marriage, and then the play ended with the scene (usually much earlier in the play; Act 3, scene 4) between Katherine and Alice (Eleanor Henderson) as Katherine began to learn English in preparation for her forced marriage. Perplexingly, this was followed by an epilogue where the actress who had played Katherine, Joséphine Callies, transformed into a modern immigrant, responding to a British naturalization exam; perhaps a comment, albeit unrelated to the earlier action of this production, on the fact that England, which had once had imperialist dreams of conquering foreign lands, after Brexit now places major barriers against Europeans who wish to become British citizens. While Roughan’s concept was clear, everyone spoke Shakespeare’s verse excellently, and the production was one of the best lit I’ve seen in the indoor Wanamaker Playhouse (designer Moi Tran’s metallic upstage wall reflected the candlelight that serves to light productions at this indoor recreation of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars playhouse), little else made sense. Except for Johnstone as Henry, the nine remaining cast members played all the other roles in the play, often with only the smallest costume or accent change meant to indicate a change in character. However, sometimes this convention wasn’t followed: an actor removing a coat might mean a change in character, or simply that character removing their coat. Even for a Shakespeare scholar, it was often unclear to whom Henry was speaking; I could tell that my fellow audience members were totally befuddled. This is the sort of misconceived production that sadly leads modern audiences to feel that they “just don’t understand” (or like) Shakespeare. Henry V . Photo: Johan Persson. Hakawatis: Women of the Arabian Nights , a new play by Shakespeare’s Globe writer-in-residence Hannah Khalil, which I had seen two days earlier at the Wanamaker (14 December 2022) was far more successful. A testament to women’s empowerment, storytelling, and collaborative creation, the play follows five women (Wahida the Dancer, played by Houda Echouafini; Fatah the Young, played by Alaa Habib; Zuya the Warrior, played by Laura Hanna; Akila the Writer, played by Nadi Kemp-Sayfi; and Naha the Wise, played by Roann Hassani McCloskey) who are imprisoned and awaiting their marriage to, sexual assault by, and subsequent execution at the orders of the unseen King, who is currently married to (the also unseen) Scheherazade. In contrast to the original version of the tale, it is not Scheherazade but these women who come up with the stories that Scheherazade will tell her husband, saving all their lives. The play includes riffs on classic stories from the 1001 Nights along with new tales, as if they are stories from these women’s lives, or ones told to them by their mothers, sisters, cousins, or female friends. At one point, they argue about a story that Zuya tells, which metaphorically depicts male violence and women cleverly overcoming it: Akila realizes that it will enrage the King and might lead to everyone’s death, and that this is not the moment to share that particular tale. The women argue about self-censoring, but ultimately agree with Akila that “there is a power in words. Stories. They must be told in the right way and at the right time” (61). The five very different women, placed in the same dire situation, forge close relationships, and earn their freedom, but, as they leave after 1001 nights, they vow to find some way to free Scheherazade (who had shared their stories) from her vicious husband. The moving play, presented with an Arab cast, was aided by the material conditions of the Wanamaker playhouse, where the candlelight (actors had to hold light sources at the same time as playing their roles) enhanced the sense that Rosa Maggiora’s set was indeed a dank prison room, one of the many sorts of cages (metaphorical or literal) throughout history from which women have had to escape. Hakawatis . Photo: Ellie Kurttz. Like Hakawatis, Baghdaddy at the Royal Court (8 December 2022) was a new feminist Arab play—but in every other respect the works could not have been more different. Written by Jasmine Naziha Jones, who also performed the central character, Darlee, a second-generation British-Iraqi girl from age eight to twenty, the play, which is dedicated to Jones’s father, delves into the relationship between Darlee and her Iraqi Dad as the girl comes of age during wars between the West and Iraq. The expressionist play was staged by Milli Bhatia on a set of stairs designed by Moi Tran—similar in some respects to Chloe Lamford’s set for Othello —and also featured a chorus of “Quareens”—“spiritual companions from another dimension,” two female and one male, helping Darlee “reconcile her childhood memories with Dad’s story” as an immigrant (2). Part clown show and part fictionalized reconstruction of a traumatic childhood, the show built up to two monologues: Darlee’s railing against a so-called democratic Western society that has never fully accepted her and Dad’s lament for his family who died in the Iraq war after he came to the UK. The play—and Jones’s performance as a fictionalized version of her younger self—was deeply painful but felt only half-formed, perhaps as do any of our half-remembered recollections of childhood. Baghdaddy . Photo: Helen Murray. Orlando (17 December 2022), as adapted by Neil Bartlett from Virginia Woolf’s novel and staged by Michael Grandage at the Garrick Theatre on the West End, featuring the nonbinary actor Emma Corrin as its titular immortal gender-defying character, was another sort of coming-of-age story. Of course, Orlando comes into his/her/their own over the course of centuries (and also it’s no coincidence that Orlando shares the same name as one of the romantic leads in the gender-bending As You Like It ). Excepting Corrin and Deborah Findlay, who played Mrs Grimditch, a very long-serving confidant to Orlando and the audience, the remaining cast (consisting of one man and eight women or nonbinary performers) all played both a chorus of Virginia Woolfs and Orlando’s many, many loves. When Orlando appears, the audience briefly sees him frontally naked (Corrin wore a prosthetic penis for this moment) and when Orlando transforms into a woman, she is once again naked (although this time only seen from the waist up). The play was a celebration of transformation and potentiality, ending by acknowledging that Orlando might thrive in the world today (or an approaching future, signified by an intensely bright door at the top of Peter McKintosh’s set that Orlando passed through at the end of the play) in a more accepting world that Woolf herself, who committed suicide in 1941, could only dimly imagine. The play was especially moving to my students on the mini-term, several of whom are trans and/or nonbinary; one said she was going to get a tattoo of that bright door that signified the possibilities of the future if we are willing to “try courage” (78). Orlando . Photo: Marc Brenner. Less successful in its feminism but still a delightful spectacle onstage was the jukebox musical & Juliet (20 December 2022), directed by Luke Sheppard with a book by David West Read and featuring over two decades of pop songs written by Max Martin. It’s hard to believe that Martin wrote so many of the best-known hits for artists including Bon Jovi, The Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, Britney Spears, Robyn, Kelly Clarkson, Kesha, Justin Timberlake, Demi Lovato, Katy Perry, The Weeknd, and more. The show bills itself as a feminist revision of Romeo and Juliet , in which Anne Hathaway, in a frame story, accuses Shakespeare of not giving his doomed heroine enough of a voice or agency and imagines a new ending in which Juliet doesn’t kill herself after awakening to find Romeo poisoned. Taking off from that premise, Juliet (still played, when I saw it years after it opened on the West End, by Olivier-winning Miriam-Teak Lee) goes on an adventure across Europe, along with her friends including the trans character May (now played by nonbinary actor Joe Foster). The show is raucously self-aware (a jukebox sat visibly near the center of Soutra Gilmour’s set and the spectacularly lit titles that descended from the flyspace at the opening, interval, and close resembled nothing more than a West End/Broadway marquee) and builds to Juliet’s rendition of Katy Perry’s “Roar,” which indeed stopped the show for at least a minute of applause after Lee’s performance of the song. The show has since transferred to Broadway, where Justin David Sullivan, the nonbinary actor who played May, declined to be considered for Tonys since the awards continue to require actors be nominated in binary gender categories for men and women. Thankfully, the production has fixed its original gaffe of casting a cis man as a trans character (Arun Blair-Mangat originated the role of May on the West End), but the supposed feminism continues to ring a bit hollow even as Anne, Juliet, and her friends sing about women’s empowerment. Perhaps this is because all of the authors and the director of the show were men: as noted in Hamilton (another musical created almost entirely by men that was intended to reimagine the past more inclusively), “who tells your story” matters and it’s too bad that the producers of & Juliet didn’t find a woman to write the book or direct. Just as much frothy fun, but with a lot less pretense, were two holiday shows I saw towards the end of my trip. Who’s Holiday! at the tiny Southwark Playhouse (19 December 2022) was a solo holiday drag show which was the final work to which I brought my students. Written in 2017 by Matthew Lombardo in the comic verse of Dr. Seuss, the play imagines Cindy Lou Who from How the Grinch Stole Christmas! all grown up, bleached blonde, hard drinking, foul mouthed in rhyme, having escaped a relationship with the Grinch, and planning a Christmas celebration despite constant cancellations from her friends. The play is thoroughly dirty and definitely not for the young children who might still read Dr. Seuss. But, as directed by Kirk Jameson, it is perfect for camp as performed by Miz Cracker, an American drag queen who gained fame on the television show Ru Paul’s Drag Race , and in the end Who’s Holiday! still celebrates the joy and spirit of Christmas every bit as much as its less transgressive source material. Who’s Holiday!. Photo: Mark Senior. My first West End panto was equally delightful, if far more spectacular. Jonathan Harvey’s Mother Goose , directed by Cal McCrystal at the Duke of York’s Theatre (20 December 2022), the same theatre where I had seen The Doctor a few weeks earlier, featured stand-up comedian John Bishop as Vic Goose and the legendary Sir Ian McKellen in drag as Mother Goose (the panto Dame), using wit and constant references to contemporary British politics to facing down holiday financial struggles from exorbitant energy bills. Their struggles are abated by the arrival of a goose (Anna-Jane Casey) who starts laying golden eggs and gives Mother Goose the chance to achieve her dreams of stardom. The songs, dances, and audience participation were all delightful—when one nearby audience member heard that Mother Goose was my first panto, she let me know she had been to hundreds and that this was among the very best she’d ever seen. Yet no one was enjoying themselves more than Sir Ian, obviously gleeful at the chance to ham it up in the sort of work he had adored in his youth. As he delivered key lines from Gandalf in Lord of the Rings or Portia’s “The quality of mercy” speech in the tenor of Mother Goose, his wry smile was infectious and had the audience grinning just as much as he was. On our feet at the end, we were all celebrating the holiday spirit together again, in the theatre. Mother Goose . Photo: Manuel Harlan. The holiday spirit that suffused Mother Goose and Who’s Holiday! in some ways ran through all these productions, even the darkest like Othello, Henry V, The Doctor , and A Streetcar Named Desire , since we were, once again, able to be in London’s excellent theatres together. COVID will remain part of our world for some time to come: many audience members remain masked, theatres have to cancel performances and hire more understudies (or even have the director go on for a role in a pinch!), and more. This is probably a good thing: it has led to conversations about how the arts can be safer and more equitable for everyone. I expect to return to London at the end of 2025 and I am excited to discover what will suffuse the city’s theatrical scene then, when it will have been half a decade since the height of the pandemic. References References About the author(s) Dan Venning is an associate professor in the department of Theatre & Dance at Union College (Schenectady, NY), where he also teaches in the English department and the interdisciplinary programs in American Studies and Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies. He has published numerous chapters in scholarly edited collections, book reviews, and performance reviews in a broad range of scholarly journals, including several overviews of theatre in London for European Stages . He is currently working on a book about Shakespearean performance and nation-building. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Report from London (December 2022) Confessions, storytelling and worlds in which the impossible becomes possible. The 77th Avignon Festival, July 5-25, 2023 “Regietheater:” two cases The Grec Festival 2023 The Festival of the Youth Theatre of Piatra Neamt, Romania: A Festival for “Youth without Age” (notes on the occasion of the 34th edition) Report from Germany Poetry on Stage: Games, Words, Crickets..., Directed by Silviu Purcărete Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Frank Hentschker, Jane House | A story of basic and perverse family dynamics, the play is an all-female human comedy in three acts. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, please contact us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu or find it on Amazon. New Plays from Italy Vol 1: The Origin of the World Frank Hentschker, Jane House Download PDF The Origin of the World: Interior Conversation Piece by Lucia Calamaro. Edited by Frank Hentschker. Translated by Jane House. A story of basic and perverse family dynamics, the play is an all-female human comedy in three acts. The Mother Daria lives with her Daughter Federica among bulky modern appliances, godlike monumental figures; they confront reality as they eat, chat, and get dressed. Sometimes other characters in the family constellation, such as the Analyst, join them. The womb of domestic life is staged in chapters, which lead not towards an ending but towards an origin. The play portrays the indifference, rage, and helplessness of those who live with depression. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 18 Winter 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: WAILING SONGS OF THE PAST, MIGHT THEY GROW OUR RESILIENCE. By Maya al-Khaldi. By Dia Barghouti Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF The air rose against the door And I thought the wind carried news Oh heart have patience [to endure] the separation From our loved one s [ 1 ] Since Israel began its violent attacks on Gaza and the West Bank over a year ago, Palestinian musicians and performers have been faced with the difficult question of what the role of art is in the midst of a genocide. This was the question with which Palestinian musician and composer Maya al-Khaldi began her performance, titled Wailing Songs of the Past, Might they Grow our Resilience . She explained that the question of how artists can help their communities survive in the face of such extreme violence was at the heart of her research on Palestinian wailing songs, on which her performance was based. Al-Khaldi’s performance draws on written sources, the sound archives at the Popular Art Center ( Markaz al-Fan al-Sha‘bi, مركز الفن الشعبي) , and her own interviews with women . Based on this research, al-Khaldi composed the music for a collection of songs , the lyrics of which were derived from extinct Palestinian rituals of mourning. In her introduction, she explained that many of these songs disappeared due to the cultural loss incurred with the mass displacement of Palestinians by Zionist forces in the 1948 Nakba ( Catastrophe) and the rise of Wahhabism, which considered such practices to be sacrilegious. Indeed, even during interviews, several of the women reciting the lyrics of these songs would pause for a moment to ask God for forgiveness. Yet the loss, pain, and feelings of longing embedded in these songs are more relevant to Palestinians than ever. By returning to these extinct practices, al-Khaldi is creating a space for Palestinians to come together to mourn the loss and grapple with the immense pain they are enduring. These songs of mourning, and Palestinian wailing practices more generally, used to be performed by women. Citing the lyrics of a song that says “I cry for my soul and most of my wailing is for my wounds,” al-Khaldi explained that such songs can only be performed by those who have endured the pain of loss and that these mourning rituals were a means for people to guide others through the process of grieving. According to al-Khaldi, this is the part played by the nawa ḥ a ( نواحة , the woman who performs mourning songs) in society, a feminist role that continues to have revolutionary potential in the present. During her performance, al-Khaldi explained that the significance of the nawa ḥ a is that they create the space for us to collectively feel our pain as a community, pain we are often denied because of the urgency of needing to find a way to survive. Photo by Soraya El Kahlaoui Wailing Songs of the Past, Might they Grow our Resilience is part of a series of performances organized by Gradus-العتبة , an initiative started by musician and composer Dina Shilleh to create space for musicians to artistically innovate and collaborate. It was performed twice on the 2nd and 3rd of February 2025 at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah and Wonder Cabinet in Bethlehem. Accompanying Maya in her performance were Sarouna on the Qanun, Faris Amin on the cello, and Zeina Amro as a vocalist. The performance began with a song about a host asking visitors for forgiveness as she is unable to celebrate the Eid (the Muslim feast) because she is in mourning. In a culture that places so much emphasis on hospitality, not being able to celebrate or properly host a guest during the feast represents an immense state of sadness. But it is perhaps also worth mentioning that Eid is also a time of remembering the deceased as it is customary for family members to visit the graves of their loved ones during these times. By the time the first song had finished, an atmosphere of sadness had already overtaken the room. I wondered who the other audience members were thinking of, those who had been martyred in Gaza? Did they have family in Gaza? I thought of a close friend who lost twenty-two family members on the same day as a result of Israeli bombing. Or were they thinking of those who have been killed by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank? Or those murdered by the Palestinian Authority in Jenin? Perhaps others remembered those who have passed from disease, but is stress and grief not the cause of disease? The second song, an adaptation from a poem from the Ottoman era, then began. [ 2 ] Its slow pace and the repetitive melodies of the cello and qanun were a meditation of the tragedy of loss. Yet it also emphasised Palestinian agency with the alteration of the lyrics to include a verse about a clementine that ‘heals sadness,’ the clementine here being a symbol of resistance. And although there was an element of otherworldliness in the first, it was this second song that made me feel we were on a journey to another time and space. The qanun, cello, singing, and repetition had a mesmerising effect. Along with the surreal aspect of this song, there was almost a hint of the beautiful, as if Khaldi was trying to remind us that there is beauty even in grief. The third song was a supplication to the grave, written in the voice of the deceased. It was mainly composed of repetitions of the verse “oh grave, feel my mother calling, open for her an opening so that she may come and go,” with a deep sense of pain and anguish. It is difficult to describe what occurred with al-Khaldi and her collaborators during this song. It was not only that I felt them feeling their grief in that moment, not only that I saw four individuals come together in a unison that all great performers aspire to, but it was that I felt the room being overtaken by the power of the sound. It was a grief intertwined with anger, as if it were a defiance of death itself. It was at that point that I began to cry. I thought I glimpsed the qanun player tearing up, and then I noticed several members of the audience were also crying. This song embodied the power of grief ; it was simultaneously mourning the dead and challenging the injustice that took them away from their loved ones. The following song began with equal intensity, protesting against the injustice with a demand to be heard: “I yell with a sound with which they will hear me.” It ended with the following verses: You ask for your rights And you are told they are lost My rights have been lost And the one who has wronged me walked away Where are my loved ones? Oh my loved ones, where am I? I wandered in the night With moon and light absent We crossed the flowing sea With no water Gardens in bloom With no fruit Oh people of knowledge Give me an answer The song is not only a poetic commentary on the injustice in which Palestinians live and the pain they are forced to endure but also an act of protest. This sense of defiance permeated the entire performance as if crying were an act of rebellion in itself, for we, too, have the right to feel pain. Perhaps al-Khaldi is right ; perhaps we cannot continue our struggle to survive without taking a moment to mourn the loss. The final song was about a woman’s longing for her martyred son, describing death as “ ghurbih , غربة” or a prolonged journey. And I wondered how many audience members were coming to terms with the reality of never being able to see their loved ones again. The term ghurbih is also used to describe exile and evokes the experiences of Palestinians displaced in the 1948 Nakba as well as Gazans fleeing the genocide. Al-Khaldi’s work is a pertinent reminder of the power of extinct indigenous performance traditions, such as wailing rituals, and their ability to create spaces for people to come together and heal from the ongoing traumas inflicted by Israel’s genocide. However, this return to the past is not about creating static versions of lost forms, for the power of al-Khaldi’s work is her ability to innovate to defy Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid in the present. And as these wailing women guided mourners in the past, al-Khaldi too guides us through an overwhelming pain in a sonic journey that implores us to survive. Research for this article was supported by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities and the Palestinian American Research Center. The views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Palestinian American Research Center. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes [ 1] Quotation from the second song performed at Maya al-Khaldi’s Wailing Songs of the Past, Might they Grow our Resilience. [ 2 ] The original song can be found in ‘Ali Hasan Bawab, Mawsu‘at Haifa al-Karmaliya (Amman: Al-Matba‘a al-Wataniyya, 2009), p. 112. The adaptation is from the play Journey to the Third Dimension of a Clementine (Tunis: Dar al-Kitab, 2025), p.79. The song is a collaboration between al-Khaldi and the author. References About The Author(s) Dia Barghouti is a Palestinian playwright and researcher. She holds a PhD in Drama and Theatre Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London (2021) and is currently a Research Fellow at the European University Institute. Her research explores indigenous performance traditions in Tunisia and Palestine, with a special focus on Sufi rituals. Her writings have appeared in New Theatre Quarterly, Performance Research, Theatre Research International, Jadaliyya, Bab el-Wad (Arabic), The Markaz Review, among other academic and cultural journals. She is also the author of several plays, her most recently completed work, Journey to the Third Dimension of a Clementine (Arabic, رحلة للبعد الثالث لكلمنتينا), was published by Dar al-Kitab in Tunis (Maison du Livre, 2025). Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Practicing Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Reinscription of Memory in Palestine Resisting the Unleashed Evils of the US- Invasion of Iraq in Amir Al-Azraki’s The Widow (2017) Dina Mousawi’s RETURN: a Compelling site of representing Women’s Status of Agency Under Occupation Renewed Awareness Toward Salvation: The Journey of The Story of Zahra from Page to Stage Site-Specific Performance and Theatrical Memorialization of the Nakba Performance Review: WAILING SONGS OF THE PAST, MIGHT THEY GROW OUR RESILIENCE. By Maya al-Khaldi. Performance Review: DUMMY IN DIASPORA. By Esho Rasho. Performance Review: ENGLISH. Written by Sanaz Toossi Performance Review: THE CAVE. By Sadieh Rifai Performance Review: IRAQ, BUT FUNNY by Atra Asdou Performance Review: COSMOS/AWALEM by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba. Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Vanessa Campagna Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 3 Visit Journal Homepage Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Histories, Futures, and Queer Lives Vanessa Campagna By Published on November 16, 2014 Download Article as PDF ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. by Courtney Ferriter The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 1 (Fall 2018) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2018 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center In his recent book Democracy in Black (2016), Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. argues that for Americans, “collective forgetting is crucial in determining the kind of story we tell ourselves. Ours is the chosen nation, the ‘shining city upon a hill,’ as Ronald Reagan called it. America is democracy. . . . To believe this, we have to forget and willfully ignore what is going on around us.”[1] While Glaude is particularly concerned with the distortions and fairy tales Americans continue to tell ourselves about race, Tony Kushner’s epic two-part play Angels in America tackles this same theme of conveniently forgetting and willfully ignoring so as not to disrupt the American self-image with respect to sexual orientation and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play received much acclaim from critics and scholars alike for many years following its initial publication—resulting in initial runs on Broadway and the National Theatre in London in 1992-1993 and an award-winning 2003 HBO mini-series starring Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson—but more recently, it seems to have fallen out of favor among scholars, despite a successful 2010 revival at the Signature Theatre and a 2017 production at the National Theatre that transferred to Broadway in February 2018. Indeed, many (although not all) scholarly articles that discuss Kushner and Angels in recent years focus on how AIDS functions in the play,[2] with scant consideration of Kushner’s portrayal of democracy. I argue that Kushner is especially relevant in the socio-historical moment in which Americans currently find ourselves—one marked by political polarization and distrust of those who think differently than we do. The 2016 election was symptomatic of these problems and brought them into full view for any who still harbored doubts about how deep this divide runs, but Kushner’s play proves instructive for how to build an engaged democratic citizenry. In the epilogue to Part Two of Angels in America, Prior leaves the audience with an optimistic vision for the future, stating, “The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.”[3] He then offers a blessing of “more life,” and the play concludes with the same phrase that appears at the end of Part One: “The Great Work Begins” (Perestroika, 146). As David Kornhaber has observed, many scholars and critics are dissatisfied with the play’s conclusion due to “the reconciliationist politics it seems to espouse,”[4] which for them provides “a too-easy gloss on more intractable problems”[5] that continue to plague society. Thus, Kornhaber reasons, “a lot must depend on how one figures what seem to be the two key concepts of Kushner’s conclusion: citizen and blessing.”[6] Like Kornhaber, I believe that individual understanding of the term “citizens” as well as broader notions of what constitutes citizenship figure heavily in interpretation of both the epilogue and Angels as a whole. Furthermore, I contend that Kushner’s idea of citizenship is necessarily linked to the beginning of the “Great Work” invoked at the end of both parts of the play. In Angels, “citizens” are those who are part of a Deweyan community, made up of diverse people with sometimes conflicting opinions who listen to each other and who are nonetheless connected by their desire to enact positive change in the world, to progress toward a more ideal and inclusive democracy. This is what Prior (and by extension, Kushner) means by “Great Work.” Individualism and undemocratic communication—represented by Roy Cohn and Joe Pitt—fall away by the end of Angels in America, making room for what Atsushi Fujita calls a “a new model of community,”[7] consisting of Belize, Hannah, Louis, and Prior, who value inclusivity and democratic communication. John Dewey argues in Freedom and Culture (1939) for a distinction between “society” and “community.” Society arises from the politics of individual nations, how a particular country governs, and what policies are enforced, whereas community is unrestricted and made up of individuals or groups who share a common solidarity. He explains, “[F]or a number of persons to form anything that can be called a community in its pregnant sense there must be values prized in common. Without them, any so-called social group, class, people, nation, tends to fall apart into molecules having but mechanically enforced connections with one another.”[8] Thus, for Dewey, one characteristic of community lies in shared values. Furthermore, Dewey adds democratic communication to his idea of community, arguing that “there is a difference between a society, in the sense of an association, and a community. . . . Natural associations are conditions for the existence of a community, but a community adds the function of communication in which emotions and ideas are shared as well as joint undertaking engaged in.”[9] In the case of Americans, our joint undertaking is the democratic experiment, and for this reason, we should likewise strive to embody democratic ideals of communication. In the vein of Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy, Kushner emphasizes the importance of inclusive, democratic community in Angels in America. The play models Deweyan communities while also highlighting models that are anti-Deweyan: there is no great community—no solidarity between different groups of Americans—and thus, there is no realized democracy. Kushner writes in the Afterword to Perestroika that Americans “pay high prices for maintaining the myth of the Individual,”[10] which he contrasts with the idea that “the smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction.”[11] This juxtaposition of individualism with community, illustrated in the play by Roy and Joe as opposed to the community envisioned in the epilogue, is central to Kushner’s understanding of democratic progress and what it means to be a citizen. Some leftist critics may bemoan the ending of Angels as “turn[ing] away from the kind of collective action demanded by Marx and staged by Brecht,”[12] but as Hussein Al-Badri has observed, the play’s main flaw in this regard is merely presenting “a different politic[s] than its detractors would like it to be.”[13] Kushner is ultimately more concerned with how to enact Deweyan democracy and community—which he believes will lead to real and lasting social change—than he is with envisioning an America based around socialism or Marxism. In recent years, John Dewey’s notions of community and his pedagogy have come under scrutiny from critics who rightly cite the ethnocentrism that undergirds much of his early philosophy in these matters.[14] Thomas Fallace notes that because pragmatism is “a self-correcting theory of knowledge,”[15] by 1916, Dewey understood that “a plurality of cultures was necessary for democratic living and intellectual growth.”[16] Nevertheless, Fallace argues, “ethnocentrism was built right into Dewey’s early pedagogy and philosophy.”[17] This ethnocentrism troubles Dewey’s notion of community; he conceived of community as “not merely a variety of associative ties which hold persons together in diverse ways, but an organization of all elements by an integrated principle.”[18] If Dewey believed that white people represented a more advanced form of civilization that people of color had not yet achieved, then how would it be possible to form a community in which “all elements” are organized by the same principle? As Glaude has noted, democracy for Dewey “is a form of life that requires constant attention if we are to secure the ideals that purportedly animate it.”[19] Likewise, Scott Stroud emphasizes that a “real amount of openness is implicated in the [pragmatist] habits of democracy.”[20] In other words, democracy is a process, one which must continually be reexamined to ensure that we are increasing democracy and participation among citizens, creating a more inclusive community rather than excluding or marginalizing certain voices, as Dewey was guilty of doing in his early career. As Dewey himself put it, “only when we start from a community as a fact, grasp the fact in thought so as to clarify and enhance its constituent elements, can we reach an idea of democracy which is not [merely] utopian.”[21] One particular benefit to considering the vision of Deweyan community and democracy in Kushner’s Angels is that, several generations removed from Dewey, he is interested in how to incorporate citizens from different backgrounds with vastly different life experiences into the great community Dewey envisioned, particularly African Americans and people who identify as queer. Thus, Kushner’s reexamination of community and inclusive democracy as demonstrated in Angels is itself pragmatic in its consideration of the conditions and context of American life and democracy in the 1980s and ‘90s, revising Dewey’s idea of community by incorporating more and varied groups and voices into it. Fallace argues that an important part of Dewey’s pragmatism was context: “all knowledge was context-bound; it served a purpose in a particular situation and its usefulness was dependent upon that context.”[22] Kushner speaks to a particular historical moment in his work on community, examining the anxieties and shortcomings of American democracy in light of black/white and gay/straight relations. Thus, reading Kushner as a pragmatist increases our understanding of what an ideal community might look like, taking into account the experiences of those who are often pushed to the margins of society by the not-so-silent majority. A consideration of how Kushner treated the power disparities he observed at work in society may also prove instructive for how the U.S. might address current forms of oppression and marginalization in society. I argue in the remainder of this essay that the “Great Work” to which Kushner refers at the end of both Millennium Approaches and Perestroika is, in part, a call to the greater democratic community reflected in the play’s epilogue, which is championed over the closed views of community embodied in Roy Cohn and Joe Pitt. Kushner’s vision of Deweyan community emphasizes inclusion and listening to marginal voices, for characters in Angels in America who ignore the voices of the other do so at their peril. Roy Cohn and Joe Pitt are representative of undemocratic communication in the play—Roy because he dominates those around him, and Joe because he cannot be truthful with others or see beyond himself. Dewey writes that in a democracy, “both parties learn by giving the other a chance to express itself, instead of having one party conquer by forceful suppression of the other.”[23] For Roy, suppression of the other in communication is par for the course. One early example of this occurs in Act One, Scene 9 of Millennium Approaches when Roy’s doctor Henry diagnoses him with AIDS. Roy then tries to force Henry to call him a homosexual, finally threatening, “No, say it. I mean it. Say: ‘Roy Cohn, you are a homosexual.’ And I will proceed, systematically, to destroy your reputation and your practice and your career in New York State, Henry. Which you know I can do” (Millennium, 44). When Henry gives him the diagnosis of AIDS, Roy counters, “No, Henry, no. AIDS is what homosexuals have. I have liver cancer” (Millennium, 46). Roy forcefully suppresses Henry from telling anyone that Roy is gay by threatening his career, and he even manages to suppress the diagnosis of AIDS. The next time Henry appears is in Perestroika to facilitate Roy’s admission to the hospital, where even his medical charts, as Belize reads them, say “liver cancer” (Perestroika, 21). Roy’s relationship with his nurse Belize in Perestroika is similarly domineering, as Roy makes racist and homophobic remarks, goads Belize into using an anti-Semitic slur in one scene, knocks over pills he is supposed to take, and generally proves to be an insufferable patient. Roy also makes it clear that even though he is somewhat dependent on Belize, he does not consider him an equal in any way. Bemoaning his imminent disbarment in Act Four, Scene 1 of Perestroika, Roy says, “Every goddam thing I ever wanted they have taken from me. Mocked and reviled, all my life” (Perestroika, 87). When Belize identifies and responds, “Join the club” (Perestroika, 87). Roy says, “I don’t belong to any club you could get through the front door of. You watch yourself you take too many liberties” (Perestroika, 87). Shortly after Roy has a series of violent spasms, Belize says that he almost feels sorry for him. Roy is quick to remind him, “You. Me. No. Connection” (Perestroika, 88). Thus, Roy suppresses Belize any time Belize attempts to identify with him in the slightest. If democracy is characterized in part by open communication, then Roy’s constant desire to “win” or conquer in conversations with others exposes him as a totalitarian at heart. Roy’s totalitarian communication is a natural result of his individualism. He relishes his status as “the dragon atop the golden horde” (Perestroika, 55), maintaining that “Life is full of horror; nobody escapes; nobody; save yourself. Whatever pulls on you, whatever needs from you, threatens you” (Millennium, 58). This philosophy clearly runs counter to Kushner’s belief in the smallest indivisible unit as two people. Nevertheless, Kushner includes Roy in the play, explaining in an interview that he is “a part of the gay and lesbian community even if we don’t really want him to be a part of our community.”[24] This indicates a capacity for inclusivity in his democratic vision that Roy himself disdains in the play. This inclusive community is similarly emphasized when Louis, aided by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, recites the Mourner’s Kaddish for Roy, thus accepting him into the greater Jewish community of which they are part (albeit in death). While Joe is not like Roy in his communication in the sense that he has to win or dominate others in conversation, his general dishonesty and unwillingness to take responsibility for his actions make him undemocratic in his dealings with other characters in the play. Kushner has sometimes been criticized in scholarship on Angels in America for being too hard on Joe. Hussein Al-Badri, for example, asserts that Kushner’s omission of Joe from the community included in the epilogue runs counter to Kushner’s “own political ideology of inclusion and inclusiveness.”[25] However, this dramatic punishment seems more fitting when Joe’s undemocratic communication and individualism are taken into consideration, for then it is clear that like his mentor Roy, Joe too spurns community and democratic communication. Dewey argues for truthful communication in “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us” writing, “knowledge of conditions as they are is the only solid ground for communication and sharing.”[26] Joe lies about his identity as a gay man to his wife Harper, he keeps from Louis the fact that he is a Mormon, and he repeatedly tells Harper that he is not going to leave her, only to abandon her anyway. Because Joe lacks a foundation of truthfulness with people who are important to him, open, democratic communication is not possible. Like Roy, Joe also acts with the individual—himself—in mind, rather than considering community or the circumstances and experiences of others. Following an irreparable fight with Louis in Perestroika, Joe tries to return to Harper, not because she needs him but because he is thinking of himself. He tells her, “I don’t know what will happen to me without you. Only you. Only you love me. Out of everyone in the world. . . . Please, please, don’t leave me now” (Perestroika, 139). Joe is unable to sustain a community or communicate democratically with others because he never considers the experience of the other person and only considers his own needs and desires. In fact, Joe even tells Louis that “sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be,” (Perestroika, 73) a notion that serves as Joe’s modus operandi throughout the play. Deweyan communication requires what Hongmei Peng calls sympathetic thinking, the ability to “step outside of [one’s] own experience and see it as the other would see it by putting [oneself] in the place of the other and using imagination in order to assimilate the other's experience.”[27] Since Joe proves incapable of imagining the other’s experience, he necessarily excludes rather than includes others in his would-be community, particularly Harper and Hannah. His unwillingness or inability to change in this regard is why he is not included among the democratic “citizens” in the epilogue, since undemocratic communication and exclusive community building stand in opposition to Kushner’s Deweyan model of community. Although Roy and Joe form a community of sorts in Angels, it proves to be undemocratic and representative of anti-Deweyan communication. In spite of the father/son-type relationship that Roy and Joe maintain throughout most of the play, there is much that they keep from one another, and their relationship is marked as much by silence as it is by the closeness and warm feelings for one another as mentor and mentee. This silence comes to a head in Act Four, Scene 1 of Perestroika, when Joe visits Roy in the hospital. When Joe reveals that he left his wife Harper and has been living with Louis, Roy forcefully silences Joe: JOE: Roy, please, get back into… ROY: SHUT UP! Now you listen to me. [. . .] ROY: I want you home. With your wife. Whatever else you got going, cut it dead. JOE: I can’t, Roy, I need to be with… ROY: YOU NEED? Listen to me. Do what I say. Or you will regret it. And don’t talk to me about it. Ever again. (Perestroika, 85) Roy not only silences Joe in this particular moment of the play, but he commands him never to speak of his relationship with Louis or to make any allusion to homosexuality again. Thus, Roy’s silencing of Joe is distinctly undemocratic and unrepresentative of the kind of communication expected in a democratic community. Far from being an outlier, this is not the first time Roy has stifled Joe’s communication with him. Rather than being open to hearing what Joe wants to express (even if he disagrees with it), Roy chastises him in Millennium Approaches for having ethical reservations about interfering with the disbarment committee hearing, calling Joe “Dumb Utah Mormon hick shit” (Millennium, 106) and “a sissy” (Millennium, 107). As for Joe, he claims to love Roy, but is unwilling to go to bat for him when the chips are down. Although this is a legal as well as an ethical quandary, it demonstrates that Joe’s love for Roy is more theory than practice. He asserts, “I’ll do whatever I can to help,” (Millennium, 66) but those are empty words, since he ultimately refuses the job in Washington he is offered and fails Roy. Joe and Roy cannot agree on a shared ideal toward which they can work together, and thus, their efforts at community building are doomed to fail. Given Dewey’s assertions that community involves “communication in which emotions and ideas are shared”[28] and that such community is “a pressing [concern] for democracy,”[29] Roy and Joe fail at both democratic communication and maintaining a community even with one another. In addition to their undemocratic communication, Roy and Joe are devoted to exclusion rather than inclusion and to individualism rather than community, qualities that are distinctly anti-Deweyan, and for which (along with their undemocratic communication) they are dramatically “punished” by Kushner. Roy succumbs to his illness, while Harper leaves Joe for good and Joe is nowhere to be found in the democratic community of the play’s epilogue. Unlike Roy and Joe, Louis is able and willing to change, demonstrating by the end of the play a commitment to open communication and revising harmful beliefs and actions. While Louis initially abandons Prior when the effects of AIDS become more than he can handle, he eventually sees the error of his ways and atones for his past misdeeds. Prior tells Louis when they meet after Louis’s month-long absence in Perestroika that when he cries, he “endanger[s] nothing. . . . It’s like the idea of crying when you do it. Or the idea of love” (Perestroika, 83). Similarly, Belize remarks to Louis in Millennium Approaches, “All your checks bounce, Louis; you’re ambivalent about everything” (Millennium, 95). For much of the play, Louis claims to support things in theory, but his practice reveals his own ambivalence on the subject, from his alleged love for Prior to his support of the Rainbow Coalition. However, following a conversation with Belize in Act Four, Scene 3 of Perestroika in which Belize observes that Louis is “up in the air, just like that angel, too far off the earth to pick out the details. Louis and his Big Ideas. Big Ideas are all you love,” (Perestroika, 94) Louis realizes that theory and practice must be joined, both in love and in democracy. This is confirmed for him when he researches Joe’s legal decisions written on behalf of Justice Wilson and finally understands that Joe, who wants to be “a nice, nice man” (Millennium, 107)—as Roy aptly puts it—has rendered legal decisions that have real and damaging consequences for children and gay people. Dewey argues for praxis in democracy, asserting that democracy is “a personal way of individual life. . . . Instead of thinking of our own dispositions and habits as accommodated to certain institutions we have to learn to think of the latter as expressions, projections, and extensions of habitually dominant personal attitudes.”[30] Joe thus expresses a clearly undemocratic viewpoint when he tells Louis of his legal decisions, “It’s law not justice, it’s power, not the merits of its exercise, it’s not an expression of the ideal” (Perestroika, 109). The discrepancy between Joe’s theory and practice in multiple areas of life, including love and democracy, causes him to think that he must accommodate himself to institutions—like “legal fag-bashing” (Perestroika, 109) or heterosexual marriage, for example—rather than viewing such institutions democratically, as potential sites for expressing his own experiences and habits. Louis recognizes his own behavior in Joe’s habits, and after their fight, Louis finally understands the extent to which he has failed Prior. He later asks to come back to Prior and tells him, “Failing in love isn’t the same as not loving. It doesn’t let you off the hook, it doesn’t mean you’re free to not love,” (Perestroika, 140) indicating a respect for praxis that he previously lacked. In addition, Louis gains “expiation for [his] sins” (Perestroika, 121) through his recitation of the Mourner’s Kaddish for Roy Cohn. Although he had previously refused to identify with Roy in any way, calling him “the polestar of human evil … the worst human being who ever lived, he isn’t human even,” (Perestroika, 93) with some coaxing from Belize and help from Ethel Rosenberg’s ghost, Louis recites the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, thus affirming Roy as part of the Jewish community. Framji Minwilla argues that the coming together of Belize, Ethel, and Louis to say Kaddish for Roy “invent[s] a more complex yet exact sense of self and a more expansively conceived idea of community.”[31] This community is a democratic one, in which people who have ideas and beliefs differing from the mainstream (like Roy, for whom this is the case not in life nor in the Reagan years of the play, but within the politics espoused by Kushner and the characters in the epilogue of Angels) are nevertheless included and acknowledged as part of the larger community. Based on his joining together of theory with practice and expanding his idea of community by praying for Roy, Louis is able to participate as a “citizen” in the epilogue: he argues at points with Belize about politics, but he is ultimately able to listen and value the presence of differing opinions in his community. Prior also makes a few missteps, but like Louis, he ultimately “succeeds because he is willing to change,”[32] to become more democratic in his communication with others and his vision of community. For instance, when he first meets Joe’s mother, Hannah, he assumes that because she is Mormon, she must be trying to convert him when she helps him to the hospital. After they arrive at the hospital, Prior tells Hannah about his visit from the Angel, and she says he had a vision, drawing a comparison with Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, and Prior once again rushes to make assumptions about her because of her Mormonism: PRIOR: But that’s preposterous, that’s… HANNAH: It’s not polite to call other people’s beliefs preposterous. He had great need of understanding. Our Prophet. His desire made prayer. His prayer made an angel. The angel was real. I believe that. PRIOR: I don’t. And I’m sorry but it’s repellent to me. So much of what you believe. HANNAH: What do I believe? PRIOR: I’m a homosexual. With AIDS. I can just imagine what you… HANNAH: No you can’t. Imagine. The things in my head. You don’t make assumptions about me, mister; I won’t make them about you. (Perestroika, 102) This is the first moment of democratic communication between Prior and Hannah. He acknowledges her point, listening and taking to heart her experiences. This openness serves him well when Hannah advises, “An angel is just a belief, with wings and arms that can carry you. It’s naught to be afraid of. If it lets you down, reject it. Seek for something new” (Perestroika, 103). Prior takes her advice, struggling with the Angel of America and returning the Book of the Anti-Migratory Epistle to Heaven. He previously identified with the Angels—their abandonment by the Almighty and desire to go back—but ultimately he insists upon progress and forward movement. Additionally, Prior’s vision of community becomes more expansive and inclusive by the end of the play. He tells Louis in Millennium Approaches that if Louis walked out on him, he would hate him forever. While he does not take Louis back as a partner in Perestroika, he forgives him, tells him he loves him, and Louis remains an important presence in Prior’s life based on their interaction in the epilogue. In Hannah’s first appearance, she does not seem particularly inclusive or capable of democratic communication given her outrage at Joe’s admission that he is gay, however she experiences a transformation in Perestroika and shows more concern for others, particularly Prior and Harper. Despite Hannah’s somewhat gruff manner—she is described by Sister Ella Chapter in Millennium Approaches as “the only unfriendly Mormon [she] ever met” (Millennium, 82)—and her claim that she “[doesn’t] have pity,” (Perestroika, 101) she tends to both Prior and Harper, both of whom have been abandoned by the person closest to them. Hannah explains her actions by claiming, “I know my duty when I see it,” (Perestroika, 66) which suggests that unlike Joe, she is willing to take the needs and experiences of others into consideration before acting. Much like Dewey, Hannah acknowledges that communication and community require cooperation, “understanding, learning, [and] other-regarding thinking.”[33] Given her sympathy and concern for Prior and Harper as well as her advice to Joe to reflect on his actions and beliefs by asking himself “what it was [he was] running from,” (Perestroika, 96) Hannah has become a Kushnerian “citizen” in the epilogue, musing about the “interconnectedness” (Perestroika, 144) of people in the world and providing hope for Prior to keep moving forward. Her advice to Prior that he should “seek for something new” (Perestroika, 103) if his beliefs fail him demonstrates her own willingness to revise previous assumptions and incorporate new knowledge into her experience, an essential quality in a member of a democratic community. As for Belize, who has been described in scholarship as the moral center of Angels in America,[34] his actions toward Roy and Louis show a commitment to inclusivity in line with Deweyan democratic community. Belize empathizes with Roy and Louis as fellow gay men, despite his outright hatred for some of their actions and ideologies. He advises Roy about the best course of treatment for late-stage AIDS, contra the opinion of Roy’s “very qualified, very expensive WASP doctor,” (Perestroika, 26) and warns him about the double-blind AZT trials. Despite the fact that Roy is a terrible patient and person who, as mentioned previously, takes every opportunity to remind Belize that Roy considers him beneath him, Belize feels, as he puts it, a sense of “solidarity. One faggot to another,” (Perestroika, 27) and reminds Louis that Roy “died a hard death” (Perestroika, 122). With Louis, Belize embodies the democratic value of believing in human nature’s capacity for change. Dewey argues in “Creative Democracy” that democracy is “a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature.”[35] Although Belize disdains Louis for his abandonment of Prior, he meets with Louis in both Millennium Approaches and Perestroika and offers him some moral guidance, indicating that he has not given up on Louis and retains some hope that he will change for the better. Belize’s inclusivity is unsurprising considering his description of Heaven as encompassing “voting booths … everyone in Balenciaga gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion” (Perestroika, 76) with gods who are all “brown as the mouths of rivers” (Perestroika, 76). This utopic vision eradicates all of the obstacles to justice and democratic participation of marginalized groups in the United States; everyone has gained suffrage, wealth inequality has been destroyed, and racism, sexism, and transphobia have all been tempered by mixed-race divinities and blurred gender boundaries. Belize’s idea of Heaven is aligned with Kushner’s philosophy on freedom; he argues that freedom “expand[s] outward”[36] and the most “basic gesture of freedom is to include, not to exclude.”[37] This sounds remarkably like Dewey, who concludes in “Creative Democracy” that the task of democracy is always to create “a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute.”[38] Belize’s vision of Heaven and Kushner’s understanding of freedom express Dewey’s practical ideal for democracy. The four characters included in the epilogue to Angels in America—Belize, Hannah, Louis, and Prior—represent democratic community either because they have demonstrated a willingness to change, listen to others, and revise previous beliefs/actions in the course of the play, or (in Belize’s case) because that kind of inclusivity and democratic communication had already been attained. Michael Cadden argues that the epilogue to Angels “leaves us with the image of four individuals who, despite their very real differences, have chosen, based on their collective experience, to think about themselves as a community working for change.”[39] Similarly, Ron Scapp suggests that Kushner’s ending embraces “the hope of democracy.”[40] For Kushner, the “hope of democracy” is embodied in these characters who have become “citizens” (Perestroika, 146) with differing thoughts and opinions who are nevertheless capable of working together to accomplish the “Great Work” (Perestroika, 146) of expanding democracy. Roy and Joe, who were neither inclusive of dissenting voices nor able to form democratic communities, are incapable of acting as citizens and thus omitted from the epilogue, even as Kushner includes them in the greater community of the play itself. The epilogue to Angels in America ultimately advocates for a more ideal democracy, which must begin with individuals who act as citizens. This is the kind of democracy envisioned by Dewey, where all citizens believe “that even when needs and ends or consequences are different for each individual, the habit of amicable cooperation … is itself a priceless addition to life.”[41] Such a community stands in stark contrast to the exclusive, undemocratic, and homophobic legislation and political rhetoric of the Reagan years as portrayed in the play and embodied by Roy and Joe. Kushner’s small democratic community at the end of Angels reminds the audience that democracy is a process, one toward which we must constantly work to ensure we are applying the democratic method of expanding rights and freedoms outward, revising beliefs or actions based on experience and new information, and opening ourselves to democratic communication with others. Kushner begins from the premise that including marginalized voices is not only beneficial but essential to democracy. This revises some of Dewey’s early notions, which had been grounded in ethnocentric thinking, and provides a foundation for what including others in a democratic community looks like. The inclusivity Kushner portrays in Angels in America demonstrates that democracy does not mean that all voices are considered to be equally valid; rather, Kushner highlights voices that are similarly committed to democracy as method. Roy Cohn and Joe Pitt provide examples of voices that are too partisan and too committed to their own individualistic and undemocratic ways of thinking. However, it is important to note that such people are not irredeemable; they have the capacity to change, as we see Louis do over the course of the play. As a result, such individuals deserve to be included in the larger community (as Kushner includes Roy) even if their ideology is itself anti-democratic. Kushner cautions, however, that such individualism and anti-democratic thinking is harmful to democratic inclusivity and communication. Thus, anti-democratic ideology must not be allowed to dominate at a legal level, as we see its harmful consequences in the exclusive, homophobic legislation of the Reagan administration. In addition, democratic communication is encouraged on a personal level, too, otherwise relationships and communities run the risk of being torn apart, as evidenced by Roy and Joe or Joe and Harper. Like Dewey, Kushner believes that it is necessary to revise our methods to become always more democratic and more inclusive—like the “citizens” referred to in the epilogue—progressing slowly but ever closer to true democratic communication and community with one another. In our present political moment in the United States, democratic communication and community seem like essential tools to cultivate as we work together toward a future like the one Kushner envisions in his epilogue rather than resigning ourselves to undemocratic rule by the Roy Cohns of the world. Courtney Ferriter is Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Georgia. Her research interests include American pragmatism and 20th century Jewish and African American literature. She has published articles in James Baldwin Review and Education & Culture. She is currently at work on an article about Harryette Mullen’s poetic wordplay as a form of resistance against white supremacy. [1] Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (New York: Broadway Books, 2016), 48. [2] See, for example, Alexander Peuser, “AIDS and the Artist’s Call to Action,” Lucerna 11 (2017): 10-22; Dennis Altman and Kent Buse, “Thinking Politically about HIV: Political Analysis and Action in Response to AIDS,” Contemporary Politics 18, no. 2 (2012): 127-140; Laura L. Beadling, “The Trauma of AIDS Then and Now: Kushner’s Angels in America on the Stage and Small Screen,” Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 5, no. 3 (2012): 229-240; and Claudia Barnett, “AIDS = Purgatory: Prior Walter’s Prophecy and Angels in America,” Modern Drama 53, no. 4 (2010): 471-494. [3] Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part Two: Perestroika [1992] (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2004), 146. All subsequent references to the play will be indicated parenthetically, e.g. (Millennium, 64) or (Perestroika, 75). [4] David Kornhaber, “Kushner at Colonus: Tragedy, Politics, and Citizenship,” PMLA 129, no. 4 (2014): 728. [5] Ibid. [6] Ibid, 729. [7] Atsushi Fujita, “Queer Politics to Fabulous Politics in Angels in America: Pinklisting and Forgiving Roy Cohn,” in Tony Kushner: New Essays on the Art and Politics of the Plays, ed. James Fisher (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006), 125. [8] John Dewey, Freedom and Culture [1939] in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 13: 1938-1939, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988): 71. [9] Ibid, 176. [10] Tony Kushner, “With a Little Help from My Friends,” [1993] in Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part Two: Perestroika (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2004), 149. [11] Ibid, 155. [12] Kornhaber, “Kushner at Colonus,” 736. [13] Hussein Al-Badri, Tony Kushner’s Postmodern Theatre: A Study of Political Discourse (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 73. [14] See, for example, Shannon Sullivan, “From the Foreign to the Familiar: Confronting Dewey Confronting Racial Prejudice,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18, no. 3 (2004): 193-202; Frank Margonis, “John Dewey’s Racialized Visions of the Student and Classroom Community,” Educational Theory 59, no. 1 (2009): 17-39; and Thomas D. Fallace, Dewey and the Dilemma of Race: An Intellectual History, 1895-1922 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011). [15] Thomas D. Fallace, Dewey and the Dilemma of Race: An Intellectual History, 1895-1922 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011), 4. [16] Ibid. [17] Ibid. [18] John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1927), 38. [19] Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 6. [20] Scott R. Stroud, “The Challenge of Speaking with Others: A Pragmatist Account of Democratic Rhetoric,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 29, no. 1 (2015): 100. [21] Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 149. [22] Fallace, Dewey and the Dilemma of Race, 9. [23] John Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us” [1939] in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 14: 1939-1941, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988): 228. [24] Charlie Rose, “Tony, Tonys, and Television,” in Tony Kushner in Conversation, ed. Robert Vorlicky (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998): 46. [25] Al-Badri, Tony Kushner’s Postmodern Theatre, 93. [26] Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” 229. [27] Hongmei Peng, “Toward Inclusion and Human Unity: Rethinking Dewey’s Democratic Community,” Education & Culture 25, no. 2 (2009): 82. [28] Dewey, Freedom and Culture, 176. [29] Ibid, 177. [30] Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” 226. Emphasis in original. [31] Framji Minwilla, “When Girls Collide: Considering Race in Angels in America,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, eds. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997): 110. [32] Al-Badri, Tony Kushner’s Postmodern Theatre, 101. [33] Peng, “Toward Inclusion and Human Unity,” 82. [34] See, for example, Minwilla, “When Girls Collide,” 104-105; or Al-Badri, Tony Kushner’s Postmodern Theatre, 96. [35] Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” 226. [36] Tony Kushner, Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 6. [37] Ibid, 7. [38] Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” 230. [39] Michael Cadden, “Strange Angel: The Pinklisting of Roy Cohn,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, eds. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997): 88. [40] Ron Scapp, “The Vehicle of Democracy: Fantasies toward a (Queer) Nation,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, eds. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997): 98. [41] Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” 228. "Are We 'Citizens'? Tony Kushner's Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America" by Courtney Ferriter ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 1 (Fall 2018) ©2018 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: 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: "'Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something': Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama" by Rosa Schneider "Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging" by Rachel Merrill Moss and Gary Alan Fine "Are We 'Citizens'? Tony Kushner's Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America" by Courtney Ferriter "Edward Albee's Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" by Tison Pugh 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 ©2018 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Ida Wells-Barnett and Chicago’s Pekin Theatre History is Distance: Metaphor, Meaning, and Performance in Serenade/The Proposition Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Histories, Futures, and Queer Lives “Persian Like The Cat”: Crossing Borders with The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Rahul K Gairola Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Rahul K Gairola By Published on November 16, 2022 Download Article as PDF Ishtyle : Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Kareem Khubchandani’s Ishtyle is an innovative and refreshing critical survey of gay Indian nightlife cultures in diaspora that anchors its theoretical trajectory around the monograph’s title. The book’s originality is announced from its very start, when readers encounter the front matter. The Acknowledgments section is cleverly organized as a playlist of songs that correlate to those who have helped to shape the book’s contents, thus immediately positing readers into a nostalgic past wherein we ourselves used to make mix tapes for friends and lovers. In the Preface, Khubchandani proclaims, “I fucking love drag queens…Drag artists assemble cultural meanings of race, gender, and class on their bodies, relocating us to worlds beyond the club. They make apparent tools – dress, makeup, hairstyle, body modification, comportment, gesture, pose – we can use on and off the dance floor, in and out of the club, to reinvent ourselves, our worlds. Drag offers respite from the night, giving us instruction, emplacement, and orientation in the darkness and din” (xiii). He further details that, years later, in the geographical and untimely “absence of drag, I turned to social dance floors to examine danced styles, what I call ‘drag labor,’ that engendered the socialities described above” (xiv). These ruminations coalesce around the author’s diverse experiences and field work at the Desilicious dance parties in New York City as well as Bollywood cultures, and, as such, the book is an important mash-up between gay cultural studies and South Asian diasporic studies. Khubchandani then gets to the heart of his scholarly intentions: “I am eschewing identity politics, attending instead to aesthetics and performance, to ask: what styles are given value; what are the politics, histories, and circulations of these styles; how do people perform in line with and against dominant stylistic codes; what new forms of relation are made when performances grind against the dominant aesthetics of nightlife?” (xxiii). Khubchandani’s deviation from identity politics, a realm wherein hegemonic queer cultural studies wallow, is an exciting one as it seeks to empower practice over representation while also eschewing the racism, sexism, classism, and queerphobia that often attend, and unintentionally nourish, that critical realm. Rather, Khubchandani’s methodology presents an intersectional heuristic that demands attention to style and performance over appearance and dress, thus flinging the very real materiality of identity politics into kinetic moments that transform cultural meanings with every second. To this end, the author defines the meaning of “Ishtyle” as: “a playful and common South Asian (more particularly North Indian, and even more specifically Bombay) accenting of the English word ‘style’… I mobilize Ishtyle to work beyond its vernacular use and serve as shorthand for ‘accented style.’ Thinking broadly with accents allows me to analyze differences across borders and scales, but also to ask how brown bodies, regardless of cultural performance, are rendered accents” (6). Framing the embodied critical and political stakes of his research, he concludes, “I developed new intimacies with places I already called home, made new friends, and fell in love several times over. Nightlife, proximal to and imbricated in spaces of work, home, protest, and violence, feels present all the time” (27). To this end, the author organizes Ishtyle into three parts, which each contain two chapters. The first part’s two chapters take place and seize space in India’s tech hub, Bangalore. The first chapter, “BInaryC0des: Undoing Dichotomies at Heatwave, ” aims to demonstrate how attendees to Heatwave parties effectively resist binary identities that codify these parties in India’s “Silicon Valley.” Rather than defaulting to Western aesthetics (white, gay, cisgender, masculine, and middle-upper class), attendees resist, argues Khubchandani, corporatized gay culture in favor of accented stylistics of queer nightlife cultures. Its second chapter, “Dancing Against the Law: Critical Moves in Pub City,” focuses on legal restrictions of gay nightlife in Bangalore constellated around the postcolonial country’s notorious, Victorian-era Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. This chapter speaks to the ways in which women, trans people, and other queer folx practice ishtyle despite the city’s 2006-2014 ban on social dance – exploring how these ishtyle agents of queerness “dance” around the law. Part II’s two chapters: — “Desiring Desis: Race, Migration, and Markets in Boystown” and “Slumdogs and Big Chicks: Unsettling Orientations at Jai Ho! ” — shifts Khubchandani’s ruminations on ishtyle to the gay environs of Chicago in the United States. Chapter three thus examines the LGBTQI+ neighborhood of Boystown as a marketplace for desi bodies where white gay men view them as ornaments for homonormative whiteness. Leveraging compelling interviews and field research, Khubchandani apprises readers on how “(c)olonial legacies have affixed race, gender, sexuality, linking hyperfemininity and Asiannness, hypermasculinity and Blackness, and passion and Latinidad;” this brings the gay desi male’s “brown migrant body into a kind of good gay gender” (85). In the fourth chapter, the author demonstrates accented cultural elements of Trikone-Chicago (a nationwide, pro-LGBTQI+ South Asian organization), which hosts a quarterly Bollywood dance party called Jai Ho! that definitively challenges the overt orientalism and subtle white supremacy of commercial bars and clubs. Part III examines nightlife choreographies as global accentuations that undergird resistant practices Khubchandani described in Bangalore and Chicago earlier. Yet the author extends analysis by delving into fieldwork that centers, in Chapter five, interviewees’ memories of nightlife, childhood, and, cumulatively, different articulations of “home” and ishtyle as cultural strategies of homemaking. This homemaking occurs in the context of popular Bollywood song-and-dance numbers like those of Hindi film sirens Sridevi and Madhuri Dixit. Chapter six critically ruminates on ishtyle, analyzed through the intersectionality of class, caste, region, and, of course, gender and sexuality. Here, Khubchandani traces dappankoothu music and dance from Dalit communities, threading them through Tamil films and into a queer dance party called Koothnytz— wherein dappankoothu rejects both hetero and homonormative “respectability” by subverting propriety as another strategy of ishtyle. An award-winning volume, Ishtyle : Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife is as provocative as the cultural artifacts and films it analyses. The book is at once a glamourous explosion of queer critical cultural analysis that, like a pink-powdered Holi party, at the same time remains down to earth and exceptionally honest, based in Khubchandani’s painstaking field work and ethnographic recordings. Khubchandani has forged a fabulous, compelling comparative study of queer Indian subcultures that deploy ishtyle to subvert the normalized ways in which colonialist and white supremacist gay culture fetishizes Black and Brown bodies, as well as the English language, while lording over them in consumer cultures. While these consumer cultures are staged as celebratory steps towards gay visibility, Khubchandani convincingly urges readers to recognize that any study of non-white, contemporary queer culture is incomplete without a sober reckoning of ishtyle today. This study will be formative for students, teachers, cultural analysists, South Asianists, and general readers alike for the ways in which it encourages us to locate the inflected accents that reimagine ourselves and the daily environs that surround us. References Footnotes About The Author(s) RAHUL K GAIROLA Murdoch University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Thomas H. Arthur 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 “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Thomas H. Arthur By Published on June 6, 2024 Download Article as PDF Color him black And count the bruises He was tough and slender Chiseled in bronze He died too young And he smiled too little But his dreams were the dreams of a man. --Sydney Hibbert (1986) This article investigates the career of Jamaican American theatre practitioner, Sydney Hibbert (1932-1990), who worked in Jamaica, London and the United States as an actor, teacher, and poet, and wrote meaningfully about these experiences. (1) Hibbert emerged from a colonized place and culture and was, in many ways, a postcolonial subject who negotiated the differing and often conflicting demands of values and structures created by the British, while also struggling to maintain his identity or connection with his home culture and sense of self. Educated in Kingston and London, he returned home in 1965 and, with other Jamaican students who had studied in London, attempted to establish an indigenous theatre for popular audiences of Black Jamaicans. At first this initiative failed, and Hibbert turned to the American Black Power Movement in Harlem for inspiration. Moving to New York to teach at the Harlem School of the Arts, he found frustration and rejection in the theatre world. When his agent suggested he get rid of his Jamaican accent, he refused. His struggles to preserve his Jamaican identity and find a voice among African American people reveal the challenges and complexity of postcolonial experience. Nevertheless, he managed to have a substantial career as a teacher and performer in the United States and helped start the National Black Theatre Festival of the North Carolina Black Repertory Company that exposed audiences to Black classics and new works. Hibbert was sometimes disillusioned but never idle in his pursuit of artistic accomplishment along with racial justice. (2) Black Jamaicans and the Colonial System Hibbert’s Jamaican, enslaved roots helped shape his personality and professional ambitions. Columbus landed in Jamaica on his second voyage in 1494, an arrival that was a disaster for Jamaican residents who were killed, sent to Spain as slaves, or became slaves in their native land. (3) In 1645, England captured Jamaica from the Spaniards, and in 1670, the slave trading Royal Africa Company was formed using Jamaica as its chief market and a center of their activities in the West Indies. (4) Between 1647 and 1838, British settlers imported between one and two million slaves from West Africa for plantations and estates that produced sugar, cocoa, indigo, and later coffee, with tens of thousands dying on the passage to the Caribbean. (5) Many Black Jamaicans inherited their surnames from plantation owners such as the English merchant Thomas Hibbert who immigrated to Kingston in 1734. The Hibbert family subsequently held interests in sixty estates and controlled almost half of the Jamaican slave trade. They profited from British colonialism’s triangular trade routes which began in the mother country with sugar and rum transported to Africa that was exchanged for slaves transported to the Caribbean, after which the ships were reloaded with sugar for a passage home to England. (6) By virtue of his surname, Hibbert was metaphorically part of this triangle of people, culture, and influence. Along with slavery and trade, the British brought their theatre culture, which became part of the Jamaican heritage. The first professional company to perform on the island presented John Gay’s The Beggars’ Opera in 1733 . (7) Throughout the Pre-Emancipation period, whites-only audiences were exposed to Shakespeare plays, farces and melodramas performed by European and American professional companies. (8) In 1775, the Old American Company—the first fully professional theatre group to perform in North America—staged Shakespeare’s Romeo and Julie t. In 1807, the British Parliament abolished the slave trade, and in 1834, slavery in Jamaica, but this had little cultural effect. Even after Kingston’s formerly whites-only theatres began admitting patrons on segregated and then mixed-color bases, these audiences still saw standard classics and a few current English-originated works. (9) For instance, in 1912 the new Ward Theatre opened with Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance . (10) Later, in 1941, under the aegis of the Little Theatre Movement, the Ward Theatre became the home of Boxing Day pantomimes that grew popular for a wide audience, although according to one observer, there were a “token few” black performers—the musicians and a school teacher—in the first Jack and the Beanstalk performance. (11) The next decades saw the “Jamaicanizing” of the British pantomime. (12) Perhaps more significant in the history of Jamaican theatre is the body of African-Caribbean musical and performance traditions associated with folklore, religious rituals and seasonal festivals. (13) These enactments involved storytelling, idiomatic speech, movement, gesture, personification, choreography, audience participation, and pantomime. There are parallels between the techniques of this informal theatre and formal drama which the colonial system defined as “real theatre.” The folk theatre went underground during colonialism, but re-emerged in the 1940s, forming the essential basis, sources, and techniques for a new generation of playwrights and actors seeking to define their Jamaican identity and create an indigenous theatre. Sydney Hibbert (b. 1932) grew up during the early decolonization period when Jamaicans gained universal suffrage in 1944 and full independence in 1962. (14) He had sharp words for Black voting rights: “Universal Adult ‘Sufferage’ (sic), Man to man wid’ a(n) equal X! Count the papers and forget them. Keep some pedigree and class!” (15) He became interested in theatre through a small role in a secondary school production of The Pirates of Penzance which, even though its distinctly British character had nothing to do with his own life experience, settled his goal of acting as his future occupation. “You enter into another world” doing theatre, “you’re the center of that world” he later recalled. “I knew I was always going to do this.” (16) The contrast between the world of Pirates and his own could not have been sharper. He was raised with two siblings by a widowed mother in the “lanes” (back alleys) of the Cross Roads section of Kingston with sanitary conditions so bad that residents petitioned the town council to build sewers. (17) He described it as “a heaven and a hell—a home and a prison.” (18) In a poem entitled “Actor Boy” he writes, “Boy, you come from Cross Roads/ Mek some money man!” Shame at the end of my smile/ Screaming inside my head like voices, Run, boy, run! There’s no inheritance here…” (19) A poem “Morning Call” reflects Hibbert’s disillusionment with the school curriculum: “Hiding inside the sounds change/ London bridge is falling down, Falling down… And the Lane is paved with gold, But the gingerbread houses are scarce/ And Red Riding Hood never plays here.” (20) Opportunities for education were limited because grammar schools charged fees, but Hibbert received a scholarship intended for disadvantaged Black youth at Excelsior College, recently founded by young educator A. Wesley Powell. (21) When Hibbert attended the school, it had outstanding music, speech and drama programs including performance opportunities at the Ward Theatre. While Hibbert was a student. one of Excelsior’s most famous graduates, Louise Bennett (Coverley) taught there from 1946-48. (22) Coverley, who as a student had written poetry in Jamaican patois, became a national icon in theatre, radio and TV, and champion of Jamaican folklore and indigenous literature. Later in his own poetry, Hibbert referred to “Miss Lou” in explaining his use of poetic dialect. After graduation from secondary school, he explored his interest in theatre by attending classes at the private Continental Academy, which offered tutoring in music, dance and drama. During this period, he supported himself with a low-paying civil service position in the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands. (23) Because of its colonial past Jamaica was believed to have a racial blending that created a homogeneous creole multi-racism. Martin Luther King Jr. visited Jamaica in June 1965 and was impressed that so many different nationalities seemed to be combined into one Jamaican identity. (24) However, recent studies indicate that “shadeism,” or colorism, was an open secret in Kingston. In “Examining Race in Jamaica,” Monique Kelly finds that both race category and skin color affected opportunities for schooling and access to household amenities. (25) As another researcher describes it, children acquired a sense of social differences based on skin color at home or in school. Sydney’s dark skin complexion was less desirable than lighter mixed-race skin, so he was considered to be lower class. In a poem describing his childhood, he wrote “your father is not backra (white)/ not even high brown skin.” (26) Perhaps the most important Black influencer in Hibbert’s early life was Jamaican-born activist Marcus Garvey (1887-1940). (27) Garvey established the “Universal Negro Improvement Association” (UNIA) in Kingston in 1914, aiming to achieve Black nationalism through the celebration of African history and culture with a Back-to-Africa message. In 1916, he moved to Harlem, New York where UNIA eventually established 700 branches in thirty-eight states, spreading to more than forty countries in Africa, Australia, Europe, and the Americas. (28) Garvey was deported from the US for possible fraud and lived in Kingston 1927-1935 where he continued to articulate ideas of Black pride and racial success. Though Hibbert was too young to understand Garvey’s message in the 1930s, when his body was brought back for burial at the National Heroes Park in 1964, Jamaica boiled with debates over Garvey’s significance and concepts of Jamaican nationhood. (29) Living in Harlem became a goal and when Hibbert finally moved there, he heard Garvey’s ideas reechoed by Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. Playing ‘the Outsider’ in London Seeking to better themselves in London with professional qualifications was standard practice for Commonwealth citizens. In 1962, Hibbert received a bursary scholarship to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Royal Academy of Drama (RADA). At the Guildhall, one of his most important roles was in John Gay’s Polly , a classic play rife with racial satire against the British planters and colonization. The actor was likely cast for his Jamaican identity since the story takes place in the West Indies. Instead of white men wearing black makeup, Hibbert was playing a main role as a Black actor in his own skin without makeup. He received critical acclaim for his interpretation of “Cawwawkee,” the West Indian prince who in the story eventually marries Polly. According to historian Richard Dryden, this ballad opera (a sequel to The Beggar’s Opera ) “condemns the British planter, the British soldier, the British slave trade, the transportation of British criminals, and the pirate,” thus labeling all characters as being either fools or knaves except for the heroine, Polly, and the native Indians.” (30) The West Indians were the “good guys” and the white British merchants and planters the “bad guys,” setting up a racial role inversion within a safe, comedic format. Gay’s Polly has been understood as both a superficial satire and/or an early radical anti-colonial statement. Hibbert’s Shakespearean roles also fall into the outsider category, from the title part in Othello, to Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream , to Feste in Twelfth Night . Othello the Moor is a Black man in a white Venetian society. Oberon is the king of the fairies and a magical being, outside ordinary human limitations. Feste is a licensed fool, free to observe and comment on the foibles of the play’s authority figures. All three characters were thought suitable for a Black actor. Hibbert received Guildhall’s characterization prize for his Feste, interpreted with humor, satire and menace, in the Shakespeare 400th anniversary celebrations. (31) His success with Shakespearean roles demonstrates his ability to “mimic the colonizer” while still honoring his love of Shakespearian language. When he returned to Kingston in August 1965, he was celebrated in the press, and promoted to the Ministry of Development and Welfare. (32) In the 1970s, Hibbert used his London training at the Colorado and Alabama Shakespeare Festivals. (33) At Colorado, his Othello moved critic J. H. Crouch to compare his portrayal with actors like “the sun-tanned Walter Huston, a liver-lipped Lawrence Olivier and a magnificently bullish Paul Robeson.” The critic wrote, “I had contemplated Othello as an exotic, a stranger, a pantaloon, a victim, a fool, even a black hero in a white melodrama, but he had not been prepared for “the pagan gentility, the curtailed, then unleashed barbarousness of Sidney Hibbert’s Othello.” Kari Howard notes, “The actor was devoted to the detail of character construction— from modest storytelling, through quiet authority, through steely authority through laughing security through rational security, through genuine dilemma, through a disintegration of personality which commands the trance (the most real I have seen).” (34) Hibbard later played Othello at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, where a critic commended the contrast between the actor’s soft-spoken delivery at the beginning and tension of a man maddened by jealousy at the end of the play. (35) Creating Jamaican-centered Theatre Returning to Kingston in August 1965, Hibbert was caught up in the attempts to identify and define indigenous Caribbean culture. His first Kingston project was 1865—A Ballad for Rebellion , written by Jamaican playwright and novelist Sylvia Wynter who had returned from London to teach at the University of West Indies and form “a truly indigenous theatre.” (36) In an interview, she explained the problem: local drama needed more serious audiences than pantomime attendees, as well as fresh, realistic scripts by West Indies playwrights. In addition, new professional standards should be developed. Wynter and her then husband Jan Carew wanted to establish The Jamaican Folk Theatre, starting with a production of her script A Child is Born . (37) This was delayed because the Ministry of Development commissioned her to write an epic historical drama about the Morant Bay Rebellion.” (38) After a year’s intensive research, it was ready in October 1965. Directed by Jamaican Lloyd Reckord, with Hibbert as his assistant and production manager, it featured over a hundred players. Reviewer Norman Rae described it as an elaborate production that ran three and a half hours and contained much “speechifying,” while missing opportunities for dramatic expression. He thought that the basic concept of the play was confused with no point of view and stereotyped character development. (39) It is difficult to assess the impact of this event, already highly politicized because the “Tercentenary of English Colonization” celebrated in 1955 was followed by “Emancipation Day” in 1965. (40) Ballad may not have been an artistic success, but Wynter’s approach to rewriting history more inclusively, from the Jamaican people’s viewpoint, marked a fundamental step in decolonizing the story. (41) Almost all local working Black actors were involved and thereby exposed to her humanization of the Black characters and the shift in collective memory. This predates Wynter’s theoretical writings, but reveals the germinal stages of her decolonial thinking. One concrete result of the performance was that the Ministry of Development promised to commission new West Indian scripts at future festivals. Within a month, Hibbert led a group of young theatre practitioners (five of whom had been in Ballad ) in establishing a new theatre company that aimed to attract audiences “beyond the Europhile elite.” (42) They selected the name “Theatre 77” reflecting their goal, “to establish a fully professional theatre company in twelve years: sixty-five plus twelve makes seventy-seven.” (43) They could not agree on any Jamaican scripts for their first performances, so they chose Edward Albee’s Zoo Story and Miss Julie by August Strindberg. According to company member Yvonne Jones (Brewster), they reasoned that both plays concern the struggle between the “haves and have nots, between the lower classes and those they serve.” Social inequality was “examined so brutally by both playwrights,” they believed that “audiences would see the parallels with their own society, which would make the double bill a sure winner.” (44) Without financial backing or public relations experience, the group nevertheless pushed forward arranging for performances in the Old Library/Dramatic theatre at the University of West Indies Mona campus. Hibbert directed Miss Julie , performed in Zoo Story , and was the producer and stage manager. The review by Harry Milner (a lead actor in Ballad ), published two days after the opening, was mixed: entitled “Promising Start” he praised some acting, but found the production “a bit melodramatic, old-fashioned, and slow.” (45) The show closed early, and the company was left with a large debt in part because of expensive programs ordered by Hibbert. Brewster later wrote that “we all were to blame for the fiasco” due to “over-optimistic audience projections, inflated egos, and a complete absence of financial and logistic planning.” (46) The group soon acquired a new performance space, “The Barn,” and staged the British playwright Roger Milner’s comedy How’s the World Treating You with Hibbert in the lead role. Norman Rae’s review was positive and Hibbert received special praise for his deadpan comedic delivery. (47) Still, the script was not written by a Jamaican and did not deal with the island’s political and social concerns. The company attempted to remedy this by next presenting recital/performances by four Jamaican writers, On the Off Beat , along with Afro-American Harlem Renaissance leader Langston Hughes’s jazz poem Ask Your Mama . (48) These pieces, billed as happenings with the audience bringing their own cushions to sit on the floor, were directed by George Carter, already one of Jamaica’s most established theatre practitioners. (49) Still seeking subjects more relevant to their audience’s lives, the company began to hold improvisational “devising workshops” that were recorded, transcribed with scenes marked for further workshopping. These innovative activities led to Trevor Rhone’s first play Look Two in 1967. During this time, Hibbert was working with the Jamaica Festival Office as a theatre lecturer and drama tutor. (50) Theatre 77, now renamed The Barn Theatre, endured for forty years becoming an important chapter in Jamaican theatre history. Encountering Black Power in America By early 1968, Hibbert had been transferred to the Jamaican Embassy in Washington, D. C. as the cultural attaché, but he soon abandoned the Civil Service to move to Harlem. It was in Washington that Hibbert first encountered the South African playwright Athol Fugard whose work was so important to him in future years. Hibbert studied after hours at the Stage Studio, a method acting school founded by Louise Brandwen (1932-1974), a Russian-born émigré who had trained at the Moscow Art Theatre and worked with Lee Strasberg in Los Angeles. At the Stage Studio, he studied the Stella Adler technique and the teachings of Grotowski, Artaud, and Meyerhold. He was now cast in Blood Knot , one of Fugard’s first plays written as a statement against the South African racial laws. (51) The play premiered in Johannesburg on October 23, 1961, after which it was banned in the city. The American premier of Blood Knot opened Off-Broadway with James Earl Jones playing Zacharias in 1964. (52) The plot concerns two half-brothers who share the same Black mother, but one of them passes for white while the other cannot. In the Stage Studio production Hibbert, a Black Jamaican, played the darker-skinned brother Zach. This was an especially compelling story given the young actor’s experience of racism and shadeism. The significance of Fugard’s influence on Hibbert’s career cannot be overstated. He played a variety of parts created by many playwrights, but often returned to Fugard’s plays and Blood Knot . At Illinois State University in 1970, his training included non-traditional reverse casting such as a class in which white students worked on Black playwright Ron Milner’s Who’s Got His Own while Black students performed Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf . Milner’s play had been a great success at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem in 1967 and represented the trend among the Black Arts Movement’s cultural nationalists to create “Black theatre for the advancement of Black people.” (53) Hibbert also arranged a staged reading of Fugard’s Blood Knot in which he played Zachariah with a white faculty member playing his lighter-skinned brother. In 1982 Hibbert played Zachariah again at California’s South Coast Repertory Second Stage, and in 1986 he played the teacher/servant, “Sam,” in Fugard’s anti-apartheid Master Harold, and the Boys . (54) Los Angeles Times critic Lawrence Christon calls Hibbert a “forceful, compelling figure” in a Master Harold review. (55) The Santa Ana Orange County Register ’s reviewer, Jeff Rubio, focuses on the relationship between the actor’s work, playwright Fugard and South Africa. “The playwright brings apartheid into focus,” writes Rubio, “Fugard demands an identification that is beyond most performers, but Hibbert disappears into Sam.” (56) In 1987 while teaching at the North Carolina School for the Arts, Hibbert played Zachariah again in the university production of Blood Knot , receiving stellar reviews. (57) Studying Fugard, playing his roles, and thinking about racism was becoming a central concern in Hibbert’s lifework. Hibbert was drawn to Harlem in his quest to perform plays written by Black writers about their own identity. Earlier Afro-Caribbeans had been key figures in the international Harlem Renaissance. (58) In the late 1960s Harlem was alive with militant activist ferment due to the turmoil of the Civil Rights movement and assassination of Malcolm X. Black culture was fostered by the New Lafayette Theatre, the short-lived Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School, the New Heritage Repertory Theatre, Harlem Dance Theatre, the journal Umbra and the Harlem School of the Arts among others. (59) Hibbert wrote a short prose piece, “Harlem Adagio: Part of a Symphony for Black Men Uptown,” which describes the urban scene. At first, the mood of the essay is upbeat: “at the New Lafayette, there were sold-out houses of people wearing dashikis and afros you couldn’t see around!” Hibbert noticed “Black men were looking each other squarely in the eyes for the first time in their generation’s memory. Malcolm’s words were pouring out of the most unlikely mouths in word-for-word accurate quotes; Stokely Carmichael was upfronting it all over the university campuses; and the Panthers were going to lead this revolution to kingdom come.” (60) Yet Broadway was still difficult for Black actors except for superstars, and local roles were not easy to win for a newly emigrated West Indian actor. (61) After Hibbert’s fifth unsuccessful audition in one day, ranging from Equity Principals Only to Off-Off-Broadway, his agent, who had previously respected Hibbert’s Jamaican identity, urged him to lose his Caribbean accent, something the actor refused to do. His desire to keep his linguistic culture alive was certainly influenced by Louise Bennett-Coverley who, as aforementioned, had taught in Hibbert’s secondary school. In his poem “For Those in Exile,” he wrote, “Talk bad-talk with pride/ For Louise is dictionary now!” (62) At the end of “Harlem Adagio” Hibbert talks about fighting poverty, dodging bill collectors and disrespect, and becomes furious, “Jesus Christ! I gon’ kill somebody if this go on much longer…DAMN!” (63) But then Hibbert was hired as the director of the drama workshop at the Harlem School of the Arts (HAS). After his experience in Jamaica both teaching and working with cultural development, this position was a perfect fit. The school was founded in 1964 by singer Dorothy Maynor, and offered children and adults opportunities to study music, visual arts, and theatre. She wanted children to be exposed to beauty within their community and to develop their talents from an early age. Maynor selected teachers who, like Hibbert, were professional but also adaptable to people coping with deep poverty and racial prejudice. (64) HAS hired five theatre faculty and inaugurated a new performance space in a converted garage in 1969. They presented Aimé Césaire’s A Season in the Congo that told the story of Patrice Lumumba's rise to power and assassination in 1961. Césaire, poet, writer and political figure from Martinique had been one of the founders of the French literary movement Négritude . Césaire advocated for acceptance of blackness in order to free or decolonize the mind. For his part, Hibbert directed a Nigerian play Akowawe with Afolabi Ajayi and the Moari-Moayo [Mbari Mbayo] Players, which included African music and lyrics in English, Swahili, and Yoruba. (65) Variant spellings of Yoruba names have obscured its relationship with the Mbari Mbayo clubs founded by Yoruban playwright Duro Adipo in Nigeria. Adipo’s theatre company produced performances heavily infused with Yoruba rituals, poetry, dance and theatre using authentic, historical instruments. (66) These two events show how Hibbert and the Harlem School of the Arts were instrumental in bringing contemporary pan-African culture to local audiences. Hibbert’s book of poetry, Anansi and Muntu , published in 1986, grew from free-form lyrics performed with musicians in Harlem and Los Angeles in the 1970s. (67) The explosive mid-1970s reception of Jamaican singer-songwriter Bob Marley may have bolstered the appeal of Hibbert’s performance pieces. (68) But the actor’s work had roots in the jazz poetry performed at Theatre 77 in Kingston, particularly Langston Hughes’ Ask Your Mama—Twelve moods for Jazz , which derived from the Harlem Renaissance. Hibbert writes that “Beyond the meaning of Caribbean words and their color is the rhythm of the language,” a kind of music. (69) He hoped to communicate, “clearly and succinctly, in short staccato sentences” pulsing “like the real jazz” with the “shouts of gospel” when it was “newborn, warm and supine, splendidly cathartic and holy.” (70) An especially notable poem, “A Requiem,” commemorates Paul Robeson’s death in January 1976. It begins, “Paul Robeson left today/With dignity,” and ends “Maybe you and I, small dedication/ Living best the Force we know/For another unsung prophet/ In this Black race, against Time.” Hibbert may have attended Robeson’s funeral held in Harlem at the AME Zion Church and was deeply moved by his life struggles. Another section, Somewhere a Third World, contains poems on South Africa. “Bloodbath: for Six High School Students Shot in Soweto,” decries police brutality in the Soweto riots that protested using only English or Afrikaans in all schools. From the Black point of view, this was the language of oppression. Hibbert writes, “Robbery of a people’s native right/Their chess game of securities and power/ And the UN didn’t even notice/ Black blood dripping/Between the fingers of corporate handshakes….” (71) In a section on going home, he reflects on his exile and identity: “ We climbed over fences to larger fields/And schoolhouse places relearning/Three-hundred years’ curriculum of self. And Britons, never, never, never shall be slaves.” (72) When Hibbert revisited his mother’s house after her death in 1984 he wrote, “Dreams come solid, incessant/ Through long nights remembering/ Where I keep my pain locked up/ Hollowing out my chest.” (73) Anansi and Muntu is a journal defining his Jamaican birthright and identity in the wider international world. Teaching a Postcolonial discourse for future generations Hibbert had personal experience of cultural imperialism in British control of educational curricula as a strategy for handling colonized subjugated people. Sub-par education for African Americans was also a significant problem in the United States. While earning a graduate teaching degree at Illinois State University, he directed the Black Fine Arts Festival. In an interview he said, “We have temporarily lost track of our true cultural heritage and one of the functions of this festival will be to help us reunite this lost past with our present.” (74) He displays a Postcolonial awareness of the need to educate and excavate the African American cultural heritage as an independent story that contradicts the traditional colonial narrative. Hibbert’s teaching embodied these principles in the 1970s. His first full-time teaching job was head of the newly formed Drama department at Rutgers University, Livingston campus. This was six years after the riots in Newark, New Jersey when Black protestors took to the streets to stand against the discrimination, lack of representation and working opportunities in the city. (75) Though Rutgers had created new departments and curricula “to serve the needs of the multi-ethnic community,” Hibbert observed that Blacks had little place or input in a white power structure, which seemed to be less concerned with issues than appearances. (76) While at Rutgers, Hibbert ventured into the American South, lured by a visiting artist opportunity to play “King Lear” at a Virginia university. In this setting Hibbert experimented with delivering his lines in the rhythm and patterns of Jamaican patois (patwa). By this time a formidable teacher, white student cast members remember him “beating a drum and leading us around the room to changing rhythms while vocalizing to the movements.” (77) Rehearsals ended in discussions of how each actor’s movement synched with the lines. “It was an amazing piece of work,” writes the costumer. “Sydney would be speaking quietly and then, suddenly near the end of the play, would burst into an eloquent fury, ripping off the clothing I had put on his back.” (78) In 1983, Hibbert joined the faculty of the North Carolina School for the Arts in Winston-Salem. (79) As one of only three Black NCSA faculty members, Hibbert believed that minority students should be taught survival skills because they would go into the drama world as pioneers. (80) His efforts to get Black actors cast in the same roles as Whites were termed “heroic” in a Winston-Salem newspaper. (81) Hibbert’s approach to teaching was shown in a workshop he offered using an integrated approach to drama, dance, movement, music, poetry, and dramatic literature, while his “Putting Your Best Voice Forward” class dealt with voice production and speech as applied to the “extension of personality.” (82) Hibbert also worked with the Winston-Salem based North Carolina Black Repertory Company, the first showcase for Black theatre professionals in the state and one of the first in the nation. (83) Founded in 1979 by entrepreneur/performer Larry Leon Hamlin and fueled by the same forces that had motivated Hibbert to travel from Jamaica to the United States, the missions of the organization were to “engage, enrich and entertain” with innovative programming of a high quality that “resonates across the community and challenges social perceptions,” to expose “diverse audiences to Black classics,” as well as to develop and produce new works.” (84) Of special importance to Hibbert, the company sought to sustain Black theatre internationally and provide a space in which theatre professionals could earn a living through their craft. (85) Hibbert brought broad experience to the NCBRC and the first Black Theatre Festival, where he performed well-received pieces from Anansi and Muntu and was a guest artist at an “Evening of Aesthetic Ambience,” organized to recognize officers and board members. (86) In the first year of the National Black Theatre Festival that established it as a national force, Hibbert was a special consultant to Hamlin, the artistic director of the company, helping to organize events and influencing the productions of Fugard’s The Island and Sizwe Bansi is Dead . (87) He was in contact with Maya Angelou, his previous director who became the first national chairperson for the Festival. In recognition of his work, Angelou presented him with the 1989 Conference Award for Outstanding Service. (88) After Hibbert’s death in 1990, commemorative articles refer to his accomplishments as an actor, director, writer, and theatrical entrepreneur. (89) His evocative poetry and prose as well as his “exuberance, and demanding nature as a teacher” are noted. (90) Students remember Hibbert’s voice carrying “the heavy flavor of his native accent” combined with his “rich sense of humor” reflecting “the joy he took in life” and “in the practice of his life’s work.” (91) Hamlin summarized Hibbert’s contributions saying, “Sydney believed that no matter the amount of adversity, there was always a way to overcome that. Not only could one dream the impossible dream, but one could make that dream a reality” adding, “One of the things I most liked about him was that his growing up in Jamaica had a lot to do with who he was and how he saw things.” (92) Sydney Hibbert, a man who grew from a rigid colonial education and culture as a child to a postcolonial theatre professional pushed against the racial and cultural barriers of his day, may have longed for respect for his homeland, his home culture, and himself. A choice to earn that respect for self and nation by showing the colonizer’s culture, writ large, that he could accomplish significant things on the field that those colonizers had created, is understandable. His experience surely led him to realize the value of teaching a younger generation to do better and his own Black students to be more empowered and aware. His anti-colonialist drive emerged in his powerful performances of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, now re-envisioned, as much as in roles in Fugard’s plays that brought social and racial inequities and questions about humanity to the fore. The battle that Theatre 77/Barn colleagues fought at home and in Britain, he fought in the United States. Hibbert’s choice, however, seems to have meant walking a lonely path in a culture or society where he may never have felt completely at ease. In his poetry, he displayed a sense of anger and displacement or, as Homi Bhabha has termed it, “unhomeliness.” (93) Hibbert moved from Kingston, Jamaica, to London, to Washington, D. C., Harlem, Los Angeles, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, but he never have found a physical space or social reality that was compatible with his Jamaican identity. As African American journalist Sam Fulwood III writes, animosity often clouds relationships between Caribbean immigrants and native-born African Americans citizens because of competition for jobs and differences in their dealings with whites.(94) In Hibbert’s lifetime people of West Indian descent, a minority within a minority, occupied lofty positions in American life and culture, including former United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, Harvard historical/cultural sociologist Orlando Patterson, Caribbean American writer Jamaica Kincaid, and entertainer Harry Belafonte among others. Though Hibbert’s career and life accomplishments are less well-known, attention is merited because of the breadth and quality of his work as well as his passion for changing the racial discourse in Jamaica and the United States. In an age of reclaiming the histories of People of Color and seeking to understand the experiences of people growing up in a colonial setting, this work reconstructs the life of a “Caribbean soul” who successfully negotiated the changes from Jamaican colonial life to a decolonized life in the United States. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Sydney Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu: A Caribbean Soul in Exile , (Rural Hill, NC: Independent Publishing Company, 1986), 44. See also, Gerald McDermott, Anansi the Spider: a tale from the Ashanti , (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1972). Anansi is a folktale character in the shape of a spider, often considered a god of all knowledge and stories, a trickster, one of the most important characters of Caribbean folklore and the genesis of the later Brer Rabbit in the American South. Muntu embraces living and dead, ancestors and deified ancestors. The author wishes to thank Dennis C. Beck, Professor of Theatre: Theatre History/Dramatic Literature at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA and Kathleen Giles Arthur, Professor emerita of Art History, for their invaluable assistance and editorial comments. For general history, see Clinton V. Black, The History of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Longman Publishing & Collins Educational Press,1958); Errol G. Hill, The Jamaican Stage, 1655-1900: Profile of a Colonial Theatre , (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Philip Sherlock and Hazel Bennett, The Story of the Jamaican People (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Rundle Publishers,1998); Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020). Sherlock and Bennett, Jamaican People , 77-98. Sherlock and Bennett, Jamaican People , 116-127. Rachel Manley, Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood, (Key Porter Books, 2009), Prologue xi. For specific information on slavery and the processing of sugar see “Sugar’s Revolution” in Ada Ferrar, Cuba: An American History , (New York: Scribner, 2021), 69 -77. Ferrar, Cuba pp. 73-74. Marlis Schweitzer calls these theatrical gatherings “sites that facilitated collective alignment with the “ideals and aesthetics of the ‘mother country,’” as quoted in Susan Valladares’ The Review of English Studies , Vol. 73, no. 309, April 2022, 322. Hill, Jamaican Stage , p. 237, n. 2, also credits Richardson Wright, Revels in Jamaica, 1682-1838 , (New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1937). By the early nineteenth century, segregation had become commonplace in the Kingston Theatre, though not many years later the “caste system,” white sailors and educated blacks, was “overriding racial lines.” Hill, Jamaican Stage , 36-37. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva suggests in Racism Without Racists , “Since theatre is based in storytelling” and “its ability to lie in the realm of the given,” it can “help [spectators] make sense of the world but in ways that reinforce the status quo,” in Rowman & Littlefield, sixth edition, 96. Hundreds of people saw costumes that were identical to those used earlier at London's Savoy Theatre, in https://old.jamaica-gleaner.com/pages/history/story0010.html . Yvonne Brewster, Vaulting Ambition: Jamaica’s Barn Theatre, 1966-2005, (Leeds, England: Peepal Tree Press Ltd., 2017), 23. Wycliffe and Hazel Bennett, The Jamaican Theatre: Highlights of the Performing Arts in the Twentieth Century , (Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2011), 55-78. Hill, Jamaican Stage , 272-289. On folk elements (dance and music) in African-Caribbean plays, see Osita Okagbue, Culture and Identity in African and Caribbean Theatre , (London: Adonis and Abbey Publishers, 2009), 191-201. Sherlock and Bennett, in Jamaican People , p. 368, hypothesize that rejection of Nazism at the end of World War II influenced Britain’s abandonment of concepts of Empire and trusteeship. “Echoes Still Heard,” Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu , 16. He played on the spelling of suffrage to change its meaning to suffering. “Wid a(n) X” show the lines are written in Jamaican patois. Lil Thompson, “Sydney Hibbert: The Discipline Pays Off,” Winston-Salem Journal , July 31, 1986, 26. They lived at 4 Hart Lane behind Lismore Street, running off of Old Hope Rd. See https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1934-06-05/page-5/ Hibbert, “The Lane, Tempo Mystique,” Anansi and Muntu , 9. Hibbert, “Actor Boy,” Anansi and Muntu , 13. Hibbert, “Morning Call,” Anansi and Muntu , 12. Black, History of Jamaica , 137-140; A. Wesley Powell, The Excelsior-EXED Story , (Kingston: The Methodist Church in the Caribbean and Americas, Jamaica District), 1989. Powell, 27-28, 41-47. Louise Bennett was awarded a British Council scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) in London, and returned to teach at Excelsior 1946-48. By writing in dialect, Bennett-Coverley was following in the footsteps of Jamaican poet Claude McKay. “Local Dramatist Returns,” https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-08-04/page-6/ https://www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-133/out-of-many . King said, “Here you have people from many national backgrounds: Chinese, Indians, so-called Negroes, and you can just go down the line, Europeans, and people from many, many nations. Do you know they all live there and they have a motto in Jamaica, “Out of many people, one people.” And they say, “Here in Jamaica we are not Chinese, we are not Japanese, we are not Indians, we are not Negroes, we are not Englishmen, we are not Canadians. But we are all one big family of Jamaicans.” Monique D.D. Kelly, “Examining Race in Jamaica: How Racial Category and Skin Color Structure Social Inequality,” The Journal of Race and Social Problems , Vol. 18 (2020), 300-312. Hertice Altink, Public Secrets: Race and Skin Colour in Colonial and Independent Jamaica , (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019). Hibbert, “Actor Boy,” 13. The term “high-brown” was used in Harlem in the 1920s and found in Black women’s face powder sold as “High Brown” by the Overton-Hygienic Company, Chicago. Sherlock and Bennet, Jamaican People , 292-315, 362-63. Rupert Lewis, “Jamaican Black Power in the 1960s,” in Black Power in the Caribbean , ed., Kate Quinn, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 55-56. Rex Nettleford, Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica , (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 19-37. Robert G. Dryden, “John Gay's Polly: Unmasking Pirates and Fortune Hunters in the West Indies,” Eighteenth-Century Studies , Vol. 34, No. 4, (2001), 539-557. Stoney Lloyd, “Local Dramatist Returns,” Daily Gleaner , August 4, 1965, 6. Besides those listed above, he played in the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman and Patrick Hamilton’s psychological drama The Duke in Darkness , and four separate characters in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood . He produced Jean Anouilh’s Antigone and Chekov’s Uncle Vanya , which placed on the honor list of productions in the Student Repertory Theatre. “Local Dramatist Returns,” Daily Gleaner. August 4, 1965, 7-8. Hibbert took acting classes from Kingston teacher, Violette de Barovier Riel at her Continental Academy workshop and acted with the Repertory Players, Caribbean Thespians, and the Coke Drama Group. He was married and his wife joined him. Gleaner , August 10, 1963, 19 and Gleaner, August 15, 1965, 20. He portrayed what one reviewer called an elegant Thane of Cawdor in Shakespeare’s Macbeth . Carol McGinnis Kay, “The Alabama Shakespeare Festival,” Shakespeare Quarterly , Vol. 30, No. 2 (1979), 205-208. J. H. Crouch, “The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare Quarterly , Vol. 21 (1970), 465-467. This critic used racial stereotypes that would be considered inappropriate today. Kari Howard, Kaleidoscope , “Drama Review: Othello a Mellow Fellow,” September 29, 1983, University of North Carolina at Asheville, 7. “First Novel Wins Acclaim,” Daily Gleaner , August 9, 1962, p. 24. See Imani D. Owens, “Toward a Truly Indigenous Theatre: Sylvia Wynter Adapts Federico García Lorca,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , 4:1 (2017), 49-67. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1962-11-25/page-9/ The Morant Bay Rebellion broke out on October 11, 1865, when several hundred black people raided the police station and stole weapons stored there. Two planters were killed, and several others were threatened. With the disturbances spreading, the Jamaican authorities put down the rebellion so brutally that direct rule from London was established, which ended representative government in the island for decades. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-10-17/page-18/ ; https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-10-26/page-18/ Veronica M. Gregg, “Commemorations in Jamaica: A Brief History of Conflicts.” Caribbean Quarterly 56, no. 1/2 (2010): 23–67, especially 28-29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654952 . Carole Boyce Davies, “From Masquerade to Maskarade,” in Sylvia Winter, On Being Human as Praxis , ed. Katherine McKittrick, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 203-225 https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-03-02/page-7/ ; Members who had been involved in Ballad were Sydney Hibbert, Billy Woung, Trevor Rhone, Grace Lannaman, and Munair Zacca. Bennett, The Jamaican Theatre , 90-94; Brewster, Vaulting Ambition, 16-20. Sydney was fresh from acting and management training in London. Trevor Rhone and Yvonne Brewster had studied at the Rose Bruford College in Kent. Rhone became a well-known playwright and was presented with the Institute of Jamaica Musgrave Gold Medal. Brewster founded the Talawa Theatre Company, London and, after a long career acting, directing and producing was awarded an Order of the British Empire. Brewster, Vaulting Ambition , 16-17. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-03-06/page-17/ ; As Brewster tells the story, there was no review. For the post mortem, see Trevor Rhone, Bellas Gate Boy , (Oxford, England: MacMillan Caribbean Writers, 2008), 29-32. Brewster, Vaulting Ambition, 17-19. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-07-20/page-26/ Daily Gleaner, “Merry-go-round,” June 14, 1966, Brewster, Vaulting Ambition , 33. George Carter had been a pioneer theatre director and lighting designer in Kingston since the 1940s. He was lighting designer for the musicals, pageants, dance and pantomimes in the Little Theatre Movement. In 1961 he received an Arts Council award to study in London at Sadler Wells Ballet and the Shakespeare Memorial theatre at Stratford. Hibbert’s post-Theatre 77 lecturing and teaching activities in Jamaica were extensive, as documented in Daily Gleaner, “Trends in Theatre,” October 06, 1965, 26; “New Slants to Known History,” October 14, 1965; “Drama workshop opens today,” April 25, 1966, 16; “Jamaica Festival Kingston and Saint Andrew Training courses,” April 26, 1966, 5; “Continental Academy Drama Course,” April 8, 1967, 18; “Festival Seminar, Drama Seminars,” April 25-29,” 1967, 26; May 11, 1967, 26. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2416/the-art-of-theatre-no-8-athol-fugard It toured to Cape town and other locations until June 1962. Soon after the show closed, laws were passed prohibiting racially mixed casts or audiences in South Africa. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095512988 and https://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/ fugard.html/. The Blood Knot starring J. D. Cannon as Morris and James Earl Jones as Zachariah at the Cricket Theatre in 1964, as noted in “Blood Knot' Lists American Premiere,” New York Times , Friday, January 31, 1964, 16. Milner's most significant contribution to African-American letters was Black Drama Anthology (1972), the earliest and most respected anthology of Black plays. It included works by Milner, Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, and Langston Hughes https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100158957 ) Winston-Salem Chronicle , “Hibbert honored by LA drama critics,” March 27, 1986, A-12. The Drama-Logue newspaper, a weekly west-coast theatre trade publication, gave Drama-Logue Theatre Critics Awards for theatre work done in Los Angeles and Southern California. See https://www.abouttheartists.com/award_groups/184-drama-logue-awards/year/1988 . Lawrence Christon in “Stage Review: Playwright as Exorcist in Master Harold and the Boys ' South Coast Repertory,” Los Angeles Times May 25, 1985, in https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-05-25 -ca-25 15632-story.html. Jeff Rubio, Santa Ana Orange County Register, May 24, 1985, 148. Robin Barksdale, “Group bound by ‘Blood Knot’” in “Close-Up,” Chronicle, April 30, 1987, A6. The Jamaican poet Claude McKay (1890-1948) settled in New York City in 1914 and wrote about Black life in Jamaica and challenges faced by Black Americans, often in the influential Pearson’s Magazine and Liberator . Marcus Garvey, founder of the UNIA, had lived in Harlem from 1916 until 1924. See the excellent film with photos and interviews by the Community Works N.Y.C. and the New Heritage Theatre Group, ( https://www.harlem-is.org/videos ) at https://youtu.be/vGG0LMPlf_Y Hibbert describes the whole Harlem scene, Ananzi , 30-31. See also James E. Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s , (Raleigh, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Encyclopedia of the Black Arts Movement , Vernon D. Mitchell, Cynthia Davis, editors (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). African-Americans Pearl Bailey ( Hello Dolly ) and James Earl Jones ( The Great White Hope) were playing starring roles on Broadway, but the Caribbean American Repertory Theatre (CART) was only founded in 1975. See Olivier Stephenson, Visions and Voices (Leeds: Peepal Press, 2013), and http://southernworldartsnews.blogspot.com/2015/03/caribbean-playwrights-converse-and.html Hibbert, Ananzi , 49. Bennett-Coverley brought recognition to the Jamaican Creole dialect through her poetry and Jamaica Radio series “Mis Lou’s Views” that ran 1965-1982. Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu , 29-34. He was divorced from his first wife and married Jamaican Claire Gutzmore in Manhattan in 1969. See https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1969-06-02/page-4/ and https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/903708390:61406?tid=&pid=&queryId=df594283-1d04-45d8-83aa-de0675f898fa&_phsrc=SVt1380&_phstart=successSource . William F. Rogers, Jr., “The Establishment of the Harlem School of the Arts,” Black Music Research Journal , Vol. 8 (1988), 223-236. Negro Digest (later Black World), Vol. 18, August 1969, 50. Spelled two different ways in the same article. See Genevieve Fabre, “A Checklist of Plays, Pageants, Rituals and Musicals by Afro-American authors performed in the United States 1960-1973,” Black World/ Negro Digest, April 1974, 95. Afolabi Ajayi is recorded a as Nigerian recipient of a scholarship to Pomona College where he graduated in 1964; he was deceased by 1975. See https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDAAU440.pdf Okeke-Agulu, Chika. “Rethinking Mbari Mbayo: Osogbo Workshops in the 1960s, Nigeria.” In African Art and Agency in the Workshop , edited by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir and Till Forster, 154–79. Indiana University Press, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gh6fp.11 . This is a new discovery that needs to be explored. Reported in “Studies in Caribbean and South American Literature: An Annual Annotated Bibliography, 1989.” Callaloo 13, no. 3 (1990): 564. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2931339 . Anansi “is the ‘spiderman’ in Caribbean folktales who “survives by adopting a role” and “guarding his sense of humor that pricks pretension—especially his own,” whereas, “Muntu,” the Bantu word for soul, spirit or otherness, goes with Anansi on his journeys providing stability, an unshakable inner identity. He sees two worlds, past and present clearly though he often chooses to remain quiet and detached,” in Hibbert, Anansi “Introduction.” The actor’s pointed observations are a long way from the “One Love!” sensibilities in Marley’s work. For more on Marley, see Timothy White, Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley, (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000) and Roger Steffens, So Many Things to Say; the Oral History of Bob Marley , (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017). Hibbert, Anansi “Introduction,” p. x. Hibbert aspires to “taste, philosophize, and one day even write the answers clearly, succinctly in short staccato sentences” that will be “hailed as a new style,” pulsing “like the real jazz,” blooming with “the colors and textures of the blues,” and mounting “crescendos like the shouts of gospel when it was just newborn, warm and supine, splendidly cathartic and holy, in “Harlem Adagio,” Anansi, 29. Hibbert, “Bloodbath,” Anansi , 61. Hibbert, “For Those in Exile,” Anansi, 49. Hibbert, “Visit ’84,” Anansi , 53. “The Black Fine Arts Festival,” Illinois State University, The Vidette , Vol. 82, n. 54, April 17, 1970. The theme was “The Meaning of Blackness,” with films and prominent lecturers; The Vidette Vol. 83, no.47, March 9, 1971; Vol. 84, n.39, February 8, 1972; The Vidette , Vol. 84, n. 55, March 21, 1972. The unrest from July 12-17, 1967 “came during a period when racial tensions were exploding into violent conflagrations across the country.” Over several days in Newark, “twenty-seven people were killed — many of them black residents, as well as a white firefighter and a white police detective — and more than 700 were injured,” Rick Rojas and Khorri Atkinson, “Fifty Years After the Uprising: Five Days of Unrest That Shaped, and Haunted, Newark,” New York Times, July 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/nyregion/newark-riots-50-years.html Daily Gleaner , “Jamaican Dramatist Returns for a Visit,” May 23, 1973, 5. On the Rutgers/Livingston situation, see Paul G.E. Clemens, “The Early Years of Livingston College, 1964–1973: Revisiting The “College of Good Intentions” in The Journal of The Rutgers University Libraries , Vol. 6-7, 71-114, in http://dx.doi.org/10.14713/jrul.v68i2.1987 . Pat Woodson, “Hibbert Accepts Lead—First Reading Inspires Cast,” The Breeze , September 24, 1974, pp. 3, 6; Jeffrey Alan Dailey, Communication with author, August 2, 2021. Pat Woodson, “Lear Costume Designs,” The Breeze , October 11, 1974, 3; Pamela Johnson, Communication with author, September 30, 2021. According to the Winston-Salem Chronicle , December 6, 1990, B10, Hibbert had already lectured and done university-level workshops on the Los Angeles, Northridge and Pomona California State University campuses while performing in Southern California in the 1980s. Robin Barksdale, “Group bound by ‘Blood Knot’” in “Close-Up,” Winston-Salem Chronicle, April 30, 1987, A-6. Winston-Salem Chronicle , “The Actor as Instrument,” June 21, 1984,16, and Glenda E. Gill, “Schertzer racially biased,” in “Forum,” Chronicle , Thursday, January 21, 1988, A-5. Winston-Salem Chronicle , “The Actor as Instrument,” June 21, 1984, 16; Winston-Salem Journal , December 22, 1985, 40. These organizations included The Flonnie Anderson Theatrical Association and Nell Lite Productions, see Felecia Piggot McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory Company —Twenty-five Marvtastic Years, (Greensboro: Open Hand Publishing, LLC,2005) 22. McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory , 5, “The black self-affirmation fueled by the Civil Rights Movement carried over to the Black Powers Movement and, consequently, to its cultural wing – the Black Arts Movement.” https://www.ncblackrep.org/about-us/html . Winston-Salem Chronicle “Looking Back on 1986,” “Sydney Hibbert performs a mixture of humor and pathos in his Anansi and Muntu ,” Feb. 5, 1987, C-4; McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory, 41, 61; Winston-Salem Chronicle , “Can We Talk?” September 24, 1987, A-8. McMillan, 61; The Island and Sizwi Banzi is Dead written by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona were originally performed in 1972 in Cape town, South Africa. McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory Company , 46-50. Other celebrities were Oprah Winfrey, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Lou Gossett, Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones, and Roscoe Lee Brown. Mabel Robinson, former NCBR Artistic Director, Winston-Salem Chronicle, December 6, 1990, B-9; Winston-Salem Chronicle , January 10, 1991, A-8. Daily Gleaner , Tuesday, January 15, 1991, 27. Patricia Smith Deering, “Renowned local dramatist remembered,” Winston-Salem Chronicle , December 6, 1990, 25. John Hoeffel, “Drama Professor Sydney Hibbert Dies of Cancer,” Winston-Salem Journal, November 30, 1990, 12; Nathan Ross Freeman wrote and directed a play based on Hibbert, Your Side Mine , that was performed at the Montage Showcase Ensemble in November 1997. See https://www.greensboro.com/ensemble-gives-playwrights-a-chance/article_68b7d190-97d4-5e5b-b6ea-891a97f0c19f.html . Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” Social Text , 31/32 (1992), 141-153. Hibbert experienced the “unhomeliness” in the sense of his exile and itinerant life style. Though he became a US citizen in 1978, he was constantly moving from the East to West Coasts. In “Sermon in a Dream-Mass: Port Elizabeth, South Africa,” the lanes of Kingston where he grew up haunted his imagination becoming metaphors for danger and death. Sam Fulwood III, “U.S. Blacks: A Divided Experience,” November 25,1995, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-11-25-mn-6855-story.html . Footnotes Sydney Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu: A Caribbean Soul in Exile , (Rural Hill, NC: Independent Publishing Company, 1986), 44. See also, Gerald McDermott, Anansi the Spider: a tale from the Ashanti , (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1972). Anansi is a folktale character in the shape of a spider, often considered a god of all knowledge and stories, a trickster, one of the most important characters of Caribbean folklore and the genesis of the later Brer Rabbit in the American South. Muntu embraces living and dead, ancestors and deified ancestors. The author wishes to thank Dennis C. Beck, Professor of Theatre: Theatre History/Dramatic Literature at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA and Kathleen Giles Arthur, Professor emerita of Art History, for their invaluable assistance and editorial comments. For general history, see Clinton V. Black, The History of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Longman Publishing & Collins Educational Press,1958); Errol G. Hill, The Jamaican Stage, 1655-1900: Profile of a Colonial Theatre , (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Philip Sherlock and Hazel Bennett, The Story of the Jamaican People (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Rundle Publishers,1998); Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020). Sherlock and Bennett, Jamaican People , 77-98. Sherlock and Bennett, Jamaican People , 116-127. Rachel Manley, Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood, (Key Porter Books, 2009), Prologue xi. For specific information on slavery and the processing of sugar see “Sugar’s Revolution” in Ada Ferrar, Cuba: An American History , (New York: Scribner, 2021), 69 -77. Ferrar, Cuba pp. 73-74. Marlis Schweitzer calls these theatrical gatherings “sites that facilitated collective alignment with the “ideals and aesthetics of the ‘mother country,’” as quoted in Susan Valladares’ The Review of English Studies , Vol. 73, no. 309, April 2022, 322. Hill, Jamaican Stage , p. 237, n. 2, also credits Richardson Wright, Revels in Jamaica, 1682-1838 , (New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1937). By the early nineteenth century, segregation had become commonplace in the Kingston Theatre, though not many years later the “caste system,” white sailors and educated blacks, was “overriding racial lines.” Hill, Jamaican Stage , 36-37. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva suggests in Racism Without Racists , “Since theatre is based in storytelling” and “its ability to lie in the realm of the given,” it can “help [spectators] make sense of the world but in ways that reinforce the status quo,” in Rowman & Littlefield, sixth edition, 96. Hundreds of people saw costumes that were identical to those used earlier at London's Savoy Theatre, in https://old.jamaica-gleaner.com/pages/history/story0010.html . Yvonne Brewster, Vaulting Ambition: Jamaica’s Barn Theatre, 1966-2005, (Leeds, England: Peepal Tree Press Ltd., 2017), 23. Wycliffe and Hazel Bennett, The Jamaican Theatre: Highlights of the Performing Arts in the Twentieth Century , (Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2011), 55-78. Hill, Jamaican Stage , 272-289. On folk elements (dance and music) in African-Caribbean plays, see Osita Okagbue, Culture and Identity in African and Caribbean Theatre , (London: Adonis and Abbey Publishers, 2009), 191-201. Sherlock and Bennett, in Jamaican People , p. 368, hypothesize that rejection of Nazism at the end of World War II influenced Britain’s abandonment of concepts of Empire and trusteeship. “Echoes Still Heard,” Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu , 16. He played on the spelling of suffrage to change its meaning to suffering. “Wid a(n) X” show the lines are written in Jamaican patois. Lil Thompson, “Sydney Hibbert: The Discipline Pays Off,” Winston-Salem Journal , July 31, 1986, 26. They lived at 4 Hart Lane behind Lismore Street, running off of Old Hope Rd. See https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1934-06-05/page-5/ Hibbert, “The Lane, Tempo Mystique,” Anansi and Muntu , 9. Hibbert, “Actor Boy,” Anansi and Muntu , 13. Hibbert, “Morning Call,” Anansi and Muntu , 12. Black, History of Jamaica , 137-140; A. Wesley Powell, The Excelsior-EXED Story , (Kingston: The Methodist Church in the Caribbean and Americas, Jamaica District), 1989. Powell, 27-28, 41-47. Louise Bennett was awarded a British Council scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) in London, and returned to teach at Excelsior 1946-48. By writing in dialect, Bennett-Coverley was following in the footsteps of Jamaican poet Claude McKay. “Local Dramatist Returns,” https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-08-04/page-6/ https://www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-133/out-of-many . King said, “Here you have people from many national backgrounds: Chinese, Indians, so-called Negroes, and you can just go down the line, Europeans, and people from many, many nations. Do you know they all live there and they have a motto in Jamaica, “Out of many people, one people.” And they say, “Here in Jamaica we are not Chinese, we are not Japanese, we are not Indians, we are not Negroes, we are not Englishmen, we are not Canadians. But we are all one big family of Jamaicans.” Monique D.D. Kelly, “Examining Race in Jamaica: How Racial Category and Skin Color Structure Social Inequality,” The Journal of Race and Social Problems , Vol. 18 (2020), 300-312. Hertice Altink, Public Secrets: Race and Skin Colour in Colonial and Independent Jamaica , (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019). Hibbert, “Actor Boy,” 13. The term “high-brown” was used in Harlem in the 1920s and found in Black women’s face powder sold as “High Brown” by the Overton-Hygienic Company, Chicago. Sherlock and Bennet, Jamaican People , 292-315, 362-63. Rupert Lewis, “Jamaican Black Power in the 1960s,” in Black Power in the Caribbean , ed., Kate Quinn, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 55-56. Rex Nettleford, Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica , (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 19-37. Robert G. Dryden, “John Gay's Polly: Unmasking Pirates and Fortune Hunters in the West Indies,” Eighteenth-Century Studies , Vol. 34, No. 4, (2001), 539-557. Stoney Lloyd, “Local Dramatist Returns,” Daily Gleaner , August 4, 1965, 6. Besides those listed above, he played in the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman and Patrick Hamilton’s psychological drama The Duke in Darkness , and four separate characters in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood . He produced Jean Anouilh’s Antigone and Chekov’s Uncle Vanya , which placed on the honor list of productions in the Student Repertory Theatre. “Local Dramatist Returns,” Daily Gleaner. August 4, 1965, 7-8. Hibbert took acting classes from Kingston teacher, Violette de Barovier Riel at her Continental Academy workshop and acted with the Repertory Players, Caribbean Thespians, and the Coke Drama Group. He was married and his wife joined him. Gleaner , August 10, 1963, 19 and Gleaner, August 15, 1965, 20. He portrayed what one reviewer called an elegant Thane of Cawdor in Shakespeare’s Macbeth . Carol McGinnis Kay, “The Alabama Shakespeare Festival,” Shakespeare Quarterly , Vol. 30, No. 2 (1979), 205-208. J. H. Crouch, “The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare Quarterly , Vol. 21 (1970), 465-467. This critic used racial stereotypes that would be considered inappropriate today. Kari Howard, Kaleidoscope , “Drama Review: Othello a Mellow Fellow,” September 29, 1983, University of North Carolina at Asheville, 7. “First Novel Wins Acclaim,” Daily Gleaner , August 9, 1962, p. 24. See Imani D. Owens, “Toward a Truly Indigenous Theatre: Sylvia Wynter Adapts Federico García Lorca,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , 4:1 (2017), 49-67. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1962-11-25/page-9/ The Morant Bay Rebellion broke out on October 11, 1865, when several hundred black people raided the police station and stole weapons stored there. Two planters were killed, and several others were threatened. With the disturbances spreading, the Jamaican authorities put down the rebellion so brutally that direct rule from London was established, which ended representative government in the island for decades. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-10-17/page-18/ ; https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-10-26/page-18/ Veronica M. Gregg, “Commemorations in Jamaica: A Brief History of Conflicts.” Caribbean Quarterly 56, no. 1/2 (2010): 23–67, especially 28-29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654952 . Carole Boyce Davies, “From Masquerade to Maskarade,” in Sylvia Winter, On Being Human as Praxis , ed. Katherine McKittrick, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 203-225 https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-03-02/page-7/ ; Members who had been involved in Ballad were Sydney Hibbert, Billy Woung, Trevor Rhone, Grace Lannaman, and Munair Zacca. Bennett, The Jamaican Theatre , 90-94; Brewster, Vaulting Ambition, 16-20. Sydney was fresh from acting and management training in London. Trevor Rhone and Yvonne Brewster had studied at the Rose Bruford College in Kent. Rhone became a well-known playwright and was presented with the Institute of Jamaica Musgrave Gold Medal. Brewster founded the Talawa Theatre Company, London and, after a long career acting, directing and producing was awarded an Order of the British Empire. Brewster, Vaulting Ambition , 16-17. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-03-06/page-17/ ; As Brewster tells the story, there was no review. For the post mortem, see Trevor Rhone, Bellas Gate Boy , (Oxford, England: MacMillan Caribbean Writers, 2008), 29-32. Brewster, Vaulting Ambition, 17-19. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-07-20/page-26/ Daily Gleaner, “Merry-go-round,” June 14, 1966, Brewster, Vaulting Ambition , 33. George Carter had been a pioneer theatre director and lighting designer in Kingston since the 1940s. He was lighting designer for the musicals, pageants, dance and pantomimes in the Little Theatre Movement. In 1961 he received an Arts Council award to study in London at Sadler Wells Ballet and the Shakespeare Memorial theatre at Stratford. Hibbert’s post-Theatre 77 lecturing and teaching activities in Jamaica were extensive, as documented in Daily Gleaner, “Trends in Theatre,” October 06, 1965, 26; “New Slants to Known History,” October 14, 1965; “Drama workshop opens today,” April 25, 1966, 16; “Jamaica Festival Kingston and Saint Andrew Training courses,” April 26, 1966, 5; “Continental Academy Drama Course,” April 8, 1967, 18; “Festival Seminar, Drama Seminars,” April 25-29,” 1967, 26; May 11, 1967, 26. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2416/the-art-of-theatre-no-8-athol-fugard It toured to Cape town and other locations until June 1962. Soon after the show closed, laws were passed prohibiting racially mixed casts or audiences in South Africa. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095512988 and https://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/ fugard.html/. The Blood Knot starring J. D. Cannon as Morris and James Earl Jones as Zachariah at the Cricket Theatre in 1964, as noted in “Blood Knot' Lists American Premiere,” New York Times , Friday, January 31, 1964, 16. Milner's most significant contribution to African-American letters was Black Drama Anthology (1972), the earliest and most respected anthology of Black plays. It included works by Milner, Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, and Langston Hughes https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100158957 ) Winston-Salem Chronicle , “Hibbert honored by LA drama critics,” March 27, 1986, A-12. The Drama-Logue newspaper, a weekly west-coast theatre trade publication, gave Drama-Logue Theatre Critics Awards for theatre work done in Los Angeles and Southern California. See https://www.abouttheartists.com/award_groups/184-drama-logue-awards/year/1988 . Lawrence Christon in “Stage Review: Playwright as Exorcist in Master Harold and the Boys ' South Coast Repertory,” Los Angeles Times May 25, 1985, in https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-05-25 -ca-25 15632-story.html. Jeff Rubio, Santa Ana Orange County Register, May 24, 1985, 148. Robin Barksdale, “Group bound by ‘Blood Knot’” in “Close-Up,” Chronicle, April 30, 1987, A6. The Jamaican poet Claude McKay (1890-1948) settled in New York City in 1914 and wrote about Black life in Jamaica and challenges faced by Black Americans, often in the influential Pearson’s Magazine and Liberator . Marcus Garvey, founder of the UNIA, had lived in Harlem from 1916 until 1924. See the excellent film with photos and interviews by the Community Works N.Y.C. and the New Heritage Theatre Group, ( https://www.harlem-is.org/videos ) at https://youtu.be/vGG0LMPlf_Y Hibbert describes the whole Harlem scene, Ananzi , 30-31. See also James E. Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s , (Raleigh, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Encyclopedia of the Black Arts Movement , Vernon D. Mitchell, Cynthia Davis, editors (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). African-Americans Pearl Bailey ( Hello Dolly ) and James Earl Jones ( The Great White Hope) were playing starring roles on Broadway, but the Caribbean American Repertory Theatre (CART) was only founded in 1975. See Olivier Stephenson, Visions and Voices (Leeds: Peepal Press, 2013), and http://southernworldartsnews.blogspot.com/2015/03/caribbean-playwrights-converse-and.html Hibbert, Ananzi , 49. Bennett-Coverley brought recognition to the Jamaican Creole dialect through her poetry and Jamaica Radio series “Mis Lou’s Views” that ran 1965-1982. Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu , 29-34. He was divorced from his first wife and married Jamaican Claire Gutzmore in Manhattan in 1969. See https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1969-06-02/page-4/ and https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/903708390:61406?tid=&pid=&queryId=df594283-1d04-45d8-83aa-de0675f898fa&_phsrc=SVt1380&_phstart=successSource . William F. Rogers, Jr., “The Establishment of the Harlem School of the Arts,” Black Music Research Journal , Vol. 8 (1988), 223-236. Negro Digest (later Black World), Vol. 18, August 1969, 50. Spelled two different ways in the same article. See Genevieve Fabre, “A Checklist of Plays, Pageants, Rituals and Musicals by Afro-American authors performed in the United States 1960-1973,” Black World/ Negro Digest, April 1974, 95. Afolabi Ajayi is recorded a as Nigerian recipient of a scholarship to Pomona College where he graduated in 1964; he was deceased by 1975. See https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDAAU440.pdf Okeke-Agulu, Chika. “Rethinking Mbari Mbayo: Osogbo Workshops in the 1960s, Nigeria.” In African Art and Agency in the Workshop , edited by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir and Till Forster, 154–79. Indiana University Press, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gh6fp.11 . This is a new discovery that needs to be explored. Reported in “Studies in Caribbean and South American Literature: An Annual Annotated Bibliography, 1989.” Callaloo 13, no. 3 (1990): 564. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2931339 . Anansi “is the ‘spiderman’ in Caribbean folktales who “survives by adopting a role” and “guarding his sense of humor that pricks pretension—especially his own,” whereas, “Muntu,” the Bantu word for soul, spirit or otherness, goes with Anansi on his journeys providing stability, an unshakable inner identity. He sees two worlds, past and present clearly though he often chooses to remain quiet and detached,” in Hibbert, Anansi “Introduction.” The actor’s pointed observations are a long way from the “One Love!” sensibilities in Marley’s work. For more on Marley, see Timothy White, Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley, (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000) and Roger Steffens, So Many Things to Say; the Oral History of Bob Marley , (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017). Hibbert, Anansi “Introduction,” p. x. Hibbert aspires to “taste, philosophize, and one day even write the answers clearly, succinctly in short staccato sentences” that will be “hailed as a new style,” pulsing “like the real jazz,” blooming with “the colors and textures of the blues,” and mounting “crescendos like the shouts of gospel when it was just newborn, warm and supine, splendidly cathartic and holy, in “Harlem Adagio,” Anansi, 29. Hibbert, “Bloodbath,” Anansi , 61. Hibbert, “For Those in Exile,” Anansi, 49. Hibbert, “Visit ’84,” Anansi , 53. “The Black Fine Arts Festival,” Illinois State University, The Vidette , Vol. 82, n. 54, April 17, 1970. The theme was “The Meaning of Blackness,” with films and prominent lecturers; The Vidette Vol. 83, no.47, March 9, 1971; Vol. 84, n.39, February 8, 1972; The Vidette , Vol. 84, n. 55, March 21, 1972. The unrest from July 12-17, 1967 “came during a period when racial tensions were exploding into violent conflagrations across the country.” Over several days in Newark, “twenty-seven people were killed — many of them black residents, as well as a white firefighter and a white police detective — and more than 700 were injured,” Rick Rojas and Khorri Atkinson, “Fifty Years After the Uprising: Five Days of Unrest That Shaped, and Haunted, Newark,” New York Times, July 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/nyregion/newark-riots-50-years.html Daily Gleaner , “Jamaican Dramatist Returns for a Visit,” May 23, 1973, 5. On the Rutgers/Livingston situation, see Paul G.E. Clemens, “The Early Years of Livingston College, 1964–1973: Revisiting The “College of Good Intentions” in The Journal of The Rutgers University Libraries , Vol. 6-7, 71-114, in http://dx.doi.org/10.14713/jrul.v68i2.1987 . Pat Woodson, “Hibbert Accepts Lead—First Reading Inspires Cast,” The Breeze , September 24, 1974, pp. 3, 6; Jeffrey Alan Dailey, Communication with author, August 2, 2021. Pat Woodson, “Lear Costume Designs,” The Breeze , October 11, 1974, 3; Pamela Johnson, Communication with author, September 30, 2021. According to the Winston-Salem Chronicle , December 6, 1990, B10, Hibbert had already lectured and done university-level workshops on the Los Angeles, Northridge and Pomona California State University campuses while performing in Southern California in the 1980s. Robin Barksdale, “Group bound by ‘Blood Knot’” in “Close-Up,” Winston-Salem Chronicle, April 30, 1987, A-6. Winston-Salem Chronicle , “The Actor as Instrument,” June 21, 1984,16, and Glenda E. Gill, “Schertzer racially biased,” in “Forum,” Chronicle , Thursday, January 21, 1988, A-5. Winston-Salem Chronicle , “The Actor as Instrument,” June 21, 1984, 16; Winston-Salem Journal , December 22, 1985, 40. These organizations included The Flonnie Anderson Theatrical Association and Nell Lite Productions, see Felecia Piggot McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory Company —Twenty-five Marvtastic Years, (Greensboro: Open Hand Publishing, LLC,2005) 22. McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory , 5, “The black self-affirmation fueled by the Civil Rights Movement carried over to the Black Powers Movement and, consequently, to its cultural wing – the Black Arts Movement.” https://www.ncblackrep.org/about-us/html . Winston-Salem Chronicle “Looking Back on 1986,” “Sydney Hibbert performs a mixture of humor and pathos in his Anansi and Muntu ,” Feb. 5, 1987, C-4; McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory, 41, 61; Winston-Salem Chronicle , “Can We Talk?” September 24, 1987, A-8. McMillan, 61; The Island and Sizwi Banzi is Dead written by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona were originally performed in 1972 in Cape town, South Africa. McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory Company , 46-50. Other celebrities were Oprah Winfrey, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Lou Gossett, Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones, and Roscoe Lee Brown. Mabel Robinson, former NCBR Artistic Director, Winston-Salem Chronicle, December 6, 1990, B-9; Winston-Salem Chronicle , January 10, 1991, A-8. Daily Gleaner , Tuesday, January 15, 1991, 27. Patricia Smith Deering, “Renowned local dramatist remembered,” Winston-Salem Chronicle , December 6, 1990, 25. John Hoeffel, “Drama Professor Sydney Hibbert Dies of Cancer,” Winston-Salem Journal, November 30, 1990, 12; Nathan Ross Freeman wrote and directed a play based on Hibbert, Your Side Mine , that was performed at the Montage Showcase Ensemble in November 1997. See https://www.greensboro.com/ensemble-gives-playwrights-a-chance/article_68b7d190-97d4-5e5b-b6ea-891a97f0c19f.html . Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” Social Text , 31/32 (1992), 141-153. Hibbert experienced the “unhomeliness” in the sense of his exile and itinerant life style. Though he became a US citizen in 1978, he was constantly moving from the East to West Coasts. In “Sermon in a Dream-Mass: Port Elizabeth, South Africa,” the lanes of Kingston where he grew up haunted his imagination becoming metaphors for danger and death. Sam Fulwood III, “U.S. Blacks: A Divided Experience,” November 25,1995, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-11-25-mn-6855-story.html . About The Author(s) Thomas Arthur received his PhD in American Studies from Indiana University and is a Professor Emeritus of Theatre at James Madison University (JMU) in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He has written extensively on theatre performance and film practitioners and co-authored See You at the Movies , a book on Melvyn Douglas’s acting and political activities. Arthur has led acting workshops internationally, including in the townships of South Africa as apartheid ended. 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.

Watch Moi-même by Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. In 1968 Paris, Lee Breuer, along with future members of the legendary downtown experimental theater company, Mabou Mines, shot an unscripted, silent satire following a thirteen-year-old boy named Kevin (Kevin Mathewson) attempting to make a film against the backdrop of the May student uprising. Abandoned as unfinished, the project was resurrected by Breuer’s son, filmmaker Mojo Lorwin, who began restoring and re-imagining the unfinished film in the last year of his father’s life Moi-même features a cameo by Jean-Luc Godard, footage of the student protesters outside the Sorbonne, and early performances from several of the original members of Mabou Mines including Ruth Maleczech, David Warrilow, and Fred Neumann, also known for their interpretations of Samuel Beckett’s work. Faced with hours of unedited silent film (Breuer’s original intention had been to dub the film later), Lorwin spent three years writing a script, editing the picture, and working with a number of voice actors, musicians, and sound professionals to create a feature film out of the raw footage. A collaboration between father and son across half a century, Moi-même is both a lost 60s arthouse film and a new experimental film in its own right, which uses the original footage to tell a story about the political and artistic legacy of the 60s in our time and to explore the meaning of abandoned projects.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Moi-même At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Avenue, NY 10003) on Saturday May 17th at 3pm. It will be followed by a Q&A with Mojo Lorwin and Kevin Mathewson, moderated by Frank Hentschker. RSVP Please note this film has a ticketed entry and is being screened at Anthology Film Archive. Click on the button above to visit the AFA website to reserve your seats. Country USA, France Language English, French Running Time 65 minutes Year of Release 1968/2024 About The Film In 1968 Paris, Lee Breuer, along with future members of the legendary downtown experimental theater company, Mabou Mines, shot an unscripted, silent satire following a thirteen-year-old boy named Kevin (Kevin Mathewson) attempting to make a film against the backdrop of the May student uprising. Abandoned as unfinished, the project was resurrected by Breuer’s son, filmmaker Mojo Lorwin, who began restoring and re-imagining the unfinished film in the last year of his father’s life Moi-même features a cameo by Jean-Luc Godard, footage of the student protesters outside the Sorbonne, and early performances from several of the original members of Mabou Mines including Ruth Maleczech, David Warrilow, and Fred Neumann, also known for their interpretations of Samuel Beckett’s work. Faced with hours of unedited silent film (Breuer’s original intention had been to dub the film later), Lorwin spent three years writing a script, editing the picture, and working with a number of voice actors, musicians, and sound professionals to create a feature film out of the raw footage. A collaboration between father and son across half a century, Moi-même is both a lost 60s arthouse film and a new experimental film in its own right, which uses the original footage to tell a story about the political and artistic legacy of the 60s in our time and to explore the meaning of abandoned projects. About The Artist(s) Lee Breuer (1937-2021) was an experimental theater writer and director and co-founder of the company Mabou Mines. His most acclaimed works include "The Shaggy Dog Animation"(1978), "The Gospel at Colonus" (1983), "Peter and Wendy" (1996), and "Mabou Mines DollHouse" (2004). Mojo Lorwin (1984-) is a filmmaker, film professor, and former political organizer. His 2019 short Summer in the City is a dream logic black comic exploration of climate change which won the “Best Brooklyn Project” award at the Brooklyn Film Festival in 2020. Get in touch with the artist(s) mojolorwin@gmail.com and follow them on social media moimememovie.com, https://www.instagram.com/mojolorwin/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

Jennifer Schmidt 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 Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville Jennifer Schmidt By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF The Belle of Mayfair , a musical comedy composed by Leslie Stuart with book by Basil Hood, Charles Brookfield, and Cosmo Hamilton, premiered in London in 1906. The comedy was loosely based on Romeo and Juliet , which did not prevent it from including a number called “Why Do They Call Me A Gibson Girl?” commenting on the American fashion craze sparked by Charles Dana Gibson’s illustrations. The lyrics for the song instructed the listener on how to “affect” the Gibson style: And a monumental curl, And walk with a bend in your back, Then they will call you a Gibson Girl. … The girls affect a style As they pass by With down-cast eye, And a bored and languid smile, … They do their best, for they’ve seen the pictures. [Chorus: They’ve missed the point of the Dana picture,] Which are intended, don’t you see, For all in perfect type should be.[1] For the New York production, which ran from December 1906 through March 1907, Valeska Suratt, a milliner from Indiana, used the role and her dressmaking skills to launch her acting career. Commenting on the hit song for the production’s Baltimore transfer, a review in The Sun exclaims that “Miss Surratt…looks like she had just stepped out from one of Charles Dana’s $1,000 sketches.” The reviewer also notes that the chorus featured a different look than the typical “chubby chorus girls,” stating, “Their places were well filled by tall, willowy creatures, called Gibson girls, who wore the most stunning gowns imaginable and who lifted up their chins in preference to their toes.” [2] This new, aloof physicality and the uniformity sent up by the lyrics of the song—“for all in perfect type should be”—correspond to a general trend in depictions of women in the United States. In Imaging American Women , Martha Banta argues that “ the woman as image was one of the [Progressive] era’s dominant cultural tics.” [3] The allegorical figure of Columbia, for instance, the young attractive woman representing America, appeared with great frequency during this period in political cartoons or as a brand symbol, such as in Columbia Records and Columbia Pictures. Other female allegorical figures towered over the United States in the form of the Statue of Liberty and the 65-foot Statue of the Republic at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition or graced the facades of buildings like the Four Continents statues at the United States Customs House. [4] Matching these stately figures were Gibson’s pervasive drawings of narrow-waisted, large-busted women with upswept hair, button noses, and distant gazes. As Adams, Keene, and Koella discuss in Seeing the American Woman , the Girl was “unindividualized”: “she generally looked down or away…or she danced and promenaded in lines of similar beings.” [5] Thus, as the United States entered the twentieth century, the types of women presented to the public in mass media and entertainment were often idealized, generalized, and detached. With the cultural turn to the visual, “woman as image” became increasingly separated from the living, breathing, individual bodies of women. As images of the American Girl proliferated, however, solo female performers in vaudeville offered alternatives to the disembodied anonymity of these aloof female types. In particular, the practice of mimicry allowed performers like Gertrude Hoffmann, Cissie Loftus, and Elsie Janis to break the “girl” mold with their vividly individualized impersonations of celebrities. Hoffmann, Loftus, and Janis brought attention to the manufactured nature of womanhood in the public sphere through an embodied form of imitation, which allowed them critical, creative space to comment on the celebrity culture of their time. The malleability of their form, in which they embodied several figures at once, gave them an unusual freedom from the strict types and categories for female performers, and their abilities as shape-shifters emphasized a bodily rather than an artificial or mechanical means of reproduction. In response to the commercialization and replication of the female image in the Progressive Era female mimics in vaudeville countered the mass-produced, male-created depictions of women, seen in magazines and chorus lines, with their own unruly reproductions. [6] At the beginning of the twentieth century, mimicry became a highly popular act on variety stages, and while both male and female mimics thrived in vaudeville, women especially dominated the field. A retrospective Variety article from 1948, titled “Vaudeville: Mimics,” reveals the prevalence of female mimics. The author, Joe Laurie, Jr., recalls the “heyday” of mimicry on the vaudeville stage, claiming that “There was an epidemic of imitations in vaudeville from 1905 to 1930.” [7] In a list of the “great artists” of mimicry, the majority are women, and of the artists he mentions who created original material for their acts, all five are women: Cissie Loftus, Juliet Delf, Elsie Janis, Gertrude Hoffmann, and Venita Gould. These mimics “used their own special material,” and Laurie, Jr. considered this to be a superior practice than simply copying material from the acts they were imitating. The majority of imitations in vaudeville, however, like the Gibson acts, consisted of more direct copying. The success of Suratt’s Gibson act, for instance, lay primarily with the gown—in her ability (as a dressmaker) to copy, make, and wear the “$1,000” look. Thus, while the Gibson Girl moved from two-dimensions to three, the emphasis remained on the visual, a priority that was in keeping with the period’s image obsession. In her book, Women and the American Theatre , Faye Dudden discusses theater’s turn to the visual, arguing that the commercialized theater at the end of the nineteenth century was part of an entertainment industry that created a “new kind of public realm.” [8] This new public realm “was not concerned with politics or community interests, but rather aimed at private profit and derived its publicness from the breadth of its marketing ambitions.” [9] While female audience members made an enormous impact on the growth of the mass entertainment market, the period also saw the mainstream success of the “leg business.” This type of entertainment, designed for the male gaze and formerly prevalent only in entertainments for working-class men, became standard fare in vaudeville and on Broadway. Perhaps the best theatrical example of the new public realm and its exploitation of feminized bodies and images was Florenz Ziegfeld’s “Follies,” the annual musical revue that ran from 1907 through 1931 and centered on its spectacular displays of chorus girls. In Seeing the American Woman , Adams et al. discuss the chorus girl as an incarnation of the Gibson Girl, explaining that Ziegfeld “sought primarily the Gibson look for his chorus girl.” [10] Sharing the Girl’s elegant but undifferentiated appeal, these choruses likewise represented youthful beauty and vigor, were vehicles for displaying the latest fashions, and were meant for replication, requiring hordes of women to fill the ranks. Often the extravagant costumes worn by Ziegfeld’s choruses functioned more like scenery, explicitly framing the women as objects and set pieces. Further emphasizing their conformity, the choreography comprised precision line dancing and “geometric formations” that, Susan Glenn argues, “mirrored the early twentieth-century industrial culture” and turned the chorus into a “disciplined female mass.” [11] The “new public realm” also corresponded to the explosion of print media, which, like commercialized theater, increasingly relied on exploitation of the female image. Matthew Schneirov dates the beginning of the “new era” in magazine publishing from 1893, “the year S. S. McClure established McClure’s ” as well as “the year that Frank Munsey cut the price of his magazine to ten cents—well below the cost of unit production—and made his profit through advertising.” [12] Other magazines quickly followed Munsey’s example, and advertising became the chief means of profit, driving down prices for periodical publications and making weekly and monthly illustrated magazines affordable for a broad swath of consumers in the United States. Like the magazines they funded, advertisements became increasingly visual, cutting down on text and relying on imagery, especially that of young, attractive women, to sell their products. The replicable nature of the Gibson Girl led her to be the perfect tool for selling the latest fashions. The Girl, according to Martha Patterson, “created the first national modeling of the one right look ,” and walking down the streets of an American city in the early 1900s meant encountering a sea of Gibson Girls, wearing the uniform of the New Woman. [13] Some of the Girl’s attributes disseminated progressive ideas about womanhood; she was often shown as independent, athletic, and assertive. The popular magazines, in which the Girl appeared, sold women the possibility of refashioning themselves into these sophisticated beings. Of course, by exploiting this attractive image to sell products, the advertiser’s promise of greater freedom led to greater conformity through consumption. Moreover, it was clear that her independence lasted only as long as the period of single life before marriage, and as the model for white beauty and sophistication, she also perpetuated ideas of racial superiority. In the summer of 1907, after Suratt made a hit as a Gibson Girl in The Belle of Mayfair , several vaudeville bills featured imitations of her and the Gibson aesthetic. The Broadway Theatre featured “a new Gibson girl travesty,” and Eddie Foy’s show, “The Orchid,” at the Herald Square Theatre added “a new… imitation of Miss Valeska Suratt, the ‘Gibson Girl,’ by Miss Laura Guerin.” [14] Most notably, the well-known impersonator, Gertrude Hoffmann, added a Suratt imitation into her program. The common vaudeville practice of copying coupled with the viral commercial popularity of Gibson’s drawings—spreading from postcards, to calendars, to cigarette cases, and wallpaper—made the Girl’s appearance on stage rather inevitable. Responding to these trends, imitations in vaudeville and musical comedy both exploited and satirized the superficiality and conformity in the Girl’s appeal. For her Gibson imitation, Gertrude Hoffmann, who used elaborate costumes and make-up to create the effect of her impersonations, copied the gown made famous by Suratt. A review of her performance dwells on the look of her costume: Miss Hoffman [sic], whose eccentric dancing and imitations nightly win much applause, also costumes her part smartly….for the first, of The Gibson Girl, she wore a black velvet Princess of the design worn by Valeska Surratt [sic] in The Belle of Mayfair, with it’s [sic] tight fit and deep V cutout back and front, the fluffiest of fluffy Titian hair. As an exaggeration and burlesque of the type of girl with a kangaroo walk and outlandish poses it was great. [15] Although the review pays close attention to her dress and hair, it also describes her act in decidedly embodied terms. In addition to celebrity impersonations, Hoffmann was known for her elaborate imitations of dance, such as her famous version of Salome. [16] Whereas reviews of Suratt’s performance describe her, in passive, visual terms, as a “living Gibson picture” or “living replica,” [17] the Hoffmann reviewer notes the dancer’s exaggerated movements, which provide a burlesque of the Girl’s unnatural posture. Gibson drew his female figures with an “S”-shaped spine—the result of combining a narrow waist with a large bust and hips. The corsets of the period also emphasized these features, forcing a posture that humorists likened to the curved back of a kangaroo. [18] Hoffmann’s “kangaroo walk” and “outlandish poses” thus satirized the consequences of an actual woman’s body attempting to imitate an impossible ideal. Hoffmann brought further physicality to her imitations by making her costume changes a conspicuous part of the act. An October, 22 1907 review in The Sun describes her practice of changing in full view of the audience: She cavorts back of the scene and is revealed behind a web-like screen changing costumes for dear life with the help of several maids. In a moment she flashes out as George Cohan and gives a rattling good imitation. Behind the screen she goes anon, emerging in the glare of the spotlight as Valeska Suratt singing her ‘Gibson Girl’ melody. In a minute she is Anna Held singing her nonsensational ‘eye’ lyric, and then with another flip of skirt and change of wig she is funny Eddie Foy. [19] Making the frenzied mechanics of her quick changes visible to the audience, Hoffmann exposed the labor behind her visual transformations. This choice, Susan Glenn argues, allowed Hoffmann to “deliberately establish her own presence within each imitation.” [20] It also made a spectacle out of the process of becoming an Anna Held or Eddie Foy, belying any sense of ease behind the elaborate costumes, make-up, and personalities seen in vaudeville through a display of the physical effort behind the curtain. Much of this effort was expended in donning the various trappings of gender presentation. In the space of a few costume changes, Hoffmann represented the masculine figure of George Cohan, two feminine beauty idols, Suratt and Anna Held, and an imitation of the male comedian, Eddie Foy, in ballerina drag. Ending with Foy, as another reviewer comments, made for an effective finale: “to the surprise of the house in the last character, Eddie Foy, in pink tights, ballet skirts, the funny little hat and ostrich walk, with the Eddie Foy smile; she had it all down fine.” [21] After praising Hoffmann’s imitation of Foy’s comedic physicality, the reviewer cannot help but note that she also wore the costume better: “Foy…would find it difficult to imitate Miss Hoffman’s splendid figure.” By highlighting Hoffmann’s feminine physique, the reviewer rushes to reinforce the gender expectations which Hoffmann’s act disrupts. Despite the prevalence of drag in vaudeville, especially female drag, this indicates a discomfort with Hoffmann’s quick assumption of several, differing presentations of gender. Male impersonation by women on stage, such as in breeches roles, has primarily been acceptable as a way for actresses to show off their bodies. Hoffmann follows this rule by choosing Foy’s ballerina act to copy. Like the on-stage costume changes, however, her choice also problematizes artificial markers of gender, taking a typically feminine garment like pink tights and using them to signify a male performer. Moreover, Hoffmann’s athletic physical presence in these acts, which reviewers describe in zoological terms, makes her dangerously masculine. Like other fearfully athletic New Women, Hoffmann displayed an unnerving ability to take on male as well as female attributes. Femininity, of course, has often been equated with reproduction, and the prevalence of female mimics in vaudeville opened questions about the cultural assumptions surrounding women’s “natural” capacity for imitation. With the ingrained associations between mass culture and femininity, Susan Glenn argues, female mimics exacerbated the period’s anxiety surrounding authenticity: “The mimics on the vaudeville stage…could be seen as personifications of a feminized urban consumer culture where being and imitating were one and the same.” [22] Like with the Gibson Girl, advertising used the reproducibility of the female image as a promise to women that they could buy their way to “the one right look.” [23] By impersonating various stars, the mimics encouraged the imitative behavior fostered in celebrity product endorsements, for instance, which were growing in popularity at the time. Want to look like Lillian Russell? Buy Recamier cosmetics. Want to be like Sarah Bernhardt? Buy Pear’s Soaps. [24] Providing a model for successful imitation, the mimics reinforced these attitudes. They did not, however, imitate only the beauty idols of the day. Instead, they often went in the opposite direction, transforming from lovely young women into the absurd, excessive, or racially-coded personalities of the vaudeville stage. In their acts, mimics could play a range of roles, male and female, and surprise audiences with their transformation from a demure young girl into the brassiest of vaudeville personalities. A look at the careers of Hoffman, Loftus, and Janis indicates how the mimic, as solo performer, had artistic control over her performance, and though she based her act on the personalities of other performers, she was free to interpret them according to her own design. This, as Glenn contends, gave female mimics a powerful role: “that of the artist-intellectual who both participated in and critically evaluated the cultural practices of the day.” [25] Mimicry afforded these women the chance to work in a manner similar to the caricaturists of popular magazines, and like caricature they used exaggeration, distortion, and their own unique style to offer a critical and parodic perspective on popular culture. Unlike caricature, however, the mimics’ embodied form of parody went beyond surface-level depictions of women and in return, gave them an unlikely freedom from the restrictive image of the “Girl” in American culture. Hoffmann’s practices as a mimic demonstrate how, as opposed to the photographs of star performers in mass circulation, the portraits offered by mimics were living and breathing imitations—a manual form of reproduction in a mechanical age. Two of the most famous mimics of the time, Cissie Loftus and Elsie Janis similarly emphasized physicality in their acts. Unlike Hoffmann, they eschewed the use of make-up or costume, but highlighted their natural, bodily abilities as mimics. In an interview, Loftus explained that “the born mimic is very independent of such aids to art as costumes, wigs, and makeup,” and Janis, in a separate interview, agreed: “Make-ups do not trouble me. I rely entirely on the inflection of the voice and the copying of action and gesture. That to my mind is the true art of mimicry.” [26] The desire to defend mimicry as an “art” and to stress the inherent skills of the “born mimic” relate to the broader cultural unease associated with imitation. The readiness with which the personalities of other performers could be replicated, challenged the integrity of both live performances, star and mimic, and placed mimicry in an ambiguous relationship to authenticity. Indeed, the vogue for mimicry coincided with modernist cultural anxieties over the impacts of mechanical reproduction in the age of the machine. Inventions from the phonograph to the photograph to the ready-to-wear shirtwaist blurred the lines between imitation and authenticity in an urban, industrialized society. As Walter Benjamin would later theorize in his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the “criterion of authenticity,” central to the function of “art objects,” began to break down, as, with the advent of photography “to an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.” [27] Unlike mechanical forms of reproduction like film or photography, however, mimicry was a form of imitation that preserved some of the “auratic” quality Benjamin ascribes to the traditional art object. In interviews, Janis would “compare herself to a newspaper cartoonist,” Glenn notes, who “exaggerates certain characteristics in order to give a more striking air of reality to the finished picture.” [28] The caricaturist and critic Max Beerbohm also makes this comparison in his review of the mimic J. Arthur Bleackley. Beerbohm scoffs at the mimics who give “exact faithful reproduction[s]” of their subjects, because “an exact reproduction of the real thing can never be a satisfactory substitute.” Rather, he writes, the mimic should have a critical perspective: “The proper function of the mimic is, of course, like that of the parodist in words, or of the caricaturist in line, to exaggerate the salient points of his subject so that we can, whilst we laugh at a grotesque superficial effect, gain sharper insight into the subject’s soul, or, more strictly, behold that soul as it appears to the performer himself.” [29] Beerbohm’s insistence that mimicry can reveal the “soul” of both the mimic and the subject articulates the desire of his age to find art and humanity within reproduction and to validate mimicry as an art with “aura.” Moreover, mimicry constituted an embodied form of parody, and unlike most newspaper cartoons, the creators were likely to be women. While both Loftus and Janis had long and varied careers in entertainment, their practices and stage personas as mimics had many similarities. Cecilia “Cissie” Loftus was the daughter of famous performers on the British music hall stage, and in 1891, at the age of 15, Loftus began performing her imitations at music halls to instant acclaim. She made her New York debut in 1895 at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, and although she continued to perform on both sides of the Atlantic, she centered her career in the United States. When Elsie Janis began performing, also at a very young age, she was hailed as “the American Cissie Loftus.” [30] With the encouragement and guidance of her mother Jennie, the quintessential stage-mother, Janis was touring the vaudeville circuits by ten and starring in musical comedies by sixteen. Both rising to fame as girls, Loftus and Janis’s effectiveness as mimics stemmed in part from their youthful, feminine personas, which served to heighten the transformation into their various subjects. Known for her astonishingly wide vocal range and deft physical caricature, Loftus would string together impressions of such myriad acts as the following from a 1908 program: Marie Dressler singing ‘A Great Big Girl Like Me,’ Hattie Williams and her ‘Experience’ song, Caruso as he sings in a phonograph, George Walker singing ‘Bon Bon Buddie,’ Ethel Barrymore reading the letter from the boys in ‘Sunday,’ Bert Williams singing ‘Nobody,’ and dancing the ludicrous figure that is appended, and finally Nazimova in a scene from ‘A Doll’s House’ follow in order. [31] With a range of impersonations from vaudeville, opera, and the legitimate theater, Loftus exhibited the flexibility of her voice, which could capture, for example, the specific quality of the opera tenor, Enrico Caruso, as recorded on a phonograph. That her voice stretched to low vocal ranges added novelty and transgression to her act. Reviews of her performances, however, stressed the simplicity of her acts. A notice in the Chicago Daily Tribune describes Loftus’s charm as stemming from her ingenue-like demeanor: “A dainty winsomeness, supplemented by a sense of genuine humor, the deft touch of the artist, and a mimicry that never in any analysis could be construed into coarseness, was the secret of her popularity.” [32] Despite the sometimes provocative subject matter of her impersonations—like minstrel songs or Nazimova’s Nora—Loftus, as the Tribune is eager to confirm, maintained an image of maidenly propriety. Her decision to perform without make-up played into her girlish appeal. Max Beerbohm notes this effect in his comments on Loftus: “It seemed so strange, that neglect of convention. To be behind footlights and not rouged! Yes, hers was a success of contrast. She was like a daisy in the window of Solomon’s.” [33] Beerbohm’s language evokes a striking comparison between Loftus’s simple, natural artistry—like that of a daisy—and the commercial spectacle of vaudeville likened to a flashy department store window. The critical response to Loftus reveals a difference between the superficial representations of the typical vaudeville act and the embodied nature of Loftus’s mimetic skill. Her style of mimicry surpassed artificial or technical means of imitation to get beneath the skin of her subjects, and thus, beyond the innocent appeal of Loftus’s unrouged face, her decision to forego makeup contradicted advertisements that sold the idea of transformation through consumption (i.e. buying the right beauty products). Moreover, her cultivation of a simple, “dainty” persona, gave her, conversely, significant career versatility, allowing her to experiment with more rebellious personalities as a mimic, or as an actress, to play androgynous roles, such as Peter Pan. Elsie Janis, one of the first American women to get her start in vaudeville through mimicry, similarly maintained a girlish persona to accompany her mimetic talent. From childhood, Janis displayed a natural capacity for capturing the voices and gestures of others. She was rumored to give excellent impromptu impersonations, a skill which she reportedly demonstrated before President William McKinley in 1898, when she was invited to perform at the White House. After performing a few songs, recitations, and imitations of Anna Held and May Irwin, Janis surprised the guests with an impersonation of President McKinley, followed by imitations of “members of the United States Senate, the Justices of the Supreme Court (tripping over their robes), and the stereotypical national mannerisms of some of the assembled ambassadors.” [34] As with Loftus, audiences responded to the contrast, both charming and subversive, of a young girl imitating the mannerisms of mature men and women. One reviewer of her early performances commented, “It might seem incongruous for a child to evoke mental portraits of buxom, beautiful women for an audience. But Elsie’s inflections, gestures, and postures, her duplication of the star’s mannerisms, created a perfect illusion every time.” [35] Despite his reassurance about Janis’s talent, the author’s tone reveals a certain unease with the effect of her impressions, and if the incongruity between a girl portraying buxom women was unsettling, then the difference between the young Elsie and the powerful men she caricatured could only be more so. Janis’s supposed innocence, however, also made her transgressions of power and gender easier to digest. A review of Janis’s September 10, 1923 appearance at the Palace indicates this effect. The author, Mark Henry, is filled with admiration, explaining that he “has reviewed Miss Janis many times, but the pleasure is all his, and if anyone should get a laurel wreath, a gold medal or any other recognition hereafter, it certainly is ‘Little Elsie.’” [36] Even though Janis was 34 at the time of this review, Henry still uses the nickname, “Little Elsie.” Because of the close relationship, both personal and business, between Janis and her mother, Elsie did not marry until after her mother’s death in 1931. Thus “Little Elsie” maintained the image of maidenhood well into maturity, and her act continued to rely on the pleasing transformation from “winsome” girl into crude and brash performer. Henry describes her as “the only woman in the world who can swear, do it with refinement, and make you like her,” [37] excusing her mannish behavior through her feminine charm. With her capacity for creative interpretation, Janis famously added “idiosyncratic combinations” of impersonations to her act. [38] These combinations included “[George M.] Cohan singing one of his songs out of the corner of his mouth; Eddie Foy doing a clog dance; Ethel Barrymore doing Fanny Brice; and Sarah Bernhardt singing ‘Swanee.’” [39] As this description from Armond Fields indicates, Janis’s comedic talent lay in jumbling the famous performers of the day into ludicrous juxtapositions. To do so, it is worth noting, she flexed her virtuosity as an embodied performer, mixing the already intertwined fields of song, dance, comedy, and theater on the vaudeville stage into further entanglement. The effusive Mark Henry of the 1923 Palace review provides another example of this kind of celebrity jumble. He considered her “rendition of ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas,’ as different artistes would sing it” to be “a masterpiece.” [40] Although this review may be hyperbolic, Janis clearly had a propensity for parodying the vaudeville stage, which thrived on the big personalities of its stars. Such pronounced types were ripe for mockery, and by easily mixing and matching the mannerisms of stars, Janis’s act highlighted the way in which the celebrity culture surrounding her rewarded strong personalities. For herself, however, she cultivated an image of the all-American girl; [41] she was a New Woman freed from the pages of a magazine to sendup the star-crazed culture. Especially for attractive young women like Loftus and Janis, simply the act of presenting solo, comic material on the vaudeville stage was a risky move. [42] There was a stark divide in the cultural ethos between beauty and comedy, and most female comedians in vaudeville compromised their femininity in some way in order to succeed as comics. For instance, Florenz Ziegfeld stated that his audiences expected “girls and laughter,” [43] but the subtext of that statement was, of course, that an act consisted of either “girls” or “laughter.” An act was either one of his spectacles composed for the male gaze or a comedy act in which the performer, if female, sacrificed any pretensions to beauty. Often this was achieved with a racial mask, such as Fanny Brice’s Yiddishisms and May Irwin’s “coon songs,” or by making reference to their failure to conform to beauty standards, such as the comedian Trixie Friganza’s jokes about her large build and failed diets. With mimicry, Loftus and Janis found a way to be both feminine and funny. Not only did they maintain reputations of demur womanhood while living public lives, they were also able to inhabit a range of more transgressive personalities in their acts while keeping a stable identity as “legitimate” actresses. They were not immune from the racism and xenophobia of the vaudeville stage: like May Irwin, whom she was imitating, Janis sang “coon songs,” taking advantage of the same racially-based humor. But the chameleon nature of her act gave her the privilege to separate herself from the performance. Indeed, Loftus and Janis exploited the difference between their identities as pretty white women and the ethnic stereotypes or outsized personalities they imitated to prove their skill as mimics. That they chose to capture their subjects without the artificial means of make-up constituted an unusual move to eschew superficial means of representation on the vaudeville stage. That they did it so successfully only further demonstrated the inherently artificial nature of cultural representation in vaudeville. Occasionally, battles broke out between vaudeville performers and their imitators, which exacerbated questions of authenticity. Hoffmann and Eva Tanguay, for instance, engaged in a well-publicized feud in 1908 over who could give the best performance of Eva Tanguay, the original or the imitator. [44] The interpretive flare that the mimics brought to each imitation also made it possible for the imitator to be imitated. At the beginning of her career, for instance, Janis always included of few of Loftus’s impressions in her act. Indeed, Loftus’s imitations were so well-known that several performers imitated Loftus’s imitations of themselves. This practice turned competitive when Loftus and Letty Lind became embroiled in a “dancing war” in London, which ended with Loftus adding an “impression of Lind imitating Loftus imitating Lind to her own act at the Palace” in 1894. [45] A similar battle of Loftus imitations occurred in Louisville in 1902 without the presence of Loftus herself. Since managers often liked to arrange programs so that a star would be performing in the same program as a mimic who impersonated her, it was not unusual that Elsie Janis was performing on the same bill as one of her frequent subjects, Josephine Sabel. Sabel, however, was also performing an impression of Loftus’s imitation of herself at the time. Janis took advantage of this by announcing that she would be giving an “imitation of Josephine Sabel in her imitation of Cissie Loftus giving an imitation of her.” [46] After receiving loud applause for this act, Janis brought Sabel back out on stage, and together they performed an encore of the “Loftus imitation” for the audience. With dueling imitations like these, the acts were no longer about best representing another star’s performance but about valorizing mimicry as a feat in itself. Their battle, therefore, became a virtuosic display of imitative embodiment, the movements back and forth demonstrating each star’s ability to maintain control over representations of herself. By copying themselves to a ridiculous extent, however, they also lampooned the reproducibility of popular performance, and, as each iteration of “Sabel” or “Janis as Sabel” or “Janis as Sabel as Loftus as Sabel” became further abstracted from the original performance, they pointed to the inauthenticity within forms of representation that replicated women’s bodies or images. Unlike the passive, uniform representations of women in magazines or chorus lines, they maintained agency over the act of replication, presenting themselves as accomplished parodists and critical participants in popular culture. Throughout their careers, mimics like Hoffmann, Loftus, and Janis displayed a canny understanding of women’s place in the culture of popular entertainment, and they used their imitations to undermine the expectations surrounding beauty, comedy, and women’s bodies. Perhaps the reliance on spectacle in Hoffmann’s case or the preservation of conventional femininity by Loftus and Janis limited their ability to make radical or political statements—their acts were light satires rather than biting critiques—but their careers demonstrated the opportunities that mimicry presented for experimenting with and embodying different types, personalities, and gender roles. Beyond the range of their performances, their creative interpretations also fought back against the superficialities of feminized consumer culture. Unlike the images of celebrities and the “American Girl” in magazines and advertisements, their mimicry pierced beneath the skin, destabilizing the artificial representations of women in mass media and entertainment by drawing three-dimensional portraits and caricatures with the body as image-maker. Their acts thus exemplified the cultural and political potentials of embodied performance, taking advantage of the live, moving body as a tool for creating original, critical, and “auratic” parodies of popular culture. References [1] “Why Do They Call Me A Gibson Girl?” The Bystander , October 10, 1906, Vol. 12 no. 149, 83, https://books.google.com/books?id=yvERAAAAYAAJ&pg=PT32#v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed 29 January 2019). [2] “ ‘The Belle’ At Academy,” The Sun . (1837-1993) , Nov 13, 1906, https://search.proquest.com/docview/537283401?accountid=15172 (accessed 24 January 2019). [3] Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia UP, 1987), xxviii. Emphasis original. [4] In Strange Duets (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), Kim Marra discusses the Montana Silver Statue, another allegorical statue at the World’s Columbian Exhibition, which presented “Justice” modeled after the actress Ada Rehan. That these statues were sometimes modeled on famous actresses suggests a cycle of influence between theater and visual media, with the “American Girl” type moving from two-dimensional magazine prints, to living portrayals on stage, and back to three-dimensional images cast in metal and stone. [5] Katherine H. Adams, Michael L. Keene, and Jennifer C. Koella, Seeing the American Woman: 1880-1920 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2012), 84. [6] While in other contexts, the term “female mimic” might refer to a drag performer, such as Julian Eltinge, who mimicked females in his act, I use the term to refer to female performers. Throughout the essay then, “female mimics” refers to women who performed imitations of celebrities of all genders. [7] Joe Laurie Jr., “Vaudeville: Mimics,” Variety , Vol. 170, no. 11 (May 19, 1948): 52, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1285922332?pq-origsite=summon&accountid=15172 [8] Faye E. Dudden, Women in the American theatre: actresses and audiences, 1790-1870 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994), 182. [9] Dudden, Women in the American Theatre , 182. [10] Adams, Keene, Koella, Seeing the American Woman , 77. [11] Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000), caption to image 21. [12] Matthew Schneirov, The Dream of a New Social Order: Popular Magazines in America 1893-1914 (New York: Columbia, UP, 1994), 4-5. [13] Martha H. Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 33. [14] “Beginning of Summer Season,” New York Times (1857-1922), May 26, 1907, https://search.proquest.com/docview/96730772?accountid=15172 (accessed 24 January 2019); “Roof Gardens Open,” New York Tribune (1900-1910), Jun 2, 1907, https://search.proquest.com/docview/571882732?accountid=15172 (accessed 24 January 2019). [15] Cady Whaley, “The Cohans,” The Billboard (Archive: 1894-1960), Jun 29, 1907, 10-11, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1031381111?accountid=15172. [16] For further discussion of Hoffmann’s dance impersonations see Glenn, Female Spectacle , and Sunny Stalter-Pace, “Gertrude Hoffmann’s Lawful Piracy: ‘A Vision of Salome’ and the Russian Season and Transatlantic Production Impersonations,” Theatre Symposium , Vol. 25 (2017): 37-48, 110. [17] “Modernized Romeo; Up-To-Date Juliet,” New York Times (1857-1922), Dec 04, 1906, https://search.proquest.com/docview/96609309?accountid=15172; “She Won’t Copy That Gown Again,” Detroit Free Press (1858-1922), Jun 06, 1907, https://search.proquest.com/docview/ 564061242?accountid=15172 (accessed 24 January 2019). [18] Ruth Turner Wilcox, Five Centuries of American Costume (Mineola, NY: Dover Publishers, 2004), 146. [19] “Vaudeville At Maryland,” The Sun (1837-1993), Oct 22, 1907, https://search.proquest.com/docview/537464261?accountid=15172 (accessed 24 January 2019). [20] Glenn, Female Spectacle , 76. [21] Whaley, “The Cohans.” [22] Glenn, Female Spectacle , 81. [23] Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl , 33. [24] Daniel Delis Hill, Advertising to the American Woman, 1900-1999 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), 29. [25] Glenn, Female Spectacle , 95. [26] Loftus quoted in “The Art of Cecilia Loftus,” The Billboard , May 16, 1925; Elsie Janis, “Elsie Janis Tells the True Art of Mimicry,” The Sun (1837-1993), Aug 08, 1915, https://search.proquest.com/docview/534100838?accountid=15172 (accessed 29 January 2019). [27] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” trans. Harry Zohn, (Shocken/Random House ed. Hannah Arendt), https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm (accessed 1 February 2019). [28] Janis quoted in Glenn, Female Spectacle , 77. [29] Max Beerbohm, “A Play and a Mimic,” The Saturday Review , June 11, 1904: 749, https://search.proquest.com/docview/9532068?pq-origsite=summon&accountid=15172. [30] Lee Alan Morrow, Elsie Janis: A Compensatory Biography , Dissertation, 1988, 57. [31] “News of the Theaters,” Chicago Daily Tribune (1872-1922), Apr 09, 1908, https://search.proquest.com/docview/173390463?accountid=15172. [32] “ ‘Cissie’ Loftus is More than ‘Cecilia’,” Chicago Daily Tribune (1872-1922), Jun 22, 1902, https://search.proquest.com/docview/173068991?accountid=15172. [33] Max Beerbohm quoted in John Anderson, “Miss Cecilia Loftus,” Harper’s Bazaar 71, no. 2710 (June 1938): 52-53, 114-115, 120, 126. https://search.proquest.com/docview/1832505976?accountid=15172. [34] Morrow, Elsie Janis , 24. [35] Irene Corbally Kuhn, “Elsie Janis, the one-woman U.S.O. of World War I, is gone,” in Slide, Selected Vaudeville Criticism (Metchuen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1988), 111. [36] Mark Henry, “This Week’s Reviews of Vaudeville Theaters From Coast to Coast by Special Wire: B.F. Keith’s Palace, N.Y.” The Billboard , 35, no. 37 (Sep 15, 1923): 16-17, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1031707084?accountid=15172. [37] Henry, “This Week’s Reivews.” [38] Armond Fields, Women Vaudeville Stars (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006), 159. [39] Fields, Women Vaudeville Stars , 159. [40] Henry, “This Week’s Reviews.” [41] See Deanna Toten Beard, “A Doughgirl with the Doughboys: Elsie Janis, “The Regular Girl,” and the Performance of Gender in World War I Entertainment,” Theatre History Studies 33 (2014): 56-70, for a discussion of Janis’s cultivation of her image as an all-American Girl who could be “one of the guys” with soldiers in WWI. [42] Glenn, Female Spectacle , 43. [43] Glenn, Female Spectacle , 48. [44] Glenn, Female Spectacle , 79. [45] Catherine Hindson, Female Performance Practice on the Fin-de-Siecle Popular Stages of London and Paris: Experiment and Advertisement (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 150. [46] Morrow, Elsie Janis , 61. Footnotes About The Author(s) JENNIFER SCHMIDT is a teacher, scholar, dramaturg, and performer. In 2018, she received a Doctor of Fine Arts degree in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from Yale School of Drama. Her research traces the history of the one-woman show in America, focusing on women who write and perform monologue-based solo shows. Schmidt received the American Theater and Drama Society’s Emerging Scholar Award in 2015 and has presented papers at ATHE, ASTR, Theatre Symposium, and the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Her writing has appeared in Etudes and HowlRound Theatre Commons. In the fall of 2019, she will be joining the faculty of Hanover College as Assistant Professor of Theatre. Editorial Board for Special Issue: David Bisaha Meredith Conti Leah Lowe Inga Meier Robert Vorlicky Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Embodied Arts Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Stephanie Nohelani Teves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Pp. 220. Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017; Pp. 198. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement. La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 200. Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina. Noe Montez. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017; Pp. 239 + xi. Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical. Kevin Winkler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; Pp. 368. Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018; Pp. 399. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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: 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. 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. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JOANNA MANSBRIDGE Bilkent University Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Curtis Russell Editorial Assistant: Christine Snyder Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Comment Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays. Edited by Sandra G. Shannon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016; Pp. 211. Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness. By Gad Guterman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; Pp. 236. Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre. By Dorothy Chansky. Theatre History and Culture Series. Series editor Heather Nathans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015; Pp. 620. Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being. Edited by Nicola Shaugnessy. London: Bloomsbury, 2013; Pp. 300. Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience. Edited by Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia, and Victor Iacono. Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues Series. Series editors: John Lutterbie and Nicola Shaugnessy. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 260. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Alex Ferrone Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Alex Ferrone By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Ugo Chukwu, Will Dagger, Alina Troyano/Carmelita Tropicana, Octavia Chavez-Richmond, and Karen Lugo in Soho Rep’s production of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! (World Premiere). Photo by Julieta Cervantes. For longtime frequenters of the downtown New York theatre scene, Carmelita Tropicana is a household name. In her decades-long career as a performance artist, actor, author, and teacher, she has built a body of work that alloys raucous humor and fantastical role play—with the help of a roster of memorable personas and characters—to interrogate the entanglements of queerness, ethnicity, nationality, and gender. As she toured her work across the country, collecting a raft of honors and awards along the way, she reached a wider audience still when her work was profiled by José Esteban Muñoz, whose book Disidentifications regularly introduces Tropicana to generations of theatre and performance scholars who might not otherwise experience the joy of seeing her perform live. At the end of 2024, her show Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! opened at Soho Rep, a collaboration with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, whom Tropicana taught and mentored while he was a graduate student at NYU. The play is, at once, a fantastical odyssey into the canon of one of our most beloved performance artists and a nostalgic love letter to the avant-garde performance ecology in which she continues to figure so prominently. The central conceit is as provocative as it is simple: Tropicana (playing herself) contemplates retiring her iconic persona, so Jacobs-Jenkins (played by Ugo Chukwu) offers to buy her. But such a persona can hardly be contained by so bald a commercial transaction. As Carmelita transfers from body to body, the stage gives way to a phantasmagoric dreamscape populated by Tropicana’s alter-egos, mentors, and heroes—until Carmelita finally comes home to roost, gloriously embodied by Tropicana again at last, in a direct-address coda that changes with each performance. Tropicana invited me to talk about the play with her at the Park Avenue Armory, where she and Jacobs-Jenkins share a studio as artists in residence. This interview was conducted on April 25, 2025. It has been edited for length and clarity. Alex Ferrone: I want to talk about Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! , of course, which I loved, but I thought we might start at the end. Carmelita Tropicana: The end! AF: ( Laughs ) Yes, because I was so moved by the ending of the show. I saw it the day after Nikki Giovanni passed away, and you ended the show by reading her poem “Nikki-Rosa.” There was something special about remembering her that way and inviting the audience into this collective mourning—and celebration too. I wondered why that poem specifically, why this invocation of Black love as Black wealth. CT: Well, it’s such a beautiful poem. She’s really known for it. It just states things in such an uplifting way. Like, this is what it is, and they don’t understand. They’re trying to speak for us, but they can’t possibly know. If you’re white, I’m not sure you can know what it really is to be Black in America. So, here’s somebody who was really important as a queer artist—and it was really beautiful, that poem, and what it meant—so, you know, I felt she needed to be remembered in a really good way. AF: You did that. CT: I wanted the show to end with a coda from Carmelita, because all throughout the play, I’m not Carmelita. Other people are Carmelita. But at the very end, I am fully in my body as Carmelita, and I can address the audience. And the coda is always different. It changes. Whatever happens during that day or that week, I point it out. I will remember. There was another director who died, David Schweizer, who had directed one of my pieces, the Cucaracha piece [ With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit?/Con que culo se sienta la cucaracha? ], and he also directed me and Marga Gomez in Single Wet Female . He saw the show maybe three weeks before he passed away, and he was just beaming. And that’s the image I have of David. Like this. ( She beams ) He was queer from the very beginning, you know? All his animal prints—he was always in animal prints. Always. And he was beaming. Sometimes people can be kind of jealous when others do well, but there was none of that. There was just generosity. There was just happiness at having seen the show. In fact, he told Marga that she had to come see the show. She had to come to New York. And that’s the image I have of David. So, I also mentioned him in one of my codas . It was like a memorial for him. To me, that’s important: to remember people as we’re going along. AF: This ties into something I hoped to talk about, which is the importance of queer genealogies and mentorship. It’s such a big part of the show. I mean, the fact that there’s a picture of Branden right there on the table! ( Points to the framed photograph of Jacobs-Jenkins on the opposite end of the table. ) I think the concept of mentorship means something particular among queer people, those kinds of intergenerational queer connections or mentor–mentee relationships. While I was watching the show, I thought a lot about my own mentor, Darren Gobert, who lived and worked in New York in the late nineties and early aughts, who was so enmeshed in that performance culture. I knew the show would land for him in such a special way, since he’d spent so much time in that space—Soho Rep specifically and just downtown New York theatre in general. And now here I was sitting in that space too, and I couldn’t wait to talk to him about it. CT: That’s important. You have to pass things on. Alina Troyano/Carmelita Tropicana in Soho Rep’s production of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! (World Premiere). Photo by Julieta Cervantes. AF: There are multiple generations of queer mentorship within the play. You were a student of María Irene Fornés, and she appears as a character. Branden was a student of yours, and he appears as a character—in addition to co-creating the show with you. What was it like working on this with a former student, now no longer as mentor and mentee but as collaborators? CT: ( In unison ) Collaborators. It’s very different. The world changes, you know. He was no longer the student that I met in 2007. He can’t be, and neither am I, so it’s very different. It’s more like colleagues coming together and trying to figure it out. We said we were going to work on something in 2015. Now, from 2015 to 2024, that’s a lot of years in between, and we were busy with other things. He was busy with his work, I was busy with mine, and then COVID happened too. There were a lot of intervening years, you know, where things happened, so we both grow. You know, you change, and we are no longer who we were before. His feet are also in the Broadway world now. 1 We really started working on the play in 2016 because that’s when we got a grant. When you get a grant, it’s sort of like, okay, you gotta do it. 2 We began by looking at the film My Dinner with Andre . That was where we started: it was going to be much more of a conversation, that sort of script. And then it went through different iterations. First, there was going to be a BJJ character, but it was going to be him on stage with me. It was going to be a conversation, the two of us. But he was not interested in performing at all. At all . I mean, eight shows a week, no. And he’s right. He had a lot of other commissions, and in the interim period he became a father—there were a lot of different things. So we began one way, and then the show went a very different way. But I became much more involved with Soho Rep. We’re both board members at Soho Rep, which is where he did An Octoroon . AF: Yes, of course. CT: That was really wonderful. That’s what really catapulted his career, so in a way it’s been his home for a long time. I came to Soho Rep because I saw a play in 2008, directed by Sarah Benson, and it was like, oh my god . It was so amazing and so weird and so not anything that I would do. AF: Was it [Sarah Kane’s] Blasted ? CT: Yes! AF: I’ve only seen a recording. Such an excellent, iconic production. CT: Not the type of work I do at all, but it was really important, and I thought, well, I’ve got to come to this theatre again. And I was very happy I did. Not that I love everything , but everything is done in a certain theatrical way that’s thoughtful. So even if I see something and don’t necessarily like it, there’s always something there that makes it worth it. AF: There’s a real meditation in Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! on the future of downtown, experimental theatre culture. I mean, we all knew this was the last ever Soho Rep show in that space. 3 CT: Exactly. AF: That must have felt really meaningful. CT: Oh yeah, it was. When they told us that we were going to close the space, it was like, whoa, we’re going to close this . You know, it was very—( She gestures )—for everybody working there, because it wasn’t just our show. Mimi Lien, who had done sets for Soho Rep, people who were working there from before that have a history, that are attached, that have a real feeling for the space and what it was like. It was this dumpy place where magic happened. Such magic. Octavia Chavez-Richmond, Karen Lugo, Ugo Chukwu, Alina Troyano/Carmelita Tropicana, and Will Dagger in Soho Rep’s production of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! (World Premiere). Photo by Julieta Cervantes. AF: The play asks, at a certain point, what does downtown New York theatre mean now? It’s a shift I imagine you’ve observed firsthand over the last few decades. How do you feel about the culture of downtown experimental theatre, whether now or looking toward the future? CT: I think there’s still “downtown” theatre. Back when I was starting out, it was “experimental”—there are still shows that are very experimental. What has happened is that, geographically, they used to be just downtown. The space of downtown, from 14th Street all the way to Tribeca: that was it. But now it’s expanded to different boroughs because—what’s affordable? Where can people live? Where can theatres be that’s cheaper? Where does the young population go that will come see the shows? So all of that is taken into account. I just saw Rheology by [Shayok] Misha Chowdhury, who actually just had a show at Soho Rep called Public Obscenities , which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Rheology was wonderful. It still has the sensibility of downtown, but he’s doing it at Bushwick Starr, all the way in Brooklyn. AF: ( Laughs ) Ah yes, all the way . CT: All the way , you know! It’s a beautiful play, and it’s him and his mother. It’s really very touching, and again it has that sensibility. That’s Misha. 4 But then you have people like Becca Blackwell and Amanda Duarte, who did a show at Soho Rep called Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken [ Present It’s That Time of the Month ] , where you have to go through a vagina to get to your seat. It was wonderful and almost a nod to the eighties, sort of a talk show format interacting with the audience, and they had people coming up that were guest stars. I was one of the guest stars. AF: Oh, that’s amazing. CT: And I loved it. I really didn’t answer any of the questions, so Becca went like this. ( Mimes throwing cue cards over her shoulder ) I hadn’t performed in so long, and I just really wanted to talk about certain things—like, you know, a sexual workshop I had attended with Betty Dodson, the masturbation guru, and my research on hyenas, which are a matriarchal species that I find fascinating. I mixed it up. I even had a costume. And Becca was like, well, let’s do it. They were really very generous. They were great. And at the end of the show, Becca closed with a stand-up routine that was beautiful, touching, dark, hysterically funny—and that’s still very much, in my opinion, downtown-ish experimental-type theatre. AF: So, you see this sensibility still, but it’s not limited to this or that place the way we sometimes talk about it. CT: Club culture is like this. There’s still club culture—in Brooklyn, all over the place, kids doing drag. You know, I’m less likely to go to a rave or go to a club at 10 or 11—I used to, but it’s less me now—so I haven’t seen what kids are doing, but there’s all kinds of stuff. AF: Well, there were a lot of young people in the audience at Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! CT: Which is great. I love it. That’s the audience I want. I know I can get the others, but I want that one. AF: And it was a vocal young audience. They were responding really enthusiastically to the show. I was fascinated by the pop that José Muñoz got every time he was mentioned. You know, in my case, I first encountered your work through Muñoz, through theory. And I wonder if that’s also true for a lot of young people, college students. CT: José is having quite a renaissance, let me tell you. And he has been there throughout it all because, in the academy, he’s a queer icon. What’s really great is that we were friends for a long time. We were friends from the moment we met. It was like, oh my god , because he’s funny . He was funny. No, he is . He was, he is, he was, he is. He was really funny. And he did not believe in high or low culture. He loved everything. He was brilliant. And his parties were amazing. I was at Wesleyan once and I started talking about the parties José gave, and that’s all the queer students wanted to hear about. AF: I want to hear about it! CT: José would have these salons that were just amazing, and it was all about connecting people. José is the gift that keeps on giving in terms of my life. Because a lot of the people that I know come through José. In the eighties, I met a lot of my friends through WOW [Café Theater]. Holly Hughes, Lisa Kron, Maureen Angelos of the Five Lesbian Brothers, Split Britches—Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, Deb Margolin—all those people that I met through WOW, they’re still my friends. But in the nineties and into the aughts, it was through José. José was the connector. AF: I’m interested in the relationship between theory and performance when you have an audience that is so plugged into theory, which I wouldn’t say is the case for most audiences. The average theatregoer isn’t necessarily up on performance studies. But your audiences are , which I suspect gives you a different kind of grist to work with. CT: You know, I never started with theory. In fact, I didn’t read a lot of stuff that José wrote because I’m superstitious. Like, if I read it, then I’m just going to do that . But over time that changed. At some points, I would be stuck, and I would go, let me see what José wrote about me , because you can mine that stuff. So, the theory is there. I’m not a theorist. I’m not going to talk theory. That’s not where I come from. But I like that it exists in the world, that people are looking at it, because it’s about ideas. Alina Troyano/Carmelita Tropicana and Ugo Chukwu in Soho Rep’s production of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! (World Premiere). Photo by Julieta Cervantes. AF: A lot of Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! takes place in what the show calls “phantasmagoria”—this dreamscape, which is also kind of an archive, a repository of images, and it explodes onto the stage. Talk me through how you ultimately chose that space —or infinite space, in a way—to work through the ideas of the play. CT: Well, I’m a persona. I mean, I have a persona. ( Laughs ) I have a persona. I started from the point of view of what it means to have a persona, why we have them, why we take them on. I was trying to figure out this world of personas—they’re characters but they are also real—and I was thinking of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author , characters who maybe don’t want to be in your show, who are fighting for agency. That’s where it started for me. AF: I found those sequences so exciting because of the accumulation of all these traces of performances—characters you’ve played, objects we’ve encountered but that crop up again, but now they mean something new. That kind of resignification feels very queer to me. CT: Which one are you thinking of? I’m curious. AF: In terms of objects, the plunger is one of those iconic images. CT: Yes, and that comes from Jack Smith, so it has that lineage. It’s like Duchamp and the urinal, taking an ordinary object and just elevating it. Jack Smith did that to me. I’ll never see a plunger the same way again. Caleb [Hammons], one of the producers, actually made for me little plunger earrings—so then it becomes something else again. I love the visuals of a work. Like, if I don’t have an outfit… ( Laughs ) I know it’s vapid, but Carmelita has to have an outfit. And once I have an outfit, it’s like, yes , I’m dressed for the party. My sister [Ella Troyano] made a film called Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen . In the very beginning, I’m wearing a rainbow-colored dress that Uzi Parnes designed that has fruited boas—he did the production design and the costumes for the film. When I come out in Phantasmagoria , I’m wearing a belt with bananas on it—which are not just Carmen Miranda but also Josephine Baker. Things that reference people who are important to Carmelita’s persona. AF: Again, it’s those genealogies, right? CT: I had to explain the bananas to somebody the other day. They were young and they weren’t familiar with it. AF: I think a lot of young queer people right now will probably associate bananas with a drag queen called Nymphia Wind. CT: Oh my god, I love Nymphia! AF: The bananas live on. CT: I love her. She’s “downtown” weird. And so absurd and playful. AF: Playfulness is underrated, isn’t it? It’s not taken as seriously as it should be. CT: Exactly. Humor is serious, just couched in a different way. AF: There’s also a lot in the play that’s actually really poignant. I’m thinking of [the character] Branden’s speech at the end of the show, which is kind of a mournful reflection on youth. On being at a point in your life when you’re looking backwards and forwards at the same time, filled with uncertainty. CT: Branden’s monologue is very moving. I had no idea that this play could make people cry. AF: ( Raises hand ) It did. CT: When you’re doing something, you’re hoping to move people, but you don’t know what effect you’re going to have. AF: Part of that final speech, too, is thinking about what young theatre makers are doing today, which is where the play ends before Carmelita closes the show with the coda. Are you excited about what young queer theatre makers are doing now and the kinds of things they’re experimenting with? CT: Oh yeah, absolutely. There was another play at Soho Rep called Wolf Play [by Hansol Jung], and it really got to me. It was from a very different perspective, told with a puppet, and it really worked. I saw it twice. It worked and it was very moving. I haven’t been as involved in plays that have puppets, but this really worked for me. So, I am excited. There’s a new generation that’s coming up and doing great work. AF: I want to pick up on something we discussed at the top, which is the importance of solidarity. You referred to the line in Nikki Giovanni’s poem, “I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me,” which I think says there’s a limit to how much you can understand the experiences of another person or another community that’s not your own. CT: I think that’s a kind of a dialectic that’s going to go back and forth. So, no, you can’t. But maybe at some point, yes, you can. And it really depends on being sensitive about how you speak. The world changes and you evolve. I changed a word in Milk of Amnesia when I learned more about the history. Now, is that censorship? Am I censoring myself? No, I don’t think so. I’m being careful about certain words. Words are important. AF: The discourse is evolving all the time, so we’re constantly going to be making those kinds of adjustments. CT: Which is not a bad thing. And sometimes maybe we do too much, sure, so then there’s the self-correcting, but, you know, we’re figuring it out. AF: That’s productive, though. I think that gesture is so meaningful. Like, we’re working on it. As a community—or as a community of communities—we can work together and try to figure it out. We need that coalition-building more than ever, that kind of collaboration and solidarity. CT: Yes, I totally agree. There are ways that we’re going to be different from another person, and there are ways that we are similar. Sometimes the stakes are different. But your stakes are important to me, and my stakes are important to you. And then we have a lot of stakes in common as well. There’s something really hopeful in that. References [1] At the time of our interview, Jacobs-Jenkins’s latest play, Purpose , had just opened on Broadway at the Hayes Theater—the same venue in which his play Appropriate was revived a year earlier, earning him the Tony for Best Revival. Purpose would go on to earn him the Tony for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2025. [2] In addition to becoming resident artists at the Armory, Tropicana and Jacobs-Jenkins received a Creative Capital Award and a MacDowell Fellowship to support their then-unnamed collaboration. [3] In the summer of 2024, Soho Rep announced it would be leaving its home at 46 Walker Street due to rising rent costs. Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! was the last show in its longtime downtown space. It has since been sharing space with Playwrights Horizons. [4] A few months after our interview, Playwrights Horizons announced Rheology as part of its 2025–26 season, scheduled to open in April 2026. Footnotes About The Author(s) ALEX FERRONE is an Assistant Professor of English in the Département de littératures et de langues du monde at l’Université de Montréal. He is the author of Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and has published articles in Modern Drama , Theatre Survey , and Comparative Drama . His current book project, Tacky , examines class's performative conflations with race, ethnicity, and queerness, and he is also working on a project on the unpublished plays of Louis Peterson. He is the current Book Reviews Editor of Theatre Journal . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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