Search Results

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

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 by Jennifer Schmidt The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center 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: Wear a blank expression, 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. 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. [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=yvERAAAAYAAJpg=PT32#v=onepageqf=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=summonaccountid=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=summonaccountid=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. "Unruly Productions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville" by Jennifer Schmidt ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: "Introduction: Embodied Arts" by Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson "'Must Be Heavyset': Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies" by Ryan Donovan "Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville" by Jennifer Schmidt "Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis" by Shilarna Stokes "Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis 'Tightrope' Dance" by Dana Venerable www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical Introduction: Embodied Arts "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance History, Musicals, and the Americas Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Karl G. Ruling Milford, Connecticut Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Karl G. Ruling Milford, Connecticut By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Adil Mansoor in Amm(i)gone at Long Wharf Theatre. Photo: Curtis Brown Photography Black Trans Women at the Center Eva Reign, Elisawon Etidorhpa, Simone Immanuel, Asteria LaFaye Summers, Indie Johnson (28 Sept. online, then streamed through 1 Oct.) The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion, adapted by Jonathan Silverstein (8 Nov. – 10 Dec., various locations) A View from the Bridge Arthur Miller (10 Feb. – 10 Mar., Canal Dock Boathouse, New Haven) Sanctuary City Martyna Majok (28 Mar. – 21 Apr., TheaterWorks Hartford) Darren Criss Benefit Concert (13 May, Lyman Center for the Performing Arts) Amm(I)gone Adil Monsoor (28 May – 23 Jun. Yale Theatre and Performance Studies Black Box) Long Wharf Theatre used two marketing slogans during the 2023-24 season: “Theatre is for Everyone” and “Theatre of Possibility.” The two themes come together in the statement on the theatre's home page, “We are committed to revolutionizing the power and possibility of live theater [sic] as a catalyst to bring people together and   fulfill our promise of 'theatre for everyone.'” The themes came together in Long Wharf's four in-person dramatic productions, which were presented in a variety of venues, exploring where it is possible to do theatre, and bringing people together to experience stories representing the diversity of New Haven's communities. Three of the four shows were co-productions with other East Coast theatres, connecting these theatre communities. The Year of Magical Thinking, produced in partnership with the Keen Company, was an adaptation by Jonathan Silverstein, the director, of Joan Didion's book, performed by Kathleen Chalfant. Last year Long Wharf left the theatre space it had occupied since 1965 and adopted a mobile theatre model; The Year of Magical Thinking took that to an extreme by being performed in Long Wharf supporters' living rooms and public libraries around New Haven. In a New Haven Register article, Kit Ingui, Long Wharf's managing director, explained that the show is designed to be staged in intimate spaces. Indeed, the show I saw was simply Kathleen Chalfant, as Joan Didion, talking to us, the audience, about the year during which both her husband and daughter died. The staging at the Milford Public Library was minimal: a low platform, two side tables, a chair, and a table lamp at one side of the library's meeting room—space enough for a grieving woman to tell us her loss. Anshuman Bhatia was credited with the lighting design, but there was no stage lighting. It was a simple, powerful piece. A View from the Bridge was performed on the top floor of the Canal Dock Boathouse, a carpeted room with a curved wall of windows looking out at the New Haven Harbor and Long Island Sound. The setting was composed of planked platforms, three free-standing doorways, a row of coat hooks, furniture, and a hanging lamp in a corner of the room, with the audience in seating banks wrapping the playing space by 90 degrees. Stage lighting equipment was hung on a black truss grid. The open deck outside the windows was used for street scenes, and the fateful knife fight was staged there. Microphones and speakers brought the noise and dialog inside for the audience, but it was easier to hear the action than to see it. The show tapped themes important to Long Wharf Theatre—immigration, gender roles, and homophobia—and probably had resonance for New Haven's large Italian-American community. However, the casting muddied the message. Alfieri, Eddie's lawyer and the narrator, was played by Patricia Black, a woman wearing a man's suit. It was hard to believe that Eddie, who worries that Rodolpho is homosexual and who has trouble dealing with the two female characters as his equal, would confide in a woman. Sanctuary City was a coproduction with TheaterWorks Hartford and was performed in TheaterWorks's theatre. It was co-directed by Jacob G. Padrón, Long Wharf's artistic director, and Pedro Bermúdez. Set in Newark, starting shortly after 9/11 and running through late 2005, it's a three-character piece about two undocumented alien teenagers—girl G and boy B—trying to stay in the USA, and B's lover, who complicates G and B's relationship. It's a compact story about the struggles of two Dreamers, well-acted by Sara Gutierrez and Grant Kennedy Lewis, but a tight playing space made it hard for me to see them. Emmie Finkel designed a setting with translucent panels for video projections by Pedro Bermúdez. The panels forced the action downstage where audience members and support columns blocked my view. Some of the projections were pretty but slowed the show. The show's opening was a video of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. That attack triggered tighter rules and suspicion of immigrants—part of the play's background—but I doubt anyone in the audience needed to be reminded of what happened on 9/11. For the final show, Long Wharf Theatre presented Amm(i)gone , a Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and PlayCo show produced in association with Kelly Strayhorn Theater and presented in the Theater and Performance Studies Black Box at Yale University. It was a one-person show created and performed by Adil Monsoor, supported in his storytelling by recorded video, live video, and audio recordings in a setting of Ramadan lanterns, cubes, and panels with mashrabiya lattice work. It was an intensely personal story about coming to America from Pakistan, Adil's relationship with his mother, and the tension between familial love and religious duty. His mother has become extremely religious and struggles to accept Adil’s queerness. To connect with her, Adil engaged with her by phone on a project to translate Sophocles' Antigone into Urdu. Antigone is often viewed as a conflict between Antigone and Creon over civil law and religious duty, but Adil emphasized the love between Ismene and Antigone, which endures despite Ismene's concern that Antigone is making a terrible mistake. During the post-show talk-back, one audience member identified herself as a gay Asian woman who came from an extremely religious family. This was the first time she'd seen her story on stage, and she was grateful. I thought about my own Catholic grandmother struggling to reconcile Church Law with her daughter's remarriage after divorce. It was a show about being gay, Muslim, and an immigrant, but it spoke to many. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Long Wharf Theatre has announced the 2024-25 season with the marketing slogan “Building our future together”: Artistic Congress, the 5th Annual Black Trans Women at the Center: New Play Festival , She Loves Me , El Coquí Espectacular and the Bottle Of Doom,  and Unbecoming Tragedy: A Ritual Journey Toward Destiny . The Artistic Congress will be a conference, held a little more than a week before the US presidential election, to discuss theatre and democracy, consider the intersection of creativity and civic engagement, and create a broad network of artists amplifying the impact of collective effort—building our future together. References Footnotes About The Author(s) KARL G. RULING is the technical editor for Protocol , the journal of the Entertainment Services and Technology Association. Prior to that position, he was the technical editor for Theatre Crafts and Lighting Dimensions magazines, and a contributor to Stage Directions . He has an MFA in theatre design from the University of Illinois, and a BA with majors in Dramatic Art and Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has designed scenery, lighting, special effects, or sound for over 100 productions. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio 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 Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio By Published on May 26, 2016 Download Article as PDF ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. by Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 2 (Spring 2016) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The education and training of young scientists includes the acquisition of a large and technical vocabulary, understanding a variety of experimental approaches, and application of statistics and mathematical models to analyze experimental and observational results.[1] Small wonder then, that young scientists often miss the larger point that science is a process of imperfect model building. That is, students don’t understand that effective communication of scientific discoveries to all audiences must include colorful metaphor and models, and that these models aid understanding without doing harm to the scientific enterprise. We describe here our adaptation of theatric improvisation techniques to build students’ science communication skills in an undergraduate life science curriculum at Lawrence University. These techniques have been informed by, but significantly modified from, a program for graduate education at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. As the Argentinian author Jorge Louis Borges would have us understand, perfect scientific models are useless. He wrote, In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it.[2] Undergraduate students, who are just at the start of their scientific training, have instead a view that science is a process of learning about reality so that, eventually, we will understand perfectly the nuances of even the messiest biological systems. They often think that we are in the business of making perfect maps of the world and they are loath to relinquish this view. Though all our students read Borges in our required freshman course, science students usually maintain their view that the accuracy of science is so critical that their communication of a scientific understanding of the world must include a great deal of detail delivered with a high degree of accuracy. They try to communicate scientific vocabulary, the degree of imperfection of current scientific understanding, and the methods by which scientists arrived at their conclusions. While all this detail is needed for students to build their own understanding of scientific results, or for the communication of science to professional scientists, students hold fast to this method of communication in all cases, thus obscuring both the beauty and truth of science. Perhaps an example is in order. When a student wished to explain how genes get used differently in different parts of our bodies, she said, “Tissue-specific patterns of gene expression are created by cell-specific transcription factors binding to DNA sequence motifs upstream of the start site of transcription.” Did you roll your eyes? We did! While what she said was terrific if she were talking to a group of molecular geneticists, anyone else’s eyes would appropriately glaze over. Our goal is to have her ask: “Did you ever wonder why your pancreas makes insulin, but your eyeball doesn’t?” Then she could explain that both the pancreas and the eyeball contain the instructions (a gene) to make insulin, but only in the pancreas does the on/off switch for insulin production get flipped to the ‘on’ position. Do we really need to know that only certain cells of the pancreas do this? Do we need to know what genes are made of? No! If she really wanted to explain the on/off switches, she could describe the DNA sequences as musical notes and their particular order as musical motifs, and she could demonstrate how these switches can vary, much as the opening theme to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony varies throughout the piece. Is it ‘dumbing it down’ to use these metaphors? Also, no! We have learned to be explicit in saying to our students that we are not ‘dumbing down’ the science – we are making it accessible and understandable by linking scientific concepts to concepts the audience already knows. Goals This then, is our goal for graduating life science majors: yes, they learn a technical vocabulary, experimental design, data analysis, and scientific writing, but they also learn that scientific models are already imperfect, so using a metaphor or an evocative description is a wonderful way to distill and communicate scientific information to a lay audience. We want our graduates to be cognizant of their audience, to be able to react in real time to the cues that audience members send concerning their understanding of oral and visual communication, and we want our students to channel their creative energy and enthusiasm for their work to communicate scientific information effectively and engagingly. To accomplish our goal of facilitating effective and clear science communication, we designed a capstone course in our undergraduate life science curriculum in which we use theatrical improvisation as the main tool to improve oral communication of science. The capstone course enrolls 40-50 biology, biochemistry, and neuroscience majors in their senior year at Lawrence University. Lawrence University, located in Appleton, Wisconsin, is a private liberal arts college enrolling 1500 undergraduates. The college has a strong tradition of individualized learning[3] that has shown great success in stimulating student interest in, and mastery of, disciplinary research. Small group research projects are an integral part of the biology curriculum from the very first introductory course through the upper level, and many students individually elect to undertake research with a faculty mentor. We have consciously constructed our curricula to build students’ creative and technical science skills, including hypothesis development, experimental design and execution, data analysis, and oral and written dissemination of results. We couple hands-on research with course content so that students receive integrated, practical instruction in the application of scientific methodology and concepts. In 2011, the faculty of the college voted to include a required ‘Senior Experience’ with every major and allowed each department or program to design their own experience for senior students. Life science faculty designed a capstone course that would directly address students’ needs to communicate science beyond a specialized scientific community and that would allow students to dive deeply into a biological topic of their choosing, whether as lab or field research or as literature review or distillation of a biological topic for a lay audience. Our biology capstone course facilitates the transition from the life of a student to the life of a professional. Our explicit goals for the students are the following: (1) direct a project and produce a substantial paper written for a scientific audience, (2) understand ethics in the life sciences, (3) acquire skills to reach and teach non-scientific audiences about one’s project. Students begin their capstone course with their topic chosen and, in many cases, research or off-campus activity completed. The course is therefore reserved for the production of several papers on the student’s topic and multiple types of oral communication about their project. Students are primed with a deep understanding of some small area of biology and, since they chose their own topics, hopefully a great deal of enthusiasm for disseminating their understanding of this topic. Oral Communication in Science It is important to state here that even professional oral communication in the sciences is much more free form than it is in the arts and humanities. Thus, the link between theatrical improvisation and scientific communication is not as distinct as one might initially think. Scientific conference presentations, for example, always include visual aids and are never read. Speakers are expected to deliver either memorized or extemporaneous prose while using visual aids as an organizational guide. Such professional presentations are jargon-heavy and detailed. Our undergraduates learn professional presentation skills throughout their life science curriculum and are acculturated into a biological way of understanding and describing the world. Our goal in the capstone course is to expand those skills to include distillation of complex material to create engaging presentations for broader audiences. We, as a society and as individuals, need a clear understanding of biological concepts in order to make wise and safe decisions about our healthcare and our environment. For example, individuals and political entities need to decide about whether to eat farmed or wild seafood, comprehend the effects of our exercise regimens on our descendants, or accommodate an endangered thistle on the beach. The efficacy of a doctor explaining treatment or a researcher testifying in a Congressional hearing depends on clear, accessible communication. Thus, we work on student distillation of science for audiences that range from the students in the room (whose expertise ranges from ecology to neuroscience), to the college’s (non-scientist) President, to one’s grandparents, or to people in an elevator with them. Well-known American actor Alan Alda and the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University inaugurated a program in 2009 using improvisation exercises to teach graduate students in the sciences to respond to, and interact with, their audiences when speaking about their scientific work. Their initial students volunteered from many of Stony Brook University’s graduate and professional programs for a semester-long program. The changes in the graduate students’ ability to relate more naturally to their audiences brought to life subjects ranging from optics to molecular biology. In an interview published in The New York Academy of Sciences Magazine, author Kelly Walsh wrote: “To facilitate objectivity, Alda explain[ed], ‘you have emotion trained out of you when you're writing science for other scientists in your field.’ But communicating science to broader audiences requires the opposite approach because, as Mr. Alda [said], ‘people like me, ordinary people, rely on story and emotion.’”[4] Early publicity from the Stony Brook program began to circulate in science communication circles just as we at Lawrence University began our pilot life science capstone course for a few undergraduate students. Encouraged by Stony Brook’s success, we tried using theatrical improvisation to improve the communication skills of undergraduates. Our early goals for our students included breaking down communication barriers and giving students permission to drop the jargon when describing their work. As summarized by neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, “Mild to moderate short-term stressors enhance memory. This makes sense, in that this is the sort of optimal stress that we would call ‘stimulation’ – alert and focused.”[5] He later states that “the sympathetic nervous system pulls this off by indirectly arousing the hippocampus into a more alert, activated state, facilitating memory consolidation.”[6] If the neuroscience is right, our students should internalize better the lessons of science communication in the heightened alert state induced by improvisation games. Early Attempts at Improvisation with Undergraduate Scientists Lawrence theater faculty member Kathy Privatt introduced us to Viola Spolin’s Improvisation for the Theater, teaching us to use a few exercises, including Play Ball and Mirror. Undertaking these exercises, let alone the idea of leading students through them, was uncomfortable and awkward for us. Professional scientists do not typically engage in physical improvisation, though we do have experience with mental versions. We swallowed our fears and jumped into using the exercises as a way to loosen rigid, nervous, and stultifying student presentation styles. We initially presented the exercises as our American theater-based colleagues had indicated was appropriate for theater students, with minimal preliminary instructions plus a bit of Spolin’s side-coaching. In the first two years of our undergraduate course, the students only half-heartedly took part in improvisation exercises. We estimate that the leaders’ energy exceeded the total of that put forth by our students. Some students responded with outright hostility and derision. Their body language and grumblings said, “This is stupid. I shouldn’t have to do this!” We wondered whether we were on the right track or whether undergraduate students lacked the necessary motivation to use these exercises as they were intended. We also struggled to fit all our goals in the allotted 36 hours of instruction. Improvisation was therefore tucked into odd 10-minute corners of class time. Students delighted in moving about but not in learning to interact with their audience. Although instructors participated alongside the students to persuade them that the activities were not below our dignity and were valuable, students still did not relate the exercises to communication skills we addressed in other lessons. We did note, however, that most students responded very favorably to a discussion of body language and its impact on oral communication. We mentioned research that had shown measurable results of changing one’s body posture while speaking, but we did not cite any particular study. The least expressive student of our initial class departed immediately after this discussion for an Ivy League graduate school tour and interview, and returned amazed that open limbs, leaning forward, and smiling had made the process easier and the response of the school warmer. We had our first student-provided clue as to how to make improvisation palatable. Science students are further motivated when we connect the need for body language and facial expression to the fact that their audience imitates emotional behaviors (e.g., excitement) unconsciously in response to the emotional body language of a speaker.[7] In the summer of 2011, the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University began a summer institute for theater instructors, university administrators, and science faculty to learn more about science communication. Among the colleges represented, only Lawrence University was planning a program solely for undergraduates. We returned from the summer institute even more convinced of the value of Spolin’s improvisation games as a tool to help our students speak with their audiences, rather than at them and we vowed to increase the amount of time in our class devoted to these exercises. What We’ve Learned about using Improvisation with Young Scientists We have learned that one cannot just jump into improvisation with a scientific audience and expect the desired results. The barrier to doing improvisation is just too high and the students are trying to be too analytic to allow the necessary playful mindset. While theater students expect that they must transmit both information and emotion to their audience, science students feel emotion doesn’t belong in science. We therefore use science-specific modifications to open students’ minds to the benefits of improvisatory sessions. We begin with a video from Stony Brook that demonstrates how improvisation can improve science communication by graduate students.[8] Students immediately recognize the problems with the graduate students’ presentations done prior to improvisation, and they recognize themselves in this position! They are then a bit better primed to accept improvisation as a tool. We bookend improvisation sessions with explicit exposition of the goals of the exercises and a frank discussion of how students felt during and after the improvisation exercise. In particular, we find that it helps to connect the improvisational activity to human physiology. For example, use of Amy Cuddy’s excellent TED talk, “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are”[9] is well received because Dr. Cuddy explains the effect of body posture on physiology as well as on the reception of the content of one’s communication. Early in our next course iterations, we implemented several small exercises that involve minimal speaking. The first exercise is a silent improvisation called Exposure.[10] We modified this initial improvisational game from one half of the group standing in front as the other half sits as the audience, to both halves of the class facing one another across the room, first just staring at each other, and then coached to count the blue shirts. As the two halves of the class face one another, inevitably someone begins to fold in on himself, or another person tries to turn away, or yet another starts to laugh. Left alone, as instructed by Spolin, the behavior will devolve into a group giggle. These signature attitudes of discomfort and lack of confidence, of being undignified, have been a plague in past years. Our perfectionist students fear being judged, in no small part because their presentations involve a grade, and being found inadequate will not (they think) get them into medical school or a research program. So as each behavior manifests itself, we address it. Their reflection on and discussion of Exposure have proved more meaningful than the activity itself and set a pattern of reflecting on why we undertake each specific activity. Exposure has proved to be the first time many students recognize the roots of stage fright, but as science students, they need to name and analyze aspects verbally. We ask the students what makes these reactions surface. We then describe each as a normal psychological reaction to stress. When we can talk about cortisol and other stress hormone levels, we are on comfortable, biological ground, and students become more receptive to physical improvisation as a way to reduce stress in oral communication. Instructors also emphasize that we need to know why we are speaking in front of an audience, what our role and purposes are, and what we mean to do. We emphasize that the point of our improvisations is not to become actors or entertainers, but to grow to become more responsive communicators, for no communication occurs unless two or more people share a common idea. We want students to use the exercises to gain valuable insights to communicating with more clarity and to be more responsive to audiences’ non-verbal feedback. The discussions with our students helped us better realize the purpose of our improvisational work and, in turn, better articulate its goals to future students. We also realized that we needed to start our biology students at an earlier stage of the theatrical process. We begin each year now with an activity we call Audience. Improvisation Exercises that Work with Scientists Audience The students are seated in a lecture room. They are instructed to close their eyes. This is done to reduce self-consciousness while imagining, and to simultaneously accentuate the emotional and physical states. Closed eyes also reduce that urge to giggle or feel foolish. Next we say: “Imagine yourself in an overly warm and stuffy room listening to a very boring lecture. How are you positioned in the seat? Where are your legs and feet? The presenter is talking about a subject you don’t quite understand, using words you cannot quite catch. How do you hold your arms and hands? The voice is a monotone, droning on, buzzing along with no variation in pitch or rate or intensity. What positions are your head and neck in? What expression is your mouth showing? Stay in this position, open your eyes, and without moving, slowly look around the room.” At this point, the entire class is usually slumped back in their seats, legs extended, many heads are lolling, a great many have their arms crossed, some may even have put their heads down on their desks. We then ask: “Why are so many of you in the same positions? How do you feel? What are you, the audience, communicating to the speaker?” We begin to discuss defensive and distancing body language that demonstrates where the audience members are emotionally and perhaps intellectually. Next: “Please rise, stretch, and reseat yourself, for another day comes. Today’s speaker is animated, clearly one of the most knowledgeable experts in the world. How are you positioned in the seat? Where are your legs and feet? The presenter is talking about a subject you never realized mattered so significantly. New terminology is introduced gradually and only as needed. The words are connected to concepts you already know. How do you hold your arms and hands? The speaker’s voice conveys meaning with variation in pitch and rate and intensity. What positions are your head and neck in? What expression is your mouth showing? Stay in this position, open your eyes, and without moving, slowly look around the room.” This time postures are erect, many students are leaning forward, their faces are relaxed, and some are even smiling! “Why are so many of you in the same positions? How do you feel? What are you, the audience, communicating to the speaker?” We also ask: “Which audience do you want to speak to? Why?” Students need to hear very explicitly that any talk or presentation is two-way communication. Although only one person may be speaking, everyone is involved in sharing a common idea. An audience contributes to the success of a speaker when it collectively shows interest or enthusiasm, or can, through disinterest or antagonism, make the speaker’s job more difficult. This activity sets up the importance of watching one’s audience while speaking and communicating as an audience member. Each student is only a presenter for five percent of the class time, but part of the audience for all the rest. Some realize for the first time that they can gauge the success of their talks by postures of their audiences, watching for confusion or comprehension and changing their own delivery to meet the needs of that audience. The class changed attitudes about the usefulness of the remainder of the improvisation activities! Mirror Following implementation of Audience and Exposure, with students ready for something more active, it is a natural progression to move on to Mirror[11]. In this exercise, pairs of students face each other, and all the students facing west, for example, are designated the first leader. Each leader is coached to move one limb slowly, and the other student is told to mirror all movements and facial expressions. When the inevitable giggling begins, the instructor stops the exercise and then asks, “Why are we doing this exercise? How does it connect to the previous exercises?” We hope that students will see that public speaking is a two-way communication between the audience and the speaker, and we hope they will concentrate on providing and receiving feedback when it is their turn at public speaking. We then continue the exercise, asking for complete silence, and adding another limb to the movement, speeding things up, changing leaders, and eventually leading and following simultaneously (Figure 1). Figure 1. Leaderless mirroring as students explore two-way communication. (Image courtesy of C.L.Duckert.) Mirror is a great place to introduce some of the key neuroscience behind communication that convinces our students. Mirror neurons were discovered in the late 1980s by a team from the University of Parma.[12] These neurons are active in our brains and the brains of animals as we engage our attention, watch, act, or imagine another being performing some action.[13] We activate mirror neurons when we smile and make faces at babies and delight in their response. We continue to use them throughout our lives, not only to learn new things but also to interpret the emotions of others. Cuddy remarks, “In everyday life, this mimicry is so subtle and quick (it takes one-third of a second) that … it allows us to feel and understand other people’s emotions.”[14] When people use Botox to reduce facial wrinkles, they also impair their ability to smile or frown or mimic others, and as a result, fare less well when interpreting the emotional states of those others.[15] Our students’ mimicry of each other’s postures and gestures is crucial “in the collaborative process of creating a mutually shared understanding.”[16] They then realize that their enthusiasm while speaking will be mirrored by their audience, thereby increasing audience receptivity. Play Ball Our most successful active improvisation is Play Ball, which students easily understand as relevant to public speaking.[17] Instead of plunging into this game immediately, we ask two student athletes to be the first participants, and the first ball throw announced is from their sport. After a toss or two, we ask for a defensive or a scoring move. We then ask them about the changes in their bodies and postures and why they made those changes. We ask how the recipient of the throw altered her stance or hand position. It quickly becomes clear to the audience that the goal of this exercise is to respond appropriately to the actions of one’s partner. Next, half of the class is lined up on each side of the room, and students make eye contact with their partners. Now, as our class enters into ball play (with the instructor calling out ‘throw a baseball,’ ‘throw a bowling ball’), they use their entire bodies and change stances, throwing with different arm movements and strength for various ball types. After instructors chastise the group if balls change size between catch and throw, soon the students’ bodies make meaning evident and they prepare the recipient for whatever is coming next. Faces look up as both their eyes and their understanding widen once the ball toss changes from lobbing water balloons or ping-pong balls, to “throw an insult” or “deliver a compliment.” Recipients flinch or throw their arms wide. Student discussion has emphasized the teamwork aspect of communication, where success depends on reading each other’s physical and emotional states. We add how every speaker must watch their audience reaction for confusion or comprehension so as to adjust the pace, depth, and detail of explanations. The deliverer and recipient influence one another, whether in the improvisation or in public speaking or teaching. Students realize that communication involves anticipation, intent, reception, and reaction to concrete actions and metaphoric ideas. They begin to notice how their most effective science communication requires continual non-verbal monitoring of their audience to ensure comprehension. Transformation of Objects[18] If our students have a favorite, it is Transformation of Objects. Participants conjure objects from empty space. In our version, the objects must be pieces of equipment they would use doing their work or research in the life sciences, including equipment whose purpose or function may be unknown to them. Students are placed in a large circle, facing inward silently. An object is created and used by the first person and passed to the next person who repeats the use. The receiver then morphs the piece of equipment into another, uses it and passes it on. Students usually start with the very familiar -- microscopes, binoculars, pipetters -- but soon they are trying to stump one another. Less familiar equipment such as a mist net for trapping bats or a fraction collector for protein purification is handed off to the consternation of the next person. Surely we have all had to use something by rote that we did not really comprehend. Students have acted out explosions and failures, eureka moments, and malfunctioning equipment. This entirely silent exercise forces students to focus on describing things without words, a risky undertaking for students who have spent four years honing verbal and written descriptions of science. Taking risks visually, in front of a group of people, gives students permission to take what seems to them like oral risks when presenting their science. They are more willing to be informal, to use descriptive language, and even to use their bodies to describe how they did an experiment, to indicate the behavior of an animal, or to illustrate how two molecules interact. They get the idea that communication is much more than words. In short, they become more comfortable, even playful, in front of their peers! Bumper Sticker, a Written Improvisation After these initial improvisations, some barriers have been broken down, and students feel that the next important exercise is so much easier than it would have been without improvisation. We call this exercise Bumper Sticker. Students are asked to create a two to four word ‘bumper sticker,’ or a tweet that describes their project in 140 characters. Students are given time to think for a bit on their own and then they write their slogan on the board to be examined by the class. The subjects of their projects are precise and detailed. To communicate, we must first answer why should anyone else care? “ABT-737 resistant and BIM-SAHB sensitive cells ” becomes “I kill cancer.” “Hereditary pancreatitis…so rare it is painful” is easier for anyone to understand than “the p16v mutation of human cationic trypsinogen (PRSSI) gene and hereditary pancreatitis.” We could be intrigued by “Let Buddha change your brain” to consider “the underlying anatomical correlates of long-term meditation on the hippocampus and frontal gray matter.” “Got Guts?” and “Polly want a forest” can move us to action more than “surgical protocols and patient selection in intestinal transplantation,” and “behavioral changes in psittacines in modern Neotropical contexts.” Now we are beginning to communicate our science! What Do I Do for a Living?[19] + How Old Am I?[20] + Where?[21]= What’s Going On? Lastly, we use activities that cast students as performers and audience. The object is to have the audience identify what is going on. A scientist’s activities and collaboration with co-workers often requires coordinating actions in time or sequence. Spolin’s three games focus attention on behaviors that identify character as well as action. We use the three in combination, not to understand any specific aspect of life science directly, but to motivate students to learn how to assist audiences in understanding by using timing, pace, and the more nuanced aspects of body language. The students easily become self-conscious and stiff, with some even refusing to participate, but group activities ease the awkward feelings by reducing the attention focused on any single person. Simultaneously, injection of humor keeps student interest up and tensions down. We found it useful to break up close associates in the class by dividing the students randomly into groups, each assigned one of the defined activities performed in the order below. 1. Watching a tennis match – simultaneous identical individual actions 2. Getting on a passenger jet – sequential individual actions with different roles 3. Launching a canoe - coordinated actions in unison 4. Doing laundry at the laundromat – distinct individual actions in parallel 5. Carrying a 3m x 3m pane of glass – unfamiliar coordinated action in parallel Unbeknown to the groups, each small activity becomes more difficult to portray, from the tennis match to carrying the pane of glass. After three to five minutes, each group presents their short, wordless play. The rest of the class guesses the activity, but we also describe how we knew what was happening in each scene. The students do not react to this as criticism or evaluation, but recognize that they are unraveling a puzzle as the performers struggle to communicate their intentions clearly. Although there is some concern initially, students rise to each challenge as they learn from the performances of the earlier groups even as each scene becomes more challenging. By the end, students are relaxed and feeling successful, recognizing that they often attune their actions to those of lab mates and partners as well as to less participatory audiences. Science Café, an Oral Science Improvisation To this point, all improvisational activities are performed silently, but we and our students also need to speak. Biologists are often asked to explain concepts to family, friends, even strangers met while running errands. Agriculture, the environment, and medicine are in the news and in our lives. Biological terms such as DNA, evolution, and genetics surround us. We want our students to be willing and ready to engage in public dialogue about science; thus we have invented an exercise we named Science Café in which students must explain biological terms to non-biologists without using jargon. Alan Alda speaks of the "curse of knowledge, the cognitive bias that makes it difficult to think or talk about a familiar subject as if from a position of unfamiliarity.”[22] In Science Café, we work extemporaneously to explain basic biological terms to intelligent strangers. Students have either the role of explainer or questioner, both drawn from a collection of possibilities in a jar (examples in Figure 2). The term to be defined and the role of the questioner are announced to the audience. The explainer must describe the term to the questioner, who then asks a clarifying question that a person in that role would want to know. The explainer must respond using terminology or metaphors appropriate to the questioner. Initially, our students prefer to act as the questioner rather than the explainer. But soon they realize that thinking inside the mind of a non-biologist is also hard work. Also, we found that student explainers felt that they were “dumbing down” material when speaking with those outside the field. We countered this tendency by ensuring that questioners were identified as highly educated in other fields or in positions of power. Students are not graded on their content or performance, but we use the definitions the students develop to help assess our departmental efficacy in teaching key biological concepts. Terms to Explain Roles of Questioners Autotroph The president of the college DNA Your grandmother Endergonic reaction An orchestra conductor Gene An investment banker Transcription A human resources manager Trophic level cascade An electronics engineer Figure 2. A sampling of Science Café Components Results Over the six years we have been running the capstone course, we have become more comfortable with the inclusion of improvisation, better able to articulate its goals and utility, and student presentations have improved remarkably. If we have learned anything in our experiments with improvisation in a science course, it is that our students are more willing to participate when the scientific rationale behind arts techniques is considered. The more frequently we can identify and name, discuss, and analyze phenomena, the more willing they are to embrace these methods. The neurological, physiological, and behavioral aspects of improvisation belong in a biology class. The improvisational exercises we adopted remind us that we live among many intelligent and curious non-scientists. Sharing why we care, accessing the emotion behind our inquiry, can connect us with others. Current student Terese Swords writes that she “noticed [her] explanatory and communication skills considerably strengthen” as she “can more easily improvise responses to questions and tailor explanations to a wide array of audiences.”[23] Curiosity, awe, and wonder draw scientists into our fields. Our search can never prove anything absolutely true, so we employ precisely developed tools to answer narrowly defined questions about detailed phenomena. Recent graduate Konstantinos Vlachos provided this explanation of the importance of improvisation in our course: Many scientists today are afraid of talking to people about their work. It's not that we don't want to share our work, it's that we are afraid to do it because our subjects are oftentimes so elaborate and sometimes so overwhelming to others. Instead, we choose to keep a distance from many people. The improv sessions helped me not to be afraid of my own knowledge and skills.[24] We have found that discussion of the goals and utility of improvisation is key to its acceptance by undergraduate science students. Interrupting an activity to discuss, re-focus, or analyze our physiological and behavioral responses places it in a familiar context. Importantly, improvisation has become a more featured component of the course; it is started on the first day and is continued throughout the term with increasing expectations of student participation. An unintended consequence of students’ rising comfort with science communication is that student projects have become increasingly multi-media and less traditional. We have had student projects culminate in videos, art projects, games, music, and even one play script and public reading! The culminating event of our Senior Experience course is BioFest – a mix of posters, videos, and demonstrations of each student’s senior project. In 30-minute increments, one-quarter of the class presents their work to anyone who walks by. Younger students are encouraged to attend as the room buzzes energetically with friends and colleagues from all disciplines visiting the students’ presentations. Family members fly in from across the country; mentors from the campus and the community come to see the results. Posters, as seen at any conference, predominate, but some students bring along research tools or organisms they have investigated (Figure 3). Figure 3. Poster presenters display confidence and approachability while presenting the science adapted to their audiences. (Image courtesy of Tracy Van Zeeland.) Some students even stage their projects. A book on what happens after death is displayed against a crime scene tape outlining a body, staging the project’s scientific title, “The breakdown of decomposition: the processes involved as influenced by environmental processes”). Audience participation is encouraged. A website, part of the project “Therapeutic efficacy of spp in treating cancers,” displays the pharmaceutical benefits of Navajo tea, a traditional medicine, as visitors sip tea samples. An amateur winemaker tastes the results of a student’s vintages made from wild yeasts growing on grapes (“Identification and characterization of wild yeasts”). In the afore-mentioned project, “Surgical protocols and patient selection in intestinal transplantation,” there is action in the real world: a Wikipedia page describing intestinal transplants already has 1500+ hits, and visitors are able to sign up to be organ donors. Lawrence University’s Vice-President of Development speaks with the student who analyzed current and projected climate change on species growing on university property (“Bjorklunden bioclimate envelope models -- their practice and utility”). Athletes watch a video about biofeedback effects on hockey performance (“The role of biofeedback in autogenic training on physiological indices and athletic performance”). We watch with pride as our students talk with whoever comes by, answering questions and sharing their enthusiasm (Figure 4). In our first years, this was a staid and serious event. In the past three years, the room has erupted in chatter, laughter, and questions. Students and faculty are disappointed that they can’t possibly visit each student’s presentation in the time allowed. Parents and administrators attend and are impressed with our students’ enthusiastic and accessible presentations of their work. We are convinced that improvisation has improved our students’ ability and willingness to communicate their scientific know-how immeasurably. The Senior Experience course in biology has capped students’ undergraduate science training with projects of their own design, and helped them become better science communicators, obtain jobs, and find their professional passions. Figure 4. Students must be prepared to speak with any audience as they come by. (Image courtesy of Tracy Van Zeeland.) Appendix What Our Students Say We have solicited reactions to capstone improvisation from a sample of recent Lawrence University graduates. “You will not always know the knowledge level of your audience and have to be ready to either simplify or elaborate. Additionally, it is hard to know what kinds of questions will be asked after you have finished and because of this you have to be ready to improvise in order to communicate the information to your audience.” Nick Randall, Class of 2013 “When a student or colleague asks a question, and you give a response that does not follow the context of the question, they are not going to understand the answer. Much like improv, you need to stay within the context given.” David Cordie, Class of 2013 “I had such an extreme fear of public speaking that I struggled to raise my hand to answer a professor's simple question in a small class of people I knew well. When I found out we were doing improv in my science class I was very surprised. The improv techniques and speaking skills I learned in this class pushed the boundaries of my comfort zone. Fast forward a few months after graduation to my first presentation in a temporary job. Using the skills I learned in class, I wowed the upper management. Before I knew it, I was well known as a great speaker, solicited by people I barely knew for communication advice, and invited to present at several workshops. It was at one of these talks that my boss and our partners realized they needed to keep me longer than originally planned because of the work I was showcasing and my ability to excite our partners into action. I strongly believe that without the communication skills I learned in class, I would not have gotten the job I have now, and I would have been less successful and had far fewer opportunities to promote my work and engage others. I think this was the most important class I ever took.” Maria De Laundreau, Class of 2013 “Many scientists today are afraid of talking to people about their work. It's not that we don't want to share our work, it's that we are afraid to do it because our subjects are oftentimes so elaborate and sometimes so overwhelming to others that we don't want to make them uncomfortable. Instead, we choose to keep a distance from many people. The improv sessions helped me not to be afraid of my own knowledge and skills. It helped me to be ready to respond more effectively to the variety of reactions that an audience may have during public speeches. But most importantly it taught me not to be afraid of failure and criticism. After all as a young scientist, I have a lot room for improvement, which makes occasional failure and criticism an inevitable part of my career. Bio 650 showed me how to respond thoughtfully in this criticism, thus reaching my ultimate goal, which is to learn and share effectively how life works!” Konstantinos Vlacho, Class of 2015 “Initially I was horrified to participate in improv, but even after doing it for only a couple weeks, I have noticed my explanatory and communication skills considerably strengthen. I am much more confident in job interviews and feel that I can more easily improvise responses to questions and tailor my explanations to a wide array of audiences. I can now say that I am completely comfortable [with] public speaking (even about topics I am unsure of) and it is all thanks to my biology major.” Terese Swords, Class of 2016 Summary of Oral Communication Activities Audience (our own invention) Teaching Improvisation to Scientists with Alan Alda Exposure Amy Cuddy’s TEDTalk Self-Introductions (name & project title) Mirror Play Ball Bumper Sticker production 12-minute oral scientific presentation of student project & relevant background Transformation of Objects What’s Going On? Science Café BioFest Elizabeth A. De Stasio is the Raymond H. Herzog Professor of Science and Professor of Biology at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. She earned her PhD in Biology and Medicine at Brown University working in the area of molecular biology and did post-doctoral training in the Department of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is currently collaborating with researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and at Rutgers University to understand which genes are used to make functioning nerve cells. She is devoted to making science accessible to all students through her courses in introductory biology and genetics, and a course for non-majors she calls Biotechnology and Society. Cindy L. Duckert is a Lecturer in Biology and Senior Experience Facilitator at Lawrence University and the Senior Museum Educator at the Weis Earth Science Museum in Menasha, Wisconsin. Her career began as an engineer (California Institute of Technology) building airplanes at Lockheed and making toothpaste tube material more efficiently at American Can Company when she realized that explaining technical things to non-technical people is her forté. The discovery that interpreting one field of study to another is an unusual skill came as mid-career surprise. She taught K-12 teachers how to do real science in their classrooms with the JASON Project’s online courses and thousands of visitors to the Experimental Aircraft Association Museum what keeps airplanes in the air. [1] We thank Alan Alda first and foremost for his vision of improving science communication. We thank the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University for providing evidence that improvisation works wonderfully to free the stories and remind us why science intrigued us in the first place and for the concept of distillation that enables students to see that accuracy, brevity, and clarity are not the same as dumbing down science. We thank Kathy Privatt of the Lawrence University theater faculty for the choice of activities winnowed from another realm. And we thank our co-teachers of the capstone course for their patience and wisdom; without you the course wouldn’t have evolved as it has: Bart De Stasio, Kimberly Dickson, Alyssa Hakes, Brian Piasecki, Jodi Sedlock, and Nancy Wall. We thank our students both for their trust in us and for their willingness to grow and add a playful enthusiasm to imbue their science. [2] Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 325. [3] E. A. De Stasio, M. Ansfield, P. Cohen, and T. Spurgin, “Curricular responses to ‘electronically tethered’ students: Individualized learning across the curriculum,” Liberal Education 95, no. 4 (2009): 46-52. [4] Kelly M. Walsh, “Discovering a Common Language,“ The New York Academy of Sciences Magazine, October 6, 2015. http://www.nyas.org/Publications/Detail.aspx?cid=d77626ca-e830-47da-a546-7fbeab1846f1. [5] Robert M. Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers 3rd ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 2011. [6] Ibid, 2011. [7] Beatrice de Gelder, “Towards the Neurobiology of Emotional Body Language.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 7 (March 2006): 242-49. [8] School of Journalism, Stony Brook University, Teaching Improvisation to Scientists with Alan Alda (2010) http://www.youtube.comwatch ?v=JtdyA7SibG8. (5:24-8:38 in particular). [9] Amy Cuddy, Your Body Shapes Who You Are, TEDGlobal, (June 2012) http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are. [10] Viola Spolin, Improvisation for the Theater, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 53. [11] Ibid., 61-63. [12] G. Di Pellegrino, L. Fadiga, L. Fogassi, V. Gallese, and G. Rizzolatti, “Understanding motor events: a neurophysiological study.” Experimental Brain Research, 91 (1992): 176-80. [13] Marco Del Giudice, Valeria Manera and Christian Keysers, “Programmed to learn? The ontogeny of mirror neurons,” Developmental Science 12, no. 2 (March 2009): 350-63. [14] Amy Cuddy, Presence (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015), 179. [15] Eddie North-Hager, “Botox Impairs Ability to Understand Emotions” (6 June 2011) https://news.usc.edu/28407/Botox-Impairs-Ability-to-Understand-Emotions/ [16]Judith Holler and Katie Wilkin. “Co-Speech Gesture Mimicry in the Process of Collaborative Referring During Face-to-Face Dialogue.” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 35, no. 2 (June 2011): 133-53. [17] Viola Spolin, Improvisation for Theater, 64. [18] Ibid., 82. [19] Ibid., 74. [20] Ibid., 69. [21] Ibid., 88. [22] Kelly Walsh, “Discovering a Common Language.” [23] Personal communication with the authors. [24] Personal communication with the authors. “Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Imrpovisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum” by Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 2 (Spring 2016) ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: James Armstrong Editorial Assistant: Kyueun Kim Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Bill Demastes Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D. W. Gregory’s Radium Girls” by Bradley Stephenson “Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of The End of the Moon” by Vivian Appler “iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change” by Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd and Suzanne Trauth “Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum” by Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio “Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters” by George Pate and Libby Ricardo www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Blue-Collar Broadway The New Humor in the Progressive Era Stages of Engagement Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Al Evangelista Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Dance Planets Al Evangelista By Published on May 22, 2022 Download Article as PDF In every class remotely related to dramaturgy, I encounter performance studies scholar Elinor Fuchs’s critical essay “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet.” [1] When I was an undergrad, I was taught Fuchs’s article twice. Grad school? Twice more. When I want to teach choreography and composition, I teach Fuchs’s dramaturgy of planets. I’m grateful every time. When we take aspects of world-making as the work of a dramaturg, I believe that this is one way to arrive at our traumatic present. How to arrive in spaces of wide-ranging, inequitable, and systemic traumas? Or, how do I reveal this traumatic present as everyday, as repetition (ongoing, both physically and historically), as also a dramaturgy? My parents imagined brighter futures. Their planet made of dreams. I find myself in a constant battle with how their imagined futures sometimes were (mis)guided and influenced by colonial mentalities. [2] A planet of complication. Nevertheless, this planet is one in which their children flourished in opportunities, even though their own brown bodies did not. I even think my parents have multiple planets—worlds made in their imaginaries. In section V, “Theatrical Mirrors,” the shortest section of “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet,” Fuchs offers a consideration of multiple planets and how they could affect a dramaturgical world: “Important as these internal systems are, dramatic worlds don’t just speak to and within themselves; they also speak to each other.” [3] In the paragraphs that follow, I expand on section V through a queer Filipinx American choreographic strategy and explain how the dramaturgical planets in these choreographies relate, speak, and move with one another. This strategy takes into account a range of planets, their array of invisibility and gravity. This is a dance with the incomplete as a practice of care. It’s not just my planets or my parents’ planets or the number of planets. It’s also the orbiting pathways, the circuitous dance of repetition, release, and rotation through space. [4] Dramaturgy, to me, is an intimate act of analysis. Dramaturgy in dance—an analysis of bodies, movement, context, and performance—becomes entangled in these conceptual imaginaries even more when focused on queer Asian American performance. My choreography and dramaturgy, embodied by my Filipinx American body, fall into these traumas: my own, my family’s, and my ancestors’. These owned and inherited traumas are invisibilized in a landscape of systemic oppression, but performance can highlight their embodied worlds. And yet they are more than all of these things. My dramaturgy is not simply connected to my Asian American history or identity; my performances do not simply represent Asian American histories. Many other histories and planets, often not seen, are part of my dramaturgy. [5] Dramaturgy could be explained as research done for, by, and about a production. But what if those productions explicitly involve the personal and familial experiences of the researcher and performer? And why is it something worth revisiting within a container of performance? The practice of dramaturgy helps answer these questions. I work with the dance of planets to highlight the many complex pathways and vast space that, because invisibilized, become easier to ignore, to move with the emptiness and make it intentional. The process of making something not seen can be a choreographic or dramaturgical choice. In Fuchs’s work, the last instruction after all the amazingly detailed questions is to look at the planet from a distance, to squint. But these planets may not be visible or static, and they might not want to be visible. They move unseen. And as a choreographer noticing this movement and invisibility, repeating it in performance is one way to grow this complexity. If I were to expand on this, and move with and beyond Fuchs’s essay once more, I would further imagine what this complexity might mean within my own performance work. It might look something like this. A queer Filipinx American performer, choreographer, and artist-scholar’s visit to dance planets: My dramaturgy. or feelings about my feelings. My dramaturgy is a Barong. Which might mean a symbol of resistance or might mean a perpetuation of US colonialism. [6] My dramaturgy is singing Santo Niño because as a child, I loved the upbeat tempo and clapping despite the Catholic prayer event that lasted hours. [7] My uncles sometimes left the room because they were allowed a break outside, but children no matter their gender had to stay. My dramaturgy is the lack of primary interviews from the St. Louis World’s Fair “human-zoo” participants. [8] One of the few direct quotes I could find is from Antero Cabrera, the 14-year-old translator known for singing “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” [9] My dramaturgy is having to explain the preference to not be seen because sometimes being seen is more dangerous than they can imagine, not having had to imagine any sort of danger in their position. My dramaturgy is recording a phone conversation with my mother about how line dancing (cha-cha, electric slide) in Filipinx American bodies cannot be attributed to a single historical event. After conversations with family still in the Philippines and other Filipinx American artists, I still could not identify a definitive or specific event (besides the obvious: cultural imperialism). But to not know where it originated beyond that? Is it dramaturgically necessary? My dramaturgy is a complicated relationship to hip hop dance. Especially having grown up in the land of the Ohlone people, the San Francisco Bay Area, I tend to choreograph more productively when there is a good beat to a song. The dramaturgy in hip hop dance is starting to grow even more eloquently in academic spaces thanks to Imani Kai Johnson, Naomi Macalalad Bragin, grace shinhae jun, and J. Lorenzo Perillo, to name a few scholars. [10] But what does it mean that a good beat is what drives more movement in my choreographic practice? [11] This dramaturgical question could be essentialized to the steadiness of the beat, the bass better felt through the speakers, and the nostalgia of youth. It can also be complicated by the musicology and history of downbeats in dance or further complicated by the lived experiences of hip hop dance practitioners. Johnson mentions the nuance required in discussions of appropriation in hip hop culture. [12] This too is part of the dramaturgy. These orbiting pathways and their traces do not fully capture all dramaturgical motion in performance, nor should it. If the goal of dramaturgy is to create a fuller, more critical, and more nuanced performance and world, then my dramaturgy is intricately linked to but simultaneously complicated by the everyday and the loss in them. My dramaturgical practice as a queer, cis, Filipinx-American, artist-scholar (and as of this writing) Midwesterner takes all of these labels and throws them into the orbit of vast empty space. This dramaturgy, while performed onstage in singular events, is lived every day, unfolds every day, and dances every day. That is to say, we see only partially what is illuminated, what is possible, with detail we could never imagine, and that is okay. Otherwise, we reinforce a colonial approach of assuming we can and should fully know what it means to be any marker of difference. [13] My Filipinx-American dramaturgies are incomplete and whole at the same time. The missing and incomplete are part of my post-colonial Filipinx-American framework. To return to Fuchs’s “Theatrical Mirrors,” the invitation to dance with more planets is always there in an ever-expanding multi-directional universe. To which planets do we hold ourselves accountable? What are we doing to dance with this ever-expanding complexity? Through these complex dramaturgical orbits, I hope my performance work and dramaturgy provide care for the everyday. Sociologist Valerie Francisco-Menchavez demonstrates care work in Filipina migration as multidirectional. [14] In my screendance How to Dance with Filipinx Ancestors? , I work with artist and scholar Julian Saporiti’s track, “Gimme Chills” as the underlying music score. Julian Saporiti, performing as No-No Boy , has dramaturgical planets rooted in cross-cultural loss, Japanese American incarceration, histories of war, and abuses in Asia and the United States. When Julian Saporiti granted me permission to use the track first for movement research and then for the screendance work, the care work was present not just in the song or in the dance, but in the unseen interactions in the building of relationships, the sharing of archives, and the everyday construction of artistic practice and research. To be clear, this is not the same as the care work studied in Francisco-Menchavez’s research that focuses on Filipinx export labor and the international flow of care. However, the multi-directional movement of care does link to the plural traces of planetary orbits rather than a dramaturgical planet in isolation. Queer Filipinx American dramaturgy offers a dance with incomplete colonial and postcolonial narratives. These rich diasporic stories parallel a complex colonial and postcolonial history. We intentionally do not see all of these planets. This withholding can sometimes fail. Ultimately, this failure and repetition are parts of the dance work, whether intentional or not. Suzan Lori-Parks might call this type of dramaturgy “rep and rev.” [15] Imani Kai Johnson might call this dramaturgy a dance away and with complexity, at the very least pushing away binaries that hold us back when repeated. [16] In the doing, I hope to choreograph invisible orbits that include the dramaturgical consideration of what is seen, not seen, lost, imagined, and moving in the opposite direction all at once, not in isolation. When my parents imagined opportunities in diaspora, the doing, the actual immigrating movement of their bodies is what put that dramaturgy into practice. And the moment here, now. References [1] Elinor Fuchs, “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play,” Theater 34, no. 2 (2004): 4-9. [2] René Alexander Orquiza, “Lechon with Heinz, Lea & Perrins with Adobo,” in Eating Asian America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 177-85. [3] Fuchs, “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet,” 9. [4] My deepest thanks to Kevin McDonald for dramaturging this article and helping me arrive at this point. [5] Katherine Profeta, Dramaturgy in Motion: At Work on Dance and Movement Performance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), 87. [6] Mina Roces, “Dress, Status, and Identity in the Philippines: Pineapple Fiber Cloth and Ilustrado Fashion,” Fashion Theory 17, no. 3 (2013): 341-72. See also Mina Roces, “Gender, Nation and the Politics of Dress in Twentieth‐Century Philippines,” Gender & History 17, no. 2 (2005): 354-77. [7] Christina H. Lee, Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines Under Early Spanish Rule (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). [8] Al Evangelista, “How to Dance with Filipinx Ancestors?” in “Six Illuminated Videos,” Journal of Embodied Research 4, no. 2 (10 October 2021), https://doi.org/10.16995/jer.91. [9] Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). See also, Alfred C. Newell, Philippine Exposition: World’s Fair, St. Louis, 1904: 40 Different Tribes, 6 Philippine Villages, 70,000 Exhibits, 130 Buildings, 725 Native Soldiers (St. Louis: s.n., 1904), https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiuc.2869262, and Carl Wilhelm Seidenadel, The First Grammar of the Language Spoken by the Bontoc Igorot: With a Vocabulary and Texts, Mythology, Folklore, Historical Episodes, Songs (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1909), Special Collections Research Center, University of Michigan Library. [10] Naomi Bragin, “Shot and Captured: Turf Dance, Yak Films, and the Oakland, California, Rip Project,” TDR/The Drama Review 58, no. 2 (2014): 99-114. See also, Imani Kai Johnson, “Black Culture without Black People: Hip-Hop Dance Beyond Appropriation Discourse,” in Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Simone C. Drake and Dwan Henderson Simmons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 191-206; grace shinhae jun, forthcoming, “Asian American Liminality: Racial Triangulation in Hip Hop Dance,” in The Oxford Handbook on Hip Hop Dance Studies , ed. Mary Fogarty and Imani Kai Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press); J. Lorenzo Perillo, Choreographing in Color: Filipinos, Hip-Hop, and the Cultural Politics of Euphemism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). [11] Alan Chazaro, “A New Generation of Filipino Hip-Hop Builds On a Deep Bay Area Legacy,” KQED , 26 October 2021, https://www.kqed.org/arts/13905208/a-new-generation-of-filipino-hip-hop-builds-on-a-deep-bay-area-legacy. [12] Johnson, “Black Culture without Black People,” 191-206. [13] C. Nicole Mason, “Leading at the Intersections: An Introduction to the Intersectional Approach Model for Policy & Social Change” (New York: Women of Color Policy Network, 2010). [14] Valerie Francisco-Menchavez, The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018). [15] Steven Drukman, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Liz Diamond, “Suzan-Lori Parks and Liz Diamond: Doo-a-Diddly-Dit-Dit: An Interview,” TDR 39, no. 3 (1995): 56-75. [16] Johnson, “Black Culture without Black People,” 191-206. Footnotes About The Author(s) Al Evangelista is Assistant Professor of Dance at Oberlin College and Conservatory. Al is an interdisciplinary artist whose creative process engages with social justice, queer Filipinx-American diaspora, and performance studies. His research identifies ways in which theatre and dance provoke and create change. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Fiona Gregory Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 2 Visit Journal Homepage Crossing Genre, Age and Gender: Judith Anderson as Hamlet Fiona Gregory By Published on May 29, 2014 Download Article as PDF In 1970 Judith Anderson, doyenne of the classical American stage, fulfilled a long-held desire to play the title role in Hamlet. Employing a heavily cut text and minimalist setting, the production relied on the power of voice to illuminate Shakespeare’s poetry. Yet most viewers were unable to see past Anderson’s seventy-three-year-old female body to the spirit of her Hamlet, and her performance was widely criticised. Anderson later described the experience as a “heartache and a tragedy.”1 Despite its disappointing reception at the time, Anderson’s performance merits recognition, and re-examination, as a notable event in theatrical history with significant aesthetic and social implications. Anderson’s Hamlet was an extraordinary exercise in boundary crossing—rejecting conventions of Shakespearean performance alongside those of age and gender. Furthermore it refused to be aligned with either classical theatre or avant-garde performance, existing in a state of otherness and demanding to be assessed on its own terms. Australian-born Anderson began her Broadway career in the 1920s, later balancing her stage work alongside steady employment as a character actress in film. Her career was transformed when she appeared as Medea in Robinson Jeffers’s adaptation of Euripides’s play. Anderson’s intense and archly theatrical performance met with popular and critical acclaim and enhanced her status, positioning her as “first lady” of the American stage. In the 1950s and 1960s she cemented this identity, touring both the full production of Medea and her program of excerpts from Medea and Macbeth in America and abroad. Although she continued to appear regularly on film and television, Anderson repeatedly figured the stage as her true metier. As well as lauding the performative freedom of the theatre, she expressed an understanding of the stage as a site that enabled communion with “genius:” “That’s why I like to do great plays—to be a part of greatness.”2 In the 1960s and 70s, Anderson became increasingly disillusioned not only with film and television but with the contemporary theatre. Her solution was to retreat into the classics: “There’s so little that is good. I would rather fail as Hamlet than succeed in something less worthy.”3 Anderson’s Hamlet, directed by William Ball and produced by Paul Gregory, performed predominantly at university theatres but also appeared at venues such as New York’s Carnegie Hall. Anderson’s performance, Ball’s direction, the supporting cast, and the design were all repeatedly deemed weak and ill-conceived by critics, but the production proved a commercial success: the two nights at Carnegie Hall sold out before rehearsals even commenced. [caption id="attachment_1124" align="alignnone" width="420"] Figure 1., Hamlet program, signed by Judith Anderson, in Author’s collection.[/caption] Anderson’s popularity suggests a nostalgic longing for the grand theatre of the past amongst some sections of the community during a period of immense change in America. The consequences of involvement in the war in Vietnam, the rise of second wave feminism and the civil rights movement, and the emergence of the gay liberation movement transformed American society during the late 1960s and early 1970s. These issues were explored in the work of avant garde troupes such as Richard Schechner’s Performance Group, Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theatre, and Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatre Company, as well as in more mainstream forms such as the rock musical Hair. Judith Anderson was removed from these trends; from the early 1960s, she repeatedly conveyed her distaste for modern theatre. In 1969, she told a journalist: “[there] isn’t anything that I want to see today. You hear about Hair and Oh Calcuatta! (sic) and it’s all disgusting to me. There is no quality or imagination in the theatre today [and] I object to the nudity.”4 She also raised her objections to “thrust” stages that brought the actors into the audience: “For her it’s too much reality . . . and not enough left to the imagination.”5 Anderson articulated a preference for performance that occurred inside the pictorial frame of the proscenium and maintained its distance from the audience. Yet despite her conservative outlook, her Hamlet was read as potentially radical, and she was obliged to deny that it held feminist intent or was an experiment in “camp.” Female Hamlets The desire to play Hamlet had been experienced and fulfilled by many women before Anderson, including Mrs. Furnivall, Sarah Siddons and Elizabeth Inchbald during the eighteenth century.6 These women were led, Tony Howard suggests, by the desire to claim ownership over a role that was becoming identified as the greatest work of England’s greatest poet.7 Female Hamlets proved particularly popular in the Romantic age, a move attributable in part to changing conceptions of Hamlet’s character. Robin Headlam Wells notes the “age of sensibility invented a new Hamlet—sensitive, delicate, distressed,”8 and Elaine Showalter suggests this feminisation of the character opened the role to women.9 According to Tony Howard the first woman to essay the role in an American theatre was likely the touring English actress Mrs. Bartley at New York’s Park Theatre in 1819, closely followed by Fanny Wallack, Charlotte Barnes and, most notably, Charlotte Cushman.10 Departing from earlier models, Cushman privileged Shakespeare’s text in her production—she reinstated much of the play that was typically cut, as well as restoring her understanding of emotional “truth” to the Hamlet role, in a “conscious critique of what many men had done with it” before her.11 Anderson drew attention to the long tradition of actresses in the role and particularly cited Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet, which the actress premiered in 1899 at the age of fifty-four, as a precedent for her own performance. Bernhardt performed her Hamlet within the tradition of “travesti” performance popular on the French stage. Actresses in travesti sought to create a stylised masculinity that male actors were thought to be unable to achieve in their representations of young men and boys. Gerda Taranow notes the object of travesti was not “androgyny.” Despite its insistence on the feminine within the masculine and vice versa, the aim of travesti was not to unite the sexes but to highlight difference through the contrast of female body and male attire. Female travesti “did not seek to intermingle opposite sexualities, but to emphasize, with delicate insistence, the feminine presence [of the actress in the male role].”12 Anderson, in contrast, would seek to direct attention away from her gendered identity and body when playing Hamlet. While many French critics applauded Bernhardt’s depiction of masculinity, some questioned the suitability of Hamlet for travesti performance, as they believed Hamlet’s feminine soul needed to be contrasted with a masculine body.13 English critics also objected to Bernhardt’s performance in terms of the body, finding it impossible to read this Hamlet as anything but a woman—specifically a very famous French woman named Sarah Bernhardt. In Max Beerbohm’s analysis, Bernhardt’s Hamlet “betrayed nothing but herself, and revealed nothing but [her] unreasoning vanity . . . her Hamlet was, from first to last, très grande dame.”14 The actress’s body and, more particularly, her celebrity, prevented critics from seeing the “real” Hamlet. The same phenomenon would attend Anderson’s appearance in the role. From Anderson’s personal scrapbooks, she appears also to have been interested in two lesser-known female Hamlets: Asta Nielsen and Esmé Beringer.15 These actresses demonstrate radically different readings of Hamlet by women in the twentieth century, and provide a counterpoint to Anderson’s own approach to the character. Nielsen played Hamlet in the German film, Hamlet: The Drama of Vengeance (1920), directed by Svend Gade. The plot followed Edward P. Vining’s 1881 monograph The Mystery of Hamlet in suggesting Hamlet had been born female but was raised as a boy for political reasons. As the title suggests, this adaptation rejected the passive protagonist of Romanticism for an active avenger. Nielsen’s Hamlet is a young “man” of intellect and honour, troubled by “his” (inexpressible) love for Horatio and grief at the death of “his” father. The film disrupts traditional readings of Hamlet’s delay, or resistance to revenge, as a “feminine” trait. Nielsen had become renowned for playing freedom-seeking new women and enigmatic prostitutes, and Lawrence Danson contends that she brought the memory of these roles to her Hamlet, thereby aligning the character with sexual transgression. In Danson’s analysis, this Hamlet thus became a spectacle of simultaneous liberation and containment: “In Nielsen’s polymorphous sexuality a viewer could read the strong image of a conceivable freedom from gender restrictions, crossed with the pathos of that freedom’s bafflement by actual social conditions” as represented in the material circumstances of the play.16 Nielsen’s Hamlet demonstrates the radical potential of cross-gender casting in Shakespeare, a potential that would also circulate around Anderson’s Hamlet. Esmé Beringer played Hamlet in London in 1935 at the age of sixty-three, and later published an article in which she justified actresses playing Hamlet. She repeatedly figures the character in emotional terms: prior to the catastrophe he is “happy,” “highspirited” and “in love;” following it he is “grief-stricken,” and “runs the gamut of love, scorn and despair.” Beringer does not explicitly comment on the implications of cross-gender casting, but the aspects of the character to which she draws attention are those that seem particularly suited to female performers. She stresses Hamlet’s sensitivity, and finds his interpersonal relationships with Ophelia, Horatio, and Gertrude amongst “the most vital themes of the play.”17 Even within a normative reading of the play, and a conservative approach to theatre, Beringer implicitly validated actresses playing Hamlet. As an older woman performing Hamlet, Beringer also functioned as a precedent for Anderson. Had Anderson read the Times’s review of Beringer’s performance she would have seen that the actress’s age was ignored by the critics, but her ineffectual representation of masculinity and male behaviour, and her “monotonous, sing-song intonation,” were openly criticised.18 Anderson decided not to attempt a representation of masculinity in her reading, and to focus her performance on her greatest asset—her powerful and flexible voice. Anderson on the road to Elsinore In 1954, Anderson told an American journalist she wished to play the role of Hamlet.19 She reiterated this desire in the press that attended her appearance in Medea in Epidaurus in 1955.20 The opportunity to do so did not arise until 1969, a delay she attributed to the difficulty of finding a suitable director.21 Bernhardt had also stated that her desire to play Hamlet was long-standing but she had been delayed by production difficulties—in her case the search for an appropriate translation.22 This discourse of desire thwarted by circumstances beyond the actresses’ control has a number of effects: it foregrounds the actresses’ professionalism; inhibits reading their decision to play Hamlet as a “whim” or rash act of folly; and frames their eventual appearance in the role as in some way “destined.” Anderson’s trouble finding a director also suggests the limited commercial potential of a female Hamlet on the American stage in the late twentieth century. Anderson did eventually find someone to guide her Hamlet: William Ball, founder and director of the American Conservatory Theatre (ACT), based in San Francisco from 1965. Under Ball’s vigorous leadership, ACT presented modern classics by authors such as Chekhov, Pirandello and Tom Stoppard, rising to become “one of the most active and prosperous resident repertory companies in the country.”23 During the 1960s, Ball also directed John Gielgud, Edith Evans and Margaret Leighton in A Homage to Shakespeare, and worked at a number of America’s major Shakespeare festivals. The venture was produced by Paul Gregory, who had worked in Hollywood and the music industry in addition to the theatre. In 1953, he had produced John Brown’s Body, a dramatic reading starring Anderson, Tyrone Power, and Raymond Massey. In this production, Anderson had demonstrated two things above all else: her range, and her ability to build characters through voice—she created, through recitation, “anything from a great Southern hostess to a child of the woods.”24 In the Hamlet program, Gregory and Ball are described as initiators of the production and, if this was the case, it may have been Anderson’s creation of diverse characters through voice in John Brown’s Body that inspired the project.25 The program notes state Gregory and Ball have (like the actress herself) lived with the idea of Anderson as Hamlet for a long time: “It has been a long cherished dream of [Gregory and Ball] to bring Dame Judith back to the stage as the doomed heir of Elsinore, and when she became available, they lost no time in bringing it to fruition.”26 This comment “authorises” Anderson’s performance by framing it as the “brainchild” of two respected and experienced theatre practitioners, and forestalling its being read as the whim of an aging actress. The idea of Anderson as Hamlet held a popular appeal few might have anticipated. The actress herself stated she originally intended the play for university audiences (a decision she framed in part as a pedagogical exercise27), but Lewis Funke noted that when “the big city managers heard that she would be going out in the production they “demanded” that she play for them too, hence Carnegie Hall.”28 Anderson’s desire to remove the production from Broadway and other avenues of “high status” theatre suggests she was conscious of the risky nature of her venture. The managers’ insistence that she play Carnegie Hall shows the actress remained tethered to a position of status within the American theatre. This status meant Anderson was obliged to present herself as an item of consumption to the critics and patrons that would descend on Carnegie Hall—some of whom then read the “failure” of her Hamlet as a transgression of her status. While some reviewers (especially those from regional and university papers) supported Anderson’s performance, most were critical of her interpretation and of Ball’s production in general. Dan Sullivan, of the Los Angeles Times, found Anderson’s performance “so far off the mark in conception and execution that it is hard to know where to start to describe it.”29 Chris Curcio, of the California State University at Hayward, described the performance as “misconceived,” “monotonously boring,” and “awkward and contrived.”30 Nathan Cohen, of the Toronto Daily Star, suggested Ball had “done nothing to benefit Dame Judith or the play,” and the New York Times’s Mel Gussow described Ball’s Hamlet as “a bloodless production, with no power, poetry, or humour.”31 The reviews indicate the voice was the focus in this Hamlet. As Nick Milich noted in the Watsonville Register, the “point” of this production was “Shakespeare’s poetry, not action, not swordfights.”32 Indeed Milich and Cohen referred to the production as a “recitation,” and Gussow felt “it was almost like a concert reading.”33 In A Sense of Direction, his manifesto on directing, Ball lists “language” as one of the five basic elements of a play, alongside “theme,” “plot,” “character,” and “spectacle.” In any production, writes Ball, a director should identify one of these as the “predominant element;” this element then becomes the focus of the work.34 In keeping with a focus on language, Ball devised a minimalist production: “There are no props, and red velvet backdrops take the place of sets. All the characters except Hamlet wear variations of the same costume, deep red velvet and silk. In vivid contrast, Hamlet is garbed—boots, tights and vest—all in black.”35 Such costuming of Hamlet in black can be read as a further effort to erase the body, but with the set and remainder of the cast in red it is likely that it highlighted not only Hamlet’s body, but also the character’s singularity and Anderson’s star status. [caption id="attachment_1123" align="alignnone" width="606"] Figure 2., Judith Anderson as Hamlet, production still. Department of Special Collections, Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara.[/caption] A number of critics went so far as to describe the production as “stylised.”36 The actors used gestures rather than realistic movement, and there was little “action.”37 These factors enhanced the sense of a recital, although Ball also incorporated some more striking production choices, such as when “the ghost makes its entrance to the sound of amplified heartbeats.”38 The performance text was cut to run under two hours; it was in fact so abbreviated that one critic suggested “a more honest title would be ‘Gems from Hamlet.’”39 Anderson’s degree of input into the performance text is difficult to determine. In Ball’s 1985 manifesto on theatre, A Sense of Direction, he states that his preferred method was to cut the text himself and distribute the arranged script to the cast at the first rehearsal.40 Such a method was unlikely to appeal to Anderson, and Lewis Funke in the New York Times notes “[some] of the original pruning wasn’t to Dame Judith’s liking.” However, the text developed in performance, and Funke added that “things are better now [in November] than when the tour started out [in October].” Anderson later admitted: “[Hamlet] wasn’t done the way I wanted it done.”41 Yet, despite the friction between them, Ball and Anderson actually held the same vision for the production: the desire to focus on language, and a belief in the power of the voice.42 Anderson had played Gertrude opposite John Gielgud’s Hamlet on Broadway in 1936, and this actor’s reading is likely to have influenced her. Gielgud evoked the character’s grief, sensitivity, intellect, and emotional connectivity to those around him. The actor himself described his Hamlet as “introverted,” and located his voice as his focus during the performance: “[I was] more worried about the inflection, the phrasing, and the diction [when I played Hamlet].”43 Anderson also used “grief” as a keynote of her reading, and one critic pejoratively described her as the “Melancholy Dame.”44 The actress conveyed grief through vocal effect: reference was made to her “frequent sobbing voice.”45 While some reviewers criticised her “blubbering” and “sobs,” another admitted, “nobody hovers on the edge of tears so thrillingly” as Anderson.46 In one of the few interviews discussing her interpretation of Hamlet, Anderson suggested she would “be a more emotional Hamlet than, say, Gielgud or Olivier. I might cry.”47 This seemingly innocent comment provides a clue to the critical reception of Anderson’s performance. As Tom Lutz notes, “the meanings assigned to tears are always compounded by the age and sex of the crier.”48 The performance of Hamlet by an elderly woman held the potential to radically destabilise the play’s accepted meanings. James W. Stone has explored Hamlet in terms of its ordering and expulsion of the feminine through language and action. In Stone’s analysis, the feminine is represented in the play in images of dissolution, of movement into water, and therefore in tears: “Whether tears . . . represent Niobe’s sincere expression of grief or Gertrude’s masquerade of seeming, they serve variously to define the bifurcated feminine.”49 Stone describes Hamlet’s journey in the play as a movement away from the feminine. Anderson’s decision to make Hamlet more emotional, to cry noticeably and often, had the potential to instead show him collapsing into the feminine. Such a reading of the text would unsettle critics by its unconventionality, and by its disturbance of the play’s symbolic function: the ordering and expulsion of the feminine. And while the focus on the voice in this production was to draw attention away from the body, the act of crying—a manifestation of the feminine—may have actually underscored the presence of the actress in the role. “She is Judith Anderson” Critic Dan Sullivan described Anderson in Hamlet as the “victim of three obdurate facts. She is a woman. She is a rather short woman. She is Judith Anderson.” For Sullivan, the actress’s association with performative evil through her appearances in Rebecca, Macbeth, and Medea prevented her from becoming Hamlet.50 Frank Hains found Anderson’s Hamlet in conflict with her celebrity, rather than her performance identity. He found he “was never able to associate in any way that Great Lady of the Stage before me with the character which my program told me she was playing.”51 In his review, Hains divides “Judith Anderson” into two personae: “Miss Anderson” and “Dame Judith.”52 “Dame Judith” is linked with Sarah Bernhardt, connoting celebrity, wilfulness, and performative excess. In contrast, “Miss Anderson” is linked with roles such as Lady Macbeth and Medea, which signify tradition, professionalism, and the craft of acting. Lady Macbeth and Medea are described as Anderson’s “property,” suggesting these roles form the basis of her “authentic” performance self. The appearance as Hamlet is a transgression of this self, or as the critic himself puts it, “madness.”53 We can also read Anderson’s Hamlet as a transgression of her status and established identity in Chris Curcio’s response to her performance as “grotesque,” and Bernard Grebanier’s description of it as a “strange [undertaking].”54 For Grebanier, Anderson’s Hamlet became “strange” when considered alongside her “brilliant” performances in Medea and Macbeth.55 Like Medea, Hamlet explores the protagonist’s desire for revenge that leads to murder, but does so via contemplation rather than hasty action, and through lyric, philosophic musings instead of raw and bloody dialogue. It is, paradoxically, a more “feminine” role than was usually associated with Anderson. In addition, unlike the wicked and wilful Medea and Lady Macbeth—Anderson’s most famous roles—Hamlet aims to do good and is obsessed with “right.” Hamlet thus exists at a considerable distance from Anderson’s trademark roles. Anne Davis Basting’s analysis of another actress’s return to Broadway helps us appreciate the transgressive effect of Anderson’s Hamlet. In 1995, at the age of seventy-four, Carol Channing played Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly!, a role she originated in 1964, and with which she was strongly identified. Basting suggests the popularity of Channing’s 1995 performance resulted in part from its performance of “authenticity”—its nostalgic affirmation of a much-loved actress’s identity, and of a golden, “lost” period in Broadway’s history.56 Anderson’s Hamlet, in contrast, denied her authentic self, and was compromised not by the lingering presence of Medea or Lady Macbeth, but by their very absence. While critics figured Anderson’s Hamlet as a transgression of her status and performance identity, I would like to suggest Anderson herself perceived it as an escape from her performance identity—an identity epitomised by the emotion and arch theatricality of Medea. Emerging as it did in the early 1950s, Anderson’s desire to play Hamlet arose in the midst of her journey with Medea. In 1969, Anderson reflected that playing Medea had been a physically and emotionally draining experience: “Medea consumed every bit of me . . . I saw nobody and did nothing, other than concentrate entirely on my work. It took everything out of me, including all my blood. I had to have a blood transfusion.”57 Anderson read Hamlet in distinctly cerebral terms and perhaps Shakespeare’s sensitive, reasoning Danish prince appeared to her here as a tantalising retreat from the physical onslaught of Medea. The body and its sufferings were at the centre of Medea, but Anderson’s vision for Hamlet virtually elided the body: the actress told Robert Feldman that the production “will be in chiaroscuro with lots of shadows,” and the “shadows will include everything from the waist down.”58 Anderson made this comment ten months before the production opened and it is not clear from the reviews and still photographs if her vision was realised in performance. What is apparent is that in Anderson’s approach to the text (she focussed on the poetry); in her performance style (she privileged the voice); and in her proposed design (she hoped to mask the body), she turned away from the mode that the physical had been configured in her landmark role, only to have it reinscribed by the critics. During the tour, Anderson expressed frustration at the media’s interest in her age. As she told the New York Times: “Sure I’m old . . . but I am sick and tired of you writers who keep dwelling on that. I want people to see me and not be thinking of how old I am.”59 In this conceptualisation of her identity, Anderson distinguishes between her essential self and her physical self. She spoke of Hamlet in similar terms: figuring the character as a “soul” rather than a “body.” In her vision for the production, Anderson denied Hamlet a physical identity, but she also denied him a gender identity. Lewis Funke noted that “she doesn’t think of [Hamlet] as being a man . . . She sees the role as asexual.”60 Anderson refused to align Hamlet with either male or female subjectivity. She asked a student reporter: “‘Well, what did you think of me as while watching the play? Did you think of me as a woman or as Hamlet?’” The student replied: “‘At first I thought of you as a woman . . . [but later] I thought of you as Hamlet.’”61 Hamlet is here not female but is also, perhaps, not male. For Anderson, Hamlet appears to have been simply “human” and “his” experience “universal,” and there is a suggestion here that at least one viewer shared her vision. Despite the negative criticism, there were other viewers who approached the play on Anderson’s terms. Nick Milich suggested the majority of critics were searching for the wrong production: “[this Hamlet] is very hard for a modern audience to take . . . [For the players] offered nothing else but the poetry; their production was stripped down to essence, to a dreamlike state.”62 Prior to its opening, Variety predicted Anderson’s Hamlet would dismay theatre purists.63 Most reviews suggest this prediction was realised, as does Bernard Grebanier in Then Came Each Actor, his 1975 history of Shakespearean performance, in which he lists Anderson’s Hamlet as a “total failure.”64 Yet for Milich, Anderson’s Hamlet did not fail. Rather it affirmed the significance of Shakespeare’s poetry and the power of performance to transform the written word. In addition, for several viewers it provided a glimpse of some universal human “essence” that transcended age, gender, celebrity and the body. It was for such transcendence that Anderson had essayed the role: to escape her seventy-three year old body and the yoke of established celebrity and performance identities, and become “part of Shakespeare’s riches and poetry.” Anderson seems to have received the most positive responses from students, her intended audience. The audience at La Crosse University, for example, was described as “rapt” in the production; they gave Anderson a standing ovation.65 Anderson told the New York Times she regularly received letters from appreciative students: “I had a three-page letter only the other day from a girl thanking me, saying ‘Thank God you exist, thank God I saw you’.”66 Grebanier refers to this letter in Then Came Each Actor. It had prompted him “to wonder whether or not the college girl had not already been enlisted in that branch of the woman’s lib movement which would like to see men unsexed.”67 He was not the only writer to suggest Anderson’s performance held some affinity with contemporary feminism. The New York Times told its readers not “to go running over the landscape in praise of Women’s Liberation . . . [as Anderson is] not the first and surely not the last of her sex to essay the Dane.”68 Chris Curcio admitted, “Women’s Liberation proponents may be astatic [sic] that Dame Judith Anderson is playing Hamlet, [but] theatre aficionados were dropping in the aisles.”69 In common with much contemporary media commentary on the women’s movement, these critics’ alignment of the production with feminism was done jokingly and/or disparagingly. Anderson herself denied any feminist agenda in her work, and described “Women’s Lib” as “a lot of tommy-rot.”70 And yet, although she seems unaware of it, Anderson’s Hamlet performed a destabilisation of gender distinctions that, like the discourse of women’s liberation, questioned gender boundaries. “I’m Not Going to Camp it Up”71 When Anderson announced her desire to play Hamlet, the media recognised the camp potential of such a project: a syndicated newspaper article published throughout America “predicted that [Anderson] would camp up the role.”72 “Camp” had entered the American mainstream with the publication of Susan Sontag’s influential essay, “Notes on Camp,” in 1964.73 Fabio Cleto notes that “within weeks” of this essay’s appearance, camp “exploded as a mass media keyword.”74 In 1970, as a consequence of Sontag’s essay and its application by the mass media, the word “camp” signalled excess, incongruity, and theatricality, and while recognised as an important part of gay culture was not thought of as exclusively “homosexual.”75 In “Notes on Camp,” Sontag describes an enormous variety of cultural moments, objects and persons as “camp,” and her essay has been criticised as “unsystematic” and “inconsistent.”76 Yet, due to its influence, Sontag’s essay provides a useful insight into how camp was perceived at the time of Anderson’s Hamlet. For Sontag, the “essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.”77 Camp is thus found in excessive and/or incongruous displays of gender, age, class, or style. A number of Anderson’s performances prior to Hamlet can be identified as camp in their excess. In films such as Salome (1953) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and in Hallmark Hall of Fame television productions, “Elizabeth the Queen” (1968) and “The File on Devlin” (1969), Anderson’s overt theatricality could not be contained by the camera. Her performances in the above productions were characterised by emotionalism and exaggerated gestures and movement. In his review of “The File on Devlin,” George Eres described Anderson’s “dramatics” as “out of all proportion” to the script and the medium.78 The implication here is that Anderson’s performance is not only “excessive” but also “passé,” belonging to an earlier, and superseded, style of performance. As Andrew Ross notes in an important definition, the “camp effect” is created “when the products . . . of a much earlier mode of production, which has lost its power to produce and dominate cultural meanings, become available, in the present, for redefinition according to contemporary codes of taste.”79 Ross notes that the distance between contemporary and historical performance was highlighted by the “recirculation of classic Hollywood films on television.”80 Repeated screenings of Anderson’s intense emotionalism in Rebecca and Salome, and the theatricality of her television appearances, rendered her anachronistic in a culture influenced by the understatement of the Method. These performances, and Anderson’s performance and celebrity identities, were liable to be received as camp in Ross’s terms. The idea of such an actress playing Hamlet, especially at the age of seventy-three, was so incongruous that some sections of the media automatically presumed her performance would become camp. However, as Anderson had shown in films such as Laura and The Red House, she could produce restrained and realistic performances when necessary, and her relatively measured Hamlet did not become camp solely on the grounds of “excess.” Nor was its old-fashioned style purely to blame, despite Bill Marvel’s description of Anderson as “out of her depth” in “attempting to make the Bard come alive for members of the Woodstock generation.”81 Indeed, as discussed earlier, some of the most appreciative viewers of the production were university students. Anderson’s Hamlet is more completely read as an example of what Sontag terms “naïve” or “pure” camp, the “essential element” of which is “seriousness, a seriousness that fails.” Sontag goes on to note that “not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.”82 This Hamlet was expressive of each of these elements: “exaggeration” in its style; the “fantastic” in its casting of a seventy-three year old woman as a young man; “passion” in that woman’s intense desire to play the part; and “naivety” in her belief it could work. Ultimately Anderson’s experiment with Hamlet stands as an audacious, boundary-defying act, yet one that also demonstrates the very fixity of the boundaries it was attempting to cross. ------------------------- Fiona Gregory lectures in the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University in Melbourne. Her research on issues of celebrity representation and performance identity has appeared in New Theatre Quarterly, Australasian Drama Studies and Affirmations: Of the Modern. She served on the editorial board for Twenty-First Century Drama: The First Decade (Gale, 2012). She is currently undertaking a major research project on representations of the actress and mental illness from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. ------------------------- Endnotes: [1]“A Heartache and a Tragedy,” Sydney Morning Herald, 19 April 1973. [2] Michael Clowes, “Dame Judith Anderson,” Adelaide Advertiser, 19 February 1966, 8. [3] Barbara Cloud, “Judith Playing Hamlet,” Pittsburgh Press, 3 January 1971, 19. [4] Louis Calta, “Judith Anderson Plans to Play Hamlet,” New York Times, 19 November 1969, 44. [5] “A Theatre Great is Still ‘A Country Girl,’” Sydney Morning Herald, 24 April 1973, 2. [6] For a fascinating analysis of the history of actresses in the role into the twenty-first century see Tony Howard, Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). [7] Ibid, 36. [8] Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare on Masculinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 81. [9] Ibid.; see also Elaine Showalter, “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), 79. [10] Howard, Women as Hamlet, 43. [11] Ibid, 49. [12] Gerda Taranow, The Bernhardt Hamlet: Culture and Context (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 83. [13]Ibid., 85. [14] Max Beerbohm, Around Theatres (New York: Greenwood Press, 1930), 36-7. [15] Anderson’s personal scrapbooks, boxes 10-11, Dame Judith Anderson Collection, PA Mss 6, Department of Special Collections, University Libraries, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). [16] Lawrence Danson, “Gazing at Hamlet, or the Danish Cabaret,” Shakespeare Survey 45 (1993): 45. [17] Esmé Beringer, “Woman’s View of Hamlet,” 15 October 1953, unidentified fragment, UCSB. [18] “Miss Esmé Beringer in Hamlet,” Times, 22 January 1938, 8. [19] New York Herald Tribune, 18 October 1954, Judith Anderson Clippings file, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (NYPL). [20] Fragment from unidentified article dated 4 July 1955, NYPL. [21] Morning Telegraph, 11 August 1970, NYPL. [22] Sarah Bernhardt, The Art of the Theatre (London: G. Bles, 1924), 139. [23] Gerald M. Berkowitz, New Broadways: Theatre across America: Approaching a New Millennium, rev ed. (New York: Applause, 1997), 78. [24] Power’s opening speech, page from Anderson’s script of John Brown’s Body, UCSB. [25] Nick Milich states Anderson “selected Ball to direct her,” in “Critics Missed the Point,” Watsonville Register, 13 October 1970, DJA. This does not preclude the possibility that Gregory initiated the project. [26] Hamlet program, in author’s collection. [27] Ibid. [28] Funke, “Dame Hamlet.” [29] Dan Sullivan, “Dame Judith in Hamlet Role,” Los Angeles Times, 1 October 1970, UCSB. [30] Chris Curcio, “Anderson’s Hamlet: A Fiasco,” Daily Pioneer, 6 October 1970, UCSB. [31] Nathan Cohen, “Female Hamlet Never Satisfying,” Toronto Daily Star, 27 October 1970, UCSB; Mel Gussow, “Stage: A Lady ‘Hamlet,’” New York Times, 15 January 1971, 18. [32] Milich, “Critics Missed the Point.” [33] Ibid; Cohen, “Female Hamlet;” Gussow, “A Lady ‘Hamlet.’” [34] William Ball, A Sense of Direction: Some Observations on the Art of Directing (New York: Drama Book Publishers, 1984), 27-8. [35] Bill Marvel, “Hamlet’s Mother Plays Him,” National Observer, 5 October 1970, 17. [36] Frank Hains, “Dame’s Dane: Madness in Great Ones Must Now Unwatched Go,” Jackson Daily News, 17 November 1970, DJA; Milich, “Critics Missed the Point.” [37] Sullivan, “Dame Judith in Hamlet Role,” Los Angeles Times. [38] Marvel, “Hamlet’s Mother.” [39] Sullivan, “Dame Judith in Hamlet Role.” [40] Ball, A Sense of Direction, 99. [41] Robert Berkvist, “When a Great Role is Passed Along,” New York Times, 2 May 1982, NYPL. [42] Anderson referred to the “friction” between herself and Ball in an interview with Clyde Packer, in No Return Ticket (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1984), 67. [43] Richard L. Sterne, John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in Hamlet: A Journal of Rehearsals (New York: Random House, 1967), 294. [44] Hains, “Dame’s Dane.” [45] Milich, “Critics Missed the Point.” [46] Curcio, “Anderson’s ‘Hamlet;’” Gussow, “A Lady ‘Hamlet;’ Sullivan, “Dame Judith in Hamlet.” [47] Robert Feldman, “The Dame from Rose Park, Adelaide,” Bulletin, 27 December 1969, 54 [48] Tom Lutz, Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 151. [49] James W. Stone, “Androgynous ‘Union’ and the Woman in Hamlet,” Shakespeare Studies 23 (1995): 76. [50] Sullivan, “Dame Judith in Hamlet Role.” [51] Hains, “Dame’s Dane.” [52] Ibid. [53] Ibid. [54] Curcio, “Anderson’s ‘Hamlet;’” Bernard D. N. Grebanier, Then Came Each Actor: Shakespearean Actors, Great and Otherwise (New York: McKay, 1975), 262. [55] Grebanier, Then Came Each Actor, 262. [56] Anne Davis Basting, “Dolly Descending a Staircase: Stardom, Age, and Gender in Times Square,” in Kathleen Woodward, ed., Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 251. [57] San Fernando Sun, 19 November 1969, UCSB. [58] Feldman, “The Dame from Rose Park.” [59] Funke, “Dame Hamlet.” [60] Ibid. [61] Fragment of article by Melinda Wojtasiak, circa 1971, UCSB. [62] Milich, “Critics Missed the Point.” [63] Variety, 30 September 1970, NYPL. [64] Grebanier, Then Came Each Actor, 262. [65] Grant Blum, “Dame Judith Triumphs,” La Crosse Tribune, UCSB. [66] Funke, “Dame Hamlet.” [67] Grebanier, Then Came Each Actor, 263. [68] Funke, “Dame Hamlet.” [69] Curcio, “Anderson’s ‘Hamlet.’” [70] Wojtasiak, “Dame Judith Anderson.” [71] Show, 20 August 1970, NYPL. [72] Kernan, “Dame Judith.” [73] Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” was first published in Partisan Review in 1964 and reissued in Sontag’s Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966). It is reprinted in Fabio Cleto (ed.), Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 53-65. [74] Fabio Cleto, “Introduction to Section One,” in Cleto, Camp, 46. [75] See points 50-53 in Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” in Cleto, Camp, 64. [76] Mark Booth, “Campe-Toi!: On the Origins and Definitions of Camp” (1983), in Cleto, Camp, 67. [77] Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 53. [78] George Eres, Long Beach Independent, 25 November 1969, UCSB. [79] Andrew Ross, “Uses of Camp” (1988), in Cleto, Camp, 312. [80] Ibid., 310. [81] Bill Marvel, “One View of Will Shakespeare: Let’s Respect the Stories,” National Observer, 23 November 1970, 20. [82] Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 59. ----------- The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2014) Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Guest Editor: Cheryl Black (University of Missouri) With the ATDS Editorial Board: Noreen C. Barnes (Virginia Commonwealth University), Nicole Berkin (CUNY Graduate Center), Johan Callens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Jonathan Chambers (Bowling Green State University), Dorothy Chansky (Texas Tech University), James Fisher (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), Anne Fletcher (Southern Illinois University), Felicia Londré (University of Missouri-Kansas City), Kim Marra (University of Iowa ), Judith A. Sebesta (The College for All Texans Foundation), Jonathan Shandell (Arcadia University), LaRonika Thomas (University of Maryland), Harvey Young (Northwestern University) Managing Editor: Ugoran Prasad Editorial Assistant: Andrew Goldberg Circulation Manager: Janet Werther Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue The Border that Beckons and Mocks: Conrad, Failure, and Irony in O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon Alternative Transnationals: Naomi Wallace and Cross-Cultural Performances Transgenero Performance: Gender and Transformation in Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders Crossing Genre, Age and Gender: Judith Anderson as Hamlet YoungGiftedandFat: Performing Transweight Identities Hot Pursuit: Researching Across the Theatre/Film Border Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Alex Ferrone 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 Appropriate Alex Ferrone By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF Michael Esper, Elle Fanning, Natalie Gold, Alyssa Emily Marvin and Corey Stoll in Appropriate. Credit: Joan Marcus. Appropriate By Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Directed by Lila Neugebauer Helen Hayes Theatre New York, NY November 30, 2023 Reviewed by Alex Ferrone A prolonged blackout opens Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate , so it is through sound—the tremulous hum of “ a billion cicadas ”—that the audience first encounters the yet unseen world on stage. In Lila Neugebauer’s production at the Hayes Theatre, the play’s first time on Broadway, ten years after regional co-premieres in Louisville and Chicago, sound designers Bray Poor and Will Pickens immersed the audience in a surround-sound cicada song that seemed almost to overwhelm the senses. I say senses (plural) because the soundscape’s penetrative quality was intended to exceed audition: as Jacobs-Jenkins explains in the stage directions of the play’s prologue, the sound “ sweeps the theater […] over and beyond the stage – washing itself over the walls and the floors, baptizing the aisles and the seats, forcing itself into every inch of every space, every nook, every pocket, hiding place and pore until this incessant chatter is touching you. It is touching you .” We were thus meant to feel the sound on our bodies, on our skin. When the lights finally came up on the meticulously cluttered interior of an old two-story Arkansas plantation house, designed by the collective Dots, the play’s premise was deceptively familiar: the semi-estranged family of a dead white patriarch reunites to auction off the property and divide the assets, but their long festering resentments soon dominate the proceedings and cause irreparable fissures. Appropriate knowingly riffs on the American tradition of the family reunion play, inviting easy comparisons to plays like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , Buried Child , and August: Osage County —a tradition Jacobs-Jenkins admires and also problematizes for its racial exclusivity. “No one ever talks about Raisin in the Sun as a family drama,” he told Diep Tran in the December 2023 issue of Playbill : “It’s always ‘a social allegory about race and class.’” Jacobs-Jenkins expressed a similar misgiving in American Theatre nine years earlier, the first time Appropriate was mounted in New York in an off-Broadway production at the Signature Center: “there were a lot of triggers for me in hearing people list and describe the ‘great American family dramas.’ I’d look around and be like, ‘There’s no people of color on these lists.’ […] Who has access to this idea of ‘family’ as a universal theme?” Michael Esper, Elle Fanning, Natalie Gold, Alyssa Emily Marvin and Corey Stoll in Appropriate . Credit: Joan Marcus. Of course, the Lafayette family drama was front and center at the Hayes Theatre for Appropriate ’s almost three-hour runtime. The cast, led by an indomitable Sarah Paulson, traded endless verbal (and eventually physical) assaults as they aired their grievances and exposed each other’s indiscretions. Supporting performances were uniformly excellent: Corey Stoll, as the absent, entitled son for whom care entails merely signing checks, and Nathalie Gold, as his apprehensive wife who struggles as an outsider in the family, were standouts; so was Michael Esper, as the prodigal son whose serial transgressions alienate those close to him; Elle Fanning was especially memorable as his suspiciously young girlfriend, whose new-age spiritualist word salad was a consistent source of humor. But the evening belonged to Paulson: she gave an astonishing performance as the eldest daughter Toni, at times beset with exhaustion, at others ferociously stalking the stage, her fierce commitment to her family barely concealing both vulnerability and venom. If there is familiarity here, soon comes the curveball, a series of disturbing discoveries as the family sorts through Daddy’s things: first, an album of lynching photos; then, jars of “weird stuff” that resembles human remains; finally, a Klan hood over the head of the youngest grandchild, which, when I saw the show, drew the night’s loudest combination of belly laughs and horrified gasps. It is a rupture the family is determined to avoid, as they downplay and outright deny Daddy’s obvious involvement in anti-Black violence. But their insistence on centering themselves, on claiming victimhood at each other’s hands, wilfully sidelines the Black victims of racist violence whose traces continue to crop up on the family estate. And so the photo album shifts signification, no longer a physical record of heinous racist violence but a commodity worth “hundreds of thousands of dollars” whose sale would enact yet another indignity on the murdered Black people among its pages. While the family cannot fathom calling Daddy an outright racist (gasp!), daughter-in-law Rachael points out that the Antebellum South is “the soil upon which his worldview was fashioned.” This mention of soil is no coincidence, for the vast property includes two burial grounds: one, a cemetery for generations of the Lafayette family; the other, the unmarked graves of generations of enslaved people who worked on the plantation. Even unseen, they are nevertheless there. And so we return to the cicadas, whose characteristic life cycle confines them to the soil for thirteen years at a time. In Appropriate , the cicadas never left, their low thrum pulsating through the theatre for the full length of the show. (In the text, Jacobs-Jenkins specifies that they “ fade to a place just beyond us but never disappear ,” and, sure enough, the stage directions that end each scene reinvoke their continuous presence.) It is an unnerving element of the sound design, something the audience acclimates to, often drowned out by the onstage histrionics, but never absent—an ongoingness that recalls Christina Sharpe’s figuration of “antiblackness as total climate” in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Ultimately, little is resolved by the end of the play. Instead, Jacobs-Jenkins pulls another narrative trick (and maybe exacts some revenge) by absenting the Lafayette family altogether: generations whoosh by (“ it is some day – any day – tomorrow – thirteen years from now – twenty-six years from now. It is the future. It is the present. It is any present. Is the past – any past – now ”), and, in a stunning coup de théâtre , the house falls apart before our eyes. Jane Cox’s dazzling lighting produced a cinematic timelapse as shelves collapsed and windows shattered and a chandelier swung from a rope. Finally, a colossal tree grew from the ground, its wide trunk and full branches stretching out of view, high up into the fly space—radical growth after so much decay. Neugebauer’s final image departed from the text, but it was perhaps in direct conversation with the titles of the play’s three acts, not reproduced in the Playbill. Where Act II, “Walpurgisnacht,” gestures to paganism and witchcraft (and surely to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , another “family drama” in its own way), Acts I and III, titled “The Book of Revelations” and “The Book of Genesis,” take us from the end of the world back to the beginning, to the garden and the great flood, to regeneration. The production’s final scene, with its spectacular collapse and its magnificent tree growing through (or perhaps from) the ruins, beautifully captured the extent to which Appropriate is not really about the Lafayettes at all: it’s about the house and about the land on which it stands and eventually falls. It’s about the soil. Sarah Paulson in Appropriate . Credit: Joan Marcus. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Alex Ferrone (PhD) is an Assistant Professor of English in the Département de littératures et de langues du monde at l’Université de Montréal, where he teaches dramatic literature, theatre history, and performance studies. He is the author of Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London (Springer, 2021), and his articles and reviews have been published in Theatre Survey , Theatre Journal , and Comparative Drama . 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.

Roger Tang Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Roger Tang By Published on May 23, 2022 Download Article as PDF Artistic Statement Roger Tang has been an advocate and champion of Asian American theatre ever since he found himself a dormmate of noted playwright David Henry Hwang. Not being able to match him in talent, he decided through sheer persistence to match him as a promoter of Asian American theatre: as the creator of the Asian American Theatre Revue , one of the foremost Asian American information resources on the web, as the founder of the aa-drama listserv, a forerunning email list linking Asian American artists across the country, as a producer introducing new Asian American works to the Pacific Northwest, and as a board member for the Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists. Throughout all this, his guiding principle is to see what exists out there and what doesn’t. If something doesn’t exist, then he will fill the gap, whether it’s humor, legendary heroes, or Asian American bodies themselves. All photos in this essay except for Figure 3 are by Roger Tang. Figure 3 used with permission from the Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists (CAATA). Section I Arising at the same time as the Black Power and Third World movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the Asian American theatre movement was part of the political formation of a pan-ethnic Asian American coalition on the West Coast. Asian American theatres demand recognition of Asian Americans as inherently valuable and allow Asian American perspectives, values, and art to flourish in a way that would not be possible at primarily white institutions. As institutions, Asian American theatres meet community needs for solidarity, advocacy, and artistic expression, particularly for artists early in their careers. Still, having a home of our own is just the beginning for Asian American artists. In my work with the aa-drama listserv and the Asian American Theatre Revue , I created forums where people gather to learn what other artists were doing and meet kindred souls. Emails crisscross the country as artists network to brainstorm solutions to common problems. The Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists (CAATA) similarly began as a way to create these homes on a larger scale, using the listserv and the Revue to track down and assemble previously unknown artists and groups. In 1999, there was a convention in Seattle that brought together Asian American artists from Los Angeles, New York City, and other parts of the country. Then, in September 2003, six Asian American theatre companies attended a gathering sponsored by Theater Communications Group. These companies were the largest and most stable of the dozen companies that existed at that time: Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, East West Players, Ma-Yi Theater, the National Asian American Theatre Company, Second Generation, and Mu Performing Arts. These six groups began discussions to hold the first national Asian American theatre conference, which younger groups such as Los Angeles’s Artists at Play and Chicago’s Silk Road Rising were able to attend. Spearheaded by Tim Dang of East West Players, “Next Big Bang: The First Asian American Theater Conference” took place in Los Angeles in June 2006, followed by the first national festival in New York City in June 2007. This was the genesis of CAATA, a collective of Asian American theatres, leaders, and artists who collaborate to inspire learning; share resources; promote a healthy, sustainable artistic ecology; and work toward social justice, artistic diversity, cultural equity, and inclusion. Each ConFest (Conference Festival) features a wide array of offerings that include academic panels, artists’ roundtables, staged readings, and full productions, often one-person shows. This palette of offerings assured Asian American artists that they were not alone and that their feelings were valid. There were also opportunities to discuss solutions to common problems, such as combatting yellowface and diversifying a previously all-white talent pool. Conferences and festivals have since been hosted in Minneapolis (2008), New York City (2009), Los Angeles (2011), Philadelphia (2014), Ashland with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (2016), and Chicago with DePaul University (2018). These have proven to be especially popular among young and emerging artists who seize on the opportunities ConFests create to connect with established theatres and artists from across the country. A welcome byproduct was the formation and strengthening of new, local networks that carried on the grassroots organizing ConFest promotes. Chicago began a regular series to present new works by local playwrights. Philadelphia saw the formation of the Philadelphia Asian Performing Artists group, which has now presented its own multi-day regional conference, complete with a slate of readings, panels, and festival offerings. This sense of connection is cultivated and expanded upon by attendees after the physical ConFest moves to other cities. Section II ConFests enable Asian American theatre makers and scholars to connect with and reflect on history, whether directly with canonical playwrights or thoughtfully with the constituency of an ever-evolving Asian America. In the most obvious sense, leaders in the field (like David Henry Hwang, Rick Shiomi, and Rajiv Joseph) come to speak and attendees get to pick their brains about their work and the history created. Here, in Figure 1, from the 2008 ConFest in Minneapolis is a panel of longtime figures in Asian American theatre: David Henry Hwang ( M. Butterfly , Soft Power ), Lloyd Suh ( American Hwangap , The Chinese Lady ), and Chay Yew ( A Language of Their Own , Question 27, Question 28) . Nothing beats hearing from the source that 75% of the material in Yellow Face was true events that occurred around M. Butterfly and Miss Saigon . Figure 1. Photo by Roger Tang. This sense of connection extends to more individualized exercises that link the personal to the larger events of Asian American theatre history. For example, a regular exercise at ConFest is to line up attendees by which decade they entered Asian American theatre; the groupings tend to show that most of the attendees joined very recently (leaving me and other CAATA board members in the outskirts with other “old-timers”). Another interesting exercise in the 2006 ConFest in Los Angeles saw attendees generating The Timeline, a record of events in Asian American theatre history, both in general importance and personal importance (Figure 2). This timeline is now available online (and updated) at the CAATA website and the Asian American Theatre Revue . Figure 2. Photo by Roger Tang. Finally, these connections have broadened in recent years. Asian American theatre originally centered on Japanese American, Chinese American, and Filipino American artists. Over the years, that focus has expanded to Korean Americans and Southeast Asian Americans, as immigration policies and histories changed and new artists emerged. As a matter of policy, the CAATA Board maintains the organization as a big house, welcome not only to those who want to be in coalition but also to those who choose not to be. This harkens back to the origins of the creation of Asian American identity, where Filipino Americans, Japanese Americans, and Chinese American formed coalitions that emphasized shared experiences and politics. This also reflects the voluntary nature of this identity, with each group entitled to self-determination to join or to focus on their own needs. ConFest backed this up by organizing regular pre-conference activities aimed at specific groups with whom to form connections. In 2007, pre-conference events were aimed at South Asian American artists. In 2016, the pre-conference was devoted to Middle Eastern and North African artists. For the current ConFest, CAATA is focusing on Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders as groups needing an uplift and whose issues are distinct from Asian Americans as a whole; for example, in Hawai‘i, various Asian American groups are actually settlers on indigenous land. Section III Another current that runs through CAATA and ConFest is social justice, both on stage and off. In the industry towns of Los Angeles and New York City, much of the impetus for Asian American theatres stemmed from employment issues—casting (or lack thereof) and stereotyping on film, television, and stage. In cities such as Seattle and San Francisco, where Asian American political identity was born, issues of racial injustice were also prominent; representation on stage was seen as both a political and artistic statement. This made Asian American stages a natural home for plays like Paper Angels and Gold Watch , which dealt with the injustices inflicted on Asian Americans throughout history such as racist immigration laws and the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans. Theatre artists in all cities easily navigated the stage and the streets in matters of social justice, as many had day jobs as activists and advocates for housing and employment while taking the stage at night. Recent ConFests have seen a return to this call for social justice. In 2016 (Figure 3), ConFest attendees replicated the 1921 march in downtown Ashland Oregon by the Ku Klux Klan but replaced the Klan members with Asian Americans, African Americans, Indigenous people, and other marchers from the global majority. This was an optimal blend of the theatric and the activist. In 2018 in Chicago, ConFest attendees acted more directly and joined Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) at their invitation in a protest against the Aloha Poke chain and their attempt to trademark “Aloha” as its intellectual property (Figure 4). Figure 3. Photo by the Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists (CAATA). Figure 4. Photo by Roger Tang. Section IV ConFest attendees form a sense of community (that is too often denied in their home bases) that blossoms into something fuller once there is face-to-face contact. There is a substantial uptick in social media following meetings, as members make Facebook friends and exchange Twitter handles. Pockets of more specialized groups such as the Mixed Asian American Artists Alliance begin to sustain specialized interests, and existing geography-based groups such as the Bubble Tea group for Chicago activities and the Network for Asian American Theatre Professionals – L.A. get an influx of out-of-area members (possibly to check out potential areas where they might move). Children and families form a consistent part of the ConFest scenery (gotta start them young in theatre!), as seen in this shot (Figure 5) from the 2011 Los Angeles gathering. Discussions of theatre life with children have been consistently part of the conversation at ConFests, and of course, food always plays a part in bringing people together and bonding (Figure 6, also from the 2011 ConFest). Figure 5. Photo by Roger Tang. Figure 6. Photo by Roger Tang. Section V ConFests present fully realized works on stage, allowing Asian American artists chances to see works that have yet to reach their part of the country. With careful consideration, delegates of the CAATA Board through the ConFest Committee select a variety of work that span forms (from solo works to large casts), ethnic groups (East Asian and South Asian to Western Asian and Pacific Islanders), and subject matter (remounted Western classics to Hawaiian dance pieces to reflections on September 11, 2001). These works act as test labs for the future, not only for Asian American theatre but for drama in general. Playwrights network with each other and other ConFest attendees. Here in Figure 7, in 2011 in Los Angeles, we see playwrights Qui Nguyen ( Vietgone, Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon ) and Lauren Yee ( Cambodian Rock Band , King of the Yees , The Great Leap ) on the panel with director Jeff Liu to discuss their work. A decade later, they have gone on to win major awards and become some of the most produced playwrights in the United States. From Minneapolis in 2008, we see SIS Productions in Figure 8 produce an episode from their 20-part Sex in Seattle romantic comedy that was a smash hit running from 2000 to 2012, a clear harbinger for the success of the movie Crazy Rich Asians in 2018. Leah Nanako Winkler’s Two Mile Hollow , a parody of dysfunctional white family dramas, received its first reading in 2016 and has now played in dozens of theatres from coast to coast; Figure 9 is the cast photo of the reading in Ashland, Oregon. Figure 7. Photo by Roger Tang. Figure 8. Photo by Roger Tang. Figure 9. Photo by Roger Tang. What is presented is unpredictable but often signals new pathways for the field. Here in Figure 10, in New York City in 2009, we see Soo-Jin Lee and perennial ConFest artist Kristina Wong perform in APACUNTNY. And in Figure 11, we have Asian Steampunk Cowboys from 2016, as we see May Nguyen Lee and Denny Le perform a scene from The Tumbleweed Zephyr. Both of these works defy conventions of mainstream American and conventional Asian American theatre. APACUNTNY attacks the idea of the model minority by embracing enthusiastic, frank Asian American female sexuality, and The Tumbleweed Zephyr seizes tropes like the lone wolf bandit and the Wild West train robbery and reshapes them to place them squarely in the Asian American theatre canon. Shows such as these point to new directions, themes, and genres for Asian American theatres to pursue. Figure 10. Photo by Roger Tang. Figure 11. Photo by Roger Tang. Section VI ConFests remain a vital part of the future of Asian American theatre. Due to the continuing waves of the COVID–19 pandemic, ConFest has chosen a virtual presentation again in spring 2022, but the focus remains on the work of Kānaka Maoli and how Asian American artists can work with them. To fill the need for connection, there will be virtual happy hours set up to link Hawaiian theatre artists with their counterparts in the continental United States. Future ConFests remain on the agenda (perhaps ConFest will again return to Hawai‘i to learn about the lands of Indigenous artists), and CAATA will move forward to highlight different parts of the North American continent, less visible aspects of Asian America, emerging artists, and other pressing new concerns. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Roger Tang is Executive Director of Pork Filled Productions (Seattle, WA), the Pacific Northwest’s oldest Asian American theatre. He has introduced the region to such authors as Qui Nguyen and Carla Ching and has presented the Pacific Northwest and world premieres of nearly a dozen plays, including his own She Devil of the China Seas . He is also Secretary of the Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists and the editor of the Asian American Theatre Revue ( www.aatrevue.com ). Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Seokhun Choi Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 1 Visit Journal Homepage Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning Seokhun Choi By Published on November 8, 2019 Download Article as PDF Introduction: Mourning, Estrangement, and Affect According to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler, world-renowned experts on loss and healing, we now live in “a new death-denying, grief-dismissing world” as illness and death disappeared from the public view and reemerged in the hospital and funeral home. [1] Accordingly, mourning has become a private affair, giving rise to what Sandra M. Gilbert calls “the shame of the mourner” or “Job’s shame” which is “the shame of the one who fears he has been singled out for suffering because he is unworthy of happiness,” particularly in contemporary British and American cultures. [2] It is in this cultural context that Leslie Atkins Durham situates Eurydice (2003), one of Sarah Ruhl’s early plays about bereavement. Durham reads the play alongside the irony that while “Americans had much to grieve” in the wake of big- and small-scale tragedies including 9/11, the Gulf War, and Hurricane Katrina, “grieving and mourning have been carefully regulated” in the delicate political climate of the Bush administration. [3] Although modern society in general has relegated the gloomy subject to the private realm and periphery, human mortality is a universal and perennial issue since all of us will lose someone and eventually die. In this respect, Ruhl’s plays of mourning— Eurydice , The Clean House (2004), and Dead Man’s Cell Phone (2006)—not only hold considerable significance for grief-stricken theatregoers today as they provide an occasion of communal mourning, but also make a strong case for the importance of theatre as an affective cultural medium. On the other hand, Ruhl’s theatre is not simply a venue of sorrow and tears as her plays represent bereavement in unusual ways with surreal humor: Eurydice depicts a fairytale version of the Underworld populated by clownish characters including a tricycle-riding Hades and talking stones; Dead Man’s Cell Phone is a romantic comedy which begins with an organ broker’s sudden death from a heart attack and ends with his mother’s (off-stage) self-immolation with barbecue fire; and finally, a cancer patient is literally killed with a joke in The Clean House . In these plays which resist conventional realism, highly emotional circumstances are interrupted by an unexpected turn of events and death and grief are estranged by humor with mixed emotional results. In an attempt to expound the dramaturgical significance of Ruhl’s peculiar method of estrangement in her plays of mourning, this essay revisits the German playwright and director Bertolt Brecht’s theory of Verfremdungseffekt (hereafter referred to as “V-effect”), a representational strategy that “allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar.” [4] The estrangement of death and grief in Eurydice , The Clean House , and Dead Man’s Cell Phone is achieved by various techniques evocative of Brecht’s epic theatre, with humor at the core of the process. Far from showing how Ruhl’s estrangement is indebted to Brecht, my aim is to use his theory as a point of contrast to articulate how Ruhl’s distancing devices in the plays defamiliarize emotion for emotion’s sake relieved of the materialist premises of V-effect. Here, Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), an anti-war satire revolving around the protagonist’s loss of her three children, will serve as the specific reference point for Brecht’s result-oriented V-effect, in contraposition to what I propose to call ‘estrangement affect ’ (hereafter referred to as ‘E-affect’), Ruhl’s emotion-centered estrangement for the audience’s rehearsal of bereavement. This conceptual formulation of E-affect suggests a new possibility to understand and use estrangement as a theatrical device detached from its original ideological context. While Brecht’s influence on Ruhl’s antirealist dramaturgy has generally been noted, her major critics, such as Durham, James Al-Shamma, and Ana Fernández-Caparrós, have borrowed the German scholar Franz Roh’s “magic realism” and the Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky’s “defamiliarization” ( ostranenie ) to analyze Ruhl’s estrangement devices in her grief-themed plays. For instance, Al-Shamma traces Ruhl’s lineage back to Brecht via Tony Kushner, John Guare, and Thornton Wilder, making several specific references to the German playwright throughout his monograph on Ruhl’s major works. [5] Aside from the fact that some critics used the term in their performance reviews of her plays, Al-Shamma does not explicitly state why he draws on magic realism instead of Brecht’s epic theatre to illuminate on the antirealist characteristics of The Clean House . While his choice seems to reflect his awareness of the discrepancy between the play’s non-rationalist poetics and the strain of European rationalism found in Brecht, the unstated rationale warrants further investigation. If he puts Ruhl in the genealogy of Brecht along the line of her American predecessors and wants to talk about estrangement in her plays, why not Brecht? In her essay on Dead Man’s Cell Phone , Fernández-Caparrós analyzes the estrangement process in the play in terms of ostranenie . And yet, she only applies ostranenie to the cell phone, but not to the central theme of death, despite her observation that the play and The Clean House are two of the plays that demonstrate “Ruhl’s distinctive concern with dying and its aftermath” and “approach mortality ‘with a somewhat lighter touch.’” [6] As a result, the significant relationship between estrangement and the emotion of grief in the play remains unexplained. While magic realism and ostranenie resonate with Ruhl’s aesthetics and help illuminate the major issues that the plays tackle, drawing on the literary notions seems to limit her estrangement to noetic and stylistic concerns. More fundamentally, magic realism and defamiliarization were developed in the context of postcolonial fiction and Russian formalism, respectively, without regard to the mechanics of theatre, where the audience emotionally reacts to the action on stage. I seek to complement these previous studies by paying particular attention to the emotional function of Ruhl’s estrangement (E-affect) in comparison with the V-effect, which is arguably the most systematic theory of estrangement proposed thus far, particularly as a way to combat emotional manipulation in the theatrical context. Since the so-called “affective turn,” the word “affect” has gained wide currency, particularly in literature and cultural studies, and has sometimes been distinguished from feeling or emotion as “a preliminal, preconscious phenomenon.” [7] However, it would be arbitrary to maintain such a neat distinction since the word connotes a wide range of bodily experiences which may well include emotional responses; for instance, the Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines affect as “the conscious subjective aspect of an emotion considered apart from bodily changes” or “a set of observable manifestations of a subjectively experienced emotion.” [8] Also, the affect-emotion dichotomy is not strictly adhered to by many theorists of affect including Silvan S. Tomkins, whose foundational system of primary affects is comprised of the nine emotional responses of interest, enjoyment, surprise, fear, anger, distress, shame, contempt, and disgust, [9] and Eve K. Sedgwick, who expands on Tomkins’ work in her Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003). In this essay, I adopt James Thompson’s definition of affect as “emotional, often automatic, embodied responses that occur in relation to something else—be it object of observation, recall of a memory or practical activity” and use it as the counter term to “effect” to focus on the emotion of grief. [10] Here, the affect of grief is specifically attached to people who are lost, although affects, as Sedgwick notes, can have any object such as “things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions, and any number of other things, including other affects.” [11] Making Death Visible and Grief Felt The unrealistic and abstract settings of Eurydice , The Clean House , and Dead Man’s Cell Phone blur the line between the worlds of the living and of the dead. Eurydice takes place on a dark, bare stage suggestive of the Underworld with rusty pipes, an abstracted River of Forgetfulness, and strange watery noises. The living and the dead exchange letters by dropping them on the soil and the characters arrive in the Underworld in a raining elevator. In Dead Man’s Cell Phone , the dead man Gordon, who now is “in a hell reserved for people who sell organs on the black market and the people who loved them,” transcends the boundary between life and death by telling the audience about the last moment of his death and even having a conversation with the protagonist Jean. [12] The Clean House is set in the all-white living room of the snobbish doctor Lane’s house in a “ metaphysical Connecticut ” or “ a house that is not far from the sea and not far from the city ,” where the 27-year-old Brazilian maid Matilde sees imaginary visions of her deceased parents reenacted on stage. [13] The plays’ phantasmagoric settings allow the living and the dead to co-inhabit the same space to restore death to the domain of everyday life. [14] The representation of the dead on stage and the living characters’ struggle with the losses inevitably elicit highly emotional responses from the audience. A couple of years before she wrote Eurydice , Ruhl published an essay on one of her mentors, María Irene Fornés, titled “Six Small Thoughts on Fornés, the Problem of Intention, and Willfulness.” In the essay, Ruhl pits Fornés’ “theatre of desire and pleasure” against two different types of western theatre that revolve around the notion of objective: American realist theatre and Brecht’s politically-motivated epic theatre. On behalf of Fornés, Ruhl argues that a “heightened emotional state” such as grief can be self-justifying as a pure emotional process without an external purpose: It wants nothing. It is complete in itself. If X dies, and I grieve for X, my grief does not depend on a frustrated desire for X. I know that I can’t have X from beyond the grave. I am not thinking about how to ameliorate my grief. My grief for X is beyond desire and beyond intention. It is a state. [15] Like Tomkins who argued that “affect is an end in itself,” Ruhl views the affect of grief as a natural process that has to happen for its own sake. [16] The grief that her characters experience and the audience may share with them is not meant to achieve any objective, at least in the sense of the character’s objective in the realist theatre (i.e. what does the character want?) or the socialist aim of epic theatre. In feeling grief, neither the characters nor the audience are supposed to think of ways to bring the deceased back to life or prevent others’ deaths. Rather, grief is a state of acceptance and the emotion matters in itself. Ruhl’s view of grief makes a striking contrast with that of Brecht who aimed at “an extremely classical, cold, highly intellectual style of performance.” [17] Here, it would be important to note that Brecht was not against emotion per se . For instance, comparing Brecht’s treatment of emotion in The Measures Taken (1930) and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948), R. Darren Gobert concludes that Brecht’s initial “hostility toward emotional effects” rose as a reaction to the behaviorist understanding of emotion and his view evolved from the “wholesale rejection” to “cognitive catharsis”—an emotive clarification that works alongside reason. [18] Similarly, Darko Suvin argues that Brecht was against emotion at first but later “suppressed the final opposition between emotion and reason.” [19] Thus, Brecht’s revolt against empathy did not connote an outright rejection of emotion, at least towards his late career—the phase Vidar Thorsteinsson refers to as “the late Brecht’s passionate defense of political-theatrical affect.” [20] Still, Brecht’s approval of emotion hinged on the proviso that it is based on reason and conducive to his socialist goal for his ultimate aim was to make the audience “feel emotions that would drive them to try to change situations like the ones represented on stage.” [21] One good example is his use of grief as a medium of rational critique in Mother Courage . Brecht wanted to lead the audience to critically examine the circumstances surrounding Mother Courage’s grief rather than simply share her emotion. John Rouse explains how Helene Weigel’s Mother Courage “defamiliarized Courage’s grief through the very demonstration of that grief” to achieve V-effect as follows: Both Brecht’s play and his production allow Courage this intensely human moment in order to illustrate for the audience the basic social contradiction out of which the character is built. Courage is both businesswoman and mother. Or rather, she tries to be both; the social realities of the total war from which she tries to profit as businesswoman prevent her from fulfilling her responsibilities as mother. She has been confronted with a nearly impossible economic choice—either she lose her son or she pay a sum that will cost her the wagon, her only means of supporting herself and her daughter. But she has tried to avoid making this choice in attempting to deal her way out. . . . Sounds of gunfire teach both her and the audience that her delay is indeed costly. Courage bears responsibility for her own extreme moment of grief. . . . Brecht allows Courage her grief, but he also uses it to provide his audience with the necessary data for a dialectical analysis of his play’s social relationships. [22] As Rouse explains above, the play directs the audience’s attention to the social and individual causes of Courage’s grief: war and her delayed action. For Brecht, it is of critical importance that these conditions look problematic and alterable to the audience, and grief is used against grief—i.e. to ward off further grief occasions in reality—as a tool for the stimulation of their critical thinking and social action. The contrast between Ruhl and Brecht in terms of grief reveals a fundamental difference in their approaches to the issue of human mortality. Whereas Mother Courage ascribes the deaths of the heroine’s children to identifiable causes as a way of exhorting the audience “to take pleasure in the possibilities of change in all things,” bereavement in Ruhl’s plays of mourning is beyond human control. [23] In Eurydice , the father is already dead when he first appears, residing in the Underworld, and the cause of his death is not mentioned at all—although it is possible, since it is an auto-biographical play, to assume that he, like the playwright’s own father, died of cancer. Similarly, the cause of Gordon’s sudden heart attack in Dead Man’s Cell Phone remains unidentified; he was just eating a lentil soup at a café instead of the lobster bisque he wanted. Ana’s death in The Clean House , though it could be argued that it was facilitated by Ana’s refusal to be hospitalized and Matilde’s joke, is due fundamentally to her stage four breast cancer, a medical condition that is incurable by contemporary medicine. These characters’ deaths are thrust upon the other characters due to unpreventable causes. More significantly, Ruhl’s plays are not a critique of such causes of death; they do not say cancer and the heart attack, for instance, are evil in the way Brecht deemed war and capitalism. A materialist application of V-effect to the plays would be equivalent to trying to find ways to change the individual or social circumstances that made these characters die, which would be a preposterous task for Ruhl’s audience given the circumstances. These points of contrast suggest that Ruhl is interested in dealing with bereavement as an inevitable incident rather than analyzing its causes and preventing it. In the plays, Ruhl presents three different types of response to bereavement: committing suicide to follow the deceased, trying to save the deceased (only if, of course, it appears possible), and acceptance. Eurydice, Mrs. Gottlieb, and Matilde’s father make the first choice: Eurydice dies a “second death” by dipping herself in Lethe, Mrs. Gottlieb sets herself on fire, and Matilde’s father shoots himself. Even though the emotional difficulty of their loss and their sincere desire to be reunited with their lost family member are understandable, it is apparent that suicide is not the best course of action for two main reasons. First, there is no guarantee that they will see the deceased after the suicide; they, overcome by their emotion, act on impulse despite the potential futility of such a venture into the unknown. Secondly, by killing themselves, they are causing further bereavement and grief for their surviving family and others who care about them. Orpheus and Lane’s husband Charles show the second type of response; Orpheus braves the gates of hell to bring his bride back to the world of the living, and Charles flies to Alaska to find a yew tree, a conifer that is believed to have some healing effect on cancer patients and used to produce chemotherapy drugs. [24] Unfortunately, their long trips turn out to be counter-productive. Orpheus and Eurydice only reaffirm their differences and have to experience a second separation, and Charles deprives himself of Ana’s last days which he could have spent with her and belatedly arrives with the tree only to find her dead. The failure of the two daring attempts attests to their lack of control over their significant other’s life—the case of Orpheus does so in a more symbolic way than realistic since the mythical setting cannot be taken literally. Here, Charles’s former aphorism to Lane in defense of his morally questionable affair with Ana returns to himself: “There are things—big invisible things—that come unannounced—they walk in, and we have to give way.” [25] These two purpose-driven reactions to bereavement—suicide and rescue mission—do not appear to improve the situation at all and their questionable efficacy alludes to the philosophy of life, or of death to be more specific, that the plays communicate to the audience: that there are events in life that frustrate human will and effort and demand acceptance. The third response of acceptance is represented by Matilde, who, instead of making the extreme choice her father made, moves on to make a living by cleaning Lane’s house in a foreign country. She is the character that initiates the symbolic gesture of acceptance in the play: to stop cleaning. In the play, the “clean house” is a visual metaphor for the ideal of perfect life, and to give that up is an acknowledgment that life cannot always stay in order and under control. Likewise, Lane and her sister Virginia leave the house in a mess only after realizing that the first step to come to terms with life’s inevitabilities is to let go and accept the situation as it unfolds. Here, acceptance in mourning does not mean abandonment or defeatism but care and wisdom. In mourning for the loss of her parents, Matilde resorts to some “strange” ways to keep her loss in perspective and maintain some emotional distance to it. For example, she tries to imagine her parents’ happy moments and make up new jokes, remembering her late mother’s advice: “in order to tell a good joke, you have to believe that your problems are very small, and that the world is very big.” [26] She does not simply accept her loss but also interrupts her own grief with some estrangement techniques including humor à la Brecht. Here, she not only models a peculiar attitude of acceptance herself but also serves as a good reference point for the peculiar rehearsal of bereavement that Ruhl stages for the audience in her three plays of mourning. Making Death Strange and Ameliorating Grief Ruhl’s interest in the theme of bereavement derives from her personal experience of losing her father to cancer when she was twenty years old, and she invites the audience to share her characters’ similar experiences and go along with their emotional journey. At the same time, she, knowing too well the emotional challenges of such occasions, represents their circumstances in strange ways to “ameliorate” the audience’s sorrow aroused by her characters’ losses, using several estrangement devices that are generally associated with Brecht’s epic theatre. As it is well known, Brecht devised various estrangement techniques to interrupt the realism of stage and the audience’s empathy. For instance, such interruption is achieved in Mother Courage by a wide range of dramatic and theatrical means including, but not limited to, a sudden change in situation, emotional tone, acting style, line delivery method etc., as Robert Leach succinctly captures: Peace is interrupted by war; direct address is interrupted by conversation; song by speech, and the method of singing, Sprechstimme , is a method of interrupting singing with speaking and vice versa; Mother Courage’s failure is interrupted by her success as a businesswoman, her mother’s pride by her grief; even the melodrama of the shooting of Kattrin as she drums to awaken Halle is interrupted by comedy. [27] As mentioned earlier, the goal of the interruptions is to help the audience keep some emotional distance from the characters and the situations they are in as a way of promoting critical observation. Here, Mother Courage’s loss and grief serve as a catalyst for this cerebral enterprise, and, as a result, the absurdity of social reality and the characters’ attitudes toward it are exposed as alterable conditions. Similar estrangement devices are used in Ruhl’s plays but the given circumstances of bereavement obviate such a critical exercise since they, as discussed above, are unchangeable. The most obvious Brechtian staging techniques in the plays are double casting, direct audience address, and subtitles. For instance, A Nasty Interesting Young Man and the Child in Eurydice , the Other Woman and the stranger in Dead Man’s Cell Phone , and Matilde’s deceased parents and Ana and Charles in The Clean House are double cast. Secondly, the chorus of Stones in Eurydice , Gordon in Dead Man’s Cell Phone , and Matilde, Lane, and Virginia in The Clean House all directly address the audience to break the fourth wall. In addition, subtitles, a distancing device that harks back to Brecht’s use of placards, are often projected on stage in The Clean House . [28] These antirealist aesthetics remind the audience of the theatricality of performance and create some emotional distance to the characters’ losses and suffering. In short, whereas the emotion of grief itself is objectless, Ruhl’s E-affect has a specific objective for the audience: to alleviate their emotional pain as they, watching the plays, rehearse bereavement. Ruhl also employs other estrangement devices that are more grief-specific. The most telling example would be the cell phones that ring in the middle of Gordon’s mother Mrs. Gottlieb’s funeral speech to disturb the solemnity of the woeful event. In Eurydice , it is mainly the Stones who interrupt the doleful atmosphere of the Underworld as the foil of humanity capable of grief and sympathy. Their intrusive and disturbing character is similar to that of the cell phones but their interruption is intentional and more inconsiderate. The apathetic Stones discourage Eurydice’s grief with the warning, “Being sad is not allowed! Act like a stone.” [29] Watching her mourning over the second death of her father, the Stones admonish her as follows: LOUD STONE. Didn’t you already mourn for your father, young lady? LITTLE STONE. Some things should be left well enough alone. BIG STONE. To mourn twice is excessive. LITTLE STONE. To mourn three times a sin. LOUD STONE. Life is like a good meal. BIG STONE. Only gluttons want more food when they finish their helping. LITTLE STONE. Learn to be moderate. BIG STONE. It’s weird for a dead person to be morbid. LITTLE STONE. We don’t like to watch it! LOUD STONE. We don’t like to see it! BIG STONE. It makes me uncomfortable. THE STONES. Don’t cry! Don’t cry! [30] The Stones’ heartless reproach above seems to suggest how grief is generally repressed in modern times although a “mourner should be allowed to experience his sorrow” for grief only has the power to heal. [31] It is probably a similar internal voice of repression that keeps Mrs. Gottlieb crying alone like “a small animal in pain” somewhere in her house. [32] The Stones’ coldness and rude remarks do not only satirize the modern culture that tries to keep death and grief at bay but also enable a detached look at Eurydice’s mourning by interrupting her moment of grief. The most notable example of such interruption in The Clean House is Matilde’s killing joke. As her breast cancer worsens, Ana asks Matilde to end her acute pain by making her die laughing with a joke. Matilde grants her wish and euthanizes her in the same way her father accidentally killed her mother, which “symbolically rectifies her mother’s murder as an act of mercy rather than an accident.” [33] Here, the audience’s emotional response of grief to her death is interrupted by the irony of dying from laughter. As the last example of the killing joke suggests, a major component of E-affect is humor, whose mechanism and function can be construed in light of the incongruity and relief theories of humor. According to John Morreall, the two theories, along with the superiority theory, constitute the three major theories of humor. The superiority theory of humor notes that “laughter is always directed at someone as a kind of scorn,” while the relief theory sees the major function of humor as “the venting of excess nervous energy” through laughter. [34] According to the third and most widely-accepted incongruity theory, “what amuses us is some object of perception or thought that clashes with what we would have expected in a particular set or circumstances.” [35] Despite the obvious differences, the three theories of humor are more complementary than contradictory as they focus on different aspects of humor. Generally speaking, the superiority theory is primarily concerned with the satirical nature of humor (i.e. intention of the joker), the incongruity theory with its semantic aspect (i.e. why jokes are funny), and, finally, the relief theory with humor’s physiological function (i.e. effect of humor). [36] The incongruity and relief theories are therefore not incompatible with each other and can be used together to shed light on the source and effect of humor in Ruhl’s plays. Incongruity as the source of humor in Ruhl’s plays has mainly to do with the irony of representing the serious theme of mortality in the comic mode. First of all, such inconsistency can be observed in the contrast between the classic image of afterlife and the plays’ comic representation of it. The Underworld of Eurydice is ruled by a Child riding on a red tricycle and wearing a hat and clothes too small for him, and spooky but clownish figures known as Big, Loud, and Little Stones are its major inhabitants. The fairytale setting is significantly different from the grim and terrifying image of Hades in classical accounts such as Virgil’s. [37] Eurydice’s Father, who would start his wedding speech with “one or two funny jokes,” has been living there since his death, and he describes his life after death this way: the atmosphere smells. And there are strange high-pitched noises—like a tea kettle always boiling over. But it doesn’t seem to bother anyone. And, for the most part, there is a pleasant atmosphere and you can work and socialize, much like at home. I’m working in the business world and it seems that, here, you can better see the far-reaching consequences of your actions. [38] His sensual description of the Underworld devoid of metaphysical seriousness and melancholy is unusual and refreshing. He seems to lead a rather easygoing life there, occasionally writing letters to her living daughter and practicing the jitterbug for fun. Although people lose their connection to their former lives, the life in the Underworld doesn’t seem that grim. On a similar note, Gordon describes the hell he is now in as a place where people “only have one costume” and “go to the Laundromat once a week,” and Matilde imagines heaven to be “a sea of untranslated jokes” where “everyone is laughing.” [39] These unorthodox and blithe images of afterlife challenge the common assumptions and expectations in contemporary religious and popular culture. In Dead Man’s Cell Phone and The Clean House , similar incongruity is witnessed in the circumstances of the characters’ deaths. At the opening of the second act, Gordon describes the last day of his life to the audience, on which he woke up thinking he’d like a lobster bisque. When he finally arrived in the café, he, much to his dismay, found Jean finishing the last lobster bisque that was supposed to be his so he had to settle for lentil instead. All of a sudden, he had a heart attack and began to think about to whom he would make the last phone call although his heart stopped before he could make the call. This is how he describes his last moment: A man doesn’t call his brother on his deathbed—no—he wants a woman’s voice—but the heart keeps on heaving itself up—out of my chest—into my mouth—and I’m thinking—that bitch over there ate all the lobster bisque, this is all her fault—and I look over at her, and she looks like an angel—not like a bitch angel at all—and I think—good—good—I’m glad she had the last bite—I’m glad. Then I die. [40] The gravity of death is lifted by the comic situation of dying in the middle of eating a lentil soup, jealous of another person enjoying the much-wanted lobster bisque. His mother’s self-immolation with barbecue fire at the end of the play also displays a similar incongruity between the quotidian and casual occasion of eating and the singular and serious event of death. What further estranges her bizarre method of suicide is her second son Dwight’s seeming indifference to or even approval of his mother’s self-immolation. Both her death and Dwight’s reaction challenge common expectations and produce surreal humor. Humor’s central role in the E-affect is most explicit in The Clean House since not only does the play begin with Matilde’s joke about the first night of a virgin man in Portuguese but also its plot revolves around two killing jokes. According to Matilde, her father, contrary to his good intention, choked his wife to death with a joke on their anniversary and shot himself in order to follow her. She reprises the family “tragedy” when she kills Ana in the same way albeit for a different reason. These homicides sound absurd for jokes and laughter are not seriously considered as possible causes of death. [41] The ideas of jokes and laughter in themselves evoke humor but what makes them even more humorous is their incongruity with the grave topic of mortality. In fact, incongruity is the main principle of Brechtian humor, too. As a device to prevent the audience’s emotional engagement he called empathy, he employed “a range of comic elements, from slapstick and commedia dell’arte exaggeration, to burlesque and stagey playfulness” with a view to promoting the audience’s recognition of the gap between ideal and reality in his contemporary society. [42] In other words, the comic in Brechtian theatre is “a structural principle underlying acts and communications that exposes the conflict between what is and what should be.” [43] In both Brecht and Ruhl, therefore, humor arises from the conflict between one’s expectations and what actually follows and plays a pivotal role in the estrangement process, although the two playwrights use humor for significantly different purposes. Unlike Brecht who formulated V-effect under the shadow of fascism and capitalism, Ruhl’s employment of humor had a deeply personal motivation. Ruhl’s father used to tell a joke to the concerned family during his struggle with cancer and he was one of the people who made her believe that “humor pushed to an extreme, like any emotion, has a transformative power.” [44] Another person who nurtured her belief in the power of humor is Italian writer Italo Calvino who considered lightness as the foremost quality of the New Millennium. Ruhl likewise believes that lightness is “a philosophical and aesthetic viewpoint, deeply serious, and has a kind of wisdom—stepping back to be able to laugh at horrible things even as you’re experiencing them.” [45] Aside from these personal and philosophical influences, it was her college mentor Paula Vogel who taught her to translate the wisdom of humor into the idiom of theatre. Vogel’s Baltimore Waltz (1990), a semi-autobiographical comedy about terminal illness, death, and grief, was a primary dramatic influence on the estrangement of death and grief in her plays. [46] In short, Ruhl’s E-affect was developed in a very different personal and historical context from the V-effect to serve a different function as she uses humor mainly for the audience’s relief of tension and emotional excess. In contrast to Brecht’s satirical humor designed to provoke the audience’s resistance to the status quo, Ruhl’s humor is geared toward acceptance. The clinical psychologist Rod A. Martin explains the positive function of humor as follows: Because it inherently involves incongruity and multiple interpretations, humor provides a way for the individual to shift perspective on a stressful situation, reappraising it from a new and less threatening point of view. As a consequence of this humorous reappraisal, the situation becomes less stressful and more manageable. . . . Humor and laughter provide a means for cancer patients to make light of their illness and maintain a spirit of optimism, and jokes about death are a way for people to distance themselves emotionally from thoughts of their own mortality. Thus, by laughing at the fundamental incongruities of life and diminishing threats by turning them into objects of nonserious play, humor is a way of refusing to be overcome by the people and situations, both large and small, that threaten our well-being. [47] Owing to the transformative power of humor, Ruhl’s audience can take a more objective view of the situation and maintain control of their emotion while participating in the mourning. In psychological parlance, this type of humor is called “gallows humor,” which Katie Watson defines as “humor that treats serious, frightening, or painful subject matter in a light or satirical way.” [48] The term originally comes from Freud’s example of prisoners joking on their way to the gallows, and gallows humor can be distinguished from cruel or derogatory humor by the analogy of “whistling as you go through the graveyard” versus “kicking over the gravestones.” [49] According to clinical psychologist Thomas Kuhlman, gallows humor flourishes in a hopeless situation that “justifies the psychological shift from a goal-directed frame of mind to a playful one.” [50] Likewise, Ruhl’s humorous representations of bereavement introduced above take the audience away from a rationalist and goal-driven perspective to a playful state of mind. While intellect is an important component of this process, the physiological function of laughter, which usually accompanies humor, is also critical. According to the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, a proponent of the relief theory along the line of Freud, laughter is “purposeless” in the sense that, unlike fear that makes a person run from the danger, laughter is not directed to “special ends”; it is just “an uncontrolled discharge of energy.” [51] Likewise, humor in Ruhl’s E-affect mainly serves an affective or physiological function. The aforementioned incongruities—the fairytale version of the Underworld, Gordon’s and her mother’s unusual circumstances of deaths involving lobster bisque and barbecue fire, and the motif of killing jokes—not only set an emotionally ambiguous tone throughout the plays but also allow the audience to release their emotional tension though laughter. Here, the point of such relief is not to prevent or repress their grief—if so, why represent grief in the first place?—but to help them grieve well as they rehearse bereavement. Navigating sorrow in the comic mode, Ruhl’s plays lead the audience to laugh through grief or grieve through laughter as a result of empathy. Unlike Brecht, Ruhl’s E-affect is not opposed to grief, but it does resist an excess of grief lest one should fail to recover from the overwhelming emotion. It guides the audience through their mourning process without necessitating a sober inspection of the situation to find a practical solution. According to Ruhl, “laughter is a kind of acceptance” since it is to acquiesce to the view that “life is funny, because it’s both tragic and bizarre.” [52] Critics such as Charles Isherwood, Peter Marks, and David Rooney have used the word “whimsical” to describe Ruhl’s antirealist and fluid dramaturgy but that is in fact what her plays show life itself to be. By inducing the audience to laugh at life’s most difficult experience represented on stage, Ruhl challenges them to face life’s uncertainties with courage. Conclusion: Towards a Theatre of Emotional Freedom Today’s Brechtian scholarship, even after the publication of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre , which problematizes “the overpowering authority of Brecht” and defines postdramatic theatre as “a post-Brechtian theatre ,” is still heavily concerned with the question of empathy with the materialist premises and implications of V-effect taken for granted. [53] For instance, David Krasner and Paul Woodruff find fault with Brecht’s narrow view of empathy and redefine it as both an emotional and cognitive response fundamental to theatrical spectatorship. Other major Brechtian scholars aforementioned have challenged the conventional understanding of Brecht’s stance towards emotion by making a notable case for Brecht’s transition to a positive assessment of emotion later in his career. The central question is whether emotion necessarily encumbers rational criticism or not. While Brecht and his critics all acknowledge the importance of emotional engagement in theatre spectatorship, their views presuppose the utilitarian credo that emotion should contribute to socio-political agenda somehow. However, this focus on “effects—identifiable social outcomes, messages or impacts,” as Thompson argues, can lead us to overlook “the radical potential of the freedom to enjoy beautiful radiant things .” [54] In this respect, Ruhl’s E-affect supplies us with an alternative model to Brecht’s epic theatre to understand and describe other types of non-realist drama that have so far been discussed in relation to his name and focus on affect instead. Even though Ruhl does not make practical suggestions as to how one can bring a lost person back or avert death, I would argue that her plays of mourning are graced with profound insight in their earnest and extraordinary explorations of some of life’s most grievous experiences. Despite considerable development in science and medicine, there are many questions yet to be answered and we are still mortal beings subject to forces larger than life. Against our wish, unfortunate events do occur, demanding the serenity to accept what we cannot change and ready ourselves to deal with the aftermath of what must come to pass. In this regard, Ruhl’s sincere engagement with such matters deserves attention for learning to accept is as important as fighting to fix a problem. Grieving for the sake of grieving does not simply mean abandonment, lack of purpose, or being selfish and indifferent to others. Rather, it means pleasure and freedom in Ruhl’s theatre. Fornés believes that life is “not constantly about wanting to get something from somebody else”—as most American actors are taught within the realist tradition—but about pleasure, particularly “the pleasure of communication.” [55] In Ruhl’s plays of mourning, death is closely linked to community, and the community literally includes the dead: Eurydice’s father, Gordon, and Matilde’s late parents. This communal aspect of her plays evokes the essential affinity between theatre and mourning. In many ways, theatre itself can be seen to be a place of mourning. In the Western classical formulation, for example, theatre evokes multiple losses, restaging past events and resuscitating the voices of those who are no longer there. At the same time, it enables an “acting out” of projective losses, those phantasmatic griefs that remain unspoken within the performance of everyday life. [56] Ruhl’s theatre is meant to be a gathering space of people made of flesh and blood, with feelings and desires, and entitled to laugh and cry without being told to stop being melodramatic and channel their emotion into some socially productive action. As a playwright, Ruhl’s genuine interest in grief and emotion contributes to increased “appreciation of the roles of feeling and of bodies in making meaning,” which “recalibrates historical hierarchies of meaning which have denigrated bodies, feelings and, for that matter, theatre and performance.” [57] For the audience, Ruhl’s theatre allows its human subjects to exist outside the burden of utility, celebrate their emotional freedom and have the pleasure of communication with each other—even with the dead—whether in laughing or mourning, or doing both at the same time. References [1] Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Keller, On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss (New York: Scribner, 2005), 205. [2] Sandra M. Gilbert, Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 261. [3] Leslie Atkins Durham, Women’s Voices on American Stages in the Early Twenty-First Century: Sarah Ruhl and Her Contemporaries (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 31. [4] Brecht, Bertolt, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic , ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 192. The most widely accepted English translation of Verfremdung has been “alienation” since the publication of John Willett’s collection of Brecht’s essays, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic , published in 1964. However, the accuracy of this translation has been contested by several scholars. According to Michael Patterson, for instance, the closest English translation is “distanciation,” and Robert Gordon has pointed out that Verfremdung can be more accurately translated as “strange-making” or “distancing.” See Michael Patterson, “Brecht’s Legacy” in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht , ed. Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 273-87 (274); Robert Gordon, The Purpose of Playing: Modern Acting Theories in Perspective (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 233. In this article, I use ‘estrangement’ as the general term for the theatrical method of making something strange whether in the strictly Brechtian sense or not, chiefly because the word most immediately communicates the idea of making something ‘strange.’ Also, the rarely adopted phrase ‘estrangement effect’ itself makes V-effect unfamiliar, which is the partial aim of the current essay. [5] See James Al-Shamma, Sarah Ruhl: A Critical Study of the Plays (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), 187. [6] Ana Fernández-Caparrós, “Death and the Community of Comic Romance: Sarah Ruhl’s Poetics of Transformation in Dead Man’s Cell Phone ,” Contemporary Theatre Review 25, no.4 (2015): 489. [7] Megan Watkins, “Desiring Recognition, Accumulating Affect,” in The Affect Theory Reader , ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 269. In a similar vein, Brian Massumi defines affect as “an ability to affect and be affected” and “a prepersonal intensity” rather than a personal feeling. See Brian Massumi, “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments,” in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), xvi. [8] “Affect,” Merriam-Webster , https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/affect (accessed 5 August 2018). [9] Silvan S. Tomkins, “The Quest for Primary Motives: Biography and Autobiography of an Idea” in Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S. Tomkins , ed. E. Virginia Demos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 58. [10] James Thompson, Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 119. [11] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke University Press, 2003), 19. [12] Sarah Ruhl, Dead Man’s Cell Phone (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2008), 80. [13] Sarah Ruhl, “The Clean House,” in The Clean House and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006), 7. [14] In this regard, it is significant that the terminally-ill cancer patient Ana in The Clean House spends her last days in Lane’s house instead of the hospital, the modern institution that has had “local monopoly on death” since the twentieth century. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death Over the Last One Thousand Years (2nd ed.), trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 584. So, when Ana dies in her house, Lane, the doctor, starts panicking and says, “I’ve never seen someone die in a house before. Only in a hospital.” Ruhl, “The Clean House,” 106. Ana’s choice literally brings death home in order to show that it is an undeniable part of our everyday life. [15] Sarah Ruhl, “Six Small Thoughts on Fornés, the Problem of Intention, and Willfulness,” Theatre Topics 11, no. 2 (2001): 197. [16] Silvan S. Tomkins, Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S. Tomkins , ed. E. Virginia Demos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 51. [17] Brecht, Brecht on Theatre , 14. [18] R. Darren Gobert, “Cognitive Catharsis in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, ” Modern Drama 49, no. 1 (2006): 13. [19] Darko Suvin, “Emotion, Brecht, Empathy vs. Sympathy,” Brecht Jahrbuch / The Brecht Yearbook 33 (2008): 58. [20] Similarly to Gobert and Suvin, Thorsteinsson holds that “Brecht’s late dramatic theory” in the 1940s is “more eager to chart the territory of production through an affective, emotional, and bodily exploration.” Vidar Thorsteinsson, “‘This Great Passion for Producing’: The Affective Reversal of Brecht’s Dramatic Theory,” Cultural Critique 97 (2017): 58. Thompson also argues that affect was an integral part of Brecht’s epic theatre. Thompson, Performance Affects , 129–130. [21] See Paul Woodruff, “Engaging Emotion in Theater: A Brechtian Model in Theater History,” The Monist 71, no. 2 (1988): 237. [22] John Rouse, “Brecht and the Contradictory Actor,” in Acting (Re)Considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide , ed. Phillip B. Zarrilli (New York: Routledge, 2002), 255. [23] Brecht, Brecht on Theatre , 202. [24] According to Jennifer Heller, Charles wrongly chooses “a thing” (“yew”) over “a human connection” (“you”). Jennifer Heller, “‘To Follow Pleasure’s Sway’: Atomism in Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House ,” Modern Drama , 60, no. 4 (2017): 443. [25] Ruhl, “The Clean House,” 63. [26] Ibid., 26. [27] Robert Leach, “Mother Courage and Her Children,” in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht , ed. Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 135. [28] Peter Marks, who saw the Wooly Mammoth Theatre production in 2005, notes that “Ruhl intermittently has subtitles flashed on a panel above the set, as if her characters were the subjects of a documentary.” According to him, some of the subtitles are “mere recitations of apparent events” while others “offer ironic commentary.” Peter Marks, “‘Clean House’: A Lemon-Fresh Shine,” The Washington Post , 19 July 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/18/AR2005071801502.html (accessed 1 August 2018). [29] Ruhl, “Eurydice,” in The Clean House and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006), 373. [30] Ibid., 406. [31] Kübler-Ross and Keller, On Grief and Grieving , 24. [32] Ruhl, Dead Man’s Cell Phone , 49. [33] Al-Shamma, Sarah Ruhl , 39. [34] John Morreall, introduction to The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor , ed. by John Morreall (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987) 3–6. [35] Ibid., 6. [36] Salvatore Attardo also sees the tripartite division as a “commonly accepted classification” and notes that the three theories are “not incompatible” with each other. Salvatore Attardo, Linguistic Theories of Humor (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), 47–49. [37] Here’s lines 467-70 from Virgil’s Georgics IV, for instance: “The jaws of a Spartan cavern, Death’s towering gateway, / and the grove miasmic with black dread—he entered them / and came to the realm of the dead with its fearsome king, / their hearts impossible to soften with living prayers.” Virgil and Janet Lembke, Virgil’s Georgics: A New Verse Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 75. [38] Ruhl, “Eurydice,” 343. [39] Ruhl, Dead Man’s Cell Phone , 82; Ruhl, “The Clean House,” 109. [40] Ruhl, Dead Man’s Cell Phone , 61. [41] Although death from laughter is rare and not usually discussed as a serious research topic in medicine, there have been several reports of the case in history, mostly caused by asphyxiation or heart failure. One of the earliest records comes from Book VII of Diogenes Laertius (meaning “Lives of Eminent Philosophers”) which gives the account that the Ancient Greek scholar Chrysippus died after “a violent fit of laughter,” looking at his donkey eating his figs. R. D. Hicks, ed., Diogenes Laertius (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, 1972), http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=D.%20L (accessed 25 July 2018). A more recent and credible case is that of Alex Mitchell, the Scottish bricklayer who “died from heart failure after laughing non-stop at The Goodies ” in 1975. Although the cause of his death was simply thought to be a cardiac arrest at that time, doctors now believe that Mitchell had Long QT syndrome, “a rare form disease which causes irregular heartbeats,” based on his granddaughter’s abnormal heart condition. Andrew Levy, “Doctors Solve Mystery of a Man Who ‘Died from Laughter’ While Watching The Goodies after His Granddaughter Nearly Dies from Same Rare Heart Condition,” Mail Online , last modified 20 June, 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2162102/Doctors-solve-mystery-man-died-laughter-watching-The-Goodies-granddaughter-nearly-dies-rare-heart-condition.html (accessed 15 June 2018). For people of normal health, death from laughter is simply a joke. [42] Marc Silberman, “Bertolt Brecht, Politics, and Comedy,” Social Research 79, no. 1 (2012): 170. [43] Ibid. [44] Wendy Weckwerth, “More Invisible Terrains,” Theater 34, no. 2 (2004): 32. [45] John Lahr, “Surreal Life: The plays of Sarah Ruhl,” The New Yorker , 17 March 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/03/17/surreal-life (accessed 20 May 2018). [46] Al-Shamma, Sarah Ruhl , 43. [47] Rod A. Martin, The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach (San Diego: Elsevier, 2007), 19. [48] Katie Watson, “Gallows Humor in Medicine,” Hastings Center Report 41, no. 5 (2011): 38. [49] D. Wear, et al, “Derogatory and Cynical Humor Directed towards Patients: Views of Residents and Attending Doctors,” Medical Education 43 (2009): 39. [50] Thomas L. Kuhlman, “Gallows Humor for a Scaffold Setting: Managing Aggressive Patients on a Maximum-Security Forensic Unit,” Hospital and Community Psychiatry 39, no. 10 (1988): 1087. [51] Herbert Spencer, “The Physiology of Laughter,” in The Bibliophile Library of Literature, Art, and Rare Manuscripts , vol. 22, ed. Nathan Haskell Dole, Forrest Morgan, and Caroline Ticknor (New York: International Bibliophile Society, 1904), 7566. [52] Alexis Greene, ed., Women Writing Plays: Three Decades of The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 138. [53] Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (New York: Routledge, 2006), 29, 33; italics in original. [54] Thompson, Performance Affects , 6; emphasis in original. [55] Quoted in Ruhl, “Six Small Thoughts on Fornés,” 187, 197. [56] Adrian Kear and Deborah Lynn Steinberg, “Ghost Writing,” in Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief , ed. Kear and Steinberg (London: Routledge, 1999), 6. [57] Paul Allain and Jen Harvie, Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance , 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2014), 149. Footnotes About The Author(s) Seokhun Choi holds a PhD in theatre from the University of Kansas and is currently Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Seoul. He has widely published on contemporary American and Korean theatre and popular culture, and his essays have appeared in Korean and international journals including Journal of American Drama and Theatre , Ecumenica: Journal of Theatre and Performance , and Theatre Research International . His two forthcoming articles (fall 2019) deal with two recent Shakespeare productions in South Korea and will appear in Kritika Kultura and Asian Theatre Journal , respectively. He is also a co-editor of the 2017 special issue of Cultural Studies Review on media, mobilities and identity in Asia. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Tom Grady Bristol Community College Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Tom Grady Bristol Community College By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Kelvin Roster Jr. in Fences at Trinity Rep. Photo: Marisa Lenardson. The Good John Proctor Talene Monahon (7 Sept. – 12 Nov.) Becky Nurse of Salem Sarah Ruhl (21 Sept.- 10 Nov.) A Christmas Carol Adapted from Charles Dickens (9 Nov. – 31 Dec.) La Broa’ (Broad Street) Orlando Hernández (18 Jan. – 18 Feb.) Fences August Wilson (21 Mar. – 28 Apr.) La Cage Aux Folles Music and Lyrics Jerry Herman, Book Harvey Fierstein, Adapted from Jean Poiret (30 May – 30 Jun.) Trinity Repertory Company’s 60th season was equal parts crowd-pleasing ( A Christmas Carol, Fences, La Cage Aux Folles ) and risk taking with topical, newer plays ( The Good John Proctor, Becky Nurse of Salem, La Broa’ [Broad Street] ). The latter trio investigated current issues such as immigration, #MeToo , and the opioid crisis. However, while staging these plays fulfilled Trinity’s mission to engage “our diverse community in a continuing dialogue,” these choices may have prioritized issues over dramatic craft. The other three works, culled from the theatrical canon, were exceptionally well-executed. ( La Cage Aux Folles’s opening postdated this writer’s deadline and will not be reviewed here.) Arthur Miller took a double drubbing in Trinity’s two play season opener where contemporary, female playwrights questioned the primacy—and historic veracity—of The Crucible , one of Miller’s most popular plays. Sarah Ruhl’s Becky Nurse of Salem and Talene Monahon’s The Good John Proctor, playing in repertory on the same minimalist but evocative stage, placed Miller’s The Crucible in their crosshairs, exposing the cringeworthy core of Miller’s concoction, namely his ascribing the source of all the Salem witch hysteria at the buckle-shoed feet of a woman scorned. Even worse, the actual Abigail Williams was 11 years old, but Miller aged her to 17. Perhaps this was an attempt to ameliorate the 60-year-old Proctor’s grooming of the recently orphaned child put into his care. The Good John Proctor is an imagined prequel to The Crucible focusing on the relationship between Abigail and Betty, Proctor’s nine-year-old daughter. Miller’s veiled fear and loathing of women was summarily MeToo’d as Monahon found the source of all of Salem’s evil was indeed at the hands of men. A challenging premise to explore. But this play had its troubles, too. The two children were cast as adults, and 17th century vernacular was swapped for present-day Kardashian speak: I am so over churning butter! These postmodern attempts to be more appealing to a modern audience effectively put air quotes around the horror of what was happening to these two girls. And while the production was well-paced and well-acted, the script’s overreliance on the particulars of The Crucible created a distancing effect for those unfamiliar with its source material. Less dependent was Ruhl’s Becky Nurse of Salem . Tightly staged by Artistic Director, Curt Columbus, it too skewered Miller, but its tone was less arch and more Norman Lear, blending sitcom laughs with our hottest topical issues and losing some focus along the way. The play’s intention was to show a connection between Becky, a present-day descendant of the original accused witch Rebecca Nurse, and how they endure societal misogyny that spans over 350 years. So, when the opioid crisis made its entrance late in the game, the production’s dramatic action became increasingly muddled. Trinity’s annual staging of A Christmas Carol carries a burden to balance presenting Dickens’s core narrative while staying fresh and worthy of seeing repeatedly. Trinity is smart to start from scratch with a complete overhaul every year. If this year’s production had a distinct vibe, it would be that of RuPaul’s Drag Race . We were visited by three ghosts with as much bedazzling and show-stopping entrances as you could handle. Next came the season’s most ambitious undertaking, and the highwater mark for Trinity’s aspirations to “reinvent the public square.” La Broa’ (Broad Street) is a memory play commemorating 50 years of Providence’s Latino community. The framing device is a story of two women: one is a student journalist of sorts, and the other is the neighborhood abuela (grandmother), who imparts the student with tales of immigrating from the Dominican Republic. And there are many stories to tell, perhaps too many. The play is a bit overeager and could benefit from some judicious dramaturgical pruning. It was most compelling when it went beyond the rather thin surface tension of its present-day conflict (will the student persuade the abuela to tell her story?) to investigate complex issues of loss, diaspora, and intercultural prejudice. It was also quite funny, with a hard-working ensemble playing multiple characters, zipping in and out of a myriad of entrances. Of particular note was the remarkable use of bilingualism as both a story element and an integrated method of storytelling. The highlight of the season was the revival of August Wilson’s 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences . Director Christopher Windom knows how to calibrate the momentum of this operatic behemoth. He created an environment where actors were truly listening and playing off each other. For many, the climax of the play is Troy Maxson’s existential “Death ain’t nothing” monologue. Kelvin Roston Jr. was so inside the character of Troy that when he essentially bayed at the moon in rage and defiance, it was one of the most inexorably shattering moments of this stellar production. On a national level, people look to Trinity as an anchor of excellence, representation, and innovation. Here’s hoping Trinity’s next 60 years continue to strive for that balance of principles and excellence. 2024-25 Season: POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive by Selina Fillinger; Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson – Apt. 2B by Kate Hamill; A Christmas Carol by c; Someone Will Remember Us by Deborah Salem Smith and Charlie Thurston; La Tempestad — The Tempest by William Shakespeare; translated and adapted by Tatyana-Marie Carlo, Leandro “Kufa” Castro, and Orlando Hernández; Blues for an Alabama Sky by Pearl Cleage. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Tom Grady is a playwright whose work has been staged by notable companies like Trinity Repertory Company and The Drama League. He was a story consultant for David Henry Hwang’s Tony-nominated Flower Drum Song . His play An American Cocktail won the Clauder Competition, while Global Village earned the Dallas Theatre Critics Forum Award and was a finalist for a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. He wrote and co-directed Symposium , starring Oscar-nominated Margaret Avery, winning awards at fifteen festivals. Grady holds a BA in Film and a Master’s in English, and he teaches at Bristol Community College in New Bedford, MA. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Becca Levy and Jared Rubin Sprowls 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 Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship Becca Levy and Jared Rubin Sprowls By Published on May 16, 2023 Download Article as PDF What began as a peer-reviewed research paper naturally grew into a dramaturgical adaptation of chevruta , a centuries old Rabbinic approach to interpreting Jewish texts. The style of this paper mimics our process of multiple voices in conversation. In chevruta , dialogue is necessary as one voice can’t capture the depth of a text; we can only approach understanding through discussion and interpretation. Through this lens, we push against prioritizing finality (a deadline, production, or publication) which dictates a linear process. Rather, we hold space to return again, offering a process that spans a lifetime as both the people and art deepen and unfold. We share authorship below, identifying the writer above each section. Though our names signify what we initially wrote, through revision, our voices continue to overlap, always in conversation. As we consider how this lens is valuable for new work development, both Jewish and non-Jewish, we invite you to engage in our reflection of Fringe Sects’ script development as a fellow chevruta partner: our voice, your voice, and the text. Jared In March 2020, I was finally ready to write my “Jewish play” based on a Buzzfeed article a friend sent to me a year prior: “Finding Kink in God: Inside The World Of Brooklyn Dominatrixes And Their Orthodox Jewish Clients.” [1] This article complicated the stereotype of Jewish sexuality I saw being portrayed on stage and screen: Jews as less sexual and less desirable. Expanding what a Jewish “man,” “woman,” or “relationship” looked like felt important to my own understanding of Jewish queerness and an inquiry I could share with my community. COVID interrupted that plan as Jewish sexuality onstage was no longer an urgent exploration, instead it was the last thing on my mind. What we thought would be a few weeks of mandated isolation became months. As Passover approached, I felt detached from my Jewish identity without the ability to invite friends over for Seder. The holiday traditions, rooted in community, didn’t feel the same with only me and my two roommates skimming through the Haggadah. In August 2021, I moved to Tempe, Arizona to pursue an MFA in Dramatic Writing. Fear of isolation continued, and I wondered what I’d do for the upcoming High Holidays. Rosh Hashanah felt like an opportunity for a new chapter in the desert, but I wondered if anyone would be there to join me. Becca That’s where our Research Methods course comes in; it was my first semester of grad school as well, beginning the MFA program in Theatre for Youth and Community at ASU. I had also just moved to Tempe from Chicago, and much to my delight and surprise the old song “Wherever you go there’s always someone Jewish” [2] proved to be true. I overheard Jared talking about Jewish dominatrixes and had to learn more. Jared As I discussed revisions to my research question, I vividly remember Becca leaning over to join the conversation. Another Jewish woman to discuss Jewish womanhood and femininity? Baruch Hashem! On that day, I was paired with Clara, whose Hebrew necklace had sparked conversation a class prior. Marissa would soon ask what we were doing for Rosh Hashanah. She too had overheard the musings of Jewish study and wanted to join. We had all worried that we’d be the only Jew in the program and were relieved to have found each other so quickly. Becca Jared and I requested to be paired for the final round of peer review. What was scheduled to be a brief meeting about our papers over coffee became a multi-hour conversation relating our artistry to our values and our values to our Judaism. We intuitively worked as chevruta: a non-hierarchical dyadic practice of Jewish text study rooted in traditional methods going back centuries. A chevruta partnership is a meaningful and holy relationship through which we understand text, and our relationship to text, more fully. The word chevruta comes from the Hebrew root chet, vet, reish, chaver , meaning “friend,” emphasizing that this relationship is between more than peers or colleagues. In fact, it’s not just a relationship between two voices, but three: two people and the text. Scholarly discourse around Fringe Sects was a catalyst for our partnership, while genuine friendship became central to our ongoing collaboration. Jared was researching about Jewish gender and sexuality while more deeply connecting with Jewish ways of being through his writing. Jared Where do the stereotypes, roles, and ideas of Jewish women come from? Who perpetuates them within our community and how does that differ from what we see in the media? Becca In my initial notes, I wrote about the importance of discoveries, using this play to reveal Jewish challenges and provide space for healing while weaving the Jewish with the universal– Jared Questions and themes that simultaneously drew me into Becca’s research. Becca What is the relationship between creativity, identity, and values in Jewish artmaking spaces? Grad school was the opportunity to further explore our embodied knowledge through research and practice. Jared Research and practice exist over coffee as much as they exist in conferences and classrooms. I got to know Becca through her research, and I better understood her research by getting to know Becca. Becca We spent the next semester together in a graduate Dramaturgy Workshop course. One of our first readings was from Geoffrey Proehl’s Towards a Dramaturgical Sensibility ; I sent Jared a text, “Ok so I finally started the reading this morning and tbh I think a dramaturgical sensibility is just simply how Jews read Torah” [3] [4] . I quickly recognized in Proehl’s description of dramaturgical practice a kinship with Jewish ways of thinking, conversing, and analyzing. Jared “Isn’t there a Jewish thing about rehearing the Torah and the purpose of that? Helping me connect dramaturgy and Judaism again” [5] , I texted Becca as we continued to quip that “dramaturgy is Jewish.” It became our special segment in class where we reflected on how teachings from Jewish synagogue, camp, and school prepared us to analyze text as dramaturgs. Later that semester, I assembled a team for a staged reading of Fringe Sects at ASU: Marissa as director, Becca as dramaturg, and Clara, Matt (the only other Jew in our MFA program) and Sam (a non-Jewish MFA peer) as actors. The energy of the rehearsal room was immediately alive – Becca Is the milk a reference to milk and honey? Jared I hadn’t even thought of that. Becca What about the Binding of Isaac? Jared That sounds like BDSM. Becca Our playful yet serious conversations around script development were contagious, or perhaps Jared had just gathered the perfect group for this week-long rehearsal process. We were more than Jewish artists chosen for a Jewish play; we were friends. In our first few months of grad school, we had already spent High Holidays, birthdays, and Chanukah together, discussed art that was important to us, and reflected on the ways our Judaism connected us even when it manifested differently. In fact, the different shades of Judaism were what we celebrated most: the variety of latke recipes, family and community traditions, or the way we pronounced “bimah.” Questioning, connecting, and respecting the multitude of text interpretations based on our diverse lived experiences were the foundation upon which the script could develop so significantly in such a short amount of time. Reflecting upon the process, it is clear that this ensemble intuitively worked from a place of shared values. Jared It was interpretive. It was direct. It was Jewish. Becca Jared and I always bring these values into our creative practice. Through this process we affirmed that we practice those values creatively in specifically Jewish ways. Text Messages between Jared and Becca during Fringe Sects development. Jared Although I had been in a new work development space with other Jewish artists, I had never felt that a room was guided by a Jewish way of reading text in the way this process was. Sam’s active participation proved that anyone can engage with text in this way. Not only did this way of working benefit the script, but it was life-giving. I was no longer an isolated writer but an artist in the community. Becca Going deeper into the etymology of chevruta, the Hebrew chaver (friend) derives from the Aramaic, chibor , meaning “to bind together.” In this process, chevruta partners’ understanding of text becomes bound together in discussion, creating something entirely new with what is on the page. Below is an example of a text study where a peer and I engaged with the very first Torah portion. The first translation you’ll read is a more standard version and the second is a collaborative translation discovered in shared study. While working with the text, I was drawn to the word “ ruach ” which translates to “wind” or “spirit” and my partner noticed “ pnei ” which can mean “surface” or “face.” We excitedly investigated more translations and read the text anew. Together, we uncovered a translation that neither of us would have found on our own. Hebrew words with multiple meanings are illustrated below in corresponding colors. I invite you to notice what is the same, what is different, and how these changes influence your understanding of the text. When God created heaven and earth , the earth was chaos and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God fluttering over the surface of the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2) When The Universe began to create sky and land , the land was without form and void. Behold darkness over the face of the abyss and the spirit of Creation floating over the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2) [6] Stereotypical depictions of dramaturgy seem so isolating– an image of a lonely scholar with their head in their laptop or a book comes to mind; it’s not so different from the rabbi locked in their study or b’nai mitzvah student up in their room, practicing their Torah portion alone. But these are all misrepresentations of reality. To be Jewish is to congregate. To make theatre is to congregate. In the process of working together we bond with one another and the work binds to the point where it’s sometimes hard to know where one person’s idea ends and another’s begins. Jared and I intuitively did this work with our research papers, with everything we read in Dramaturgy Workshop, and with our collaboration on Fringe Sects . Jared Below is a visual representation of our chevruta-inspired conversations analyzing a paragraph from the opening monologue of the play, Rabbi Moshe’s Rosh Hashanah sermon, which we’ve retroactively formatted in the style of rabbinic commentary of Talmud. Visual representation of chevruta-inspired conversation between Becca and Jared on Fringe Sects script text. Becca Rabbi Adina Allen writes, “Like the parchment wound around the Torah handles, our reading of this story is not circular, but spiral. We move along the same axis, but drop in and down, unearthing new meanings in the cracks of our old stories” [7] . This concept of time provides repetition while acknowledging that with repetition comes a new depth of experience in the present. During our collaboration on Fringe Sects , Jared and I trusted each other to continue to drop in and down in the reading and re-reading, writing, and re-writing, talking and re-talking of the script. We built trust and a shared language through cultural understanding, shared values, and unearthing new meanings while the script developed. The play is set during The Ten Days of Awe, the time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when we’re tasked with Tshuvah. Tshuvah means to “return:” to return to right relationship with one another, the world around us, and ourselves. We return to something old or familiar – an ancient practice, text, or question. We seek to find something new, not in hopes of the perfect answer or action, but to embrace the multiplicity of interpretations and meaning-making as part of the process. Jared Even in the process of writing this article, we return again. Remembering text messages we forgot we had sent, making notes for our next stage of development. Becca (I still want Jared to add the shehecheyanu into that scene). Jared (I will). Becca These conversations ground us because there’s always something new to uncover. Jared If chevruta is three voices, our process contains even more: playwright, dramaturg, director, cast, characters, script, research, prayer, Torah, and Talmud. If Jewish text, ancient and unchanging, contains such multitudes, we must listen to all possibilities as a new work finds its voice. To give a script agency is to understand that it will never actually be finished… Becca …but it is always where it’s supposed to be. Jared Jewish values tell us that we too are not finished and that growth is a lifelong process. Becca As the spiral continues to deepen, may we delight in moments of synchronicity and express gratitude for moments of divergence. Jared & Becca As this article concludes, we invite you to bring yourself into our chevruta practice. In doing so you join us in community and together we begin again. References [1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahfrishberg/dominatrixes-orthodox-jewish-haredi-kink-bdsm-brooklyn [2] Milder, Rabbi Larry. “Wherever You Go There’s Always Someone Jewish.” [3] Levy, Becca. Text message to Jared Sprowls. 23 Jan. 2022. [4] Proehl, Goeffrey. Towards a Dramaturgical Sensibility: Landscape and Journey . Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008. [5] Sprowls, Jared. Text message to Becca Levy. 30 Jan. 2022. [6] This text study and my learnings on chevruta come from Becca’s time with the Jewish Studio Project . She has been participating in the Jewish Studio Process, a Jewish art-making and text study practice, with them since May 2020 and is currently part of their Creative Facilitator Training Cohort. [7] Allen, Rabbi Adina. “The Kernel of the Yet-to-Come.” My Jewish Learning , 21 Oct. 2022, https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-kernel-of-the-yet-to-come/amp/ . Footnotes About The Author(s) BECCA LEVY is an arts educator and theatre artist who facilitates educational programs and theatrical productions that center community, celebrate culture, and foster creativity for people of all ages. Becca worked as a teaching artist, arts program manager, and stage manager in Chicago after earning her BFA in Stage Management from Western Michigan University. Currently studying for an MFA in Theatre for Youth and Community at Arizona State University, her praxis explores the relationship between creativity and values, drawing from many years of work and play in Jewish arts programming and theatre teaching artistry. www.beccaglevy.com JARED RUBIN SPROWLS is a Chicago-based playwright currently in Tempe, Arizona pursuing an MFA in Dramatic Writing at Arizona State University. His work has been produced Off-Broadway through the Araca Project, as well as at Northwestern University and the Skokie Theatre. He is a 2018 O’Neill NPC Semi-finalist and has been a part of Available Light’s Next Stage Initiative, the New Coordinates’ Writers’ Room 6.0, and Jackalope Theatre’s Playwrights Lab. He is a project-based staff member with Crossroads Antiracism Organizing and Training. He holds a B.A. with Honors in Theatre from Northwestern 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 Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater 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 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Bradley Stephenson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 2 Visit Journal Homepage Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter Bradley Stephenson By Published on April 23, 2015 Download Article as PDF From 1892 until 1954, Ellis Island was the gateway for immigrants seeking American citizenship. Over twelve million individuals passed through the federal immigration station, underwent rushed and haphazard examinations, and eventually entered the country. Many had their names changed and ethnicities homogenized. But many thousands more were rejected for various reasons, including the likelihood that an individual would become a public charge. Historian Kim Neilsen has argued that this clause “clearly assumed that bodies considered defective rendered them unable to perform wage-earning labor.”[1] Physical or cognitive differences were literally marked in chalk on people’s backs as they passed by the inspectors, and markings such as PH (physically handicapped), X (possible mental illness), and S (senility) were grounds for rejection and deportation.[2] Strong, able bodies capable of working independently and earning wages were considered crucial criteria for American citizenship. Such assumptions of ability and dependency in relation to American identity have permeated American culture and artistic cultural representations to the extent that they have developed to mythic proportions. However, many artists are beginning to challenge these cultural assumptions and the oppressive structures which undergird them. D.W. Gregory is a Washington D.C. based playwright who has written dozens of plays, many of which are set in rural and working-class America. She is a resident playwright at New Jersey Repertory Co. and a member of Playwrights Center in Minneapolis. Gregory is also a teaching artist and founding member of The Playwrights’ Gymnasium in D.C., and she has worked as a theatre critic for The Washington Post. Her plays have garnered numerous awards and have been developed and performed throughout the United States at theatres including New Jersey Repertory Co., Actors Theatre of Louisville, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Co., and others. She conducted an interview with Caridad Svich that was recently published in the collection 24 Gun Control Plays published by NoPassport theatre alliance.[3] Drawing upon her working class roots, her plays often explore “the disconnect between the dream and reality of American blue collar experience ,” and also “frequently present an unseen offstage character as well – the economic and political forces that shape the individuals on stage.”[4] In addition to predominantly female protagonists, disability is a powerful force that permeates her plays in unique ways that challenge traditional representations of disability in drama and can offer up new paradigms for representation, understanding, and inclusion of different forms of embodiment. D.W. Gregory’s 2003 play The Good Daughter, originally produced by New Jersey Rep and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, is a story of love and rebellion set in rural Missouri between 1916 and 1924. Critic Bob Rendell described the world premier as “a multifaceted, thought provoking traditional American play which stirs echoes of Eugene O’Neill;” others have noted similarities to William Inge’s Picnic.[5] The play also elicits echoes of King Lear as it tells “the story of Ned Owen, a pious Missouri farmer whose only hope is to see his daughters settled and his farm pass to the capable hands of one of their sons.”[6] Ned is a widower with three daughters, aged fourteen, nineteen, and twenty-one at the start of the play. The eldest daughter, Esther, survived childhood polio and now walks with a limp. Rudy Bird, a shy neighboring farmer, comes to the Owen estate to propose to Cassie, the beautiful middle daughter who has just fallen for Matt McCall, the dashing and worldly merchant trying to convince the locals to buy into a government-funded levee project to prevent floods in the Missouri River. Over the course of eight years and a great war, daughters leave home, shun suitors, get married, and get pregnant, yet nothing happens the way Ned wants it to. Highlighted with Brechtian super-titles, peppered with bible verses, and bookended by torrential floods, The Good Daughter is an epic yet intimate family tale of “a part of the country where change comes slowly, and at great price” (iii).[7] Ned’s desire for “capable” male heirs becomes a dominant trope in the play that influences how Ned treats his three daughters, their suitors, and the land itself, and also how those objects respond to their treatment and find new expressions of agency. This essay analyzes how D.W. Gregory explodes the myths of independence and the American Dream by subverting traditional dramatic representations of disability in The Good Daughter, exploring the intersections of gender, dependency, disability, and the environment. The notion of an American identity can be thought to have formally begun with the Declaration of Independence. This was the first formal, public statement about who Americans are as a collective people: we are independent.[8] As such, the notion of dependency has been anathema to American identity since the arrival of the pilgrims. The rags-to-riches characters of Horatio Alger earned their mythical status and their financial rewards by hard work and determination, not asking for help. Yet “dependency” itself, some would argue, is an ideological term that shapes social perspectives just as much as describing them.[9] Some political conservatives argue that government entitlement programs are equivalent to hand-outs and lead to a dependency that is detrimental and contrary to the spirit of America.[10] Historian and political scholar Rickie Solinger claims that dependency, as epitomized by welfare programs, “is the dirtiest word in the United States today.”[11] To be dependent on another person for survival or day-to-day functioning is a social embarrassment and a cultural flaw that needs to be eradicated, or at least hidden away from public sight.[12] Independent American thinking holds that dependent people have no need to be educated, either, since they have no chance of success in American life , so it is no surprise that people with disabilities generally received no education, were hidden from view (if the family was able to afford such institutionalization), and if they could not be medically “cured,” then they were kicked out and forced to be beggars. The result was a great cultural anxiety towards public disability. Disability scholar Alison Kafer explores some of these cultural anxieties surrounding disability in American culture, suggesting that disability (especially when coupled with female-ness) is viewed in the United States as “an unredeemable difference with no place in visions of the future.”[13] To be disabled, and especially to be a disabled woman, was to be disqualified from the American dream and its notions of progress, independence, and ability. This worldview was especially powerful during the early twentieth century, the age of immigration, and the time in which D.W. Gregory set her play. In The Good Daughter, Ned Owen’s obsession with hard work, moral purity, and traditional family hierarchy is representative of an American conservatism that relocates the American Dream into a more personalized vision of happiness and home. When James Truslow Adams coined the phrase “the American dream” in 1931, he explained it as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.”[14] This notion of physical and mental ability as prerequisite for opportunity also assumed maleness and whiteness and was, for the most part, unquestioned throughout most of American history. Douglas Baynton has observed how this primacy of ability has been central to the justification of inequality in American history. Accusations that women were incapable of being educated or that racial minorities had smaller, defective brains are based upon the assumption that the white, able-bodied, heterosexual male was both “normal” and ideal.[15] In most cases, Baynton explains, the defense against these injustices was to argue, for example, that women are strong enough to be educated or that racial diversity is not correlative with deficient brains. However, neither the oppressor nor the oppressed ever questioned the assumption that lack of disability is prerequisite for participation in civic life. The question was only who was or was not able enough to have social and political rights. Until the disability rights movements of the late twentieth century, lack of disability was always considered part and parcel to full citizenship in America. It is not surprising, then, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt would not be allowed to be seen publicly in his wheelchair. As Paul Longmore describes it, “The capacity to function as a true American, an independent moral agent, is predicated upon physical and economic self-sufficiency.”[16] The disabled were not invited. Although we still have room to grow, Americans have come a long way in terms of who gets to participate in civic life, but it is within this pre-civil rights cultural understanding of disability that Gregory sets her play. Painted on the “rich canvas of our [American] history,” Gregory’s characterizations in The Good Daughter have been described by critics as both complex and compelling.[17] Since losing his wife during the birth of their third daughter, Ned Owen stayed focused on his biblical Christian faith, tending his farm, and protecting his daughters the best way he knows how. He is a deeply flawed but loving man; he is no villain. Although Ned fits rather neatly into classical tragic constructions, his eldest daughter Esther, disabled by childhood polio, does not. Victoria Ann Lewis and other scholars have noted the use of disability in drama and literature as a character trait that immediately identifies a disabled character as either victim or villain.[18] These portrayals of disability – Tiny Tim, Captain Hook, Laura Wingfield, Darth Vader, Charlie Babbit, and many others – stem from a medicalized understanding whereby disability is a flaw to be cured, overcome, or eliminated. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder argue that the use of disability in this way in literature and drama as “an opportunistic metaphorical device” affects the way that people living with disability live and understand their lives.[19] Metaphorical representations of disability affirm and shape discriminatory attitudes from pity to euthanasia. According to Lewis, “the metaphor of disability has been so successful in the imaginative arena that it now functions as real.”[20] The modern cultural imagination now perceives disability in life the way it has been depicted in literature, that people with disabilities can either be heroic sufferers or bitter cripples, or perhaps objects of inspiration when they overcome their disability to succeed in life. D.W. Gregory, however, resists these traditional tropes in her portrayal of disability. While Esther’s polio has given her a limp, it has not reduced her to a metaphor within the play. In act one, during a dinner scene, Ned is overly protective of Esther, the oldest daughter, age twenty-one at the start of the play. Though Esther has prepared the meal on her own for the family with no assistance, Ned orders Cassie, the rebellious middle daughter, to fetch him and Esther a “cuppa water” so as not to over exert her older sister (19). Though Cassie makes backhanded comments suggesting that everyone in the family is more than able to get their own beverage or take care of their own business, Ned insists that Cassie rehearse her domestic activities, including ostensibly taking care of the weak, since he believes Cassie is shortly to become engaged. The subtle protectiveness towards Esther is a sign that Ned perceives her as weak and in need of special care, or rather, in need of his pity towards her. Scholars and historians like Paul Longmore and Joseph Shapiro have thoroughly described the role that pity has played in the charity-driven marginalization of people with disabilities.[21] Ned treats Cassie the toughest since he sees her as the most able to perform her role: marry and have children. Ned’s special treatment of Esther could be perceived as favoritism or privilege of the elder or favorite child, but eventually it becomes clear that Gregory is crafting his patriarchal, ableist behavior as motivated by fear and pity not only towards Esther’s disability, but also to all three of his daughters. In act two, seven years later, there is a similar dinner scene, but the relationships have shifted significantly. Esther is still living at home and tending the house, but she also holds down a part time job in a local store. Rachel, the youngest daughter, now twenty-one years old, is married and very pregnant. Ned now behaves overly protective towards his pregnant daughter rather than Esther. Since Cassie ran away seven years ago at the end of the first act, and Esther is still unfit for marriage in his opinion, Rachel is his last hope at fulfilling his American dream and having someone (male) to pass his farm on to when he dies. Yet it is not just an effort at protecting the unborn child. Rachel’s mother died in childbirth – a loss Ned has mourned for over twenty years – and he recognizes how potentially deadly a pregnancy can be. Gregory makes the subtle connection between Esther’s and Rachel’s disability in a brief exchange among all three sisters. Cassie comments to Rachel: CASSIE: Such a change in your life, havin’ a baby. Someone dependin’ on you for everythin’. And what if you ain’t fit for it? RACHEL: Who says I ain’t fit for it? CASSIE: I didn’t mean – ESTHER (cutting her off) Rachel is as fit as anybody I know. (76) Esther recognizes the perception that both she and her pregnant sister are unfit for independent living and quickly cuts off the accusation. The infantilization and pity inherent in dependency is part of the American perception towards disability as weakness and flaw. There is even some contemporary debate and controversy about the consideration that pregnancy might be considered a temporary disability for purposes of insurance claims, discrimination practices, and/or parking places.[22] In any case, whether or not pregnancy is legally or socially considered a disability, Rachel eventually lashes out at the all-consuming nature of the pregnancy: “The baby, the baby, that’s all I ever hear is the baby” (92); she feels as if her life has become the condition itself. Ned considers the pregnant Rachel to be unable to adequately care for herself, and as such she is in need of his charitable protection. Ned is exhibiting what Lewis calls a kind of “colonial missionary attitude toward the disabled subject” that is reflective of a “larger social pattern in which the non-disabled expert […] controls the life options of the disabled person.”[23] Ned feels that he knows best and must control the actions and behaviors all three of his daughters for their own good, since he sees them as impaired and unable to do so themselves. This behavior stems from the terrifying prospect raised by disability that humans might not be in control of their own destinies. As Longmore puts it, “Disability imperils the American myth of the sovereignty of the self.”[24] If the story stopped there, if the daughters capitulated to their father’s demands, Ned’s victimizing behavior would simply be another portrayal of ableist American colonialism and the use of disability as narrative metaphor to justify oppression masked as benevolence. But Gregory does not stop there. Cassie returns from her self-imposed exile and Rachel offers her some tea, but Ned objects, saying, “‘Rachel. Let Esther do that. Rachel.’ Rachel ignores him and brings the tea tray” (65). In this brief act of defiance, Rachel momentarily reclaims her own subjectivity. It is a very subtle move, but in doing so Rachel defies the able-bodied expert, the doctors and telethon hosts who think they know what is best for disabled people and how to cure or protect them. However, a glass of tea does not a cultural revolution make; and the sexism of Ned expecting a woman to serve him tea still remains relatively unchallenged. These small acts of subjectivity, of asserting that being disabled is not the same as being useless, incapable, unfit, helpless, or voiceless, of claiming “nothing about us without us,” these small acts are the shifting of stones that can eventually lead to moving mountains.[25] In The Good Daughter, Ned believes deeply that independent capability (read ability) is at the heart of a Bible-based American life. He quotes liberally from the Christian Bible throughout the play and never strays from his able-bodied valuations of home, hearth, and hard work. Ned soon discovers that these abelist assumptions are not fully ingrained in his three daughters. Esther has taken over many of the homemaking responsibilities since her mother died fourteen years earlier. Though she has a mild flirtation with Rudy Bird, the neighboring tenant farmer, Ned assumes that Esther’s disability essentially renders her unfit for marriage or her own family: NED: Esther ain't never gonna marry. You know that. CASSIE: She ain't so bad lookin' if she'd just smile once in a while. NED: No man gonna marry a crippled girl. Man wants a girl can give him a family. CASSIE: Not every man. NED: Any man worth havin'. Now, that's a painful thing for her to accept. But it's a hard, sad fact of this world. Just like it’s a hard, sad fact of this world that a girl who puts off settlin’ on one fella or another pretty soon ends up with no fella at all. (24) Cassie, the rebellious middle daughter, does not perceive Esther’s limp as a disqualifier for marriage, nor does Cassie think that marriage and childbearing are the only viable life options for a woman in the new century, but Ned takes the assumption that Disability historian Paul Longmore has critiqued, “that disability corrupts one’s capacity for responsible choices.”[26] Solinger agrees and argues that dependency, especially in women, is seen as “inconsistent with sensible choices.”[27] Ned is insistent on instilling his patriarchal version of common sense and teaching what he thinks are the truths of life: that every woman needs a man, and crippled girls can’t produce a family. Thus Cassie needs to settle down and start a family – since Esther cannot do so and the youngest daughter, Rachel, is still a little too young – so that Ned’s version of the American dream can be fulfilled and passed on to an able-bodied, male heir. Ned’s views and behavior represent the way ableist attitudes can establish and reinforce barriers that are disabling. This social model of disability – that regardless of impairments or physical difference, one only becomes disabled when social constructions or physical barriers (such as lack of curb cuts or accessible transportation) prevent one from equal participation – is a socially significant mode of understanding disability, one that provides an important corrective to more oppressive and problematic medical models. The social model serves to implicate society in the nature of disability, calling for reasonable accommodations so that everyone can engage with society independently regardless of differential embodiment. Many scholars, including Tobin Siebers, are critical of a purely social model, arguing that it does not pay enough attention to the lived realities of different bodies.[28] In The Good Daughter, the behavior of Ned’s daughters is a critique of a purely conceived social model (as well as moral or medical models) by bringing more attention to the reality of their interdependence without ignoring the power of ableist expectations to impede social agency. In this way, Gregory is perhaps resignifying independence in ways similar to Ed Roberts and the early disability rights activists of the 1970s, changing the definition of independence to mean what is possible for you with the right assistance. Gregory’s representations and explorations of disability in The Good Daughter can thus influence how we understand the nature of independence itself by challenging Ned’s ideology of ability. Ned’s assumption that disability makes Esther incapable of bearing children and having a family represents the desexualization of disability that is prominent in American culture. Many scholars have noted and explored the way people with disabilities have been desexualized throughout American history.[29] From the forced sterilization of people with cognitive and developmental disabilities and the eugenics movements of the early twentieth century to assumptions that young women paralyzed in a car crash will no longer need her birth control pills (since what “normal” guy would want to sleep with a paraplegic?), the relationship between sex and disability has been anxiously ignored at best and surgically outlawed at worst.[30] As recent as 2010, a young couple was married in New York state, but because they are living in a state-sanctioned group home and have mental disabilities, they are not allowed to share a bedroom (lawsuits by the couple’s parents are still pending).[31] Abby Wilkerson notes how “a group’s sexual status tends to reflect and reinforce its broader political and social status.”[32] Sexual agency is thus correlative with political agency and respectable social standing. In Ned’s perspective, Esther’s body has been physically and culturally pathologized by her polio. In the eyes of her father (who is representative of an ableist American culture), her marked body is inherently flawed and no longer fit for sexual participation in marriage, or, by extension, any subjective participation in American culture outside the protective enclave of her father’s home. Since Esther is viewed as unable to marry and have children, she also cannot fulfill what Ned believes is God’s plan for her gender. Ned’s deep faith contributes to his fears that his middle daughter, Cassie, might also become lost in the same stigmatized state of childlessness, so he forces her to read a Bible passage from 1 Timothy 2:14-15. “Adam was not deceived. But the woman bein’ deceived was in the transgression […] Notwithstandin’, she shall be saved by childbearin’, if they continue in faith, charity and holiness with sobriety” (25). Cassie is hesitant as she reads, yet she still submits to her father’s patriarchy at this early point in the play. This bible verse is Ned’s warning to Cassie that in order to avoid Esther’s tragic condition, Cassie must fall in line and submit to male authority, marry, and have children. Otherwise she cannot be saved, just like a desexualized and physically disabled Esther cannot be saved. Ned’s ableism has not only desexualized and pathologized Esther’s body, but it has also damned her to hell. In this regard, disability is both socially and morally constructed, and Ned sees Cassie’s rebelliousness and desire to reject marriage as equally disruptive as Esther’s polio. He couldn’t save Esther from her polio, but perhaps he can save Cassie from herself. This patriarchal and charity-driven attempt at control simultaneously desexualizes and strips agency from his daughters. Ned’s world, dominated by fear, patriarchal conservatism, and able-bodied privilege, is girded by an extremely oppressive power matrix in which his three daughters and their suitors must navigate. However, Gregory is not content to simply portray or exploit oppressive power structures in her play. She works subtly through her female characters and the ecological environment to radically explode these power structures from within. Esther could remain single and lonely and become a tragic or heroic sufferer, a common trope for disabled characters throughout literature. She could be rescued by a charitable man, like the neighbor Rudy Bird or the idealistic merchant Matt McCall, and try to fulfill her God-given calling as a procreative woman. These would be the traditional paths that disabled dramatic characters might follow. Gregory leads us down that path before radically reorienting our perception. At the end of act one, Ned has arranged for Rudy Bird to marry Cassie, whom he deeply loves, but Cassie is in love with Matt McCall. When she asks Matt to run away with her, he reveals that he is going off to fight in the war, so she runs away by herself. Seven years later, in act two, Cassie comes home to help Rachel with the end of her pregnancy, and Matt is now courting Esther. When Cassie reappears, however, Matt is still not fully over his heartbreak until (or perhaps even though) she brings him closure face to face and encourages him to do right by Esther. At dinner the next evening, after Matt and Esther had some alone time, everyone assumes Matt was going to propose to Esther, but when she returns alone, she begins to cry: NED: I knew it! RACHEL: Esther. What happened? NED (to Rachel): I’ll tell you what happened… He let her go! That’s what! CASSIE: He didn’t ask? NED: I knew he’d never ask. CASSIE: I thought sure he’d ask! ESTHER: HE DID ASK! He did ask! (a beat) I said no. CASSIE: You turned him down? RACHEL: Esther. What in the world. Why? ESTHER: I ain’t gonna be the one who’s settled on. I will not have a man who’d marry me out of duty. Or pity […] I ain’t gonna be no man’s second choice. (89-90) Like Cassie says to Rudy early in the play, Esther says “no.” She has the opportunity to be “rescued,” to get the happy ending and “overcome” her disability through marriage where she can become a wife and perhaps mother and pass as “normal” in her American culture. But she says no. She rejects pity. She defies her father’s assumptions about her, and she defies an American culture that defines her agency in terms of her womb and the symmetry of her appendages. In her cry of “no pity,” Esther makes a powerful and political action that asserts her own subjectivity in terms that she defines for herself. Ned’s reaction to Esther’s rejection of Matt’s proposal is particularly telling, especially if he is viewed as a representative of the ableist American cultural milieu. First, when Esther cries, he claims he knew that Matt would never propose, reiterating his previous claim that “no man gonna marry a crippled girl” (24). Then, he shifts and adopts an “I told you so” attitude to try to spin the situation back towards his culturally normative corner. Ned tries to regain control of the situation and solidify the dominance of his perspective, but Esther will have none of it: NED: Maybe this is for the best, Rachel. I worried how Esther’d take to marriage. RACHEL: She’d take just fine, Pa. NED: Marriage is a strain on a woman. Esther’s frail. ESTHER: Frail? NED: I know it's a painful thing to accept, but Esther, maybe you ain't really fit for marriage. ESTHER: Ain't fit? I do a full day of work. Never ask nobody to do nothin’ for me. Every spring I put in that garden by myself. Clean this house top to bottom, carry half the furniture out into the yard. Don’t you tell me I’m too frail. Don’t you tell me I ain’t fit. Nobody knows what they’s fit for till they try it. (91) Ned tries to reshape the event to fit his previous explanation of reality, that Esther is dependent and thus unfit and unable to have cultural agency. Yet Esther claims she has never asked for help or needed help. In this moment, it appears as if Gregory is simply writing Esther to reject her own disability, to claim traditional independence, and to accept the vilification of dependency as anathema to American identity. This could be a highly problematic character twist and would indicate that Ned’s ableism has permeated deeper into Esther’s worldview than originally thought. But yet again, Gregory craftily subverts this easy and oppressive plot device. But this time, she uses an Act of God. Ned’s fears are part of a carefully constructed house of cards that Gregory has structured in the play. Ned is afraid of God’s punishment; he is afraid that his daughters will not produce an heir to his estate; he is afraid that Cassie will run off and abandon her womanly obligations; he is afraid Rachel might have the same pregnancy problems that took his wife; and he is afraid of the technological progress that is happening in the agricultural community within the play. Abby Wilkerson has said, “Beneath the moral stigmas attached to pathologized bodies lies fear: the fear of bodily alteration, and even death itself – and to the extent that the singular human body represents the body politic, the fear of social upheaval and chaos, the loss of all social order.”[33] This is the fear that undergirds Ned’s – and perhaps by extension, America’s – ableist attitudes and behaviors. Ability is understood as part of the American status quo; it is prerequisite for, and part of, stability. Gregory imagines this chaos and loss of social order through visions of the natural world, the farms, and the ecology of Missouri river. Critic Bob Rendell describes, “The entire play has a backdrop of drought, flood, the mechanization of agriculture and a growing ability to bend nature to our will.”[34] Matt McCall’s job is to convince the local farmers to support the construction of new levees to rein in flood waters. The biblical images of floods and rain are prominent constructions in the play which highlight notions of complete human impotence and complete ecological destruction. However, the relationship of these images to disability is somewhat less obvious. The notion of disability as personal catastrophe is a common trope in literature and drama, as well as in social situations. A person’s disability is seen as either something to be heroically overcome, or something that consumes her with bitterness, hence the victim and villain tropes described by Lewis and discussed earlier. Disability is seen as a personal tragedy, or perhaps, a kind of natural disaster that could befall a person. This understanding of disability as a kind of natural disaster permeates traditional dramatic literature, much contemporary thought, and Ned Owen’s world view. But Gregory subverts this traditional calamitous mode of understanding disability by juxtaposing it against literal images of natural disasters. For farmers like Ned, the Missouri river is the giver of life and the bringer of destruction. Independent human efforts to control it are unable to rein in its mighty power. The river can give, and the river can take away. And when the river floods, it becomes a natural disaster – like Ned’s view of disability – that can wash away all of our efforts of forging the American dream. This is how Gregory depicts Ned’s world view. He clings to his own power to outlast the flood by refusing help from his family to get to higher ground. If he accepts their help, he believes, he acknowledges his lack of independence and his unworthiness to have the American Dream, which for Ned is a bigger disaster than a deadly flood. The understanding of disability as natural disaster is related to the moral or religious model of disability depiction, “in which the physically different body is explained by an act of divine or demonic intervention.”[35] But in The Good Daughter, the divine intervention serves not to explain disability and by extension dependency, but rather the Act of God purges the rejection of disability and dependency, in a way that disavows the whole notion of independence itself as a fallacy. In the torrential floods that bookend the play, Ned comes face to face with a kind of natura ex machina that is the great equalizer to the exaltation of independence. As the waters rise, Ned stays put in the barn, refusing to accept the help of his family. As Longmore describes the denial of dependency in relation to disability, “Americans cling to visions of absolute personal autonomy and unlimited individual possibility while, it seems to many of them, their power over their individual lives evaporates like a mirage.”[36] Ned has survived many floods before, on his own, and he believes he will survive this one just the same. But in fact, the only way to survive is to accept his interdependence with those loved ones trying to help him make it to safety before the levees break. Esther realizes the value, necessity, and ubiquity of interdependence and makes it to safety with her family. Ultimately she is able to resist Ned’s world view. Clinging to his notions of independent moral superiority, the lights fade on Ned as the flood waters rise. With this Act of God, Gregory turns the tide on the myth of independence and claims the necessity of interdependence in life and death. Eva Feder Kittay acknowledges not only that independence is a fallacy, but it is contrary to the human condition, and refusing to acknowledge this fact is unjust and has damaging effects on people and relationships. She says, Independence, except in some particular actions and functions, is a fiction, regardless of our abilities or disabilities, and the pernicious effects of this fiction are encouraged when we hide the ways in which our needs are met in relations of dependencies. On the other hand, this fiction turns those whose dependence cannot be masked into pariahs, or makes them objects of disdain or pity. It causes us to refuse assistance when it is needed. It encourages us either to deny that assistance to others when they require it or to be givers of care because we fear having to receive care ourselves. In acknowledging dependency we respect the fact that as individuals our dependency relations are constitutive of who we are and that, as a society, we are inextricably dependent on one another.[37] We are all inextricably interdependent, and the notion that dependency is grounds for marginalization and evidence of loss of subjectivity is not only a fallacy, but a rejection of the reality of the human condition and a pernicious perspective that can hurt everyone. In The Good Daughter, Ned clings to his notions of independence that have splintered his family as the flood waters crash around him. His death is not tragic because he never has a realization or change of heart. His death is becomes heartbreaking because Cassie and her unborn child stay with him, refusing to accept the help of their family. In one sense, Cassie’s death could be read as a kind of self-sacrificial womanhood, refusing to let her father die alone, affirming our interdependence in life and in death. But it is also possible to read Cassie’s actions as being just as pitiable as Ned’s, in that they both so attached to traditional notions of independence that they reject the possibility of life (however messy it may be) in an interdependent community with their family. Just before the calamitous resolution of the play, Cassie and Rudy have a heart to heart about why she left and where their true feelings lie. Cassie confesses that her journey was one of self-discovery: CASSIE: I just had to see what was out there. RUDY: See where the river took you. CASSIE: This is as far as it went. RUDY: River took us all places we didn’t expect. (96-97) Her quest took her back home, back to her father, and she sits with him in the final moments, ready to die tragically with her father and her unborn child because she failed to find what she thought was true independence. Her quest for independence teaches us that the ecology of our American Dreams defy expectations. The disability rights movement has gone a long way in changing cultural perceptions of ability and redefining independence to included interdependence, but these cultural notions were decades away from being brought to the public eye during the time in which The Good Daughter was set. For Ned Owen, the perception of disability in his family – Esther’s limp, Cassie’s rebellion, Rachel’s pregnancy – became a damaging metaphor that caused him to doubt his own future and his own version of the American dream. However, Gregory ultimately reverses this paradigm and explodes Ned’s American dream from the inside out, exposing the fallacy of independence and reclaiming notions of interdependent subjectivity that are inherent and positive aspects of disability. Esther initially appears to be cast as the innocent victim, but she is not. She is a caretaker in the family as well as a care-receiver, she chastises her sisters for their misbehavior, and speaks up against her own mistreatment. Though her circumstances may conspire against her subjectivity, her quest for agency within her oppressive and pitying father’s worldview serves not as a metaphor but rather as an embrace of the lived realities of her culturally situated experiences with disability. Gregory’s subversion of literary tropes and dramatic constructions of disability are demonstrative of a subtle but tectonic shift that is happening in mainstream dramatic representations of disability, exploding the myth of independence within cultural ecologies of American identity. Bradley Stephenson earned his Ph.D. in theatre at the University of Missouri. He has also earned a Master of Divinity and a Masters in science education from Wake Forest University, as well as a Masters in theatre from Northwestern University. He has been published in journals such as Ecumenica, Studies in Musical Theatre, and Theatre Topics. His current scholarship explores the intersections of disability and identity in dramatic literature. Bradley is also a director, playwright, actor, husband, and father. [1] Kim E. Neilsen, A Disability History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 108. [2] Neilsen, A Disability History, 104. [3] D.W. Gregory, “The Artist as Activist – Take it to the Street or to the Stage?” in 24 Gun Control Plays, ed. Caridad Svich and Zac Cline (Southgate CA, NoPassport Press, 2013), n.p. The interview was originally written for her blog before being published in this collection. [4] http://www.dramaticpublishing.com/AuthorBio.php?titlelink=10106 accessed 8 May 2012. [5] Bob Rendell, “A Very Good Daughter World Premiers at New Jersey Repertory,” www.talkinbroadway.com , accessed 8 May 2013; and Robert L. Daniels, “Legit Review: The Good Daughter,” Daily Variety Gotham, November 12, 2003. [6] http://dwgregory.com/. Accessed 8 May 2013. [7] D.W. Gregory, The Good Daughter, unpublished PDF manuscript (2003). Used by permission. All subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. [8] I use the first person pronoun “we” not to be exclusionary, patriotic, or culturally ego-centric, but simply because I am an American citizen and I can only write from my own perspective. Using third person descriptions of Americans seems inauthentic and unnecessarily distancing from my lived experience. [9] Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State,” in The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency, edited by Eva Feder Kittay and Ellen K. Feder (New York: Rowman Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002), 15. [10] http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/11/the-2013-index-of-dependence-on-government accessed 7 July 2014. [11] Rickie Solinger, “Dependency and Choice: The Two Faces of Eve,” in The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency, edited by Eva Feder Kittay and Ellen K. Feder (New York: Rowman Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002), 61. Solinger argues that “dependency” is coupled with “choice” in ways that continue to keep women vulnerable to control and censure. [12] For more perspectives, analysis and unpacking of notions of dependency, care, and disability, see Eva Feder Kittay and Ellen K. Feder, eds., The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency (Lanham MD: Rowman Littlefield Publishers, 2002). [13] Alison Kafer, “Debating Feminist Futures: Slippery Slopes, Cultural Anxiety, and the Case of the Deaf Lesbians,” in Feminist Disability Studies, ed. Kim Q. Hall, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 222. [14] James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1931), 404 (my emphasis). For a fascinating and nuanced analysis of the American dream in relation to dramatic criticism, see Cheryl Black, “‘Three Variations on a National Theme’: George O’Neil’s American Dream, 1933,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 22 no. 3 (2010), 69-91. [15] Douglas C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History” in The New Disability History, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umanski (New York: NYU Press, 2001), 33-57. [16] Paul K. Longmore, “Conspicuous Contribution and American Cultural Dilemmas: Telethon Rituals of Cleansing and Renewal,” in The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, ed. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 137. [17] Rendell, www.talkinbroadway.com . [18] Victoria Ann Lewis, ed., Beyond Victims and Villains: Contemporary Plays by Disabled Playwrights (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005). The portrayal of disability in cinema is more well documented than in theatre. See, for example, Christopher R. Smit and Anthony Elms, eds., Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability (New York: University of America Press, 2001); Martin Norden, Cinema of Isolation: a History of Physical Disability in the Movies (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994); and Sally Chivers and Nicole Markotić, eds., The Problem Body: Projecting Disability on Film (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010). [19] David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 47. [20] Victoria Ann Lewis, Beyond Victims and Villains, xxi. [21] Longmore, “Conspicuous Contribution.” Joseph Shapiro, No Pity: How the Disability Rights Movement is Changing America (New York: Times Books, 1993). [22] See, for example, Shawn Dean, “Accessible Parking for Pregnancy? Count Me Out,” EasyStand blog, www.blog.easystand.com , 11 April 2011, accessed 8 May 2013; and Stacie Lewis, “Do You Consider Pregnancy a Disability?” Baby Center Blog, www.blog.babycenter.com , 10 January 2012, accessed 8 May 2013. [23] Victoria Ann Lewis, Beyond Victims and Villains, xvii. [24] Longmore, “Conspicuous Contribution,” 153. [25] “Nothing about us without us” was another rally cry during the disability rights movement. [26] Longmore, “Conspicuous Contribution,” 152. [27] Solinger, “Dependency and Choice,” 75. [28] See Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). [29] See, for example, Margarit Shildrik, Dangerous Discourses; Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); and Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States. [30] See Abby Wilkerson, “Disability, Sex Radicalism, and Political Agency,” in Feminist Disability Studies, ed. Kim Q. Hall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). [31] Frank Eltman, “Disabled Rights: Couple Fights for Right to Live Together at Group Home,” Associated Press, www.huffingtonpost.com , May 7, 2013. Accessed 9 May 2013. [32] Wilkerson, “Disability, Sex Radicalism, and Political Agency,” 195. [33] Wilkerson, “Disability, Sex Radicalism, and Political Agency,” 193. [34] Rendell, www.talkinbroadway.com . [35] Lewis, Beyond Victims and Villains, xxi. [36] Longmore, “Conspicuous Contribution,” 154. [37] Eva Feder Kittay, “When Caring is Just and Justice is Caring: Justice and Mental Retardation,” Public Culture 13 no. 3 (2001), 570. "Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter" by Bradley Stephenson ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 27, Number 2 (Spring 2015) ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee Table of Contents "The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance" by Brian Eugenio Herrera "Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men" by Kee-Yoon Nahm "Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter" by Bradley Stephenson "Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; or, William Dunlap's A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience" by Samuel Shanks www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction (JADT 27.2, 2015) The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Malcolm Richardson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 3 Visit Journal Homepage West of Broadway: the Rockefeller Foundation and American Theatre in the 1930s Malcolm Richardson By Published on November 19, 2015 Download Article as PDF Given its historic role as one of the leading institutions in American philanthropy, perhaps it is not surprising that the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) was among the first American foundations to experiment with arts funding.[1] Better known are the efforts of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which provided support for arts appreciation in American schools, and above all, the Juilliard Musical Foundation, created after the death of benefactor Augustus Juilliard in 1919.[2] By contrast, the Rockefeller Foundation’s earliest ventures remain largely unknown and have yet to receive any extensive scholarly study. Its first hesitant steps in the arts offer a revealing look at the prevailing attitudes among foundation trustees and staff. Many of these assumptions or biases—especially the fear of providing direct support to individual artists—would create barriers to arts funding for the next half century. The Foundation’s efforts in the 1930s to underwrite a regional theatre movement and its related experiment in offering support directly to individual playwrights also provide an interesting case study in the evaluation of arts philanthropy. Success proved elusive and difficult to measure, if not to define, in this first Rockefeller arts program. Rockefeller insiders regarded these efforts as failures, and scholars have been content either to repeat this judgment or to ignore the entire effort. Historians have failed to see the full significance for the arts of this Rockefeller program of the late 1930s, perhaps because it began as a simple effort to strengthen university programs in drama. To begin setting this record right, it may first be useful to stake out some broad tentative claims: First, if we exclude the Juilliard Foundation’s very specialized support for the music school of the same name and the Carnegie Corporation’s eclectic educational programs, the Rockefeller Foundation conducted the first sustained program in the performing arts by a major private foundation in the years before the second world war. Moreover, this effort predated the more celebrated work of the Ford Foundation from the mid 1950s until the 1980s and the Rockefeller’s own quite significant work in these same years.[3] A second and more specific historical claim may be ventured: while the RF’s first efforts in the arts produced mixed results at best, the passage of time makes it increasingly clear that the program in drama helped build the foundation for the flourishing non-profit, repertory theatre movement of the postwar period. At the same time, these first efforts also demonstrated the limits of that support, especially when reservations about supporting individual creative artists came into play. In the early 1930s Rockefeller Foundation trustees were debating the organization’s basic goals. In the previous decade the Foundation had chosen the advancement of knowledge as its underlying purpose, and support for the humanities became one of its core programs. Soon, however, calls from RF board members for more practical results increased with the country’s worsening depression. While the RF trustees were willing to concede that basic research in economics might not immediately lead to solutions to unemployment and stalled growth, they could see a direct link between the work of social scientists and the country’s most pressing problems. In the humanities, by contrast, evaluation proved difficult and the connection to daily life seemed remote at best. A trustee evaluation of all the Foundation’s programs warned that the humanities were in danger of falling into a trap if they slavishly imitated the natural and social sciences: It frankly appears to your committee that a program in the humanities, based on a cloistered kind of research, is wide of the goal which the Trustees of the Foundation should have in mind. It is getting us facts but not necessarily followers. We have more detailed information about a great number of rather abstruse subjects, but that does not logically mean that the level of artistic and aesthetic appreciation in America has been measurably raised.[4] The trustees concluded, “In our opinion the officers should be asked to study other methods by which cultural appreciation can be developed and the values of the humanities brought more directly into contact with daily living.”[5] The trustees’ embrace of the democratization of culture—“From being aristocratic and exclusive, culture is becoming democratic and inclusive”[6]—suggested that the humanities program should strike a balance between scholarly research and educational projects, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s board pushed the humanities program in particular to experiment with methods to reach a broad public audience. In practice this would mean a serious attempt to explore ways to advance the humanities through radio, film, and the mass media, and this is where much current scholarship on Rockerfeller philanthropy focuses its effort.[7] The change in policy dictated by the trustees coincided with a change in leadership within the Foundation. Seeking someone with a similar vision for the humanities, the Foundation turned to David H. Stevens, a former professor of English and administrator at the University of Chicago, who served as Vice President of the General Education Board (GEB), an older Rockefeller philanthropic foundation, and who was now given dual responsibilities at both the GEB and the Rockefeller Foundation. To understand the emphasis the Rockefeller Foundation would place on grass-roots theatrical work, it is also necessary to consider Stevens’ broader theoretical and scholarly commitments. When he left the University of Chicago to take a position with the General Education Board, which had been the first Rockefeller fund to support the humanities, both the GEB and the Rockefeller Foundation were supporting work in the humanities that emphasized archaeology, ancient history, and and the classical tradition.[8] To the extent that the Rockefeller offices had given any attention to the question, the implicit definition of the humanities rested upon an older tradition of philology and the study of the classics, leavened with a strong American interest in the study of Semitic langauges and archaeological work related to Biblical and religious traditions.[9] In contrast to an approach that left American culture subordinate to European-dominated scholarly traditions, David Stevens detected a “present urgent need for a larger appreciation of the American cultural heritage.” He had no patience with those who (“out of ignorance”) asserted “the poverty of the American cultural tradition” and turned their attention insistently “toward the achievements of other peoples.”[10] Stevens’ conception of the humanities meant that the Rockefeller Foundation should seek first to support “the preservation and development of American cultural traditions with a view to their continuing growth.”[11] For Stevens, support for a program in the dramatic arts would become the major vehicle for developing a distinctive American culture and for realizing the trustees’ goal of taking the humanities from the classroom into the public arena. Because of the “broad participation that dramatic work required,” and its effectiveness as “a strong social force,” a program in the theatre was ideally suited to respond to the trustees’ instructions to enhance public appreciation of the humanities. As Stevens put it, “the arts of the theatre draw on the past as well as the present, and when successfully used have an immediate effect upon the public.”[12] In spite of the obviously greater reach of the new mass media, in the search for ways to communicate the values of American culture, support for drama and theatre came to be the hallmark of the foundation’s grant-making in the humanities. In the 1930s the dramatic arts in the United States stood awkwardly poised on the cusp of a new era in which opportunities expanded in new directions while older theatrical traditions died. Hollywood exerted its magnetic pull for both audiences and performers, though for many actors, directors, and authors Broadway remained the pinnacle of achievement. But even though champions of the “legitimate” theatre might loudly proclaim the superiority of the live stage, theatre people knew that their industry was undergoing a sea change. Vaudeville, burlesque, and many variants of the popular theatre were dying, unable to compete with the movies and radio. Touring companies and summer stock were shrinking as well. While strong local audiences in Boston and other northeastern cities still gave Broadway producers a chance to try out an expensive production before opening in New York, the likelihood of recovering initial investments diminished at a time when demand from depression-weary audiences was weak. The number of new shows opening on the great white way dropped, and in a refrain that sounds quite contemporary still, these factors tended to limit risk and to channel energies into well-worn paths. Against this background of a changing profession, the humanities division of the Rockefeller Foundation embarked on a modest program of support for drama. In contrast to the vast literature on the federal theatre and the decline of Broadway during the same period, the Foundation’s support for theatre has only begun to attract scholarly interest and it remains a poorly understood chapter in American cultural history.[13] At the time theatre professionals debated their course of action without the vocabulary routinely used today, and as a consequence historians have perhaps failed to connect the Foundation’s work in the 1930s with the widely hailed postwar explosion of creativity in the American theatre. The little that has been published on the humanities program in the 1930s also falls into the trap of using the Rockefeller Foundation’s own awkward phrasing: non-professional theatre. For good reasons, the Foundation bent over backwards to avoid the dreaded word “amateur” to describe the theatrical organizations it supported. At the time the concept of a distinctive non-profit sector in general was only emerging, while the self-conscious, full-throated advocacy of professional repertory theatres in particular would not develop until after the second world war. Then, a significant number of free-standing new theatres, employing professional actors and staffs, usually in a repertory company, took shape within a not-for-profit organizational structure. While the Cleveland Play House shared some of these attributes,[14] including most notably its status as an independent non-profit, a true movement can be said to have started only with the founding of the Alley Theatre in Houston in 1947 and the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. in 1950. The professional repertory theatre began to reach its full maturity the following decade with a wave of new creations, beginning most notably with the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis (1963), and soon followed by the Actors Theatre of Louisville (1964), the American Conservatory Theatre (San Francisco, 1965), Long Wharf Theatre (New Haven, 1965), the Yale Repertory Theatre (1966), the Mark Taper Forum and Center Theatre Group (Los Angeles, 1967), and the American Repertory Theatre (Cambridge, 1970) among many. Nonetheless, despite some substantial morphological differences, it is possible to see this new theatre emerging in embryo in the 1930s. Barrett H. Clark, the theatre professional who would shape the thinking of David Stevens and the Rockefeller Foundation, left the commercial firm of Samuel French and Company to champion these theatres. Clark was well aware of the problem of defining the new theatre struggling to be born. “A theatre is emerging here and there throughout the country that is neither a part of the Road, nor an imitation of Broadway,” Clark wrote prophetically in 1935.[15] Clark listed some of the many names given these theatres—“Regional, Folk, Local, Little Theatre, Community, Amateur, Civic Playhouse, Revolt against Broadway, Nonprofessional”—before dismissing most of these as “labels indiscriminately stuck to a thousand theatrical ventures which have only a few similarities in common.”[16] The future of American theatre could be detected in a small coterie of intensely motivated groups springing to life in dozens, if not hundreds, of American communities. “The theatre I am thinking of is a group of units organized for the most part by the dramatic departments of colleges and universities and by private or semi-private corporations,” Clark wrote. “These are scattered throughout the country in large and small cities and in rural communities, and are distinguished from professional theatres in that they are chartered and operated not for profit, and pay no actors for acting.”[17] He conceded that the lack of paid actors and the absence of a commercial or profit motive could indeed be called “amateur,” but Clark settled upon “nonprofessional,” a somewhat unfortunate choice given that Clark praised the commitment of these theatre workers precisely for the sense of vocation and devotion to high standards that characterize professional activity. These not-for-profit theatres, Clark thought, embodied a new emphasis that would increasingly set them apart from Broadway and its satellites. “This difference is fundamental since it throws emphasis upon the theatre as an end in itself and not upon the making of money.”[18] Clark excluded from his definition the great majority of the community or Little theatres. He counted approximately 1,000 such theatres at large but thought that no more than 100 at most could produce four good productions in a season, and among the 700 college and university theatre programs Clark generously estimated that perhaps 100 could be deemed of high quality. (A year or so later, Clark lowered this estimate to one percent of all these theatres combined.)[19] Yet within this limited universe of less than 200 university and not-for-profit theatres, Clark thought that the quality of productions often equalled and sometimes surpassed the professional stage. He teased readers of the New York Times with the news that he had seen performances “far above the average of Broadway” at such venues as the Cleveland and Pasadena Playhouses and at the University of Iowa, Northwestern, and the University of Washington.[20] If the trustees offered the fundamental theory for the entire humanities program, Clark provided both a rationale and the strategy for the Rockefeller Foundation’s work in drama and regional theatre. In this vein Clark forwarded to Stevens a report on his visits to mid-western and western theatres. Everywhere he went, Clark noted, depression-era students approached him for advice. “What most of them wanted,” beyond career advice, he concluded, “was a viewpoint, something to make them feel that what they were working for was really worthwhile.”[21] Clark’s message to the schools he advised and to the students he encouraged served as the rallying cry for a new non-profit theatre movement. “If you want a theatre,” Clark told an audience of theatre educators and regional theatre leaders meeting in Seattle, “make it.”[22] If the emerging non-profit theatres offered one axis for plotting the boundaries of the new program, regionalism provided a second organizing principle. Just as Stevens rejected the prevailing Eurocentric view of the humanities, he also managed the delicate balancing act of working for an organization that personified the Establishment while kicking against the traditional dominance of Eastern institutions and elites. Wisconsin-born and a graduate of Lawrence College, Stevens seems to have shared the populist instincts of the Midwestern progressives. The first step in “the discovery of ourselves,” as he referred in one happy phrase to his proposed emphasis on American culture, lay in an exploration of American regional life. In one of his first messages to the Foundation’s trustees Stevens called their attention to the drama program at the University of North Carolina as an outstanding exemplar of regional culture. At UNC and other universities with experimental theatre programs those responsible for this work had succeeded in resisting “the cramping influence of pure scholarship in their graduate schools.”[23] Stevens identified with those who wanted to see a strong, decentralized network of American theatres and regional companies. Attracted by the populist and democratic impulses that were revitalizing American theatre in the 1930s, Stevens looked upon the work of the Federal Theatre Project and the WPA’s cultural activities in general with interest and sympathy. Early in the Federal Theatre Project’s life, Stevens offered the director, Hallie Flanagan, a small grant-in-aid to enable her editorial group to buy color printing equipment. In 1937 the Foundation provided much more strategic aid by providing funds to Vassar College (where Flanagan had taught theatre before her New Deal post) for a summer workshop, allowing Flanagan to bring forty of her best regional directors, playwrights, and designers to the New York campus for an intensive workshop. The resulting production, One Third of a Nation, was hailed as one of the most significant productions undertaken by the federal theatre and it toured widely, arousing both critical admiration and political controversy.[24] The Foundation’s program in drama thus moved very self-consciously from the center of the professional theatre world in New York toward the regional and amateur theatre. The program’s goals were to sustain a national movement of little theatres and university theatres, to improve their professional status and coordination (through the National Theatre Conference which Foundation grants helped reorganize), and to help these theatres find better plays for a public eager for good theatre. Pursuing this latter goal, Stevens urged Barrett Clark, who now led the Dramatists Play Service, an arm of the Dramatists’ Guild that licensed plays for amateur and collegiate groups, to make serious plays available to these theatres at reduced royalties. The Foundation’s largest grants went to university drama programs, although two community theatres in Cleveland and Seattle received substantial support for their ambitious attempts to develop independent local theatres. One of the aims Stevens had in mind when funding university programs was the development of the next generation of leaders. Stevens singled out Yale, the University of North Carolina, the University of Iowa, Case Western Reserve, and Stanford as centers of excellence. Yale’s outstanding drama department—arguably the best in the country at the time—received funds for technical experimentation, which led to the development of a new stage-lighting system (the work of George Izenour). The University’s scholarly interest in the history of drama was encouraged by a grant to help it organize a theatre archive. Foundation funds also provided a camera unit which allowed Yale to start a film archive of its productions and at the same time use film as a teaching aid. If Yale embodied a standard of academic excellence, the University of North Carolina, Iowa, and other institutions were chosen as “centers having a continuing influence on the cultural life of large sections of the country.”[25] Stevens saw a regional theatre as a natural, if not the principal, outlet for the expression of values that the mass media deliberately ignored in its search for a common national cultural denominator. Grants and fellowships, Stevens hoped, would help the community and university theatres develop playwrights who could employ local idioms and speak to regional needs. The outstanding example of this program was the University of North Carolina, where Frederick Koch led an ambitious program. The Carolina Playmakers toured the state, created a competitive high school program, and opened two summer theatres at either end of the state to reach prospective audiences more effectively. In many ways Koch’s work embodied what Stevens hoped to see develop at strong regional centers throughout the country. When Koch left North Dakota for North Carolina, he joined a university with a long theatrical tradition and an increasingly strong commitment to public service.[26] There, according to his admirer Kenneth MacGowan, he “found richer materials with which to fire his writers . . . and in North Carolina, even more than in North Dakota, Koch has brought forth playwrights.”[27] At its best, then, the regionalist movement of the 1930s promised a radical democratization of culture. Both in North Dakota and North Carolina, Koch’s theatre sought to empower local groups and communities to create their own productions and tell their own stories. By the time the Rockefeller Foundation decided to back his work in 1933, Koch had 141 students in his classes and in the academic year 1932–33 they staged no less than 52 plays written by students.[28] Stevens liked to recall that Paul Green, Betty Smith, and Thomas Wolfe all worked at one time in the theatre department at Chapel Hill with its director.[29] As David Stevens continued his exploration of American drama, he increasingly turned to Clark for information and advice, and the emerging Rockefeller program reflected a strong partnership between the two men. Among other things, Clark and Stevens agreed that there was an unmet hunger in America for good theatre. “Last year,” Stevens reported to the Rockefeller trustees in 1934, “the Federal Office of Education listed 22,000 public schools in which dramatic activity is under direction,” and there were “something like 1,000 new plays a year published by American distributors using mail-order techniques to reach buyers.”[30] Some indication of the mass market that the amateur or local theatre might on occasion reach was provided by the sales figures of the best-selling plays listed by Samuel French and other agencies. At one publishing house a serious play, Dust of the Earth, was paying all of the publisher’s overhead, while “at a lower level of theatrical entertainment” the gripping tale of Aaron Slick of Punkin Crick had been produced 50,000 times and had sold over one million copies.[31] While the motion pictures might be killing local stock theatres and the road companies alike, it did not follow that the demand for serious drama had declined in America. “The true index to that demand is not the number of New York performances given a new play,” Stevens observed, “but the printed copies sold and the royalties paid for its noncommercial productions.”[32] Stevens’ index measured only an aggregate demand and omitted important qualitative considerations, but it pointed to another area where the Foundation might work. Stevens’ reports to the Rockefeller trustees underscored the immense vitality of the country’s theatre and the possibilities of its market—if only good material were available. Or, as the producer Theresa Helburn put it, “One thing is sure. The theatre is only as good as its plays.”[33] Clark was ideally positioned to help solve this problem, and in the late 1930s he proposed several imaginative projects to create or identify new material for the network of theatres he and Stevens sought to strengthen. In 1936, when Robert Sherwood and other leading playwrights created the Dramatists Play Service, Clark left the for-profit sector to become executive director of the Guild’s new service for non-profit theatres and schools.[34] Clark’s work for the Dramatists’ Guild continued to place him at the center of what we would now call intellectual property issues, and he shared Stevens’ desire to improve the quality of material available to the emerging regional and not-for-profit theatrical movement. One Foundation memo called him “the only man in his profession who is in constant touch with all amateur producers and directors of university departments of drama. Mr. Clark is evidently the man to make the preliminary search in order to locate manuscripts wanted by non-professional producers.”[35] Amid all his professional work, Clark somehow found time to pursue his interests in theatre history. With Stevens’ enthusiastic help, beginning with a modest grant-in-aid and continuing through major grants for editing and publication expenses, Clark pursued a research project intended to expand the repertoire of available plays by locating original manuscripts and printed copies of popular nineteenth-century American plays. Armed with Rockefeller Foundation grants, Clark directed the work of a small army of editors and from 1940 to 1942, serving as the executive editor, he shepherded twenty volumes into print in the series, America’s Lost Plays.[36] At the Dramatists Play Service, Clark devised a plan to give college, university, and other non-profit theatres access to some of the best available material at a substantial discount. Given the Guild’s prestigious membership, Clark was able to offer plays by many of the leading contemporary American playwrights, including Sherwood, Maxwell Anderson, Elmer Rice, and others. Among the plays that Clark and the Guild listed for discounts to colleges and nonprofit groups were contemporary hits such as John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Claire Boothe Luce’s The Women and the popular comedy, You Can’t Take it with You, by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Stevens was delighted to connect his academic network, newly organized in a rejuvenated National Theatre Conference, with Clark’s office, and he seems to have spent much of the decade attempting to broker more partnerships between the authors’ service organization and the representatives of the colleges and community theatres. Clark’s willingness to offer an immediate reduction in the rates charged to the NTC’s membership and other nonprofit groups seemed an omen of good things to come. Support for Individual Playwrights: the Dramatists’ Guild Fellowships Perhaps the most significant grant the Foundation made in the late 1930s in its support of drama came in an experiment with direct support to young and unproven American playwrights. This effort, the first attempt by the Rockefeller Foundation to provide support to creative artists, began in 1938 when the Humanities division provided $25,000 (approximately $375,000 in today’s dollars) to the Authors’ League for fellowships to playwrights. Administered by the Dramatists’ Guild, one of the component societies forming the League, the plan appeared to be in the hands of the best-placed professional society. The Guild first approached the Foundation in 1937 with its plan. Once again the key figure was Barrett Clark, and the plan took shape in the course of the continuing dialogue between Stevens and Clark. Clark first outlined his idea in a letter to Stevens in 1937, asking straightforwardly, “Would the Rockefeller Foundation care to offer to the Dramatists’ Guild (and Authors’ League—they are really the same in practice) say half a dozen scholarships, fellowships, or awards per year for one, two, three years or more?”[37] The new fellowships “should be awarded to young and unknown playwrights, in or just out of college,” selected on the basis of merit, and given with “no strings attached.” Calling the idea “of the utmost importance,” Clark proposed that the selection and administration be placed in the hands of the Guild, and he promised Stevens that if the Foundation were to back the plan, the Guild could produce “a board of judges that simply dazzles.”[38] Among the names he dropped as possible judges were Eugene O’Neill, Marc Connelly, Sidney Howard, Fannie Hurst, and George S. Kaufman. Robert Sherwood, the highly successful playwright who served as the president of the Dramatists’ Guild, wrote a fervent letter to Stevens promising the Guild’s full cooperation “at the shortest notice” if the Foundation would agree to aid it in its search for promising new talents.[39] Clark admitted that the proposal was prompted in part by the Guild’s stance toward Theresa Helburn’s Bureau of New Plays, a competition aimed at young writers at American colleges and universities. Helburn served as executive director of the (somewhat confusingly named) Theatre Guild, an experimental theatre company founded by the entrepreneur Lawrence Langner, who hit upon the then-novel method of selling subscriptions to sustain the company. Though Langner and Helburn numbered Eugene O’Neill among their favorite playwrights, and though the Theatre Guild was committed to producing serious work on the Broadway stage, the need to sell tickets initially led the producers to favor works by established playwrights such as George Bernard Shaw. This emphasis irritated American dramatists, and Sherwood and many of the playwrights at the Dramatists’ Guild feuded bitterly with Langner and Helburn over rights and production issues. Elmer Rice, for example, resented their early commitment to British and European authors and wrote bitterly of Langner and Helburn’s Theatre Guild, telling Clark “there seems to be no good reason why I or any American playwright should ever submit a play to the [Theatre] Guild. The Guild in its entire career has done nothing whatever to encourage the American playwright nor to help foster an American drama.”[40] When Helburn’s Bureau of New Plays accepted funds from the motion picture industry to re-grant to playwrights, Dramatists’ Guild leaders denounced the contracts offered by the Bureau as unfair to the authors. Helburn’s prizes, they claimed, served as a way for Hollywood to buy rights to cheap scripts from inexperienced authors who were signing away their future royalties.[41] (Clark gloated that at least two of the Bureau’s prize winners had renounced their awards, and he informed Stevens that those Dramatists’ Guild board members who had been working with the Bureau were resigning from the new group.) Nonetheless, it seems clear that the Bureau posed a serious competitive challenge to the Guild, and Helburn’s ability to offer new playwrights some modest funding worried the Dramatists’ Guild leaders. Clark confessed as much to Stevens by defending his plan in these terms: “This is the Guild’s opportunity, in the sense that the Guild stands for fair treatment to authors, yet it has been unable to give such material help as the picture interests could.”[42] The grant awarded by the Foundation in 1938 called for the funds to be awarded to the Guild’s parent organization, the Authors’ League, with Dramatists’ Guild staff responsible for administering the funds and working with the selection committee and authors.[43] But the plan approved by Stevens and the Foundation made some serious alterations to Clark’s original sketch. Stevens told Clark and the Guild that he also expected a proposal from the National Theatre Conference requesting funds to re-grant as fellowships to young academics working in drama at the university level. Stevens threatened to delay consideration of the Guild proposal until he could compare the two plans, implying perhaps a threat to cut the baby—in this case, the Foundation’s limited grant money—in half. To avoid any such Solomonic compromises, the Guild quickly agreed to join forces with the National Theatre Conference and to accept two NTC candidates as fellows. These stipend recipients would travel to New York to work in the Guild’s offices. Meanwhile, the selection committee would be composed in part of academics from the National Theatre Conference membership and in part by professional or Broadway theatrical figures, including Guild members. With the exception of the two awards for the NTC fellows, the remaining fellowships would be reserved exclusively for younger playwrights who had previously demonstrated some promise by having one or more of their works produced, usually off-Broadway at a commercial theatre, but who were not yet capable of earning a living from their writing. The Guild’s formal proposal cited its experience providing emergency assistance to hard-pressed authors, noting that in its own modest relief program “the large majority of the applicants are living a hand to mouth existence and that at least half are at present not writing because they have been obliged to take temporary employment that prevents their doing so.”[44] The experiment began bravely. An entry in David Stevens’ diary captures the initial high hopes. According to Stevens, the Executive Secretary of the Guild “says her experience shows a certainty every year of twelve to fifteen persons of first rate quality whose success may be determined by a year of support at a critical time.”[45] However, this first Rockefeller attempt to provide support for individual authors never found those 12 to 15 talents. In fact, the Dramatists’ Guild rang down the curtain itself and even returned some of the grant funds. From October 1938 to June 1941 the Guild awarded twenty fellowships, a total that includes four one-year renewals, to sixteen aspiring young playwrights. Looking at the careers of these sixteen playwrights, only one award appears to have gone to a playwright of undisputed talent whose work would continue to be staged years after the project ended. Two, as noted earlier, were given to candidates designated by the National Theatre Conference who were expected, it seems, to spend more time gaining professional and administrative experience than writing plays. (Interestingly, these two choices—George Milton Savage of the University of Washington and Betty Smith from the University of North Carolina—actually did write numerous, though hardly memorable plays. Smith, later famous as the author of the novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, earned some income from her playwriting, while Savage would go on to write over 70 plays and have a long career as a theatre educator at the University of Washington.) Given the terms of the Guild’s proposal, the remaining fellowships, with perhaps a few exceptions—notably for the African-American playwright Theodore Browne (Natural Man)—could hardly be called even qualified successes. Putting aside the two NTC administrative awards, of the remaining fellowship recipients chosen for their ability as authors, the Rockefeller files identify only three who succeeded in getting their new manuscripts accepted by any theatre for even a trial production. Although Browne’s work was staged by both the Federal Theatre project in Seattle and in a New York theatre, and continues to attract scholarly attention, neither the play he wrote for the Dramatists’ Guild program or that of any of the other Rockefeller Playwriting Fellows received any extended theatrical production during the life of the grant.[46] Consequently, David Stevens did not hesitate to rate this program a failed experiment. “In spite of this success in part,” his official evaluation of 1942 observed, “the plan has not resulted as hoped in establishing a method of encouraging young playwrights on the second lap toward arrival in the professional theatre.”[47] His final evaluation placed the blame for the experiment’s failure squarely on the Dramatists’ Guild and its selection committee. For its part, the Guild also pronounced the experiment a failure, laying the blame on a supposed paucity of new dramatists. “The committee was surprised to find out that there were so few capable new writers,” the Guild’s executive officer Luise Sillcox wrote to Stevens.[48] The Guild’s report explained its decision to return some Foundation grant because “the committee was not convinced that the awards were going to produce results.”[49] A Failed Project? Clearly, as this summary demonstrates, there was a well-thought out philanthropic program whose individual grants connected to one another, sometimes in intricate ways. But if there was a strategy, was there success? While admirable, Stevens’ attempts to expand the repertoire available to college and university theatre departments and other nonprofit or amateur groups met a number of setbacks. The weak sales for Clark’s twenty-volume scholarly edition of American plays perhaps indicates that the hunger for such plays was largely among a small group of theatre historians rather than active theatre directors. Moreover, the partnership between Clark’s Dramatists Play Service and the National Theatre Conference did not succeed immediately in reducing the costs of obtaining rights to the works of the popular dramatists represented by the Guild. As Clark admitted to Stevens, by the end of the decade, not one play had been sold at the non-profit rate because the NTC members had not bought sufficient quantities to trigger the discount. Clark explained to Stevens that “we agreed to make a 25 per cent royalty reduction on certain plays, provided we received a minimum number of requests through the N.T.C. To date, we have received on not one of these titles anywhere near the required minimum.”[50] All three of Clark’s most imaginative ideas—the discounting scheme, America’s Lost Plays, and the Rockefeller/Dramatists’ Guild Playwriting Fellowships—failed to expand the repertoire for amateur and regional theatres. And judged by its stated goal – identifying promising playwrights with work ready for the commercial stage—the playwriting fellowships seemed a disappointing experiment that clearly had failed. At least two Rockefeller insiders judged the entire program in drama a failure. Raymond B. Fosdick, who served as president of the Foundation during this period and who had been one of the most influential trustees directing the shift in priorities in the 1930s, thought the humanities program had not gone far enough in freeing itself from traditional academic scholarship and in reaching out to a broader public. Writing in retirement, Fosdick confessed, “We followed academic patterns although we understood in our hearts the wide gap between academic conceptions and the common life of man.”[51] More damningly, Stevens’ lieutenant, associate director John Marshall, later told an oral history interviewer that the “work in drama by the Rockefeller Foundation accomplished relatively little” in either the development of the theatre or playwrights.[52] Stevens, Marshall thought, was far too cautious and “felt he needed to be protected in this field by confining his recommendations” to college and university drama departments and community theatres. For Marshall, this proved to be a fatal flaw, as “this restriction doomed us to work with people I regarded as rather mediocre.”[53] The leading lights of the regional movement left him unimpressed. Marshall thought Frederick Koch “something of a ham” and he also dismissed the work of the Pulitzer Prize winning author and dramatist Paul Green.[54] Marshall’s most telling criticisms, however, pointed beyond Stevens to the general culture of organized philanthropy: The Rockefeller Foundation itself was too averse to risk taking. This attitude, driven in equal parts by the Foundation’s own conservatism and David Stevens’ academic orientation left Marshall chafing under the limitations of the program in the late 1930s. “I was always somewhat unhappy about this, and given to reminding Stevens that the theatre had its real life on the professional stage,” he later recalled.[55] Marshall’s criticism owed much to his own strong desire to see the Foundation embrace the creative arts and offer support directly to artists. When invited by Stevens to critique the existing program in preparation for a report to the trustees, Marshall wrote, “If we take the arts seriously as a means of communicating what the culture offers that may be of value to the individual, perhaps this is the weakest point in our record.”[56] Stevens saw the force of this objection, and his answer may be found in the finished report. Discussing the RF’s on-going work in radio, communication, and drama, Stevens contrasted the varying roles of the reporter, the critic, and the creative artist. “If we have done less here [i.e., in the arts] than in the less difficult fields of communication and interpretation, it is because judicious help for the artist is harder to provide than for the reporter and critic.”[57] For Stevens and many other foundation officials and trustees, the experiment simply demonstrated that fellowships for individual artists might be a poor way to subsidize the arts. The Foundation’s cautious approach also reflected an ambivalence about support for individual artists found surprisingly even within the ranks of the Dramatists’ Guild and among other established theatre professionals. Harold Clurman, the artistic director of the Group Theatre, wrote approvingly to Stevens after his discovery that “three of the playwrights in whom the Group Theatre is especially interested have been given your assistance in the way of grants for continued creative work.” In the same breath, however, Clurman confided, “Generally, I am pessimistic about awards given to artists, as so often inferior people manage to be chosen and good people to be neglected, but I am happy in this instance, and it is true of last year’s awards as well, good things have happened to the right people.”[58] Even Barrett Clark voiced some skepticism about the desirability of philanthropic support for authors and playwrights. “The giving of personal subsidies,” he thought, limiting his remarks to the creative arts, “should be based on rather more facts than we now have, and those who give such subsidies ought, in my opinion, to know somewhat more definitely than they do just how these subsidies work and to what extent they succeed in helping.” Clark proposed that the Foundation commission a detailed study of 100 fellowship recipients from various organizations to determine “to what extent such help has proved effective or otherwise.”[59] Although these attitudes may have colored the evaluation of the experiment, it nevertheless remains true that the Dramatists’ Guild project failed to produce theatrical work ready for full-scale production. Given the criteria of the project, success would have been possible only if the young playwrights had had time to smooth out the rough spots in their plays and work at length on the staging with directors. In this sense, the experiment ran into the bleak realities of Broadway and professional theatres in the late 1930s, where there was little time or money to expend on uncertain new work, a situation made even more difficult with the advent of war. At the same time a more in-depth look at the Dramatists’ Guild Fellowship calls into question the sharp black or white dichotomy of “success” and “failure.” First, it can be argued—as Stevens did in his evaluation—that even grants to those playwrights who were not endowed with genius paid some small dividends. While most of these writers are of little interest today as dramatists, it is essential to note that many did pursue successful careers. In addition to George Milton Savage and Betty Smith, several—Ramon Naya, Ben Simkhovich, Arnold Sundgaard, George Corey—were deemed by experienced producers to have talent. Another, Ettore Rella, wrote drama in verse and served the field by translating foreign works for American audiences.[60] Finally, in judging the merits of this scheme, it must be borne in mind that the program was experimental in the best sense of that word: grants for unproven talent are among the most difficult exercises to evaluate that foundations can undertake. With these caveats in mind, a look at the work of three playwrights whose works received trial productions suggests a different standard for evaluating fellowships to creative writers. George Corey, one of these aspiring playwrights, actually got his Broadway debut through the Experimental Theatre, a production that Corey credited the RF award with obtaining for him. His play, with the ill-omened title “Not in Our Stars,” closed after a short run. Corey admitted that his play lacked something vital that not even the short trial period could supply. Nonetheless, in the proud author’s judgment the play “contained excellent material and met with most of the requirements of a good play.” Yet correcting its defects for the stage had eluded him. Until the Rockefeller-Dramatists’ Guild fellowship came, “the task was a hopeless one, for that which the play needed could only come when the author himself could see with his own eyes and hear with his own ears the play’s theatrical weaknesses.”[61] Despite this rather damning admission, Corey credited himself with a good start in the first act, but “my shortcomings as a craftsman boomeranged in the fatal third act.”[62] His critics, however, were not so kind. Even the two acts the young playwright regarded as satisfactory failed to please New York critics. One critic complained of a “long, clumsy and faltering first act,”[63] while another thought the entire play “can do with considerable rewriting, especially in its third act.” This latter critic added, “It might save Mr. Corey future disappointment if he were to toss it into a trunk and start another play.”[64] Despite the unanimous verdict that the play was a failure, some of his critics detected promise in Corey’s work. One review hailed “a genuine playwrighting talent”[65] and even his harshest critic took care to sprinkle some compliments. This latter critic [Burns Mantle] clearly understood the purposes of the experiment, and while he dismissed the Guild project as an effort to create “synthetic or test-tube drama,” he nonetheless called Corey “a promising dramatist” and conceded that, given its goals, the experiment “may quite reasonably get him an assignment, either to write other plays, or to submit such other plays as he has already written to those producers of plays and pictures who are continually yelling for them.”[66] This prediction proved accurate as Corey did not use this experience to forge a career on Broadway, instead becoming a successful screen writer. If Corey’s first-person story of his dashed hopes seems tinged with pathos, it may well have been representative. Two other RF-Guild fellows fared hardly better. One news story disclosed that a new play by Theodore Browne would get only one more night at another New York theatre before it too would be closed. A third fellowship recipient, whose work had been intended for the New York stage, was instead given a trial run in Boston, but there too his production closed after only a brief run. In the case of Theodore Browne, the judgment by producers and the Dramatists’ Guild may have ended a promising career. Browne, the only African-American author selected for this program, was one of only a handful of Negro playwrights working professionally in the 1930s and 1940s, and according to theatre historian Doris Abramson, of these few he was indisputably one who “had something to say, cared passionately to say it, and had talent that could be trained to that end.”[67] Although Browne became identified with the American Negro Theatre (ANT) in New York, he first achieved some success as part of the New Deal’s Federal Theatre project in Seattle. While working on the West Coast, Browne adapted Lysistrata for the Negro unit of the Federal theatre, setting it in an African context. During this time he wrote an original play, Go Down, Moses to dramatize the life of Harriet Tubman. Finally, Browne’s Natural Man, a creative re-working of the John Henry legend, built upon his success in Seattle and prompted calls for a staging in New York where theatres in Harlem, as well as stages downtown, clamored for new material aimed at black audiences. Critical reaction to Browne’s work at the time was largely favorable, and he remains of interest to scholars and practitioners in African-American drama. One of the founders of the American Negro Theatre judged Natural Man to be the “best and most significant play” of all those presented by the ANT in its short-lived inaugural season.[68] Browne’s production for the ANT was also the first of its productions to be reviewed in the mainstream press, though Brooks Atkinson faulted Natural Man for its sketchy script. More recently, Quita Craig has credited Browne with writing a multi-layered work that can be read on the surface as the re-telling of the familiar story and more deeply as a work communicating in a specifically black idiom, whose political overtones audiences would have understood as the playwright “completed the transformation of the ‘brute Negro’ into a black revolutionary hero.”[69] Despite the producers’ intention to revive the production later in 1941, the resources for a specifically African-American theatre dried up quickly along with the larger federal theatre project. Browne never got another chance to stage his work and although he seems to have been exactly the type of talent the Rockefeller project aimed at identifying and promoting, his career as a playwright never recovered from this early cancellation. A third fellowship recipient, whose work had been intended for the New York stage, was instead given a trial run in Boston, but there too his production was closed after a brief run. Like George Corey, this playwright left an account of his trials and tribulations, and again like Corey, he credited the fellowship with giving him the vital opportunity to see first-hand the problems of translating stage directions into a workable theatrical piece. “Probably no man has ever written for the theatre with less foreknowledge of it,” the young author confessed, adding, “As rehearsals progressed it became more and more apparent that if nothing else needed fixing, the ending of the play certainly did.”[70] The third act did prove to be the fatal flaw, but not entirely in the sense the author meant. In addition to the development of the plot, the play also experienced a number of production problems. Although the play was set in the South, the producers chose a British director who had never been there and who was more familiar with Shakespeare than Faulkner. Fears that Boston’s legendary censors might also take offense at the script also proved well-founded, even if the actual changes came long after opening night. But in the end the flaws in the script were upstaged spectacularly in the third act by the production’s technical crew. The climax of the play called for a fire to destroy the little country store where the action was set, but in rehearsal the smoke pots used to simulate a fire produced only some very unconvincing wisps of smoke. On opening night the production literally increased its fire power, and theatre patrons in the first rows were soon gasping for breath and fleeing the theatre.[71] Despite this staging fiasco, the critics were surprisingly kind. A critic writing for the Boston Post described the evening as “the maddest night of melodrama” and wondered in print whether “the happenings on stage were not the aftermath of the glorious celebration in the imaginative brain of a genius who celebrated gaily but a little too well and was removed for quiet to that famous ward at the Bellevue Hospital.” [72] The play, Battle of Angels, ran for two troubled weeks but never recovered from the opening night debacle, and perhaps needless to add, never received its New York production. However, as we know, the playwright, who had taken to signing his works as Tennessee Williams, went on to much bigger and better things. Although Tennessee Williams conceded that Battle of Angels did not work for the stage, he also left accounts that suggest the Rockefeller grant was indeed a defining episode in his career.[73] The financial support came at a crucial juncture in his career, and Williams’ notebooks, early essays and later memoirs all point to the same conclusion: the recognition by the Rockefeller Foundation was of decisive importance for the transformation of the awkward Thomas Lanier Williams into the flamboyant Tennessee Williams. At the same time, too much should not be claimed for the grant, as the desire to write was deeply embedded in the young playwright. In his first account of the Boston production, Williams wrote, “My conversion to the theatre arrived as mysteriously as those impulses that enter the flesh at puberty. Suddenly I found that I had a stage inside me.” Williams recognized the theatre as his vocation, adding that he had been writing since he was 12, and concluded, “for me there was no other medium that was even relatively satisfactory.”[74] Given this deep-seated need to write and to write specifically for the stage, no one could seriously argue that young Tom Williams would have failed to develop into a writer and a playwright had the Rockefeller Foundation/Dramatists’ Guild program not provided him money. But the Rockefeller grant clearly did mean something important to the aspiring young playwright. The Rockefeller money enabled him to move to New York and begin the career he dreamed of—though at $100 a month, Williams soon had to take another job to stay there. Years later, when he wrote his autobiography, his first ten pages were devoted to this prize and to the sense of triumph it gave the struggling young writer. Williams recounts with evident pleasure the fact that all of the daily newspapers in St. Louis interviewed him. His father, with whom he had waged an epic battle for respect, was now forced to concede that his fay son had some talent after all.[75] If it seems clear that at least some of the fellowship recipients had genuine talent, why did the RF-Dramatists’ Guild project collapse in such disarray? It seems clear that both the Foundation and the Guild had serious reservations about the desirability of providing direct support to individual authors, and the failure of all but a handful of the fellowship recipients to get their work produced even for a trial run must have confirmed both organizations in their skepticism about support for individual writers. At the Rockefeller Foundation, at least, it appears that this experiment colored internal discussions about the arts for years to come. However much John Marshall may have wanted to see the Foundation offer support to composers, playwrights, and creative writers, the immediate result of the Dramatists’ Guild experiment was to make this type of support less likely. Yet the premises on which this experiment was based were not entirely unrealistic as the experience of more recent playwriting schemes demonstrates. A comparison with contemporary experiments in identifying new plays, such as the Fund for New American Plays or the Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, is instructive.[76] Initiated by the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities and administered by the Kennedy Center, the Fund for New American Plays had an excellent track record in identifying talented young playwrights whose work would go on to commercial as well as critical success. (Among others, this project provided early support to such writers as Tony Kushner and Wendy Wasserstein and helped develop new work by more established writers, including August Wilson.)[77] The key difference between the Rockefeller Foundation’s experiment and these more recent projects appears to be that efforts such as the Fund for New American Plays provided financial support not only to the authors but also to the non-profit theatres that agreed to sponsor new productions. These recent ventures in playwright development depended, therefore, on nonprofit theatres whose mission and whose budgets permitted more extended development of new work. Producers in the 1930s clearly understood this need. “Much can be done in teaching the fledgling playwright technique,” Theresa Helburn wrote, “But without the practical workshop of a tryout—of seeing the play in actual production and the shortcomings of the work, whether dramatic or structural, whether in development of convincing characters or of dialogue, whether in faulty timing or in lack of tension—the playwright simply cannot learn the basic principles of his craft.”[78] The Dramatists’ Guild’s fellowship competition for playwrights was an imaginative attempt to produce such conditions in the shadows of Broadway. Theatre directors and authors in the 1930s also understood that they needed a laboratory for new work. While the Theatre Guild and other partners attempted to set aside funds and time for experimenting, the harsh realities of recouping investments on Broadway meant that new works had to show promise immediately. “Five weeks is not long enough to prepare a complex play,” Williams complained after his effort went up in smoke. Asking rhetorically why his play had to be cast, rehearsed and rewritten in such a short time, Williams wrote tersely, “Answer: Money.”[79] While the Rockefeller Foundation may have been well-equipped to supply that need, it was less successful addressing another and no less real problem: in the 1930s there was no strong organizational framework in either the professional or the nonprofit theatres to mount sustained experimental work. No Foundation grant could remedy that absence quickly. Casting about for an alternative, one writer from the period could see few avenues other than those already identified by Clark and Stevens. “It appears that the universities and their theatres are the most hopeful places to look for such a new wave of creativeness,” Irving Pichel wrote in 1936.[80] A careful consideration of the evidence, then, suggests that David Stevens and the Rockefeller Foundation were not wrong, as Stevens’ colleagues later maintained, to look to the university drama departments and community theatres for future leaders or to offer grants to strengthen emerging regional playhouses. If the Rockefeller Foundation failed to find a way to link the commercial New York theatre that Marshall hailed with the emerging regional centers that Clark championed, it must be quickly noted that this chasm has never been easy to bridge. Stevens’ support for the leading university programs of the day provided crucial support during the depression for a generation of young theatre professionals, while the for-profit status of most of the Broadway theatrical organizations would have ruled them out as grantees of the Foundation. The appeal of the plan that Clark and the Dramatists’ Guild crafted came precisely because it promised to provide opportunities for all sectors of the theatrical community. If the Rockefeller Foundation proved adept in supporting universities and community theatres, it clearly stumbled over the problem posed by individual artists as the Dramatists’ Guild fellowships painfully illustrates. Yet, a project that sets free the talents of a Tennessee Williams poses some interesting questions about this first, halting effort to promote individual talent in the arts. Even though all the contemporaries, including Williams, regarded the RF/Dramatists’ Guild fellowship project as a failure, must historians join in this chorus? In retrospect, it seems worth asking whether an experiment that gave validation to one of the greatest dramatists of the twentieth century really should be deemed a failure at all. Perhaps one genius among 20 grantees is not such a bad percentage for any philanthropic foundation willing to take risks to advance the arts. Seen from a vantage point decades later the experiment illustrates a paradox in philanthropic support for the arts: sometimes a foundation or patron’s greatest success, like that of all creative artists, comes only when they are willing to fail repeatedly first. Malcolm Richardson is an independent scholar who has written on American philanthropy, support for the arts and the humanities, and international cultural exchanges. Over a long career he has worked for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Before completing graduate studies at Duke University, he worked briefly as the drama and film critic for the Memphis Commercial Appeal. [1] The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments helped improve and shape the presentation of this paper’s argument. [2] Andrea Olmstead, Juilliard: A History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 99-122, offers a brief overview of Carnegie’s support for the arts. Abigail Deutsch, “Investing in America’s Cultural Education,” Carnegie Reporter 6, no.1 (Fall, 2010): 16-25 describes the best-known Carnegie programs in arts and music education. Although her work does not examine Carnegie arts programs in detail, Patricia L. Rosenfield, A World of Giving: Carnegie Corporation of New York—A Century of International Philanthropy (New York: Public Affairs, 2014) provides the most comprehensive look at the Carnegie Corporation’s leadership and grant-making strategies. [3] On those efforts see Richard Schechner, “Ford, Rockefeller and Theatre,” in The Tulane Drama Review 10, no.1 (Autumn, 1965): 23-49. [4] Report of the Committee on Appraisal and Plan, Rockefeller Foundation records at the Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 3: series 900, box 22, folder 170. [5] Ibid. [6] Raymond B. Fosdick, The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation (New York: Harper & Row, 1952), 241. Fosdick, who wrote much of the trustee committee’s report, elaborated on this thinking after he became president of the Foundation in 1936: “The conquest of illiteracy, the development of school facilities, the rise of public libraries and museums, the flood of books, the invention of the radio and the moving picture, the surge of new ideas—and, above all, perhaps, the extension of leisure, once the privilege of the few—are giving culture in our age a broader base than earlier generations have known.” This quote also from The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation, 241. [7] William J. Buxton, ed., Patronizing the Public: American Philanthropy’s Transformation of Culture, Communication and the Humanities (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009). [8] See Fosdick, Story of the Rockefeller Foundation, 237-51, for an overview. [9] James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). [10] David H. Stevens, Memorandum: “Program in the Humanities,” March 1934, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 3, series 911, box 2, folder 9. [11] “The Humanities in Theory and Practice,” 31 March 1937, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 3, series 911, box.2, folder 10. [12] Ibid. [13] William J. Buxton, “RF Support for Non-Professional Drama, 1933-1950,” Research Reports from the Rockefeller Archive Center (Spring, 1999), 1-5. Stephen D. Berwind, “Raising the Curtain: Rockefeller Support for the American Theatre,” in Angels in the American Theatre: Patrons, Patronage, and Philanthropy, ed. Robert A. Schanke (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007), 225-41, comes in only during the second act, so to speak, by focusing on post-1945 developments. The essay by Julia L. Foulkes, “‘The Weakest Point in Our Record’: Philanthropic Support of Dance and the Arts,” in Patronizing the Public: American Philanthropy’s Transformation of Culture, Communication and the Humanities, ed. William Buxton (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009) is also valuable on the development of Rockefeller Foundation arts grants. [14] Jeffrey Ullom, America’s First Regional Theatre: The Cleveland Play House and Its Search for a Home (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). [15] Barrett H. Clark, “West of Broadway,” New York Times, 27 October 1935. [16] Ibid. [17] Ibid. [18] Ibid. Later RF documents captured this definition by substituting “non-commercial” for “non-professional” theatres. [19] “Playwright and Theatre,” in Our Theatre Today, ed. Herschel L. Bricker (New York: Samuel L. French, 1936), 175. [20] However, he conceded, “True, I have yet to see anything there as finished as the Moscow Art Theatre, the Theatre Guild at its best, or the best productions of such directors as Arthur Hopkins or Jed Harris.” “West of Broadway,” New York Times, 27 October 1935. [21] Clark report, 7. Appended to letter to Stevens, 25 February 1935, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200, box 210, folder 2513. [22] Ibid. [23] “Program in the Humanities,” dated “March, 1934,” record group 3, series 911, box 2, folder 9. [24] Hallie Flanagan, Arena: History of the Federal Theatre Project (New York: Limelight Editions, 1985 reprint); and Joanne Bentley, Hallie Flanagan: A Life in the American Theatre (New York: Knopf, 1988). [25] “The New Program in the Humanities,” 10 April 1935, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 3, series 911, box 2, folder 10. [26] See Archibald Henderson, ed., Pioneering a People’s Theatre (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1945). [27] MacGowan, Footlights Across America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929), 209. [28] Rockefeller Foundation, Annual Report, 1933, 329. [29] Stevens, A Time of Humanities: Recollections of David H. Stevens as Director in the Division of Humanities, Rockefeller Foundation, 1930-1950 (Madison: Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, 1976), Robert H. Yahnke, ed., 82-83. [30] Stevens, “Program in the Humanities,” March 1934. [31] Ibid. [32] Ibid. [33] Theresa Helburn, A Wayward Quest: The Autobiography of Theresa Helburn (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960), 97. [34] On Sherwood’s leadership of the Guild, see Harriet Hyman Alonso, Robert E. Sherwood: The Playwright in Peace and War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 195-6. [35] “Detail of Information,” attached to the signed authorization for the grant-in-aid, 4 March 1936, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200, box 210, folder 2513. [36] The series, originally published by Princeton University Press, was reprinted as Barrett H. Clark, General Editor, America’s Lost Plays (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963-65), 20 volumes. [37] Clark to Stevens, 5 February 1937, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200R, box 210, folder 2519. [38] Ibid. Most of the proposed judges were members of the Guild’s board. [39] Robert E. Sherwood to David H. Stevens, 24 December 1937. Rockefeller Archive Center in record group 1.1, series 200 R, box 210, folder 2519. [40] Quoted in C.W.E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth Century American Drama, 1900-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), vol. I, 130. [41] Ibid. The split between the authors and producers is well-documented in Bigsby A Critical Introduction. [42] Clark to Stevens, 5 February 1937, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200R, box 210, folder 2519. [43] The administrative arrangements are spelled out in a letter from Luise Sillcox, the Treasurer of the Authors’ League of America and Executive Secretary of the Dramatists’ Guild, to David Stevens, 9 March 1938, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200R, box 210, folder 2519. [44] Luise Sillcox to David Stevens, 9 March 1938. This letter, a separate document on Dramatists’ Guild stationery, served as the formal proposal. It too is found in Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200R, box.210, folder 2519. [45] David H. Stevens, diary entry for 10 January 1938, summarizing visit by Clark and Luise Sillcox, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200R, box 210, folder 2519. [46] Although the files and reports mention only three productions, I found that at least two other Dramatists’ Guild Fellowship recipients––Ramon Naya and Alexander Greendale—received productions either during or shortly after the grant period. Greendale’s drama, Walk into My Parlor, even played at a Broadway theater for 29 performances in late 1941. Gerald Bordman, American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1930-1969 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 208. On the off-Broadway production in 1942 of Naya’s Mexican Mural, see the account by director Robert Lewis, Slings and Arrows: Theater in My Life (New York: Stein and Day, 1984), 132-4. [47] Stevens’ evaluation, “Appraisal of RF 38053 to the Authors’ League of America,” 11 February 1942, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200R, box 211, folder 2521. [48] Sillcox to Stevens, 24 February 1942, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200R, box 211, folder 2521. [49] Ibid. [50] Clark to Stevens, 8 March 1939, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200R, box 210, folder 2515. [51] Fosdick to Francis Hackett, 31 January 1952. Papers of Raymond B. Fosdick, Princeton University Library manuscripts collection. [52] “The Reminiscences of John Marshall,” an oral history memoir in the Oral History Collection, Columbia University, and in the Rockefeller Archive Center, 213. Hereafter cited as Marshall, Reminiscences. [53] Marshall, Reminiscences, 208. [54] Ibid., 208-9. [55] Ibid., 208. [56] John Marshall to David H. Stevens, Memorandum titled “DHS’ Draft Review of Humanities Program,” 19 June 1939 Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 3, series 911, box 1, folder 2. [57] “The Humanities Program of the Rockefeller Foundation: A Review of the Period from 1934 to 1939,” 22, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 3, series 911, box 2, folder 11. [58] Harold Clurman to David H. Stevens, 2 January 1940, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200, box 211, folder 2520. [59] Clark to Stevens, 28 June 1939, Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200R, box 210, folder 2515. [60] In addition to those listed here and the three discussed in detail in this article, the remaining fellows were Leopold Atlas, Alis de Sola, Alladine Bell, Caroline Francke, Alexander Greendale, David Howard, and Noel Houston. [61] Corey’s first person account was published in the New York Times, 27 April 1941. (This and other clippings found in Rockefeller Archive Center, record group 1.1, series 200R, box 211, folder 2522). [62] Ibid. [63] John Anderson, New York Journal American, 28 April 1941. [64] Burns Mantle, New York News, 26 April 1941 [65] Christian Science Monitor, 26 April 1941. [66] Mantle, New York News, 26 April 1941. [67] Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, 1925-1959 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 156. [68] Ibid. [69] E. Quita Craig, Black Drama of the Federal Theatre Era: Beyond the Formal Horizons (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 47. [70] “The History of a Play,” in “Battle of Angels: A Play by Tennessee Williams, with a note on the play by Margaret Webster and an account of its production in the City of Boston by the author,” Pharos 1&2 (Spring, 1945): 110. [71] Ibid. His most recent biographer concludes, “If ever the professional debut of a major playwright was a greater fiasco, history does not record it.” John Lahr, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (New York: Norton, 2014), 25. Lahr follows Williams’ account (16-28). Also useful are the accounts in: Claudia Wilsch Case, “Inventing Tennessee Williams: The Theatre Guild and His First Professional Production,” in The Tennessee Williams Annual Review 8 (2006): 51-71; and Milly S. Barringer, “Battle of Angels: Margaret Webster Directs Tennessee Williams,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 4 (Winter, 1992): 63-77. [72] Unsigned review [Elliott Porter?] “Miriam Hopkins at the Wilbur,” Boston Post, 31 December 1940. [73] In his notebook, Williams wrote “I wait! For the Fates’ decision. I mean the Rockefeller Fellowship Committee’s. It seems a last chance of escape. . . . I dare not think what it will be if this last, wild hope is snatched away from me.” Tennessee Williams, Notebooks, edited by Margaret Bradham Thornton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 167. [74] Williams, “The History of a Play,” 110. [75]Williams, Memoirs (New York: New Directions, 2006). See also, Donald Spoto, The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985). [76] Jeffrey Ullom, The Humana Festival: the History of New Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008) provides an excellent overview of this venture. [77] Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a good summary of the Fund for New American Plays. The only overview appears to be The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, “History of the Fund for New American Plays,” at http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/theater/fnap/history.html (accessed 29 September 2015). See also, The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, Report to the President (Washington, 1992), reprinted in Journal of Arts Management and Law 23, no. 1 (1993) and Backstage, 20 February 2001. [78] Helburn, A Wayward Quest, 254. [79] Williams, “History of a Play,” 117. [80] Irving Pichel, “The Present Day Theatre,” in Our Theatre Today: A Composite Handbook on the Arts, Craft, and Management of the Contemporary Theatre, ed. Herschel L. Bricker (New York: Samuel French, 1936), 152. "West of Broadway: the Rockefeller Foundation and American Theatre in the 1930s" by Malcolm Richardson ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 27, Number 3 (Fall 2015) ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Jim Bredeson Editorial Assistant: Kyueun Kim Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Bill Demastes Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “Twisting the Dandy: The Transformation of the Blackface Dandy in Early American Theatre” by Benjamin Miller “West of Broadway: the Rockefeller Foundation and American Theatre in the 1930s” by Malcolm Richardson “Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China” by Wu Wenquan, Chen Li, and Zhu Qinjuan www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Twisting the Dandy: The Transformation of the Blackface Dandy in Early American Theatre West of Broadway: the Rockefeller Foundation and American Theatre in the 1930s Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Amy Mihyang Ginther Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Amy Mihyang Ginther By Published on May 19, 2022 Download Article as PDF “I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling.”—Saidiya Hartman [1] Using theatre to generate empathy for characters and narratives has been a longstanding goal in Eurocentric drama and a strong argument for this medium to be a tool for larger social change. In the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, sparked largely by the unjust deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd, theatre makers are exploring alternative ways to represent Black, brown and other historically excluded narratives, which are too often exploited as trauma porn. In this essay, I offer dramaturgy of deprivation, or 없다, as an alternative to dramaturgy of empathy. I contextualize this concept theoretically and practically, and use examples from my own practice to illustrate how 없다 is potentially effective in dramatizing narratives from my own positionalities as an Asian American and as a transracially adopted person from South Korea. Critique of trauma porn and sentimentalized narratives While white representation is afforded abundance and complexity, “ethnic and racial others live in an economy of narrative scarcity.” [2] Theatre has long had the power to disrupt this scarcity but often only in the form of providing the previously invisiblized or marginalized narrative for an audience to elicit empathy. Performance studies scholar/ethnographic theatre maker Nikki Yeboah asks in our current moment, “is empathy enough, or does our work reify power more than disrupt it?” [3] Particularly in relation to Black and brown suffering, how can we dramatize characters’ experiences in ways that do not re-traumatize people of color or leave white audiences feeling passively satisfied for having empathy, therefore perpetuating the white and colonial gaze of surveillance, voyeurism, fetishism, and possession, [4] something Yeboah critiques as “not an inherently radical act”? [5] Theorists from Black and decolonial studies indicate that highlighting the historiographical absence of people or obfuscation of narratives illustrates how forces such as white supremacy and colonialism have dehumanized or invisiblized them. Tapji Garba and Sara-Maria Sorentino argue that metaphoricity is a crucial part of Black enslaved identity and that its “political indecipherability … exemplifies the violence of slavery itself.” [6] If “what slavery-as-metaphor offers is an opening to tarry with unknowing, to increase frustration,” [7] then what impacts can this type of depiction have on a theatre audience? Can frustration and unknowing provoke stronger actions that will result in social justice after the performance? Yeboah argues for dramaturgy that leaves the audience with the kind of frustration Garba and Sorentino refer to because “collective action requires agitation. Collective action is fueled by feelings of unrest, anger, and dissatisfaction so strong that they cannot be contained. It emerges out of turbulence. It draws strength from a people unsettled.” [8] Saidiya Hartman seems to agree: “the loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them. So it is tempting to fill in the gaps and to provide closure where there is none. To create a space for mourning where it is prohibited.” [9] Hartman’s idea of narrative restraint as a way to “respect the limits of what cannot be known” [10] contrasts with the dramatic urge to present such narratives with explicit specificity and detail for contemporary white audiences as a way to compensate for their invisibilization. Although greater representation and embodiment of these stories and characters are still important, is there a dramaturgical alternative that complicates these depictions and denies audiences satisfaction? These questions inspire me to think about the Korean verb 없다, which roughly translates to “there are none; (to be) lacking; (to be) nonexistent,” [11] not dissimilar to faltar in Spanish. [12] How do we create dramatic experiences of loss or absence for an audience so they feel the grief and rage needed to take action towards a more just world, instead of feeling passively good about themselves for empathizing with victims/survivors of oppression? Rather than working to perform and prove my humanity for the audience, how can I compel them to feel the irreconcilable loss of self and/or history so we can be inspired to make collective change? Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview and Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop are excellent recent examples that engage with more complex representations around racialized trauma. As an audience member, I felt the unrest, anger, and hunger that Yeboah and Hartman hope to evoke in their work; both shows created strong desire within me to experience their characters and narratives more fully, and I felt a renewed urgency to fight for them offstage. In the next section, I will argue that the uniqueness of transracially adopted Asian American identity is suited for 없다 and provide examples from my own work. Racist Love : Asian American and adopted Korean representation This essay takes inspiration from a performative response on Zoom that I gave to Leslie Bow’s working introduction to her book, Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy . [13] Bow argues that the US’s racialized relationship with Asian American identity can be illustrated through its abstracted affection or desire for nonhuman proxies (such as objects) and that this partly stems from a “deliberate absence of Asian people.” [14] This resonated with me as both an Asian American and a person who was transracially adopted from South Korea. “Transracial” does not mean white women trying to pass as Black or brown. In this context, it means being adopted into a family whose race differs from theirs (often Black/brown folks being adopted by white folks), and it has been an established term in adoption studies for decades. [15] Directly following the Korean War in the 1950s, a time when the US was strengthening its anti-Asian immigration policies, [16] adoptions from countries like South Korea increased. I argue that this is because US society and its adoption industrial complex viewed adopted children as dehumanized objects that allowed them to project the same kind of abstracted affection and longing that Bow highlights. White US families often adopted South Korean children because they were deemed acceptable as a model minority [17] in ways that are consistent with Bow’s assertions that the US looks “outward to Asia for its ‘bit’ of the other, for the object that makes satisfaction possible while imperfectly concealing racial anxiety.” [18] The larger AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) immigrant community often fails to be in solidarity with transracially adopted people from Korea [19] (who make up 10% of the Korean-US diaspora) while their white parents disregard their racial identity often with the intention to assimilate them. [20] Because “adoption is a series of transactions—legal, social, and financial [and] … those with the most power get to define the terms and create the policies and practices that most benefit them,” [21] white parents as major actors in these transactions tend to further objectify adopted people as nonhumans. The Korean government and its counterparts in countries like the US that make up the adoption industrial complex commodify adopted people; they were a literal export, because “US adoptive laws were designed in the context of free market capitalism and based on children as property.” [22] Agencies duplicated, interchanged, and manipulated our records to make us more marketable/adoptable. I was one of likely thousands of adopted people whose status was changed to orphan on my paperwork, a lie to appease the US government’s scant overseas adoption policies at the time. Instead of wanting to prove my humanity as an Asian American and transracially adopted person, my impulse was to move in another direction: to depict myself as literal Asian objects. Utilizing the Zoom format, I used Snapchat filters that stir Western desire such as food, toys, and appropriative clothing/costume. I leaned into my own objectification and used filters that intentionally obscured most of my face in the hopes that the audience would strain to see more of my personhood and be present to this less comfortable sensation. Fig. 1. Screenshots of Ginther (taken by the author) during her Zoom performance, using Snapchat filters. Clockwise from left to right: 1. As a dumpling, 2. As an old-fashioned Orientalist doll, 3. As a Geisha in full makeup, 4. As a boba tea. As I presented using a boba tea filter, for example, I talked about how experts estimate that South Korea made somewhere between 15-20 million dollars a year at the height of Korean adoption. [23] Using my own birth year, 1983, and adjusting for inflation and the pricing for my favorite bubble tea place in Santa Cruz, I shared with the audience that I cost about 1,315 boba teas. I hoped that in highlighting the loss of my story and personhood through anti-Asian American racism and the international adoption industrial complex that I would generate hunger, agitation, and unrest in ways that Yeboah and Hartman imagined. Attendees described my performance as “playful,” “incisive,” and “disorienting.” Another reflected, “Mainstream representations of ‘Asian-ness,’ like dumplings, ‘Geisha’ makeup, and boba tea, seen all together in aggregate made for a compelling visual argument of how we consume and project, literally on our faces, cultural iconography and object.” These responses suggest that I effectively performed alienation and objectification. My work: between and No Danger of Winning My first solo show, between , explored Korean adopted identity through multiple characters that centered my search for my first family. [24] Many adoption narratives use reunion as a form of climax, [25] but I intentionally deprived the audience of this dramatic moment, telling them: There was no grand moment that led me to my family in Korea.Perhaps that’s what you were hoping to find here.Meeting my family in Korea did not complete me.Reunions are not ends. They are middles. [26] I did not consciously know it at the time, but I was exploring ways we can withhold representation from audiences for sociopolitical reasons. I remarked that I had intentionally resisted this type of resolution scene because “I think this dilutes the complexity and richness of the experience that the continuously progressing relationship demands and deserves.” [27] In addition to depriving my audience of a realistic depiction of my reunion, I realized that my inability to “authentically” portray a Korean woman also deprived Korean audience members in Seoul of the ethno-national identity that was taken from me through the trauma of my transnational adoption. This is particularly important because transracially adopted people “are seen as suspect in their communities of origin or seen as not authentic,” [28] so a more supposedly “accurate” depiction potentially misses an opportunity to convey a more complex truth. I reflected: I want the audience to fully believe that I am this Korean mother before them, but I have accepted the fact that, to a Korean-fluent audience, there really is no amount of voice work I can do to achieve this. … you’re not the only one to intimate that part of what is moving about this performance of Ki-Bum is how hard and perhaps how imperfectly I, as an adoptee, am trying to portray this character to audiences here in South Korea. [29] Being unable to achieve this character’s accent with believable mimesis originally felt like a failure in my performance. With between , I am interested in the impact of my inability to fully embody Koreanness for Korean audience members. In feeling deprived of this more authentic portrayal, perhaps they will be moved to support policies such as family preservation so as to not perpetuate this discomfort they feel. The theory I cite in this essay, my previous work like between , and pieces like A Strange Loop and Fairview have inspired the ways I am writing and dramaturging my current project, the book for No Danger of Winning , a verbatim musical based on my interviews with ten former contestants of color who were eliminated on The Bachelor/ette . It is a meta-musical where a character, Joy, based on me as the playwright, navigates the complex ethics of trying to represent the people she interviews in ways that are more humanizing than the reality television depictions. In some ways, she is exploring the same questions as this essay through a more dramatic, embodied medium. Originally, one of our major dramaturgical goals was to humanize the contestants in ways that the reality TV did not and to illuminate the ways they suffered as a result. When one Black audience member commented at our first workshop reading, “I don’t need an entire musical to tell me that these reality shows are racist,” [30] it became clear to me, the composer (Thomas Hodges), and our developmental director (Lisa Marie Rollins) that providing literal/mimetic depictions of the characters’ experiences simply to replace the racist televised versions was not sufficient representation. The musical needed to disrupt the conditioned white gaze of the audience. After six Asian/Asian American women were killed in a mass shooting in Atlanta in March 2021, the stakes of representation and its deadly consequences resonated with me in a deeply personal way, adding to the heightened despair and fear so many of us in the AAPI community were feeling since the pandemic and its racist consequences emerged. [31] I wanted to depict the way this event shifted my (Joy’s) making of our musical—but how? How can I represent the responses of my Asian American and transracially adopted Asian communities through my theatre making in ways that do not reify trauma or leave a white audience feeling sated with their empathy for us? There is a moment where my character, Joy, seeks comfort after the tragic news by having an intimate and romantic moment with the presumed Asian male contestant she interviewed from The Bachelorette. I offer this staging as a possibility of something because the scenario of two Asian people experiencing romantic love does not happen often on The Bachelor/ette . However, it becomes increasingly apparent through his lines that this Asian actor is actually playing Joy’s white boyfriend; along with Joy, the audience experiences this possibility of romantic love dissolve. No matter how much agency Joy has as a playwright, she is unable to generate this narrative in her real life. Using this reveal, I aim for the audience to feel deprived of what a romantic love story between Joy and an Asian American partner may look like and the ways whiteness can feel insufficient in supporting partners of color during/after racist trauma. Conclusion Adopted writer Mary Kim Arnold reminds us: “being visible is not the same as being seen.” [32] Too often, audiences leave shows “feeling good about feeling bad” [33] for a character of color who experienced oppression or trauma as part of the dramatic narrative. While representation is important, and this may be arguably better than continuing to exclude these narratives from our canon, I believe there are ways we can reimagine dramaturgy that can move audiences beyond a passive experience of empathy that does little to change power dynamics and the world at large. In my theatre making, I aspire to deprive the audience of my full personhood and its related narratives in an effort to generate feelings and experiences of irreconcilable loss: a traded commodity through cute Snapchat filters; a yearned-for reunion scene; an “authentic” Korean character; or a loving, healing, romantic relationship between two Asian Americans. I dream of emancipatory ways Korean adopted people and other people of color will be seen onstage. Perhaps one of the ways to do this is to deprive an audience of what could have been, to compel them to experience our grief, our losses, our irreconcilability, so they rage with us, fight for us, and do something in the world that generates actual justice. References [1] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 11. [2] Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 203. [3] Nikki Owusu Yeboah, “‘I know how it is when nobody sees you’: Oral-History Performance Methods for Staging Trauma,” Text and Performance Quarterly 40, no. 2 (2020): 132. [4] Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 2003), 6. [5] Yeboah, “Oral History Performance Methods,” 149. [6] Tapji Garba and Sara‐Maria Sorentino, “Slavery Is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,’” Antipode 52, no. 3 (2020): 776. [7] Garba and Sorentino, 777. [8] Yeboah, “Oral History Performance Methods,” 46. [9] Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 8. Hartman’s essay is known for laying the foundations of critical fabulation, the praxis of filling in the gaps of historical data with creative, semi-fictive accounts, particularly in relation to Black trauma in the US. This is already being referenced in dramaturgical processes in productions. See Calley N. Anderson and Holly L. Derr, “Using Critical Fabulation for History-Based Playwriting,” Howlround, 3 March 2021, https://howlround.com/using-critical-fabulation-history-based-playwriting. [10] Hartman, 4. [11] “Google Translate,” Google, https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=%EC%97%86%EB%8B%A4&op=translate. [12] “Google Translate,” Google, https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=faltar%20&op=translate. [13] Bow’s remarks and my response to them were part of the Writing for Living: Helene Moglen Conference in Feminism and the Humanities, sponsored by University of California: Santa Cruz, 2021. [14] Leslie Bow, Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 10. [15] For more on this, see: JaeRan Kim, “Race and Power in Transracial and Transnational Adoption: Historical Legacies, Current Issues, and Future Challenges,” in The Complexities of Race: Identity, Power, and Justice in an Evolving America , ed. Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe (New York: New York University Press, 2021), 104-125; Eleana J. Kim, Adopted Territory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Andy Marra, “An Open Letter: Why Co-opting ‘Transracial’ in the Case of Rachel Dolezal is Problematic,” Medium, 16 June 2015, https://medium.com/@Andy_Marra/an-open-letter-why-co-opting-transracial-in-the-case-of-rachel-dolezal-is-problematic-249f79f6d83c. [16] Kim, “Race and Power in Transracial and Transnational Adoption,” 109. [17] Kim, Adopted Territory , 28. [18] Leslie Bow, “Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy” (presentation, Writing for Living: Helene Moglen Conference in Feminism and the Humanities, Santa Cruz, CA, 19-20 February 2021). Bow said this as part of the draft she presented at the conference. It was later deleted for the final version of her book’s introduction. [19] Kim Park Nelson, Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 96. [20] Kim, “Race and Power in Transracial and Transnational Adoption,” 110. [21] Ibid., 104. [22] Ibid., 112-113. [23] Kim, Adopted Territory , 33. [24] I wrote between as part of my undergraduate thesis at Hofstra University in 2005. Its World Premiere was at the Edinburgh Fringe (Gilded Balloon) in 2006. Because of its themes and production locations, audiences were predominantly white and/or had some personal/professional interest in adoption. There were more Korean attendees when the show premiered in Seoul in 2011, but still many white audience members because the show was co-produced by an expat theatre company. [25] Family reunion is commonly used to resolve many media narratives in general that are not adoption related, spanning from Finding Nemo to Avengers: Endgame . One adoption-focused example of reunion being used as a resolution is the Netflix documentary, Found (2021). [26] Amy Mihyang Ginther, between (unpublished script, Club After Mainstage, Seoul, 9-17 April 2011). [27] tammy ko Robinson, “Korean Adoptee Explores Roots In One-Woman Show,” Imperial Family Companies, October 2011, https://charactermedia.com/october-issue-korean-adoptee-explores-roots-in-one-woman-show-2/. [28] Kim, “Race and Power in Transracial and Transnational Adoption,” 115. [29] Robinson, “Korean Adoptee.” [30] No Danger of Winning talkback , book by Amy Mihyang Ginther, music and lyrics by Thomas Hodges, Shetler Studios, New York, 11 July 2019. [31] Anti-Asian racism, violence, and xenophobia has a long history in the US; this has intensified significantly since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. [32] Mary-Kim Arnold, Litany for the Long Moment (Buffalo, NY: Essay Press, 2018), 29. [33] This phrases references Lisa Nakumura, “Feeling Good about Feeling Bad: Virtuous Virtual Reality and the Automation of Racial Empathy,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 47-64. This piece critiques the goal of empathy in virtual reality (VR) documentary work specifically, and is impacting my current VR project, Mountains after Mountains (산 넘어 산), which is about my illegal abortion in South Korea. Details about this are beyond the scope of this essay, but I anticipate publication about it in the future, along with its VR release in exhibition space. Footnotes About The Author(s) Amy Mihyang Ginther (she/they) is currently an assistant professor within the Department of Performance, Play & Design at UC Santa Cruz. She is a queer, transracially adopted theatre maker and accent designer who publishes and performs around themes of identity, embodied trauma, power, and representation. Ginther’s edited volume, Stages of Reckoning: Antiracist and decolonial actor training , is due 2023 (Routledge) and she is currently working on a musical, No Danger of Winning . Ginther is a Master Teacher of Acting and Singing with Archetypes, and is a certified teacher of Knight-Thompson Speechwork and Tectonic Theater Project’s Moment Work™ devising method. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Michael DeWhatley 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 Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Michael DeWhatley By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF STAGED NEWS: THE FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT'S LIVING NEWSPAPERS IN NEW YORK. Jordana Cox. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2023; Pp. 168. Jordana Cox’s 2023 Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspapers in New York is a striking reminder that the practice of adapting the news for popular expression has deep roots that have historically influenced the fields of both journalism and theatre. Staged News bridges the constructive processes of both arenas, revealing how journalists deem which subjects are newsworthy and how artists interpret and communicate “the news” to an audience. As Cox explores the continued legacy of the living newspapers that the Federal Theatre Project constructed between 1935 and 1939, she creates an expansive resource for historians, artists, and journalists. In an important deviation from existing approaches to the study of the New York Living Newspaper (NYLN) that focus on the political message or artistic value of living newspapers, Cox sees the NYLN as a “news-making” body that was able to identify and publicize urgent social issues. The designations “news-making” and “news-makers” in reference to the NYLN reflects the group’s hybrid combination of professional journalists and theater-makers as it worked under the auspices of the Federal Theatre Project. Cox argues throughout the book that the NYLN “cultivated journalistic imagination ,” a term she defines as “a capacity to perceive, reflect on, and revise the processes through which people and issues are deemed newsworthy ”(2-3, emphasis original). Cox extends the influence of living newspapers to the history of journalism, a historiographical challenge to a field that has traditionally ignored the NYLN. Cox makes the case that the NYLN had a substantive effect on journalistic imagination; moreover she asserts that the study of the NYLN offers a chance to “consider how text, image, time, and space work together to create conditions for witness” (26). Living newspapers, in Cox’s study, are an important site for understanding how journalists create and perform the news. This insightful volume traces the evolution of the NYLN’s approach, providing an organizational history that analyzes the NYLN in her first chapter, followed by three internal chapters, each of which investigates an NYLN production, presented in chronological order. While the NYLN produced six living newspaper projects in its four years of operation, Cox explores four: Ethiopia (1936), The Events of 1935 (1936), One-Third of a Nation (1938), and Liberty Deferred (1938) in detail. All her case studies illustrate the NYLN’s philosophical development in its newsmaking processes. She argues that Ethiopia , which the NYLN developed first, and Liberty Deferred , which came last, hold particular importance in highlighting the NYLN’s approach to racial representation. Her selection fills a gap in scholarship around the NYLN’s first and last productions, yet it also seems a bit subjective. Neither Ethiopia nor Liberty Deferred received public performances during the operation of the Federal Theatre Project; at 168 pages, Cox’s history might have benefitted from the presence of two additional case studies of works that engaged audiences. In the first chapter, Cox dives into organizational logistics and describes how networks, labor practices, economic precarity, and political expedience shaped the NYLN. Having established the logistical circumstances in which Living Newspapers were produced, Chapter Two investigates what publics the NYLN was attempting to reach and why. Cox considers these social questions primarily by analyzing The Events of 1935 (also referred to as Highlights of 1935 or 1935 ), the NYLN’s third project and one in which the NYLN developed stage techniques—such as courtroom performances as an embodiment of nationhood and citizenship—that the company would use consistently thereafter. Chapter Three turns its focus to One-Third of a Nation , the most widely popular of the NYLN’s projects. Rather than examine that show’s political message about the shortage of affordable housing, Cox asserts that One-Third expanded journalistic imagination by highlighting the co-constructive relationship between mass media and the greater public of US audiences. In Chapter Four, Cox’s examination of Liberty Deferred , an unproduced anti-lynching living newspaper written by Abram Hill and John D. Silvera, serves as a meta-commentary on the flawed approach of the NYLN towards anti-Black racism in the 1930s US. Despite the white hegemony present at the NYLN, Cox demonstrates that Liberty Deferred broadened the perspective of the NYLN and, crucially, was evidence of how news is simultaneously constructed and consumed in the context of identity, specifically racial identity. In a relatively short conclusion, Cox connects the legacy of the NYLN to two projects outside the Federal Theatre Project: One-Third of a Mitten (1939) and the Royal Court Theatre’s series of living newspapers produced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cox argues that these two projects, inspired by the NYLN, utilize journalistic imagination in a similar way to create news even as they were freed from “current events and journalistic norms” (139). Staged News is consistently well-researched, drawing on photographs and archival sources in order to immerse readers in the theatrical situation of Living Newspapers and in the visual and aural experiences of the NYLN’s audience members and artists. Cox’s detailed analysis of the Living Newspaper projects provides a fresh resource for cultural critics, universities and theatremakers interested in re-staging these plays. Staged News also forges an important link between the histories of journalism and theatre. With this volume, Cox points to embodiment as a central constructive force that influences what and who journalists consider to be news and newsworthy, both at the NYLN and in the present. Ultimately, Cox argues that making and receiving news is a process of “embodying information, of taking in and responding to information at the moment it arrives in the body” (25). Significantly, the NYLN’s process of embodiment drew attention to some important social and political issues, like affordable housing, while also engaging in racial exclusion in its failure to produce Liberty Deferred . Cox’s focus on the crucial power of public embodiment in shaping journalistic imagination is one of the book’s great strengths. Staged News holds particular relevance for scholars of journalism, communication and political science interested in the methodologies of communication, performance and entertainment related to the production and consumption of news. Cox argues that journalistic history is a relatively young field of study, and this book weaves living newspapers into the fabric of the history of journalism, as opposed to the histories of labor or theatre that focus on living newspapers as a cultural program subsidized by the government. At a point when the development of new media in photojournalism and radio broadcasting caused journalists and their readers to rearticulate what the news was and how it was consumed, Cox convincingly argues that theatre offered a “glimmer of possibility” about how theater and the newspaper might “supplement and transform each other” (4). The relevance of that work from the 1930s is even greater today, Cox argues, and her book provides a significant resource in understanding how embodying the news, particularly in nonliteral ways, may again redefine what is ultimately newsworthy. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Cox, Jordana. Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2023. Footnotes About The Author(s) Michael DeWhatley is a Ph.D. in Theatre candidate with a specialization in performance as public practice at The University of Texas at Austin. A native of Asheville, North Carolina, he holds a B.A. in Theatre with departmental honors from Wake Forest University and a M.A. in Theatre with a specialization in performance as public practice from The University of Texas at Austin. DeWhatley's research is focused on the role of community and locality on American regional theatres, as well as the governance of those theatres and related arts organizations. He is particularly interested in board performance during executive leadership transition and its larger impacts on institutional health and focus. DeWhatley spent six years as the associate production manager at Actors Theatre of Louisville and has had a variety of experiences in production and artistic management at Kentucky Shakespeare, Berkshire Theatre Group, Lexington Children's Theatre and the Austin Film Festival. He previously served on the board of Theatre[502], Centerstage at the Jewish Community Center and Trinity Street Players. He is a contributor to HowlRound Theatre Commons, Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts and Theatre Design & Technology. 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.

Book Reviews 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 History, Musicals, and the Americas Book Reviews By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF Donatella Galella, Editor Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical By Kevin Winkler Reviewed by Phoebe Rumsey Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance By Stephanie Nohelani Teves Reviewed by Angela L. Robinson Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre By Cindy Rosenthal Reviewed by Derek Munson Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past Edited by Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter Reviewed by Ryan McKinney In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement By La Donna L. Forsgren Reviewed by Gabrielle Randle Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina By Noe Montez Reviewed by Karina Gutiérrez Books Received The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical Introduction: Embodied Arts "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance History, Musicals, and the Americas Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Casey L. Berner 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 Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton Casey L. Berner By Published on November 16, 2022 Download Article as PDF Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton takes a broadly sociological look at notable Broadway shows of the last 30 years, constructing a rough lineage from Angels in America ’s 1993 Broadway opening to Hamilton ’s runaway success in 2015-16. The book opens with a compelling prologue detailing former Vice President Mike Pence’s notorious visit to Hamilton only days after the 2016 election. Then, Rise Up! ’s fourteen chapters tackle one notable Broadway play or musical and an attendant event or movement in US politics (or within the larger theatre industry). Each chapter is titled for the year of the play’s Broadway opening from 1993 through to 2016 (with a notable gap from 2002-2007). In doing so, Jones builds an historical image of Broadway in which each show discussed represents a unique and important lesson or development that would lead, almost inevitably, to Hamilton as Broadway’s cultural and political peak. Jones’s clear journalistic prose takes readers inside the various Broadway houses where each show played. At its best, Rise Up! moves seamlessly from huge events of political prominence, to the local context of New York theatre, to the particular production on which the chapter is focused. The book’s first chapter, “1993: An Angel Lands,” does this beautifully, taking readers into the Broadway of the 1980s and the AIDS crisis, discussing Larry Kramer’s activism and artistry to serve Jones’s discussion of Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America . Chapter twelve, which focuses on the notorious flop musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark , is similarly compelling, guiding readers through the backstage turmoil and the on-stage errors and injuries that plagued the production in a way that is both sensitively handled and entertaining to read without feeling sensationalized. At the same time, the book is mired by Jones inclination toward tangents that never quite weave back to his overarching argument. Hamilton serves as a prominent but ultimately weak binding agent for the history this book constructs; Jones mentions each featured play’s connection to the hit show, but the tone is more winking gesture than compelling narrative thread. In some cases, these gestures distract—chapter five contains a lengthy description of the historical duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, connected loosely to August Wilson’s King Hedley II via gun violence. Missed opportunities to more clearly cohere this narrative abound. I was particularly struck that Jones makes only passing remarks on Oskar Eustis, perhaps the figure who connects Angels in America most directly to Hamilton . Similarly, Jones discusses Frozen at length in chapter seven without mentioning that the show shared a composer with Avenue Q, the primary subject of that chapter. While Rise Up! is an enjoyable read, it presents readers with an oversimplified history without ever quite connecting its many dots. This often renders thinner analysis for theater historians and scholars. I was struck especially when chapter five, on August Wilson, ends with a comment that the playwright “did not live long enough to see the first show staged [at the August Wilson Theatre]: Jersey Boys ” (80). Some hint toward Jones’s perspective here would have been useful to me as a reader—was this an appropriate choice, given the show’s grounding in a specific location much as Wilson’s plays were? Or was it inappropriate to open Wilson’s eponymous theatre with a musical about a white doo-wop group performing in the early 1960s that largely evades the politics of the period? While Jones’s journalistic prowess makes the read interesting, the breezy tone allows him to evade deeper evaluation and critical analysis of topics. Some hint at Jones’s perspectives on these works and their cultural significance might have helped guide the reader and connect the volume’s disparate threads. My reader’s copy was also riddled with typos and minor factual errors—such as incorrectly naming The Little Mermaid in a discussion of Beauty and the Beast (59) or a reference to 2011 that, in context, must actually refer to 2001 to make sense (92)—that left me equal parts confused and distracted. These errors and misclassifications affect the very structure of the book; for instance, the seventh chapter is entitled “2002: The Pull of Vegas and the Rise of the Meta,” but the chapter details events set largely from 2004-2006 and in fact makes no reference to events in the year 2002 beyond the title. This was particularly notable, as the chapters jump from 2002 to 2007, and the contents of this chapter would fill that gap. While these errors may reflect on the editing or publisher as much as author, they raise concerns for me about the historical narrative that Jones’ book constructs when this narrative is at odds with the basic facts he presents. This book is perfect for those developing an initial interest in musical theatre or Broadway history, and could be used as a launching point for discussing commercial theatre and politics with undergraduate students, or as an entryway for further research into any one of the works included. It is also excellent for refreshing one’s memory of recent Broadway shows, especially musicals, as most major successful works since 1993 are mentioned in some capacity. Scholars aiming for a more rigorous investigation of these issues could pair Rise Up! recent volumes on musical theatre and US American culture; for instance, Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past can provide greater insight into Hamilton as a cultural juggernaut, while Stacy Wolf’s Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America plucks musical theatre from New York City and examines it in the context of communities and societies across the US. Ultimately, Rise Up! is an enjoyable and sometimes insightful read that is simply not geared toward academic readers or audiences well-versed in either musical theatre or recent political history, but can be read, used, and enjoyed with that in mind. References Footnotes About The Author(s) CASEY L. BERNER City University of New York Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “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 Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife 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.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage By Published on April 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Kurt Eisen’s excellent The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage appears as part of the Methuen Drama Critical Companions series, a series that “covers playwrights, theatre makers, movements and periods of international theatre and performance” and gives “attention to both text and performance” in critical surveys of the work of individual authors. Other contributions to the series include books on Beckett and Tennessee Williams and on the American stage musical and twentieth-century verse drama in England. Eisen here gives a succinct but rich account of O’Neill’s plays, captures well the breadth and range of O’Neill’s achievement, outlines key thematic concerns, and opens up interesting questions for both established scholars and those new to O’Neill’s vast, endlessly intriguing body of work. Essays by William Davies King, Alexander Pettit, Katie Johnson and Sheila Hickey Garvey offer additional and complementary critical perspectives. A comprehensive bibliography identifies all the major critical works and also points towards useful further reading. In other words, the book is a fine addition to the large volume of material in print on O’Neill as well as a suitable beginning point for students and scholars. From the beginning, Eugene O’Neill took himself and the American theatre seriously: one is struck, in placing O’Neill in the company of other Modernists, by how little mischief there is in O’Neill and how lacking the work is in frivolity. Every play appears to have been mined from the earth through earnest labor and is presented with the utmost sincerity, and it is this purposeful determination to shape a modern American theatre from the ground up, play by play, that defines his contribution. Even O’Neill’s apprentice works, many of them terrible, show serious intent. These early failures (such as Thirst, Fog, A Wife for a Life, ‘Ile) were attempts to “sort out themes and situations that interested him dramatically” (25), says Eisen in an exemplary examination of O’Neill’s work to 1920 and, to some extent, these themes and situations interested him throughout his career. Revisiting the early plays having read Eisen, one is struck by how much of the master-works (The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten) are contained within these trial pieces. Eisen convincingly frames a consideration of these lifelong themes and situations around a distinction between “modernity” and “modernism”, the latter “both an expression and critique” of the former. O’Neill’s restless experimentation was part of his search for “a unifying principle in the absence of a guiding theology or traditional values adequate to prevailing conditions of American modernity.” In the end, O’Neill “affirmed the American theatre as a heterotopian counter-site where one can more powerfully imagine other lives and the otherness of one’s own life” (69), defining through his will alone the modern American stage as something more than the “hateful theatre of my father,” as he famously described the nineteenth-century American stage. We follow this “modernity-modernism” thread through a series of linked, themed essays, an approach that allows the reader to draw from disparate and separate phases in O’Neill’s work very profitably. The themes—they may be summarised as: America, gender, race, family—are helpful in identifying all sorts of possibilities for more detailed conversation and research. In the chapter called “New Women, Male Destinies: the ‘Woman Plays’”, Eisen gives careful consideration to, amongst others, Anna Christie, Strange Interlude, and A Moon for the Misbegotten and notes some of O’Neill’s limitations as an artist. O’Neill’s final works seems to concede “his inability to fully represent women on stage”: over his career, O’Neill “creates a powerful if distorting lens into the lives of women in modern America, rooted equally in O’Neill’s personal emotional mythology and the gender typology of an American theatre tradition he could never completely experiment beyond” (92). In “‘Souls under Skins’: Masks, Race, and the Divided American Self,” Eisen offers very interesting reflections on O’Neill’s use of masks in the context of race. Eisen’s insightful comments on A Touch of the Poet and Irishness are of particular interest to this reader and prompt a reconsideration of O’Neill as an Irish playwright. Eisen is persuasive in “Transience and Tradition: O’Neill’s Modern Families” in his remarks on Beyond the Horizon (a critical play for O’Neill) and rightly argues for the Tyrones in Long Day’s Journey as O’Neill’s “consummate representation of an American family as both fully exposed and forever concealed, tragic in their confrontation with and retreat from American modernity” (140). The complementary essays are terrific. King considers the construction of the notion of “O’Neill” and an “O’Neill play” as a kind of spontaneous “personal branding.” Pettit in his look at O’Neill as a literary—as much as a dramatic—artist concludes that “O’Neill found a text-bound, literary model of drama that allowed him to exercise the sort of control whose elusiveness all playwrights must to some degree lament” (172). Johnson’s essay on The Emperor Jones teases out some aspects of the early productions and complements Eisen’s own treatment of the play in suggesting that Paul Robeson in his performance “embodied the modernist tensions inscribed onto black men” (182). Garvey offers an interesting consideration of Tony Kushner’s productive and lifelong “dialogue” with “the greatest of all America’s playwrights” (197). Omissions are minor. Eisen says nothing about Hollywood as both expression and vehicle of American modernism and of O’Neill’s relationship with the movies. He is good on Ireland and the Irish in his relatively brief but solid consideration of A Touch of the Poet mentioned above, as well as in relation to other plays, but says very little about the influence of the Abbey players on O’Neill – O’Neill’s experience of the Abbey on tour in 1911 has been acknowledged as instrumental in shaping his aesthetic. More too could have been said about Kenneth McGowan and the “triumvirate.” But this is to quibble. There is much to recommend this book. Tragically it is to be Kurt Eisen’s last; he died prematurely (aged just 61) in 2019. A former President of the Eugene O’Neill Society, he made an important contribution to O’Neill studies and to the study of modern American theatre and this book adds to and strengthens that legacy. It is a terrific introduction to O’Neill, will be accessible to undergraduate students coming to O’Neill fresh and still raises new questions for those more familiar with this great playwright’s work. Richard Hayes Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 33, Number 2 (Spring 2021) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative The Theatre of August Wilson Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Introduction to “Milestones in Black Theatre” Interviews and Afterviews on "Milestones in Black Theatre" Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Re-Imagining America and Theater: Race, Representation, and Form Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 1 Visit Journal Homepage Twenty-First Century American Playwrights By Published on January 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. In 1982, Christopher Bigsby penned A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. What was originally planned as a single volume expanded to three, with volume 2 being released in 1984 and Volume 3 in 1985. Although Bigsby, a literary analyst and novelist with more than 50 books to his credit, hails from Britain, he is drawn to American playwrights because of their “stylistic inventiveness…sexual directness…[and] characters ranged across the social spectrum in a way that for long, and for the most part, had not been true of the English theatre” (1). This admiration brought Bigsby’s research across the millennium line to give us his latest offering Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. What Bigsby provides is an in-depth survey of nine writers who entered the American theatre landscape during the past twenty years, including chapters on Annie Baker, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Katori Hall, Amy Herzog, Tracy Letts, David Lindsay-Abaire, Lynn Nottage, Sarah Ruhl, and Naomi Wallace. While these playwrights vary in the manner they work and styles of creative output, what places them together in this volume “is the sense that theatre has a unique ability to engage with audiences in search of some insight into the way we live…to witness how words become manifest, how artifice can, at its best, be the midwife of truth” (5). This explanation, however vague, does little to provide a concrete rubric for why these dramatists were included over others. Yet productively, although most of the playwrights included in this collection have had productions on Broadway, Bigsby eschews the misguided notion that American theatre means only Broadway with his inclusion of several writers more well-known in universities, regional theatres, and Off-Broadway—providing a refreshing change from many playwright surveys. Bigsby’s recent monograph presents a combination of playwright biography, oeuvre studies, philosophies, working methods, and dramaturgical analysis. Detailed and information-rich, his discussions can be experienced like episodes in a documentary series, gently guiding audiences through the life and catalog of these nine playwrights, proving it an accessible read for academics and enthusiasts, alike. The volume is organized so that each playwright gets their own chapter, any of which could be read independently from the rest of the text for artists and scholars wishing to do a deep dive on a single playwright. Readers do not need to be familiar with each playwright’s work to follow Bigsby’s scholarship, as he takes time to give a thorough description of each play while also unearthing the themes, styles, and methods favored by each writer. The tell-tale marks of each dramatist is dissected, including, for example: Annie Baker’s penchant for pauses (“it’s not actually silence I’m after so much as the things that we do when we’re not talking” (19)); Naomi Wallace’s political narratives (“politics and art can never be divided…that’s terribly exciting” (194)); Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s “radically different” oeuvre (“each of my projects are in part a rejection of or violent departure from a previous project” (35)); Katori Hall’s examination of diverse Black experiences (“everybody is influenced by who they are and unfortunately how other people perceive them” (68)); and Lynn Nottage’s unearthing of “memoir-less” narratives that implicate audiences (“I think that provocations is when you enter in the space and everything you believe in is challenged” (165)). In allowing the playwrights to speak for themselves, Bigsby opens the door to revealing the dramatists’ relationships to the canon. This proves useful to both students and scholars searching for context in placing the latest generation of American writers against the dominant voices of the 20th century. He analyzes many of their plays against titans of not only the American theatre, but also the world’s stage. He draws parallels between Baker’s characters in The Aliens to the vaudevillian clowns of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and the “characters on pause” from Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, for instance. Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County gets read against Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for its ability to “get through the skin and muscle, down to the bone and the marrow” of familial secrets (109). David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole is compared to O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, both plays having to “recycle their sense of lost purpose within the constraints of what should have been a place of safety” (132). Yet the text is more than an exercise in comparing and contrasting work with what came before, and 20th century models; Bigsby also considers how these works navigate contemporary socio-political issues and historical contexts on both macro and micro levels. Thus he evokes Amy Herzog’s uncomfortable family history as inspiration for After the Revolution (77-78), Sarah Ruhl being inspired to write The Clean House after overhearing a conversation at a cocktail party in which a doctor claimed they “didn’t go to medical school to clean house” (178), and Lynn Nottage’s use of the 2008 financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street as the inspiration for Sweat (164). If there are any flaws to the volume, they mostly lie with the publishers themselves. There are proofreading errors throughout — including calling Albee’s work Whose [sic] Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, referencing the Vermont Senator Bernie Saunders [sic], and an indecision about whether or not there is a second hyphen in “twenty-first century.” These detract from an otherwise engaging and solid read. Bigsby himself is not above question, however. Although he doesn’t say so directly, Bigsby gives the impression that his definition of “playwright” rejects those who write for the musical theatre, a disappointing exclusion. His introduction gives credit to the “financially no less than critically rewarding” plays—sorry, musicals—of Lin-Manuel Miranda, for instance, but still Bigsby denies him a chapter’s sustained discussion. (And because Miranda is denied, we are less likely to question the omission of other critically, commercially and culturally successful musical theatre writers). Bigsby addresses this line of critique in a way, stating that “to name some of [the excluded writers] would invite complaints of further omissions” (2). While none of his volumes to date have examined musical theater writers with his impressive, engaging lens, one can hope that he is deliberately keeping a few aces hidden up his sleeve that will serve as the basis for the inevitable—and welcome—volumes yet to come. Shane Strawbridge Texas Tech University The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 33, Number 1 (Fall 2020) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2020 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202 Twenty-First Century American Playwrights Encounters on Contested Lands and Provocative Eloquence Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening "Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here": Romanticizing Grifters in American Musical Theatre Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero: The Mark of the Marketplace in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1-3 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Hui Peng Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. Hui Peng By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor brings attention to Disney tourism as a significant site of theatre and performance study, particularly immersive and participatory theatre. By placing the idea of “tourists as actors” at the center of analysis, this multi-author collection helps readers to understand Disney’s experience economy and goods through the lens of theatre and stretches the definition of “actor,” charging it with more cultural and societal connotations. Just as tourists at Disney can decide their own way to navigate the theme parks, readers here can decide how to approach this book: follow the order of the chapters or jump from one chapter to another, connecting the dots themselves to chart an interdisciplinary journey of the quintessential American theme park experience. Thirteen chapters are divided into five sections based on analogous subjects and methodologies: “Introduction,” “Time, Tomorrowland, and Fantasy,” “Environments as Ideologies,” “Liveness and Audio-Animation,” and “Counter Identities.” In the introduction, editors Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson borrow David Allen’s concept of the “tourist as actor” to challenge the stereotype of passive guests who lose their control in the “Disney virus” made of “artificiality, consumerism, and lack of depth” (6). This concept calls attention to the guest’s autonomy and agency—tourists are actually agentive subjects; they consume the illusive Disney experience with self-awareness and an understanding of how that illusion is constructed, scripted, and delivered. The subsequent four sections discuss how tourists take on their role as actors through “complicated negotiations with race, gender, sexuality, capitalism, nationality” (19). The first section, “Time, Tomorrowland, and Fantasy,” explores the dissolution of linear time and performed temporalities. Tom Robson’s opening essay excavates nostalgic time travel in Main Street and Tomorrowland installations of Disney World Park. In this signature essay, Robson investigates how the Main Street serves as a theatrical lobby, where guests transform from citizen to tourist to actor, detaching from real-time as well as the normative behavior in their everyday lives. Attuned to historical erasures, Victoria Pettersen Lantz delineates four problematic portrayals of indigenous Americans in the Disney narrative of consumerism, critiquing the romanticized representations and staging indexical absence of First Nation peoples. The section closes with Christina Gutierrez-Dennehy’s illuminating essay about “inserting the values of Middle Class America into the European Middle Ages”; as she notes, the pricy ticket and food in Fantasyland crafts the participatory experience of tourists as actors specifically for the white middle-class, making the experience a privileged act, or at least, an exclusive one (66). Section two, “Environments as Ideologies,” considers how Disney creates a reality game through the use of characters and landscapes. This reality game, “does not simulate the ‘real’; rather, it celebrates the art of simulation, or the ability to construct fantasy worlds as if they are ‘real’” (93). Jennifer A. Kokai’s essay, “The Nemofication of Nature, Animals, Artificiality, and Affect at Disney World,” succinctly criticizes the depiction of nature as “controllable, consumable, and even constructible good that is superior to geographically occurring nature” in her historical investigation into the evolution of The Living Seas to The Seas with Nemo and Friends (102). Kokai asserts that such problematic depictions further reinforce the stereotypes of increasing anthropomorphism and human estrangement from nature. This section also features Chase A. Bringardner’s essay about the Splash Mountain attraction, which details the erasure of racial narratives and identities in Song of the South as well as problematic queer representations of Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear. The section closes with Laura MacDonald’s insightful essay on Shanghai Disneyland and its mantra “authentically Disney and distinctly Chinese” (128). Through the strategy of a “glocalized” Broadway-branded musical, for instance, on the one hand, The Lion King in Mandarin with its all-Chinese cast, enables local consumers to appreciate the familiar Chinese elements, while satisfying the Western fantasy and global experience on the other. As such, they are rehearsed to “feel” authentic and become normative guests who contribute to Disney’s rising enterprise in the East. The third section, “Liveness and Audio-Animation,” explores the non-human and human performers in Disney Park and how they interact with tourists, shaping guest performances in changing contexts. This section begins with Li Cornfeld’s illuminating essay about the must-see, yet boring auto-animatronic robots performing in The Carousel Theater of Progress. These once-futuristic robots were originally featured as a prelude to an expo of forthcoming General Electric products introduced in 1975, and a portrayal of American families enjoying advances in household technology. Yet, decades later, the once-futurist robots now function as objects of cultural nostalgia. Cornfeld uses the robot dramaturgy, such as the asymmetrical aging of the Carousel cast, to showcase how Disney naturalizes its historical vision. Joseph R. D’Ambrosi focuses instead on how non-human performers create an idealized way of behaving for human beings. Drawing upon Jill Dolan’s notion of utopian performativity, D’Ambrosi proposes the term “prescriptive performativity” to describe the forms and functions of Disney’s utopian framework in a case study on the Audio-Animatronic actors in the Hall of Presidents. The final essay by Maria Patrice Amon shifts our attention from non-human actors to human ones. Amon explores how space and narrative in the Magic Kingdom construct a melodramatic imagination for the guests, encouraging and even teaching them to participate in this alluring environment as actors. The fourth section, “Counter Identities,” explores how the tourist-as-actor evolves over time and influences Disney’s audience today. Jill Anne Morries’s refreshing essay outlines the history of gated amusement parks from Luna Park to Disneyland to argue that the pay-one-price ticket shifts our attention from racial exclusion to class construction—everyone is welcomed as long as they can afford the tickets, which actually feeds colorblind racism and requires more ethical reexamination. Christen Mandracchia, in turn, focuses on the villain characters in Disneyland including the Big Bad Wolf, the Evil Queen, and Captain Hook, attuned to the ethics of their representation. Dismantling the dichotomy of good and bad, Mandracchia brilliantly explores how bad characters are normalized and celebrated as good in merchandise, attractions, and events. This fascinating section ends with Elizabeth Schiffler’s analysis of Disney’s radical consumers from Disneyland Social Club to subcultures, such as the communities attending Bats Day or Gays Day. Schiffler argues that the tourists and subcultural fans deploy agency to re-cast specific characters as their heroes, which changes their reception and meaning. Building on Maurya Wickstrom’s conception of the “Disney brandscape,” Susan Bennett closes the book by proposing the term “exemplary Disney” to scrutinize how the theme park “has provided a stage for conceiving and realizing (as well as regularly updating) performance practices, contexts, and markets” (269). This edited collection is a worthy addition to popular cultural studies, tourism, environmental studies, and theatre and performance scholarship. Accessible and interdisciplinary, Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience contributes significant American nuances to the scholarship of immersive, interactive, and participatory theatre, a realm that is predominantly occupied by British and European scholars. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Hui Peng The Graduate Center, City University of New York Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Theatre of Isolation “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Kee-Yoon Nahm Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 2 Visit Journal Homepage Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men Kee-Yoon Nahm By Published on April 23, 2015 Download Article as PDF Dead white males. This oft-cited phrase encapsulates the ongoing project of dismantling the privileged monopoly that white men have historically held over the formation of an artistic canon and cultural tradition. In the field of American drama, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller (despite significant differences among their work) comprise such a tradition, one that elevates the realist family drama over other forms of theatrical representation and underlines the centrality of the white male voice in both the imagined domestic settings and the actual public sphere. Through its prominence in theatre programming and education, realism continues to hold influence on how plays are written and received in the United States, evident not only in recent Pulitzer Prize winners such as Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County (2007) and Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park (2010), but also in designations such as “alternative,” “experimental,” or “avant-garde” theatre, which generally refer to aesthetics that are opposed to realism. This essay examines two recent plays that engage with this problematic tradition, albeit from an unconventional angle that probes and challenges existing representations of whiteness: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate and Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, which were both produced in New York in 2014.[1] On the surface, these plays stand out from the established institution that realist family drama has become in that they were written by an African-American and Asian-American respectively, challenging normative assumptions about the kinds of plays that playwrights of color can or should write. But in light of Jacobs-Jenkins and Lee’s previous, critically acclaimed work on racial identity and representation, the conscious choice to adopt—or more fittingly, appropriate—this seemingly orthodox aesthetic warrants deeper analysis. As such, this essay attempts to explain how Appropriate and Straight White Men disrupt the “traditional” link between realism and whiteness: in other words, how the purposeful emulation (rather than the rejection and dismantlement) of realist dramaturgy and stagecraft can highlight issues of racial representation, even when the form has a long and problematic history of shrouding whiteness in the myth of universality. It was in the work of feminist critics that realism was first associated with the Barthesian notion of myth as an ideological institution. To theorists such as Laura Mulvey, Catherine Belsey, and Jill Dolan (among many others), realism in mainstream cinema, literature, and theatre mystified a patriarchal value system, normalizing and universalizing the male gaze and the objectification of women by masquerading as an unmediated and natural account of reality. Following the feminist model of cultural analysis, critical race studies has demonstrated how an ideology of whiteness is reinscribed through media representations—privileging identification with white characters and the gaze of white audiences, while stereotyping non-whites to a handful of recognizable roles and scenarios. Prior to its critical scrutiny by cultural theorists, whiteness maintained a mythic status; to be white means to not be seen in terms of embodied race, to be regarded only as “unmarked, unspecific, universal.”[2] Thus demystifying whiteness in dramatic realism involves asking, for example, to what extent Death of a Salesman reflects the aspirations, struggles, and tragedy of the “common man” when Miller’s professed commonality fails to extend beyond white people. Jacobs-Jenkins explains that his initial interest in emulating realist dramaturgy for Appropriate emerged from asking, “what is the gulf between [Sam Shepard’s] Buried Child and August Wilson? I went back and read every family drama I could get my hands on, and after a while I realized they are actually all about race or ethnicity or identity. They all are but they never get credited as that.”[3] While still acknowledging that whiteness functions differently from other formations of racial identity, Jacobs-Jenkins attempts in his play to mark whiteness as a race, undermining its claim to transracial universality by making it visible. Lee engages in a similar project, although the white characters in Straight White Men are strikingly different from more stylized renditions of whiteness in her earlier pieces such as Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (2003) and Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven (2006).[4] In sum, myth is present in the American dramatic canon in two ways that are relevant to my reading of these ostensibly white plays. American realist drama since O’Neill largely preserved the mythic status of whiteness, equating “white” with “human” while excluding or marginalizing non-white experiences, subjectivities, and modes of spectatorship. At the same time, whiteness becomes myth most effectively through the form of realism. Elin Diamond writes: realism, more than any other form of theatre representation, mystifies the process of theatrical signification. Because it naturalizes the relation between character and actor, setting and world, realism operates in concert with ideology. And because it depends on, insists on a stability of reference, an objective world that is the source and guarantor of knowledge, realism surreptitiously reinforces (even if it argues with) the arrangements of that world.[5] Diamond’s theoretical work on mimesis, with realism as its most rigidified version, translates Barthes’s definition of myth—“the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal”—into one that is specific to the conditions and contexts of theatrical representation.[6] The critical vocabulary developed by feminist criticism on spectatorship and identification cover some of theatre’s unique conditions. We may also include here Varun Begley’s extension of Diamond’s theory to objects on stage, in which the fully rendered living room sets and realistic props (the epithetic “kitchen-sink”) of stage realism serve as “ideological guarantors” that help reinforce the truth effect of the theatrical representation: “Conventional realism proclaims what things are, rather than exploring how they might be appropriated and used.”[7] The overbearing presence of material things in Appropriate and Straight White Men fulfill the expectations of realist stagecraft, but when whiteness is highlighted, the socio-economic dimensions of these objects (property, the inheritance of wealth and social status, relationships to labor and leisure, etc.) also stand out. These twin principles outlined by previous scholarship will be crucial to my analysis: realism mystifies both itself (by replacing theatrical representation with an “objective world”) and racial hegemony (by replacing whiteness with universality). That said, the parenthetical aside in the last clause of Diamond’s quote introduces a difficult problem to the framework of realism and (de)mystification. She concedes that realism inevitably reinscribes the dominant ideology even when the intention is to challenge it. While Diamond sought to develop an analytical method that moved beyond the compromised politics of realist dramaturgy (which she calls “gestic criticism”), other scholars have attempted to qualify myth-based critiques of realism to account for realist plays that do not, in their view, reinforce hegemony.[8] Using the example of Terry Baum and Carolyn Meyer’s play Dos Lesbos (1980), which takes the form of realist drama but advances a radical feminist/lesbian perspective, Jeanie Forte attempts to “identify a feminist writing practice that emulates realism but operates as a different discursive strategy, perhaps a pseudo-realism.”[9] Similarly, Josephine Lee argues that the critical discourse on realism and ideology must be revised when dealing with Asian-American family dramas that adhere to conventional realism. Not only do the plays of Frank Chin and David Henry Hwang “work against a sense of mastery, of total identification, for either the Asian American or non-Asian American viewer,” they also provide opportunities of spectatorship that “support rather than oppose moments of sympathetic identification.”[10] Forte and Lee believe that realist dramaturgy can engender a sense of belonging and political purpose for minority groups when placed in the right hands, contrary to Diamond’s assertion that realism can only reinforce and mystify. But it seems to me that these counterarguments rely on the assumption that such plays feature characters and audiences that both belong to the minority group in question: that the Chinese-American families depicted in Chin and Hwang’s plays speak to Chinese-Americans in the audience. Only in this setting can something as inimical as “sympathetic identification” (which plays a crucial role in how ideology is reinforced, according to earlier theorists) can be recuperated “to authenticate through public performance a vision of ethnic community hitherto erased from public view.”[11] But how, then, are we to understand the all-white casts in Appropriate and Straight White Men? Strictly speaking, these plays couch the lives and perspectives of white characters within a mode of representation that subtly instates the stage as a reflection and extension of reality. Do these works still qualify as pseudo-realism, in other words, appropriations of realism that avoid its ideological pitfalls? I wish to make the case that they do, which requires a further revision of the critical discourse on realism and myth. Unlike earlier dramatic appropriations of realist dramaturgy, Jacobs-Jenkins and Lee are not interested in divorcing form and ideology; instead, they acknowledge and make full use of the historical affinity between whiteness and realism. That is, the conventionality of realism itself can highlight issues of race not by satirizing or parodying whiteness, but by rigorously embodying it. Indeed, what makes these plays so innovative and potentially radical as artistic interrogations of whiteness is the fact that they are not parodies. Some of the characters are unlikeable, but not necessarily because they are white. They are not caricatured vessels of dominant ideology, but rather individuals: struggling, confused, and emotionally torn. After all, if the “privilege of being white in white culture is not to be subjected to stereotyping in relation to one’s whiteness,” then reducing whiteness into a stereotype is subverting it without probing the full extent of the white culture that guarantees that privilege.[12] Instead, these plays surprisingly ask the audience for old-fashioned sympathetic identification towards their white characters, even as they draw attention to the privileged, unequal position that whiteness has and continues to occupy in American society. White supremacism, the most extreme manifestation of whiteness as ideology, literally forms the background of Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate, set in a derelict manor in southern Arkansas that was once a slave plantation. Following the death of the estate’s owner Ray Lafayette, his three estranged children, all middle-aged, return to their old family home to take stock of the property and auction it off to repay their father’s steep debts. The past works on the present as the family’s long and painful history emerges through expository recollections and mutual accusations of past misdeeds in typical realist style. Yet the characters are cautious and defensive when the past that they dig up touches upon the history of racism. Toni, the eldest daughter, is especially averse to admitting that the disturbing artifacts that they find in their father’s bookshelves and closets mean anything, although she repeatedly insists on remembering the past to emphasize how much she has suffered and sacrificed to keep the family from falling apart. Franz, the youngest, returns unexpectedly after running away ten years ago after he was convicted of child rape to seek emotional closure and start a new life. His fiancée, River, encourages Franz to forget the past without acknowledging the racial legacy enmiring the crumbling house: “This place is still in your bones and you need to let it go. And, tomorrow, when you see it’s gone, you’ll be free. It’ll become someone else’s problem and you’ll be able to sleep again.”[13] Before examining how these characters and their juxtaposition against the house’s history engage with issues of whiteness, it is important to note that the Lafayette siblings are fully-realized and emotionally complex (if somewhat over-expressive) people, molded from the same cast of conventional realism. Ben Brantley of the New York Times notes that Jacobs-Jenkins “has achieved the difficult feat of making them all both unlovable and impossible not to identify with,” meaning that the play does not treat these white characters as physical stand-ins for an abstract racial construction.[14] Such a concrete foundation of realist characterization is vital to how Jacobs-Jenkins then makes their whiteness salient—through their interaction with an old photograph album depicting lynchings of black men. The album’s spatial journey, discovered by accident on the living room shelf and passing through the hands of every character over the course of the play, creates a secondary plot that runs parallel to the family conflict among the Lafayette siblings; the range of responses to this document of racist violence—shock, disgust, curiosity, fascination, disregard, aversion—is as diverse as the characters’ inclinations and perspectives on more personal matters. Yet despite such individualized responses, the photographs mark all of the characters as white, as people that have never experienced the discrimination and violence that Hilton Als describes in his essay on actual lynching photographs: “Fact is, if you are even half-way colored and male in America, the dead heads hanging from the trees in these pictures, and the dead eyes or grins surrounding them, it’s not too hard to imagine how this is your life too, as it were.”[15] Whiteness becomes apparent when these characters are unable to imagine the terminated lives in the photographs. Toni refuses to believe that the photographs are even a part of her father’s life, arguing throughout the play that they could have ended up in the house by chance. Bo, the middle sibling, wants to throw them away until he discovers that there is a lucrative market for this “highly specialized collector’s item” (75). When River and Cassidy (Bo’s fourteen-year-old daughter) are caught looking at the album, River distances herself from the images by treating them as an educational tool: “Cassidy was actually very mature about them. She was asking all the right questions. She was using the internet” (53). Yet the lynching photographs do not completely upstage the main plot. In keeping the focus on the lives and emotional struggles of individual characters, whiteness shifts in and out of view, clearly visible when the photographs demand attention and fading away when the family fights take over. Jacobs-Jenkins subtly stages opportunities for these opposing registers of whiteness—visible and invisible—to bleed into one another, rather than building up to one grand gesture in which whiteness is fully exposed and demystified. In this way, Appropriate is a sophisticated and carefully crafted meditation on how whiteness functions differently from other races. Steve Garner writes: “whiteness is a position from which other identities are constructed as deviant. The invisibility of whiteness therefore stems from never having to define itself explicitly. It is seen as the human and universal position requiring no qualification.”[16] Thus whiteness is rendered invisible when Toni suffers over her divorce and sense of failure as a mother, or when Franz seeks redemption for the pain and trouble he has caused his family because the conventions of realist drama ensure that they are human first and foremost in these moments. In adhering to realism, Jacobs-Jenkins demands that the audience acknowledge and grapple with the privilege of invisibility granted to whiteness while not losing sight of race in the background. Realism’s reliance on material objects to verify the truthfulness of the representation here becomes the playwright’s principal means of keeping invisibility in check. The house itself serves this purpose well; in the end, the siblings are trying to claim a fortune accumulated through the exploitation of African-Americans. But hidden throughout the detritus cluttering the set are more explicit reminders of racist violence that intrude on the characters whenever they are about to forget the house’s racial history. For example, the important photograph album (which will resurface constantly throughout the play) makes its first appearance right after Toni and Bo’s squabble about who is more responsible for the estate’s ruin. Bo complains that the two graveyards within the property—one for the family’s ancestors, another for the slaves—make it difficult to sell the house “with all the red tape and historical ordinance crap”(21). As if the house is somehow responding to this dismissal of history, Bo’s wife Rachel discovers exactly at that moment that her eight-year-old son Ainsley had been flipping through the lynching photographs, abruptly ending both the argument and the scene. Later, Toni and Franz argue over inheritance rights and Franz’s past sex offenses when other family members enter carrying jars of desiccated body parts: “souvenirs” taken from lynchings. And in the emotional climax of the play when the pent-up anger and frustration explodes into a physical brawl involving all of the adult characters, Ainsley enters wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood he found in his grandfather’s closet. Again, this image immediately ends the fight and the scene. These shocking mementos of racism not only disrupt the dramatic structure, preventing arguments and fights from carrying on, they also mediate the audience’s perception of race in the play, turning these “people” into “white people” in the blink of an eye. The mounting evidence of their father’s racism pressures the characters themselves to navigate this difference; the siblings want to claim what is left of Ray’s material legacy but at the same time “disown” the racial legacy inscribed in his possessions. In this way, Appropriate specifically addresses the most current iteration of whiteness as ideology: the myth of the post-racial. Post-racial politics reinscribes the dominance of whiteness by claiming that American society has moved beyond race after the “success” of the Civil Rights movement (amplified by the election of President Obama). According to social critic Tim Wise, this myth insists that “economic forces, and even ingrained cultural factors within the African American community have overtaken the role of racism in explaining the conditions of life faced by black and brown folks, especially the urban poor,” denying the impact of intergenerational disadvantages caused by slavery and Jim Crow laws, as well as institutionalized racism today in the guise of colorblind public policy.[17] Not only does the notion of a post-racial society perpetuate norms and value systems that have historically privileged whites, it erects an impermeable border between whiteness before and after the eruption of race politics in the mid-twentieth century. When River accuses the entire family of racism, stressing “the evil and cruelty you’re descended from – that’s in your blood,” (84) Bo goes on a defensive rant that reflects this post-racial attitude: Nobody asked to be born, okay? And certainly nobody asked to be born into this – this –shitty history, so tell me what you want me to do. You want me to go back in time and spank my great-great grandparents? Or should I lynch myself? […] I didn’t enslave anybody! I didn’t lynch anybody! (84) Bo’s frustration and overreaction is in some ways understandable. Significantly, there is nothing in the play that suggests that he has done anything that would make him a racist in the way that his father was. But at the same time, even Bo’s appeal to his individuality is conditioned by whiteness; “I didn’t enslave anybody!” (84) can only be a meaningful statement of one’s morality to a white person. Meanwhile, the curse metaphor that River evokes is in response to Franz’s long speech about how he threw the photograph album in a lake. He describes this spontaneous act as a healing ritual for himself, which River then extends to the family’s cursed history of racist violence. But Franz struggles to find the right words to explain how he came to the decision to destroy the photographs: These things are…crazy. They are so powerful – They’re making everyone act crazy. […] They have like…an energy and, like, where did they come from? Because I never once saw them here. I never once saw Daddy with them. It’s like they came from nowhere. And I was like – maybe they emerged for a reason, you know? And I was thinking about what Rachel was saying – like these were killings – like crimes – I was like, maybe we’re actually supposed to solve this crime – maybe something is asking us to – to right what was wrong. (82) The imaginary scene of the crime and especially the bizarre fantasy that the photographs themselves want Franz “to right what was wrong” (84) turns a specific history of racist violence into an archetypal scenario. In this fantasy, the photographs depict a crime without perpetrators or victims, without origin or material substance. Thus Franz also attempts to disown the racist legacy within whiteness; his act of rendering the photographs illegible then amounts to destroying evidence. But what’s more revealing is how he describes his “epiphany” by the lake: There was a whole purpose to this journey! I didn’t just come here to heal – This wasn’t about me – this was about all of us. I came here to heal all of us – that’s what this was all about – and this feeling just took me to the edge of the water and the water seemed to be telling me, “Come on in. Come on in and cleanse yourself. Wash it all away. Take it all in with you and leave it here.” So I did. I took everything – all my pain, all Daddy’s pain, all this family’s pain, the pictures – and I left it. I washed it all away. (83) Franz’s self-healing is also healing “all of us”; individuality and universality merge into one. But in his journey of discovery, Franz traverses through the remains—the unmarked graves and the photographs—of those who cannot be sublimated into this ideal conjoining of self and world. The play reminds its audience of those that are not included in the healing ritual, that are not represented, qualifying and limiting Franz’s scope. Then again, Franz’s speech feels comically delusional even without reading the myth of whiteness into it. But that does not negate the validity of Franz’s assumedly life-changing experience; in fact, his speech comes across as ironic precisely because we believe that he believes what he says. And that principle aptly sums up how Jacobs-Jenkins uses realist characterization to great effect in this play. The family conflict is never trivialized at the expense of race politics, and even the Lafayette siblings’ desire to disassociate themselves from their ancestors’ racist legacy is a real and plausible desire, just one that does not speak to all of human experience. In the end, although all of the characters in Appropriate are white, the representation of whiteness does not envelop the entire drama. It is too limited and qualified to stake a claim in universality. If the title of Jacobs-Jenkins’s play ironically refers to notions of decorum in what we choose to represent, Lee’s title, Straight White Men, is as inappropriate a title as there can be for a realist play, wearing its ideas and politics on its sleeve rather than dissolving it in a “truthful” account of reality. Likewise, Lee’s reasoning for why she decided to write in traditional realism for the first time is highly self-conscious: “Straight White Men was an attempt to write an identity politics play, a straight white male identity politics play. And I wanted to use what I saw as the straight white man of theatrical genres, which is the straight play.”[18] Taken at face value, this statement sets up expectations that the play may be a satire of whiteness, expectations that are supported by Lee’s caricatures of white people in earlier plays. In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, which is based on the 1932 film The Mask of Fu Manchu, Terrence and Shelia, the white protagonists of the film, explore their inner moral qualms in the final scene of the play after killing the Oriental horde gathered to overthrow the Western world. Denying vehemently that any of her actions are racially motivated, Shelia shouts: “I’m going to show everyone that I can make it, that I can succeed without these complaints of racism bringing me down, making me feel bad about myself! I want everything to be fair and nondiscriminatory and based on logic, and fuck you! Everything I think is based on logic!”[19] Shelia shares the same post-racial perspective detectable in Bo’s self-defensive speech, but the joke here is that the racial Other has just been eradicated. (She does say she feels bad for “killing all of those Chinese people” in the final line of the play). [20] In Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, a play that also employs the technique of pitting lurid Asian stereotypes against “normal” white people, the white characters are utterly oblivious towards the Asians, refusing to acknowledge or even share the stage with them. While the Koreans and Korean-American grotesquely illustrate various stereotypes of Asian women and fight among themselves about identity politics, the white characters prefer to limit their conversations to their love relationship, their anxiety over potential alcoholism and other psychological problems, their desire to see Africa, and their dreams—all topics that mark them as individuals rather than members of a social group. Whiteness is finally recognized and problematized in one scene, but only for the duration of three lines: WHITE PERSON 2: You know what’s awesome? WHITE PERSON 1: What. WHITE PERSON 2: Being white. WHITE PERSON 1: Being white? WHITE PERSON 2: Yes, it’s awesome. Isn’t it? WHITE PERSON 1: I guess I never thought of it. And when I do think of it I feel like an asshole. WHITE PERSON 2: You shouldn’t feel like an asshole. Being white is great. WHITE PERSON 1: I guess so.[21] In both of her earlier plays, Lee stereotypes whiteness just as much as Asian-ness, presenting her white characters as shallow, self-centered, and clueless of the racialized world around them. If the Asian stereotypes strategically go “too far,” the white caricatures are inversely devoid of dramatic content, unwilling to follow through conflict and stuck repeating meaningless, vapid dialogue. Yet this “emptiness” as dramatic characters is what shields them from racial politics; as Dyer reflects on whiteness from his own position as a white scholar, “[h]aving no content, we can’t see that we have anything that accounts for our position of privilege and power. This is itself crucial to the security with which we occupy that position.”[22] Lee’s white caricatures demonstrate the sense of security that having no content provides, while also attempting to penetrate that barrier and encourage audiences to consider the connotations of whiteness in relation to the non-white stereotypes. Lee rethinks her strategies for representing whiteness in Straight White Men. When I asked the playwright about the all-white cast, she remarked: “if you’re going to have a play that’s called Straight White Men and there’s a minority or a woman in it, it’s like you know what that confrontation is going to be. […] There’s nothing that those two people could say to each other that would make me uncomfortable.”[23] Satire and caricature can easily become simplistic answers to a challenging political issue, and so in the spirit of continuing to challenge her audiences, Lee imbues the white characters in her latest play with a consciousness of identity politics that most satires of whiteness lack. Indeed, the white people in this play are able to speak eloquently not only about minority politics in general, but themselves in terms of race: for example, “No, our success is the problem, not the solution!”[24] or, “You can’t change the system without giving up the benefits you gain from that system” (70). Unlike the racially aversive Lafayette siblings, the three brothers in Straight White Men, also middle-aged, do not seem at first to rely on mythic notions of universality and humanity to mask their whiteness. Yet when faced with an unresolvable dilemma at the core of whiteness, even their eagerness to talk about the problem (how conventionally realist of them!) rings unsettlingly hollow. Matt, the eldest of the three sons, has moved in with his father Ed after first dropping out of graduate school, and then law school. The play takes place during the Christmas holidays when Ed’s other two sons, Jake and Drew visit to relax and spend time with the family; during this break from work and social life, the four men play games, joke around, sing, dance, decorate the Christmas tree, dress up as Santa Claus, and consume an exorbitant amount of food. Everything is swell. But then Matt suddenly breaks down crying in the middle of a Chinese take-out dinner, which prompts Jake and Drew to delve into Matt’s condition, questioning his puzzling lack of ambition and his self-professed contentment working as a temporary administrative assistant at a human rights organization. Drew believes depression is the cause, while Jake makes a more troubling diagnosis: a debilitating feeling of guilt over white male privilege. Although the play never sheds light on the truth of Matt’s problem, the bits of information that Lee provides on how these white men were raised gives weight to Jake’s explanation. In an early scene, Jake and Drew dig up a board game that they played as boys, a modified version of Monopoly retitled “Privilege.” A relic of late-twentieth century identity politics, the game features a pile of excuse cards that serve as lessons of tolerance and social justice. Some of them read: “What I said wasn’t sexist/racist/homophobic because I was joking.” and, rather on the nose, “I don’t have white privilege because it doesn’t exist” (63). Matt was the most dedicated of the three to radical identity politics, even establishing “Matt’s School for Young Revolutionaries” (66). The brothers look back to their home education with fond memories, but it is clear that these men are not revolutionaries, and that they benefit from a social structure that privileges whites. (Jake is a banker, and Drew is a professor and award-winning novelist.) Thus, even though these characters constantly mark themselves as white, disavowing myths of individual effort and transracial universality, it is uncertain whether making whiteness visible is enough to mitigate white privilege. Admittedly, Straight White Men asks the audience to think through a rather forced scenario: not all straight white men are as self-aware and knowledgeable as these characters. But Lee’s work raises pertinent questions regarding the profusion of identity politics in public discourse and the media, which may polarize audiences (potentially engendering post-racial backlash) or prevent deeper engagement with the politics of whiteness by providing easy textbook answers. Indeed, when Jake starts talking about Matt’s breakdown in terms of white privilege, Drew interjects: “you sound like an undergrad. Everyone already knows this stuff. It’s just masturbation” (70). In light of Lee’s ongoing dedication to creating theatre that makes herself and her audiences uncomfortable, Straight White Men demonstrates that the political vocabulary of the past is insufficient in tackling whiteness today. Hence realism. In his review for the New York Times, Charles Isherwood writes, “Believe it or not, Ms. Lee wants us to sympathize with the inexpressible anguish of her protagonist, a middle-aged, upper-middle-class straight white man named Matt who has failed to follow the codes of achievement that he’s expected to conform to.”[25] The prevailing cultural assumptions regarding whiteness make this request for sympathy difficult to believe, yet that is precisely what the conventions of realist drama solicits by focusing so heavily on one character’s interior struggle. Realism does not ensure that the audience will like Matt, but it does align them with the other characters as they try to pin down his predicament, to seek closure to Matt’s emotional arc. Before the play ends, however, Jake and Drew grow irritated by Matt’s inability to provide closure, and at the same time provide disclosure (as Barthes discusses regarding conventional realist narrative), to make himself fully known. When Matt refuses to give a straight answer about anything, Jake explodes with anger at the idea that his brother is a “loser for no reason”: in other words, an asocial individual rather than a representative of whiteness (74). Drew, who had believed until now that Matt’s breakdown was caused by a sense of failure and disappointment with his life, remarks coldly: “Nobody cares about your egotistic white male despair!” (75). Unable to sympathize with this “defective” dramatic character, the other three white men simply give up and exit the stage, leaving Matt “alone, staring out at the audience” (75). Although Matt’s unfathomable burden stems from whiteness, the final image of the play suggests that his is somehow different from the whiteness of the other characters. Throughout the play, Matt is treated as a special case, a “freak” in Jake’s words: JAKE: […] there’s nothing people like us can do in the world that isn’t problematic or evil, so we have to make ourselves invisible! ED: “People like us”? What’s that supposed to mean? JAKE: You know, privileged white dickheads. Women and minorities may get to pretend they’re doing enough to make the world a better place just by getting ahead, but a white guy’s pretty hard-pressed to explain why the world needs him to succeed. So Matt’s trying to stay out of the way. ED: Jake, you keep saying this, and I find it very hard to believe. JAKE: That’s because nobody else would ever do it! Matt’s a freak.(74) Significantly, Jake’s thorough analysis of whiteness only entails intervention in Matt’s special case; the social privileges enjoyed by the other white characters, while acknowledged, are regarded as an inevitable and unchangeable effect of the system—just the way things are in the world. By being ostensibly marked as white, Matt is paradoxically excluded from white “people like us” (74). But because he is only a half-finished character, lacking closure in the traditional sense, the whiteness that marks him remains unfamiliar, indeterminate, and not reified. Matt’s unarticulated dilemma suggests a potential fracturing of whiteness beyond its conventional image as an ideological monolith; to conceive of the possibility of sympathizing with Matt is to explore its rough and uneven surfaces, even if that means entering uncomfortable terrain. To conclude, I would like to return to Lee’s tongue-in-cheek observation that realism is the straight white man of theatrical genres. The American tradition of realist family drama has been closely associated with the monopoly of whiteness in theatrical representation; Jacobs-Jenkins’s response to “hearing people describe the great American family drama” is “‘There are no people of color on these lists.’ Who has access to this idea of family as a universal theme?”[26] But realism resembles straight white men in another sense as well. In drama and theatre scholarship, realism is often treated paradoxically as a bully and a loser at the same time, both overbearing as a vessel of dominant ideology and underachieving as an aesthetic form—not unlike how straight white men are distorted into easy, abstract targets of criticism. The critical lens crafted by Diamond and other theorists allows us to see through realism’s smooth surface and scrutinize its ideological foundations, but as a damaging side effect, this lens has also blinded us to the form’s untapped potential by presupposing that realism always operates in the same manner. Appropriate and Straight White Men demonstrate that realism can still be a refreshing and viable form to explore the politics of representation, and especially the politics of representing whiteness, which has relied on realist techniques throughout modern history. The first step towards utilizing the potential for realism to offer such new insight is to move away from the Barthesian framework of myth that has dominated discussions on realism in the past few decades. As a form that enables myth, realism was thought in the past to insist on “a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity.”[27] But Jacobs-Jenkins and Lee’s dramatic worlds are full of contradictions and hidden layers, despite being inhabited only by white characters. In place of “blissful clarity,” Appropriate and Straight White Men leave the audience with the feeling that they have not seen everything, that realism’s representative scope does not extend beyond the walls of the living room onstage. Kee-Yoon Nahm is a Doctorate in Fine Arts candidate in the Department of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism, Yale School of Drama. His current research examines strategies of appropriating cultural stereotypes in American drama and theatre from 1960 to today, in relation to contemporaneous political discourse on representation, subversion, and spectatorship. His writings have appeared in Theater, Theatre Journal, and the anthology Performing Objects and Theatrical Things. He also works as a translator and dramaturg. [1] Appropriate ran at the Signature Center from February to April 2014, following productions in Louisville, Chicago, and Washington D.C. Straight White Men opened at the Public Theater in November 2014 following its world premiere at the Wexner Center for Arts in Columbus, Ohio and a brief international tour. [2] Richard Dyer, White (London New York: Routledge, 1997) 45. [3] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Eliza Bent, “Feel that Thought: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Plays Are High-Wire Performances in Themselves,” Part 1, American Theatre (May/June 2014), http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/issue/featuredstory.cfm?story=7indexID=44, accessed 28 May2014. [4] I will provide a more detailed account of this trajectory in Lee’s work later in the discussion. [5] Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis (London New York: Routledge, 1997) 4-5. [6] Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972) 142. [7] Varun Begley, “Objects of Realism: Bertolt Brecht, Roland Barthes, and Marsha Norman,” Theatre Journal 64, no. 3 (October 2012): 339. [8] For a more recent reappraisal of dramatic realism than the examples I discuss, see also Jill Dolan, “Feminist Performance Criticism and the Popular: Reviewing Wendy Wasserstein,” Theatre Journal, 60, no. 3 (October 2008): 433-457. [9] Jeanie Forte, “Realism,Narrative, and the Feminist Playwright – A Problem of Reception” Modern Drama 32, no.1 (March 1989): 117. [10] Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997) 56. [11] Ibid., 59. [12] Dyer, 11. [13] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Appropriate, unpublished manuscript, (2014), 46. Used by permission. All subsequent references are indicated in parenthesis. [14] Ben Brantley, “A Squabbling Family Kept in the Dark,” New York Times, 16 March 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/theater/in-appropriate-branden-jacobs-jenkins-subverts-tradition.html, accessed 29 November 2014. [15] Hilton Als, “GWTW” in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000) 42. [16] Steve Garner, Whiteness: An Introduction (London New York: Routledge, 2007) 39. [17] Tim Wise, Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equality (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2010), 63–64. [18] Young Jean Lee, interview by the author, 8 February 2014. [19] Young Jean Lee, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2009) 173. [20] Ibid., 174. [21] Ibid., 71. [22] Dyer, 9. [23] Lee, interview by the author, 8 February 2014. [24] Young Jean Lee, Straight White Men, in American Theatre, unpublished manuscript, April 2015, 70. Used by permission. All subsequent references are indicated in parenthesis. [25] Charles Isherwood, “My Three Sons and All Their Troubles,” The New York Times. November 18, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/theater/straight-white-men-opens-at-the-public-theater.html?_r=1, accessed 29 November 2014. [26] Jacobs-Jenkins Bent, “Feel that Thought.” [27] Barthes, 143. "Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men" by Kee-Yoon Nahm ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 27, Number 2 (Spring 2015) ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee Table of Contents "The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance" by Brian Eugenio Herrera "Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men" by Kee-Yoon Nahm "Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter" by Bradley Stephenson "Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; or, William Dunlap's A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience" by Samuel Shanks www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction (JADT 27.2, 2015) The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.