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

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present.  Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. ISSN Number: 2376-4236 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Home Current Issue Archive About & Submission Guidelines Contact Past Issues Curren Issue Current Issue Volume 38 Issue 1 EDITORIAL Introduction Benjamin Gillespie and Bess Rowen ARTICLE Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale Teya Juarez ARTICLE “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya Jewel Pereyra ARTICLE What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre Heather S. Nathans, Javier Hurtado, Benny Sato Ambush, Henry Bial, Kristoffer Diaz, Kim Marra, Harvey Young QUEER VOICES "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Alex Ferrone QUEER VOICES Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Benjamin Gillespie QUEER VOICES Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Jen-Scott Mobley and Maya E. Roth BOOK REVIEW Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Lauren Friesen BOOK REVIEW Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Henry Bial BOOK REVIEW Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Eileen Curley BOOK REVIEW Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. Sierra Rosetta PERFORMANCE REVIEW The Brothers Size Isaiah Matthew Wooden PERFORMANCE REVIEW Dead Outlaw Elliot Lee PERFORMANCE REVIEW 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival Lindsey Mantoan PERFORMANCE REVIEW ZAZ William DeVito, Juanita Mejia Restrepo, M. Nance, Robert Pike, and Rufus ZaeJoDaeus NEW ENGLAND THEATRE IN REVIEW Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Martha S. LoMonaco, Editor, New England Theatre in Review NEW ENGLAND THEATRE IN REVIEW Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Paul E. Fallon NEW ENGLAND THEATRE IN REVIEW Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Steven Otfinoski NEW ENGLAND THEATRE IN REVIEW Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Karl G. Ruling Past Issues Past Issues Volume 37 Volume 33 Volume 29 Volume 36 Volume 32 Volume 28 Volume 35 Volume 31 Volume 27 Volume 34 Volume 30 Curren Issue Current Issue Introduction What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Dead Outlaw Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. The Brothers Size ZAZ Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Past Issue Archive We are in the process of moving all past journal entries to the current websiite. Please bear with us as we make this transition. You can view all the past issues at www.jadt.commons.gc.cuny.edu . For any queries or clarifications, write to us at jadtjournal@gmail.com Jan 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 1 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival Lindsey Mantoan Jan 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 1 Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale Teya Juarez Jan 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 1 The Brothers Size Isaiah Matthew Wooden Jan 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 1 ZAZ William DeVito, Juanita Mejia Restrepo, M. Nance, Robert Pike, and Rufus ZaeJoDaeus Jan 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 1 Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. Sierra Rosetta Jan 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 1 Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Eileen Curley Jan 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 1 Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Lauren Friesen Jan 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 1 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Karl G. Ruling Jan 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 1 "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Alex Ferrone Jan 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 1 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Paul E. Fallon Jan 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 1 What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre Heather S. Nathans, Javier Hurtado, Benny Sato Ambush, Henry Bial, Kristoffer Diaz, Kim Marra, Harvey Young Jan 26, 2026 Volume Issue 38 1 Introduction Benjamin Gillespie and Bess Rowen Load More Visit Old Website About & Submission Guideline About The Journal History and Mission Founded in 1989, JADT is a widely acclaimed peer-reviewed journal publishing thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas—past and present. The journal’s 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. JADT is fully online and freely accessible. Our aim is to promote research on theatre of the Americas and to encourage historical and theoretical approaches to plays, playwrights, performances, and popular theatre traditions. Studies of dramatic texts from a purely literary perspective are outside the scope of the journal. “I see American Drama and Theatre as a primary means of reflecting the excitement and progress of our language, our culture, our democracy, our social concerns and our historical roots as Americans. No better opportunity exists for understanding, or for contributing to our understanding, of our American world, past or present, than the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, as shown by the excellence of its past performance and the promise of its future.” – Walter Meserve Submission Guidelines The editors of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) are now accepting submissions for essays on any topics relating to theatre, drama, and popular entertainments of the Americas for consideration. Please submit completed manuscripts to jadtjournal@gmail.com . We accept submission on a rolling basis. Please email the editors with any inquiries. Article manuscripts should be 5,000 to 8,000 words in length and prepared in conformity with the Chicago Manual of Style using manual endnotes. Completed manuscripts should be submitted as Microsoft Word attachments via e-mail to jadtjournal@gmail.com . Articles will be peer reviewed, so please allow 3-4 months for a decision. If you are submitting images, please provide the images and captions with your submission. (Pleas e Note: Images should be at least 300dpi and authors are responsible for securing permissions prior to submission). Please include a short bio with your submission. Performance Reviews JADT publishes performance reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas. Single reviews are usually 800 to 1,200 words in length. We encourage authors to contact the editor in advance to propose a review at jadtperformancereviews@gmail.com Boo k Reviews JADT publishes book reviews of monographs published within the last two years. This list of recommended and nominated titles for review is refreshed annually. Reviews are usually 800 to 1000 words for a single review. To propose a book review in advance, please contact the editor at jadtbookreviews@gmail.com . Click here for the complete JADT Style Guide . View Past Issues People Editorial Board Benjamin Gillespie, Bess Rowen Co-Editors Stephanie Lim Book Review Editor Jennifer Joan Thompson Performance Review Editor Jordan Hardesty, Rani O'Brien Journal Assistants Vera Mowry Roberts, Walter Meserve Founding Editors Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Marvin Carlson Director of Publications Frank Hentschker Executive Director Gaurav Singh Nijjer Digital and Web Coordinator 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 James F. Wilson Stacy Wolf Contact Email jadtjournal@gmail.com

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 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 References [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. Footnotes About The Author(s) 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. 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.

Bradley Stephenson 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 This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Bradley Stephenson By Published on May 26, 2016 Download Article as PDF 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.

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

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. References [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=7&indexID=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. Footnotes About The Author(s) 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. Guest Editor: Jonathan Chambers Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction (JADT 27.2, 2015) The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Brian Eugenio Herrera 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 The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance Brian Eugenio Herrera By Published on April 23, 2015 Download Article as PDF Casting — the process whereby actors are assigned to particular roles — has largely eluded historical and theoretical inquiry. Casting’s iterative impact lends it a peculiar ephemerality. Once a role is cast, the complex array of criteria informing that decision — not only the methods and techniques of talent assessment but also the interpersonal dynamics, rumors, reputations, and “business” considerations — recedes in importance as the work of performance-making ostensibly begins. Indeed, despite its inarguable centrality in the performance-making project, the inevitably idiosyncratic sequence of events that comprise the process of how this or that actor did (or did not) get the part routinely evades the archive. I contend that such archival evasions are enabled by what we might call a “mythos of casting,” a constellation of interconnected beliefs and assumptions that have evolved within American popular performance over the last century or so. This “mythos of casting” cloaks within mystery the historical practices – by turns material, creative and proprietary – that guide how an actor’s labor is (and is not) valued as a commodity. This “mythos of casting” simultaneously provides ideological rationale for the acknowledged inequities in the allocation of the paid and unpaid labor of actors while also sustaining faith that the apparatus of casting can (and sometimes actually does) work to identify the “best” actor for a given role. The “mythos of casting” also guides most academic conversations about casting, which typically operate within one of three discursive modes: the logistical, the (non) traditional, and the mystical. [1] Logistical discourses of casting might be found most frequently on the “practice” side of the theory-practice divide in theatre studies, with conversations about how to audition (or how to run auditions) eliciting conversation and study in the acting studio, the production meeting, or the rehearsal hall. Such discussions, and the written works engaging them, typically rehearse, explicate or strategize the nuances of disparate audition structures, and are often guided by the premise of “entering the profession.” [2] Traditional — or, more aptly, “Non-Traditional” — discussions emphasize how casting operates as a mode of what scholar Angela Pao calls “both social action and artistic exploration” in which the assignment of a particular actor to a role might “dislodge established modes of perceiving,” perhaps especially with regard to the enactment of cultural identity in performance. [3] Both the logistical and non-traditional discourses of casting prioritize how practitioners might intervene in casting’s machinery to achieve particular ends. By contrast, the third discourse of casting, perhaps the most ubiquitous of the three, fixates on casting as an almost mystical process that defies easy explanation. Such “mystical” accounts arrive in a variety of formulations but always with a fascination for a kind of magic at play within casting decisions. Some such accounts emphasize the “special sight” of creative intuition wherein an ineffable mix of circumstance, luck and discernment combine to guide the director (or teacher, or casting director, or whoever) to the inspired insight that a particular actor is “right” for the role. Often responding to what Joseph Roach describes as “the easy to perceive but hard to define quality possessed by abnormally interesting people” sometimes referred to as “it,” [4] this response informs an inspired confidence like that described by producer Arthur Hornblow recalling his casting Marilyn Monroe in her first featured film role, “As soon as we saw her we knew she was the one.” [5] Other mystical accounts proffer casting as a kind of alchemical mastery, usually on the part of the genius director, in which art manifests from a deftly assembled configuration of actors. As film director John Frankenheimer famously quipped “casting is 65% the battle.” Director Martin Scorsese later upped the ante, noting that “More than 90 percent of directing is the right casting,” while a recent textbook Fundamentals of Film Directing offered a more conservative assessment, noting that “Casting is 50% of the director’s work.” [6] Casting’s mystical discourses also take fantasy form in the myriad speculative fictions spun within the “what if” scenarios rehearsed in discussions of “miscasting.” From sensational lists like “12 Actors Who Almost Had the Part” and “What If? ‘Pulp Fiction’ Near-Miss Casting” to entire books dedicated to Hollywood’s All-Time Worst Casting Blunders , the fantastic genre of the “what if” casting tale stands among the most recurring in popular performance lore. [7] Most mystical discourses of casting, however, fixate upon the moment an actor is assigned a role as the signal moment wherein the magic of performance is conjured. Indeed, while logistical and non-traditional discourses of casting propose strategic interventions into the casting process, mystical discourses instead marvel at the ineffability of casting, fetishize the shrouds of secrecy that sustain casting’s unknowable mysteries, and wonder at the transformative power summoned by whoever happens to be the one deciding which actor is to become the role. Mystical discourses of casting hint that mere mortals can never truly know why this or that actor got the part and imply that occasional peeks behind the casting curtain will only ever reveal a partial story. These mystical discourses suggest that some greater power is at work in both the methods and madnesses of casting, and that ours is not to wonder why. The many mysteries of casting might explain why the topic of casting remains so captivating to so many. Indeed, casting’s purported unknowability — that no one can never truly know how casting happens — incites the most passionate conversations about the process, whether in speculative games about who would be better in the role, or in moments of aesthetic outrage (or schadenfreude ) over miscasting, or in impassioned outbursts of sometimes politicized fervor within critiques of incidents of exploitation, exclusion or unfairness in casting. Yet, even in such incisive and searching conversations, most assessments of casting controversies resolve with shrugging demurrals or simple judgments of the sort proffered by the author of one best-selling theatre appreciation textbook, who writes “There is good casting and bad casting and, of course, there is also inspired casting.” [8] The persistence of some version of this reductive good/bad/inspired matrix in even the most sophisticated conversations about casting might well reflect some awareness of the many interpersonal, proprietary, and contractual complexities that all factor into the invisible calculus guiding any casting decision. (Can anyone inside or outside the process ever really, truly or fully know why someone got a part?) Even so, this recurring fixation places too much emphasis on casting’s unknowability (its “mystery”) with too little attention to the power at play in any casting decision. As the default resolution for any and every conversation about casting, the good/bad/inspired matrix both sustains the mysterious power of casting even as it also contributes to the ongoing mystification of the material practices of casting — the mechanisms, techniques and assumptions routing the process to that final casting decision — rendering such practices beyond the archive and thus exempt from historical analysis. To discern casting’s archive and thus evince its history, performance historians and theorists might explicate the three principles most routinely invoked to explain, excuse or justify the capricious operations of the casting apparatus: equitable access to opportunity, artistic autonomy, and meritocratic achievement. Over the last century or so, these contradictory premises have come to operate in dynamic tension as a “mythos of casting,” which simultaneously sustains creative faith in the capacity of the casting apparatus to identify the best actor for a given role even as it cloaks the material practices of casting in mystery. As I take up each of these principles — equity, artistry, meritocracy — in turn below, I briefly detail how each principle guided the formation of the contemporary repertoire of casting practices as I also chart the enduring conceptual contours of the “mythos of casting.” Equity The peculiar notion that casting should be fair appears to have emerged from two distinctively twentieth century points of origin. On the one hand, the growing power of actor unions within the industries capitalizing on American popular performance amplified particular questions of equity. On the other, the extraordinary and rapid expansion of educational theatre programs at the secondary, post-secondary and pre-professional level intensified concerns about access. Over time, the belief that the casting process should be equitably accessible to all eligible or deserving performers became one of the guiding ideals of the American casting process and a foundational tenet of the mythos of casting. Concerns about fair and equitable access instigated the formation of actor unions in the United States in the nineteenth century, as producers started to hire actors to “play as cast” for only a particular production (and often without guarantee of compensation for rehearsals, truncated runs, or special wardrobes and skills). Worried that they might be shut out of their seasonal “lines of business” employment, professional actors agitated to protect their access to secure employment opportunities. As these nascent actor unions continued to fight for recognition in the early twentieth century (in both the theatre and in the emerging film industry), their organizing efforts shifted from equitable employment access and toward working conditions, wage scales and enforceability of contracts, concerns which animated the historic Actors’ Equity Association [AEA] strike in 1919. [9] In the decades that immediately followed AEA’s 1919 victory, concerns about equitable access to employment did occasionally reassert themselves within the union, perhaps most fractiously in the Depression years with the 1934 formation of the Actors’ Forum (an ad hoc pressure group of member actors who sought cooperative benefits and a minimum wage for all members) and the 1935-39 operation of the Federal Theatre Project (which rankled union leadership by employing non-union actors). [10] Yet it was not until the post-World War II years, and amidst growing national concerns about civil rights and desegregation, however, that actor unions – in what one historian has called a “gradual politicization” [11] – reasserted their inceptive investment in equitable access to employment. During the 1940s and 1950s, subcommittees within all the major actor unions began to advocate for fair and equitable access to employment opportunities for minority union members, especially actors of African descent. Through initiatives like the Negro Employment Committee in the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Committee on Negro Integration in the Theatre in Actors’ Equity Association (AEA), these committees gathered and published data about the number and kind of roles available to minority actors, rehearsing and deploying strategies of advocacy that endure to this day. [12] Activist actors also, through such endeavors as AEA’s Integration Showcase (staged in 1959), argued for and demonstrated casting techniques that modeled ways of hiring actors of African descent for roles not specifically written with a black actor in mind. [13] This work by actor advocates within their unions in the 1940s and 1950s anticipated the work of AEA’s Non-Traditional Casting Project (which reanimated the premise of the Integrated Casting Committee by expanding it to also include Latina/o, Asian American, and Native American actors, as well as disabled actors). [14] This practice of assembling data and insisting that industrial casting norms adapt to rank and file realities also animated the institution of the “open audition.” The practice of the “open audition” was instituted in the 1970s to insure that all union (or union eligible) actors had access to at least one general audition for every production (or producing season) undertaken under union contract. Even though these “open call” auditions have often come over time to be regarded by many as cumbersome and hollow rituals of union compliance, the institutionalization of the open call, as well as the actor union advocacy that compelled it, not only derived from but also fortified a foundational ideal within the mythos of casting – that equitable and transparent access to the casting apparatus benefitted all actors. While midcentury actor unions worked within the entertainment industry for equitable access to opportunity for professional actors, the massive expansion of educational theater programs that boomed in high schools, universities and pre-professional training programs in the post-World War II era exerted an even more substantial influence on the idea that the casting process should be fair. Yet, in the 1940s and 1950s, no consensus existed among theatre educators about how to balance the competing priorities of fairness, efficiency and quality when assigning roles in a school or community setting. Most midcentury theatre educators advocated for some version of “tryouts.” The 1948 Play Production Primer (published in 1951 by the Mutual Improvement Association of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints ) defined the “tryout” as “a method of selecting talent for a cast. Either parts read from the play, or [a] display of general ability.” [15] In the spring of 1948, a series of short essays in Dramatics Magazine (then a publication addressing both high school and university theatre programs) discussed a striking array of “tryout” strategies. Some, like Blandford Jennings of Missouri’s Clayton High School, instructed students to “come prepared to read anything of their choice for a minute or two” because “reading at sight from an unfamiliar text is no fair indication of the true ability of a young reader.” [16] Others, like Esther McCabe of New York’s Salamanca High School, approached the casting of a play as “a lesson in democracy, reliability and human relationships” and assigned roles by student vote, subsequent to a full reading and discussion of the play. [17] Sam Boyd of West Virginia University affirmed the merits of “competitive reading tryouts” for their “spirit” and the “salubrious, unprejudiced attitude” they encouraged, [18] while Carnegie Mellon’s Talbot Pearson scoffed at even trying to select a single best practice. “There are so many methods of trying out the available players,” Talbot insisted, “that no rules can safely be applied” and “to list the dozen or more differing approaches would serve no practical purpose.” [19] Perhaps notably, none of these educators used the word “audition” to describe their preferred casting method. Where the word “audition” does appear with some frequency at midcentury is in the advocacy work of organizations like the American Theatre Wing and Theatre Communications Group, especially as such emerging, non-commercial but professional organizations explained their affiliation with professional training programs. For Isadora Bennett, the publicity director of the American Theatre Wing from the later 1940s through much of the 1950s, the audition represented the most effective point of connection between the professional theatre and those aspiring actors emerging from university and other training programs (like the American Theatre Wing’s own Professional Training School which enrolled hundreds of students at the time, most under the GI Bill). In a widely referenced 1955 essay published in Educational Theatre Journal , Bennett affirmed the importance of centralized auditions for “trained” actors so that such actors might be introduced to what she termed the “machinery of casting” and “the ‘technique’ of job-hunting.” [20] For Bennett, such auditions — in which aspiring professional actors might offer a concentrated display of their ability using brief, prepared excerpts from well-regarded plays — promised to serve as “aptitude tests given by warm and friendly but severe experts.” By the end of the 1950s, the idea that a concentrated and pre-prepared demonstration of aptitude before a panel of experts might be the most efficient means of talent assessment had begun to circulate more broadly and had begun to be termed an “audition.” In 1964, Michael Mabry — then the Executive Secretary of the fledgling Theatre Communications Group (TCG) — advocated for the institutionalization of a national audition, to be held annually in Chicago, as the most effective means of “keeping visible on a national scale” all American actors, not only those actors based in New York or Los Angeles but also those “committed…to seasonal employment with resident companies” while also including the “outstanding graduates of educational theatre.” [21] Thus, the significant midcentury influence of actor unions, in tandem with the rise of the educational theatre industrial complex, rehearsed the perhaps incongruous but nonetheless deeply entrenched notion that casting should be fair, and thereby also anchored the ideal of equity as a central tenet within the mythos of casting. Artistry Still, at play in every conversation about providing equitable access to actors, the mythos of casting also activates the question of whose authority guides the assignment of actor to role. For the actor, the casting process is their opportunity “to be cast” in a production and thus be given the equitable opportunity to work; for the one doing the casting, however, the casting process can take on additional valences of creative authorship, artistic autonomy and freedom of expression. In his genre-defining college textbook Introduction to the Theatre (1954), Frank Whiting of the University of Minnesota argued for the “executive ability” of the director: “Many factors must be considered in casting [and] many systems of tryout have been evolved, ranging from well-rehearsed, memorized scenes to informal interviews. None are perfect. All have advantages and disadvantages.” [22] Most educators publishing in Dramatics through the 1950s agreed that the directorial discernment should balance the pedagogic and artistic ambitions in a school production and that such judgment should remain the primary guide the final assignment of actor to role. Even Esther McCabe, whose proposed model of electoral casting marked the most dramatic departure, affirmed that she as director “reserved the right to change an unsuitable choice” once the election results were tallied. [23] Toward the end of his career, iconic theatre director Harold Clurman saw few artistic merits, for either actor or director, in the midcentury turn toward what he called the “absurd” and “arduous” “‘open market’ method of casting” in American theatre. [24] Such critiques of the American casting apparatus had been foundational in Clurman’s theatrical philosophy since the late 1920s, when “he prophesied that ‘immediate future of the theatre is in the actor,’ who must reject ‘type-casting’ for ‘long painful self-training.’” In co-founding the influential Group Theatre, Clurman sought a permanent ensemble company in which there would be only small parts and no star actors. Within a decade, however, the challenges of casting proved an unexpected drag on the galvanizing vision of the Group Theatre’s ensemble structure, as the number interested actors persistently far exceeded the available roles. The situation inspired Clurman to exclaim, in 1939, “Every piece of casting in the Group is a tragedy.” [25] Even so, several decades later, in his widely taught 1972 memoir of the craft On Directing , Clurman maintained his faith in the transformative potential of the ensemble as he drew unfavorable comparisons between the atomizing mechanisms of American casting (in which the actor worked as a freelancer, playing only as cast) and those used by the permanent repertory companies of Europe. Because “the American theatre has no such companies,” Clurman railed, “We proceed on the basis of ‘piecework’: for every new production an entirely new cast must be found – somehow, somewhere.” He continued, “The main business of casting [in the United States] is accomplished by means of auditions or readings,” which Clurman characterized as “a species of theatrical shopping” wherein the actor is “reduced to a commodity and gradually comes to regard himself in that light.” [26] Clurman’s contemporary and sometime colleague Elia Kazan also disliked the American casting apparatus. When asked by an interviewer about his preference for prepared auditions or cold readings, the director retorted, “I don’t do it that way. Well, sometimes I do, if it’s for a bit, but… [it] usually gets you misinformation.” [27] Where Kazan dismissed the American casting apparatus for its ineffectiveness, Clurman disdained its disruption of the creative process and its imposition of artificial, inhumane and confining limits on the artistic autonomy of the director. By so emphasizing the intangible authority of creative and executive discernment as essential to directorial autonomy, Clurman and Kazan, alongside their less famous educational counterparts, also mystified casting a constitutive and sacrosanct feature of a director’s artistic expression. By the 1990s, however, the question of whether such casting decisions were an independent expression of a performance-maker’s creative authority garnered a different measure of critique. High-profile casting controversies (like that surrounding the 1991 Broadway production of Miss Saigon ) amplified how “traditional” casting habits rehearsed by the “open market” impinged upon employment opportunities available to minority and women performers. Legal scholars Jennifer L. Sheppard, Heekyung Esther Kim and Russell K. Robinson each separately examined whether a hypothetical plaintiff might challenge a particular casting decision as employment discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which held, in part, that employer prerogative was inadequate justification for favoring one identifiable group over another in matters hiring; in tandem, the scholars also assessed whether casting decisions might be considered protected speech under the First Amendment. Though their discussions remained in emphatically hypothetical (especially given the tricky and unresolved legal question of whether entertainers were rightly considered employees under federal law), all three scholars agreed that any legal challenge to a casting decision under employment law would certainly confront (and likely fail) the test of whether a director’s or producer’s casting decision might be considered a form of creative expression and, thus, a form of protected speech. For Russell K. Robinson, “our constitutional commitment to free speech does not exact a wholesale abandonment of antidiscrimination requirements,” [28] while both Kim and Sheppard advocated for voluntary shifts in casting practice and aesthetics so that, as Sheppard concluded, “employment opportunities for minority actors may be increased, while artistic freedom is preserved.” [29] (283). Thus, as casting became increasingly understood as a constitutive feature of a theatre-maker’s creative expression, claims of artistic authority, autonomy and freedom also animated the mythos of casting in American popular performance. Meritocracy The “open market” of American casting, which Isadora Bennett so celebrated and which Harold Clurman so loathed, was itself premised on the third core principle of the mythos of casting: meritocracy. Indeed, embedded in the mythos of casting is the promise that equitable access to the casting process permits the best performers to be seen, thereby presumptively enabling directors, producers and others to identify those performers best equipped to execute their artistic vision. Underlying this promise lay the ideal that, if the flow of supply and demand could be effectively marshaled, the best actor would certainly get the role. Indeed, this meritocratic ideal — matching the best actor to the role — bridged the democratizing impulse of equitable access to casting opportunities with the discerning exactitude of artistic autonomy. But even such an emphasis on finding the “best actor” for the role was itself a noteworthy, twentieth century turn. It is an intriguing historical coincidence then that the same years that remake the American casting process as something of an “open market” also mark the arrival of several high profile contests in which the notion of “best actor” falls into particular relief within the American entertainment industries. Beginning with the Oscars in the 1920s (continuing with the Tonys in the 1940s, the Obies in the 1950s and all the way through SAG’s “The Actor” in the 1990s), these notably ritualized, annual anointings of actors as “the best” emerge as a peculiarly hallmark facet of American popular performance. To be sure, competitions among actors were not an innovation of the twentieth century, with stories reaching all the way back to the acting competitions in fifth century Athens. Even so, most previous historical contestations among actors — whether between La Clairon and Madame Dumesnil in eighteenth century Paris or between Forrest and Macready in the New York of 1848 — also staged a contestation over distinctions of region, social class, aesthetics, and philosophy, with the embodied work of actors manifesting those particular divisions. Yet, in these twentieth century American contest, this multitude of best actors are so named not for enacting cultural values but for the cultural value of enactment itself. These many annual rituals also verify the meritocratic ideal of “best actor” that animates the American casting process. Within the mythos of casting, the anointing of “best actor” connects all segments in the great theatrical chain of being, drawing a connection between the tween actor pretending in her bedroom to the acclaimed icon accepting her trophy in a glittering televised ceremony. Arriving as a sort of post-dramatic conclusion to the ostensible performance, every “best actor” award tacitly ratifies the effective (and largely hidden) operation of a casting mechanism that first delivered this particular actor to the very role that then earned them the honorific of “best actor.” The “best actor” trophy then stands as a tangibly material symbol of the twined ideals of equity, artistry and meritocracy that mutually constitute the mythos of casting in American popular performance. The mythos of casting might be invoked to sustain aspiring artists in the leanest times; likewise, it might be summoned to sustain a perhaps illusory sense of affinity amidst a casting controversy. Even among those who maintain diametrically opposed points of view over the best way to determine who the best actor for the role might be, the mythos of casting affirms that the quest for the best actor remains an ideal worth pursuing. At once a lubricant and a palliative, as much a weapon as it is a shield, the mythos of casting works to provide assurance not only that there is a method to the madness of the casting process but also that the machinery of casting works. All the while, the mythos of casting continues to accomplish its primary purpose – to mystify the actual working conditions of actors, especially as they labor to find work. References [1] A noteworthy and productive departure from this pattern can be found in Daniel Banks, “The Welcome Table: Casting for an Integrated Society,” Theatre Topics 23 no. 1 (March 2013), 1-18. [2] The pioneering template of this genre is Michael Shurtleff’s Audition: Everything an Actor Needs to Know to Get the Part (New York: Walker Publishing, 1978); a more contemporary model might be Jen Rudin’s Confessions of a Casting Director: Help Actors Land Any Role with Secrets from Inside the Audition Room (New York: It Books, 2013). [3] Angela Chia-yi Pao, No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 2. [4] Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 1. [5] Claire Boothe Luce, “The ‘Love Goddess’ Who Never Found Any Love,” LIFE Magazine (August 7, 1964), 64. [6] Stephen B. Armstrong, ed., John Frankenheimer: Interviews, Essays, and Profiles (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013): 89; as quoted in Casting By , directed by Tom Donahue (2013; Brooklyn, NY: First Run Features, 2014), DVD; and David K. Irving, Fundamentals of Film Directing (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishing, 2010), 30. [7] Treye Greene, “12 Actors Who Almost Had the Part,” Huffington Post , 24 January 2013, accessed 5 December 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/24/actors-recast-in-movies_n_2543452.html; David Weiner, “What If? ‘Pulp Fiction’ Near-Miss Casting,” ET Online , 13 November 2013, accessed 5 December 2014, http://www.etonline.com/movies/140840_What_If_Pulp_Fiction_Near_Miss_Casting/; and Damien Bona, Starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan: Hollywood’s All-Time Worst Casting Blunders (New York: Citadel Press, 1996). [8] Robert Cohen, Theatre, 5 th Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005), 535. [9] For usefully comparative summaries of early twentieth century actor union activity, see Sean P. Holmes, “All Work or No Play: Key Themes in the History of the American Stage Actor as Worker,” European Journal of American Studies 2 (2008), online; and Pamela Robertson Wojcik, “Typecasting.” Criticism 45 no. 2 (Spring 2003), 225-26. For an aptly detailed narrative account of the 1919 AEA strike and its impact on the union, see Robert Simonson’s Performance of the Century: 100 Years of Actors’ Equity Association and the Rise of Professional American Theater (Applause: New York, 2012), especially 14-61. [10] An efficient overview of AEA’s conflicts with both the Actors’ Forum and the Federal Theatre Project can be found in the epilogue to Sean P. Holmes, Weavers of Dreams, Unite!: Actors’ Unionism in Early Twentieth-Century America (University if Illinois Press: Urbana, 2013), 173-178. See also Simonson, 72-73. [11] Holmes (2013), 177. [12] Stephen Vaughn, Ronald Reagan and the Struggle for Black Dignity in Cinema, 1937-1953, The Journal of Negro History 77 no. 1 (Winter 1992), 8-9; “Committee on the Integration of the Negro in the Theatre,” Box 36 Folder 1, Actors Equity Association Records, Tamiment Library/Wagner Archives, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University. See also the “Equality” chapter in Robert Simonson’s Performance of the Century , 44-173. [13] “‘Integrated Showcase’ Well Performed, but Did Show Prove Its Point?,” Variety (22 April 1959): 78, 82; “Orson Bean Rebuts on ‘Integration’; Says Race Consciousness Is Brief,” Variety (29 April 1959), 69-74. [14] See Angela Pao’s account in tandem with that of Ana Deboo’s briefer summary in, “The Non-Traditional Casting Project Continues into the ’90s ,” The Drama Review 34 no.4 (Winter 1990), 188-191. [15] Play Production Primer: A Handbook for the Beginner or the Experienced Drama Director and All Who Are Curious About That Alluring World Behind the Footlights, Revised Edition. (Salt Lake City, UT: General Boards of the Mutual Improvement Association, 1948),185. [16] Blandford Jennings, “Rehearsing the School Play,” Dramatics Magazine (March 1948), 9-10. [17] Esther McCabe, “Casting One-Acts in a Small High School,” Dramatics Magazine (February 1948), 13. [18] Sam Boyd, Jr. “Techniques of Play Rehearsal,” Dramatics Magazine (April 1948), 6-7. [19] Talbot Pearson, “Rehearsal Procedures,” Dramatics Magazine (May 1948), 6-7. [20] Isadora Bennett, “The Training Program of the American Theatre Wing,” Educational Theatre Journal 7:1 (March 1955), 32. [21] Qtd. in Richard Schechner, “Ford, Rockefeller, and Theatre,” The Tulane Drama Review 10:1 (Autumn 1965), 35. [22] Frank M. Whiting, An Introduction to the Theatre (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), 157. [23] McCabe, 13. [24] These quotations are drawn, variously, from Harold Clurman, On Directing (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 65-68. [25] Helen Krich Chinoy, The Group Theatre: Passion, Politics and Performance in the Depression Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 14, 252. [26] Harold Clurman, On Directing (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 65-68. [27] Elia Kazan, Kazan on Film: The Master Director Discusses His Films , ed. Jeff Young (New York: Newmarket Press, 2001), 130-131. [28] Russell K. Robinson, “ Casting and Caste-ing: Reconciling Artistic Freedom and Antidiscrimination Norms ,” California Law Review 95, no. 1 (2007), 4. [29] Heekyung Esther Kim, “Race as a Hiring/Casting Criterion: If Laurence Olivier was Rejected for the Role of Othello in Othello, Would He Have a Valid Title VII Claim?” Hastings Communication and Entertainment Law Journal 20 (1997-1998), 397-419; and Jennifer L. Sheppard, “Theatrical Casting – Discrimination or Artistic Freedom?,” Columbia-VLA Journal of Law & the Arts 15 (1990-1991), 267. Footnotes About The Author(s) BRIAN EUGENIO HERRERA ’s work examines the history of gender, sexuality and race within and through popular performance. He is author of Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in 20th Century US Popular Performance (Michigan) and The Latina/o Theatre Commons 2013 National Convening: A Narrative Report (HowlRound), as well as articles in Theatre Journal , Modern Drama , and TDR . Herrera is presently developing a scholarly history of casting in American entertainment. He is Assistant Professor of Theater at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. Guest Editor: Jonathan Chambers Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction (JADT 27.2, 2015) The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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. References [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. Footnotes About The Author(s) 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. Guest Editor: Jonathan Chambers Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction (JADT 27.2, 2015) The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jonathan Chambers 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 Introduction (JADT 27.2, 2015) Jonathan Chambers By Published on April 23, 2015 Download Article as PDF In its almost 30-year history, the American Theatre and Drama Society (ATDS) has championed the study of theatre and drama in the United States, in all its wide-ranging traditions, numerous histories, and myriad forms. The organization has, along the way, sought to interrogate the constantly shifting notion of what constitutes “America,” both as a place and an idea. Running parallel to the efforts of ATDS has been the Journal of American Drama and Theatre ( JADT ), itself nearing its 30 year anniversary. As does ATDS, JADT offers a forum for scholars interested in the American theatre, writ large, to exchange ideas, to push the field forward, and to explore and challenge received notions of “America,” “drama,” and “theatre.” Given their corresponding missions, it should come as no surprise that the names comprising the list of authors who have published in JADT is very similar to those found on the membership roll of ATDS, and that the organization and journal have shared in numerous fruitful partnerships. This annual special issue of JADT , guest edited by a member of ATDS, is just one of those many collaborations that have long-defined that symbiotic relationship. The call inviting submissions for this particular special issue encouraged authors to use as a point of departure Joseph Campbell’s expansive conception of myth, considering specifically the history and continued presence of myth in theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas. Authors were asked to explore how myth—functioning mystically, cosmologically, sociologically, pedagogically, or in some way other way – shaped American theatrical expression, drama, and performance; and, in turn, how theatrical expression, drama, and performance shaped our conceptions of our universe and ourselves. In composing the call, I sought to draw in pieces that would address the idea of “myth” broadly construed. Thus, while I would have gladly welcomed considerations of ancient Greek or Roman myth within the context of historical or contemporary America (a subject I personally find fascinating), I was more keenly interested in exploring the ways in which myth was and is built into “America,” and how theatre, drama, and performance have participated/continue to participate in that process. The four pieces in this issue engage in that type of thoroughgoing investigation in intriguing ways. In the first, “The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance,” Brian Eugenio Herrera reviews multiple conversations about casting, finds a pattern within them, and terms that pattern the “Mythos of Casting.” In turning a spotlight on this aspect of theatrical production that has typically escaped careful examination, Herrera offers a number of thought-provoking observations regarding not only the mythical qualities that drive the casting process in most professional and academic contexts, but also the entire theatre making enterprise. In the two pieces that follow – “Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men ” by Kee-Yoon Nahm, and “Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D. W. Gregory’s The Good Daughter ” by Bradley Stephenson – the focus shifts to myths at play in contemporary, American theatre pieces. In the former, Nahm challenges conventional notions of what constitutes realism. Offering rich analyses of two new pieces by emerging playwrights in the field of experimental or avant-garde theatre – Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate and Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men – Nahm persuasively argues that, despite claims to the contrary and as is evidenced by these pieces, realism has the potential to generate political power and, in so doing, disrupt the traditionally perceived link between realism and whiteness. In the latter essay, Stephenson argues that Gregory’s play disrupts and contests contemporary and historical ways of viewing disabled people as “less than,” “fragile,” or “incapable.” The Good Daughter , thus, represents disabled characters differently than persistent cultural depictions. In the final piece, “Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; or, William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience,” Samuel T. Shanks grants Dunlap – a frequently ignored American dramatist who deserves more attention given the quality and quantity of his work – his much-needed due. But beyond this specific focus on Dunlap, Shanks challenges the community of American theatre scholars to think more deeply and critically about the historiographic biases, assumptions, and mythologies the frequently structure and shape its investigations of the theatrical past. Taken together, then, the four pieces collected here powerfully demonstrate the continued force that myths have on American theatre and on our critical considerations of it. This issue is the product of many hours of labor on the part of a number of people. First and foremost, I had the good fortune of working with an extraordinarily sharp and responsible editorial board, drawn from the membership of ATDS. Consisting of Amy Brady (Kean University), James Cherry (Wabash College), James Fisher, (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), Fonzie Geary (Lyon College), Megan Sanborn Jones (Brigham Young University), Jennifer Kokai (Weber State University), Ilka Saal (University of Erfurt), and Lisa Jackson-Schebetta (University of Pittsburgh), the board helped shape the call, offered thoughtful and thorough responses to submissions, and gladly lent a hand to the process whenever called upon. Thanks as well to Cheryl Black, President of ATDS, and Dorothy Chansky, Vice President, for their support of this special issue from the start, as well as their willingness to share their expertise. ATDS has the very good fortune of working with an outstanding team in the offices of JADT , including co-editors Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson, and managing editor Phoebe Rumsey. And extra loud “shout out” goes to Phoebe for her generosity and cheerful spirit while shepherding this issue from start to finish, making sure that all involved stayed on track. My final word of thanks goes to the four authors whose works are presented in this issue. I hope in reading their pieces you are challenged, as I have been, to think more deeply about the myths that structure our social, political, aesthetic, disciplinary, and personal lives. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JONATHAN CHAMBERS Guest Editor Bowling Green State 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 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.

Michelle Dvoskin Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 1 Visit Journal Homepage "Just Saying Our Goodbyes": Elegies' Queer Interventions into the History of 9/11 Michelle Dvoskin By Published on March 5, 2015 Download Article as PDF In Elegies : A Song Cycle , the 2003 William Finn musical first produced at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, five performers sing both in honor of and as the lost. [1] More specifically, they perform losses from the life of the gay Jewish composer-lyricist William Finn, embodying and/or narrating the lives of a diverse array of characters linked only by their connections to him. From a nameless English teacher, to Finn’s mother Barbara, to the architect who designed the Twin Towers, to producer/director Joseph Papp, to Finn himself, this musical engages with a range of histories. Some of those histories are obviously public (the events of 9/11, which are presented at the end of the evening); others are seemingly personal (the death of Finn’s mother); all are approached from a queer perspective. Finn (b. 1952 ) is perhaps best known as the composer and lyricist for the 1992 Broadway musical Falsettos , which tells the story of Marvin, a gay Jewish man, and his queer family: his ex-wife Trina, their son, Jason, Marvin’s lover, Whizzer, and Trina’s husband (and Marvin’s former psychiatrist) Mendel. While the first act focuses on these characters as they awkwardly attempt to negotiate their relationships, the second centers largely on Whizzer’s battle with, and eventual death from, AIDS. [2] Finn’s other well-known shows include A New Brain (1998), about a gay musician suffering from a brain tumor, and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005), which humorously dramatizes the competition, camaraderie, and struggle for (and against) perfection amongst idiosyncratic children at a local spelling bee. An interest in queer characters is a hallmark of Finn’s work, and Elegies is no exception. I use the term “queer” as a way of describing opposition to normativity broadly writ: a way of tweaking our vision so that we recognize that the normal, the “natural,” is in fact a construction. In this definition sexuality is one kind of normalcy queer challenges, but other structures of power that create and enforce the illusion that there is such a thing as “normal” in the first place, other “regimes of the normal,” can be challenged as well. [3] Elegies is arguably a bit queer in all sorts of ways. Most important to my project here, however, are the ways Elegies queers ideas about history and how it can and should be performed. Elegies challenges normativity in how it presents and structures its histories, as well as heteronormativity in the content of those histories. Initially performed in the highly respected and culturally valued public space of Lincoln Center (and later in other respected theatres in later productions, as well as on the commercially available cast album), Elegies challenge audience expectations about what histories deserve presentation in the public sphere, as well as how those histories should be crafted. [4] Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Elegies’ challenge to normative ideas about history comes from how it takes what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick termed a “reparative” approach, one that performs not simply what “really” was, but also what might have been. By incorporating a range of losses into a profoundly public performance, Elegies queers ideas about what kind of losses are worthy of public memorialization: in other words, what losses can be acknowledged as such in history. I am particularly interested in how Elegies ’ reparative approach to the history of 9/11 both reiterates the (hetero)normative narrative of national trauma and subtly insists, through various performance strategies, on a more nuanced representation that incorporates queer lives and losses. Including queer people in histories of 9/11 is profoundly important given that many “moral conservatives” in its immediate aftermath “blame[d] the event on homosexuals and the women’s movement.” [5] Elegies ’ complex, inclusive performance of 9/11, and its positioning of the event as one among a range of (queer) personal griefs, offers a chance for audiences to productively reconsider the story we assume we know, creating the possibility for a more nuanced understanding of history—and by extension, the present and the future—to emerge. Before proceeding to a discussion of Elegies itself, I want to briefly elaborate on my use of Sedgwick’s conceptualization of reparative reading. In her essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” Sedgwick argues for the importance of moving beyond what she sees as critical theory’s, particularly queer theory’s, dependence on paranoia. Paranoid readings emphasize the revelation of all possible relevant injustices and oppressions, in order to both rouse opposition and protect against unpleasant surprises. This approach limits possibility, as the need to avoid negative surprises in some ways renders negativity inevitable. [6] Sedgwick is critical of the “faith in exposure” this approach relies on, which “acts as though its work would be accomplished if only it could finally, this time, somehow get its story truly known.” [7] This assumption, of course, requires one to ignore the very real possibilities that the story was already known, or that the audience for that story, once aware of the situation, might remain uncaring or unable to help. Reparative reading takes a different approach to exposure and to surprise. According to Sedgwick, To read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new : to a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also be good ones. Hope . . . is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates. Because she has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did. [8] Reparative readings, then, allow for possibility . They are not denials of injustices, past, present, or future; they are, however, readings that don’t see the exposure of those failures as determinative of all possible encounters. The unexpected response is possible, and things can, in fact, happen differently. In her description here, Sedgwick is focusing on the role of surprise and hope in future-oriented work. In my consideration of Elegies , I apply her principle in reverse: that is, by presenting a vision of the past that exposes what was while demonstrating what could have been, this musical allows for the possibility of more just, ethical futures. The affective power of musical theatre assists in this reparative project. Writing about reenactments—large-scale performances of the past in the present moment—Tavia Nyong’o points out that “if reenactment risks reifying the past as it was, the transmission of affect permits us to reimagine as well as to repeat, inserting new subjectivities and new desires into familiar landscapes.” [9] Smaller-scale performances of history like those in musical theatre offer a similarly affective engagement with the past, allowing for the possibility of showing both what was and what might have been (and, by extension, might still be). Elegies takes advantage of this fundamentally reparative possibility by performing histories of trauma and marginalization in ways that acknowledge the injustices of the past while also performing other possibilities, thereby opening up hope for the present and future. I will begin my discussion of Elegies ’ reparative work by considering how it fractures the linear temporality associated with traditional history, engaging with time in fluid, nuanced ways that embrace possibilities alongside “realities.” I will then address the ways in which this musical encourages audiences to engage with a range of losses, some obviously public and others seemingly private, and to treat them all as worthy of attention and respect. Finally, I will focus on the final section of the musical, which considers the events of 9/11, and the ways in which performance strategies enable a nuanced, complex approach to this history of a national trauma. Elegies takes a decidedly different approach to most traditional, normative history, which relies on a chronologically organized narrative with a clear rupture between the past and the present. First, the overall structure of the performance is entirely episodic and non-linear, bouncing around Finn’s life without regard to chronological order. The show is essentially organized as a revue, a series of songs linked by theme and subject matter rather than narrative. There is no spoken dialogue, and while some characters recur, many appear or are mentioned only in one number. Second—and more crucially for my arguments here—there is no clear border between past and present in Elegies . This queer approach to temporality comes in part from the very nature of performing history: performances of the past create an experience of co-temporality as the past exists in the unmistakably present time of performance. [10] Elegies takes this a step further, however, by taking a melancholic approach to the losses it represents. According to Freudian understandings of grief, mourning requires the bereaved to reckon with their loss in order to let go of the lost object, while melancholia insists on holding on to the lost. While Freud initially conceptualized melancholia as pathological, alternative understandings of melancholia see it as a potentially ethical response to loss. Rather than a disordered failure to let go, “we might” as David Eng suggests, “see in the call of the melancholic . . . an ethical demand to provide another kind of language for loss, another story, another history.” [11] Queer scholars have been influential in this reclamation of melancholia, particularly in relation to the AIDS crisis. [12] Finn is a gay man, and Elegies operates within a visibly queer world: lesbians, gay men, and queer communities are all among the losses grieved onstage. The queer potential of melancholia extends beyond the identities of the grieved and grieving, however, shaping a relationship with history that is queer in its form as well as (potentially) its characters. As Eng and David Kazanjian point out in their introduction to Loss: The Politics of Mourning (2003), melancholia can be read as offering “a continuous engagement with loss and its remains. This engagement generates sites for memory and history, for the rewriting of the past as well as the reimagining of the future.” [13] Melancholia, they suggest, prevents a clear separation of past, present, and future; the rupture that defines history is present, but permeable. By offering the space for “rewriting” and “reimagining” both past and future, a melancholic approach to loss allows for a reparative approach to history, one which recognizes events from the past without seeing them as inevitable or as determinate of negative futures. Elegies takes up just such a melancholic project, calling the losses of Finn’s past into being in the present moment of performance. And while some losses are simply narrated, others are brought into momentary being through performance as the singers embody them as characters. In the case of Elegies , performance allows loss to be made tangible and concrete through the bodies of the five performers. In the world of musical theatre, however, it isn’t only the performers who embody the lost. Musical theatre scholars have noted the predisposition of the form towards particularly physicalized reception practices, what Stacy Wolf terms a “performative spectatorship” that includes “tapping toes . . . humming tunes . . . learning physical bits and choreography . . . the visceral experience of watching and listening to a musical play. In this way, spectatorship of musicals is literally active.” As Wolf points out, “what we take from the musical is embodied.” [14] Audiences take musicals into them; in the case of Elegies , the song that enters the spectator carries the trace of the dead or absent. As the five performers of Elegies sing both about and for the losses Finn has sustained, then, the letting go associated with mourning becomes literally impossible as the lost are held in the living bodies of performers and audience members alike. Finn’s lyrics suggest that this melancholic project was intentional. One of the first songs in the show, “Mark’s All-Male Thanksgiving,” offers a clear example. As he tells the story of the Thanksgiving dinners thrown by Finn’s friend Mark Thalen before Thalen’s death from AIDS, Michael Rupert, singing as the character of Finn, directly articulates the song’s purpose: “I wrote this song to not forget Mark’s All-Male Thanksgiving.” [15] Rather than allowing the distance between himself and the event to grow, as it should in “healthy” mourning, Finn chooses to stay connected to the past, to “not forget” or let go. The song “Anytime” makes a similar point, this time from the perspective of Finn’s friend Monica. The song, written by Finn for Monica’s funeral at her request, is “told from her point of view” and sung by Carolee Carmello. Imagined as “a mother singing to her daughters,” “Anytime” refuses the idea that the dead can be left behind by the living. Sung with conviction by Carmello as she stands alone in a spotlight center stage, the song repeatedly declares in its refrain that despite her death, Monica will not miss a moment of her children’s lives: “I am there each morning / I am there each fall. / I am present without warning. And I’m watching it all. . . . I am there.” [16] When she leaves the stage at the end of the number, she pauses to sing a final “I am there” over her shoulder, reaffirming that even in her absence, she will remain. [17] Once again, the character refuses to acquiesce to loss, choosing continued connection instead. In an interview about the writing of Elegies, Finn states that his greatest fear in creating the piece was that “I wouldn’t write a song that would bring my mother back to life.” [18] His language is telling; he doesn’t fear writing a song that represents her poorly, he fears he won’t be able to resurrect her. The dead are not allowed to stay dead in the world of Elegies , and that is by design: the goal of the piece is to continually “bring [them] back to life” not just for Finn, but also for everyone who encounters the show. Melancholia is not merely a byproduct of performance here; it is the goal. Elegies’ melancholic, queer approach to temporality allows for the appearance of small reparative moments throughout the performance. Time is extremely fluid within this show, denying audiences any comfortable, chronological understanding of events. Even within individual numbers the present and the past (and occasionally the future) continually collide. In the song “Monica and Mark,” for example, the three men (presumably playing the roles of William Finn in the past and the present, as well as his partner Arthur within both moments) narrate the following exchange: “He [the doctor] explained that Mark had AIDS / He explained that AIDS was then fatal / Something we did not know at the time.” [19] The men sing from the present moment of performance, looking back on a moment in Finn’s personal history of AIDS, while Christian Borle and Keith Byron Kirk sit together in chairs as Finn and his partner might have done in the past moment they describe. Complicating matters still further is the inclusion of the word “then” in the second phrase. The doctor would not, in the past moment, likely have said that “AIDS was then fatal”; he would have said “AIDS was fatal,” as he had no knowledge of a future when AIDS might be understood instead as a chronic condition. By writing the line in this way, however, Finn enacts a reparative moment, embedding hope in a brief reenactment of the past, and by extension, reminding us of hope in the present as well. The song “Venice,” in which Finn recalls the illness and death of “the former lover of [his] lover, a sophisticated Pole named Bolek,” offers another illustration of the reparative possibilities offered by a queer approach to time. Temporality seems unstable from the very beginning of the song, which features Rupert, as Finn, reminiscing about how he and Bolek would fight during dinner: “He’d say, ‘You’re being a dick.’ / I’d say, ‘Bolek,’ he’d say, ‘Billy.’ / I’d say, ‘Bolek,’ he’d say, ‘What?’” The interaction seems continuous, repeated—until the next line brings time into sharp focus, as Rupert-as-Finn sings, “That then was the night I knew that Bolek was sick.” Performance matters in this shift, as the melody and Rupert’s vocal quality mark the change in grammar. From the playful, up-tempo back and forth of the earlier lines, the sound becomes more mournful and legato. Rupert’s voice becomes softer, smoother, and somehow more emotionally charged. Later in the song, Rupert-as-Finn tells us about the trip he, Arthur, and Bolek took to Venice, answering the call of Bolek’s (and the song’s) refrain, “My friends, I’m taking you to Venice.” After several lines describing the trip, Finn acknowledges that the story never happened, that what he has just reenacted in song was an alternate history: “In truth, we never went to Venice / We said we would, but Bolek died too quickly.” Once again, fluid temporality enables a reparative moment. The past is not over and gone; Finn can manipulate and re-imagine his history, suggesting what might have happened rather than simply exposing the sorrow of what “really” was. Rupert’s performance choices heighten this effect, as he performs the section describing the trip in an earnest, matter-of-fact manner that allows the “false” history to be real for a moment. If, as I have been arguing, Elegies poses a queer challenge to the “when” of history, to its temporality, it also takes a distinctly queer approach to its “who” and “what,” insisting on the importance of all kinds of people, places, lives, and memories often deemed too trivial or too marginal(ized). There are unspoken rules as to what can be grieved in an open public, which losses are worthy of consideration. As Judith Butler has argued, society sees certain marginalized lives as invalid; publicly eulogizing those lives becomes, therefore, impossible. Butler asserts that “we have to consider how the norm governing who will be a grievable human is circumscribed and produced in . . . acts of permissible and celebrated public grieving.” [20] Performance, like the obituaries Butler writes about, has a productive function in creating public understandings of what can count as a grievable loss. Elegies takes up just this project, as it publicly memorializes a wide range of losses from the life of its queer, Jewish composer. Moreover, its challenges to normative history take place not in a paranoid style that might focus on how often queer personal losses are excluded from the historical record, but rather in a reparative spirit that assumes the value of publicly sharing such losses. In doing so, Elegies expands what losses “count” as deserving of public grief and attention—in other words, what losses deserve inclusion in public histories. Elegies performs grief for a wide variety of losses, some more obviously public than others. On the seemingly personal level, the songs of Elegies honor and sometimes embody Finn’s family: his mother features in multiple songs, and “Passover” invokes a number of other family members, as well as the holiday celebration and its accoutrements. Other “personal” songs feature an unnamed English teacher, Finn’s friend (and mother of his goddaughter) Monica, and Finn’s childhood neighborhood, memorialized in his mother’s voice. Other losses seem to exist within a blend of private and public: a corner store and the Korean family who ran it; Peggy Hewitt, a little known character actress, and her partner Dr. Misty del Giorno; and performer and composer Jack Eric Williams all fit in this category. While they might be known outside of Finn’s immediate circle, the wider public of Elegies is likely unfamiliar with them. Joseph Papp, the founder of New York’s Public Theater, is more well-known than the rest of these individuals, but even he is not precisely a household name, and the song that honors him blends public recollections—“Joe saw a theatre in Central Park, and Moses builds what Joe proposes”—with more personal ones: “I never understood what Joe was sayin’ to me—he’d quote Shakespeare, and I’d simply nod.” Also fitting into this liminal space are the numerous losses to AIDS grieved throughout the piece. While Finn uses the word AIDS in only one song, the disease’s presence resonates throughout the show, most notably in three numbers I have already mentioned. “Mark’s All-Male Thanksgiving” features a gay male community and one of its rituals, decimated by AIDS. “Monica and Mark” returns Mark to the forefront, narrating his death and the advent of AIDS simultaneously. Finally, Bolek, the featured character in “Venice,” is presumably a casualty of AIDS as well. [21] The AIDS-related deaths of gay men have often been among those deemed ungrievable by the larger culture. As Douglas Crimp points out, “for anyone living daily with the AIDS crisis, ruthless interference with our bereavement is as ordinary an occurrence as reading the New York Times . The violence we encounter is relentless, the violence of silence and omission almost as impossible to endure as the violence of unleashed hatred and outright murder.” [22] By addressing these losses in the public forum of a musical, Elegies challenges this violent silence. And in doing so, Finn claims the right to publicly grieve less tangible losses. For example, “Mark’s All-Male Thanksgiving” grieves for a gay male community marked as outside normativity, a community which included “diplomats, poets, opera guys, guys dressed in leather britches,” and a ritual shared among them. [23] It isn’t just individual people he misses; it’s a community and its practices ravaged by AIDS. This song, like so many others in the show, insists on the importance of not only those people and things most central to our lives, but those that are more peripheral as well. While Mark was clearly a close friend, the song is not simply a lament for him. It is a remembrance of the various men who attended and the details of their culture. For example, Finn gives space to memories of the food they shared: [M]en cooked the turkey, and men made the cranberry sauce Without nuts—because men don’t like nuts! But the stuffing was manly, and the finger bowls ditto — And ditto, the pureed sweet yams — Very manly, when Mark made his All-Male Thanksgiving. [24] Certainly, there is humor in this description; specific word choices like “manly” finger bowls and sweet yams play lightly on gay stereotypes for comic effect. There is also humor in the quotidian nature of the material. Hearing a man sing, in a lovely high baritone, about side dishes is funny for its very incongruity. It’s also touching, however, as the addition of music gives heft to the quotidian memory: this is important enough to sing about, and to sing about publicly. [25] This emphasis on the importance of the quotidian, the mundane, the everyday—things, places, and people—is in some ways a radical act. Crimp, discussing his first viewing of the AIDS quilt, comments that he was moved by the realization that he “had lost not just the center of my world [close friends or intellectual idols] but its periphery, too. I remember at the time saying to friends that it was the symbols of the ordinariness of human lives that make the quilt such a profoundly moving experience.” [26] Elegies honors the idea that the “ordinary” needs to be attended to, to be mourned. It celebrates people central to Finn’s life (for example, his mother), but also those, like the unnamed English teacher, who appear somewhat peripheral, arguing that attention to them is relevant not just for Finn but for audiences as well. Elegies also moves beyond the immediately personal to address national traumas, both in its treatment of AIDS and, most notably, in the closing sequence of the show, which (re)presents losses incurred on September 11, 2001. This segment immediately follows the song “When the Earth Stopped Turning,” which focuses on the death of Finn’s mother. “When the Earth Stopped Turning” is a personal song, but as the title (a recurring lyric) suggests, one that addresses an emotional event of great magnitude. [27] Using this to lead in to the least obviously personal, most public sequence of the evening encourages audiences to recognize that personal losses can be as important, as meaningful, and as deserving of a place in history as public ones. The structure also reminds us that 9/11 represents a day when the world changed for individuals, not just for the nation as a whole. This emphasis on individual meanings is a valuable intervention into the historical narratives around 9/11, which have tended to be somewhat totalizing. Writing not long after the events, Harry J. Elam Jr. noted in Theatre Journal ’s “A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy: A Response to September 11, 2001” that “descriptions of the events of September 11, 2001 commonly conjoin other words such as ‘American’ or ‘National’ with that of ‘tragedy ,’” nomenclature that suggests both an identity and a politics.” The “conspicuous outpourings of nationalism” that accompanied this linkage are, he suggests, certainly not uncomplicated or necessarily positive. [28] Ann Cvetkovich, writing in 2003, uses the lens of trauma rather than tragedy, but offers a similar warning. She writes that “In the United States, September 11 has already joined the pantheon of great national traumas, and I fear that its many and heterogeneous meanings . . . will be displaced by a more singular and celebratory story.” She goes on to note her concern with the ways in which “certain forms of suffering are deemed worthy of national public attention, while others are left to individuals or minority groups to tend to on their own.” [29] One of Elegies’ major contributions is to offer, through performance, a heterogeneous awareness within the “more singular and celebratory story” that has become the normative narrative. In considering how Elegies queers the history of 9/11, it is important to understand that normative narrative, and how the musical both engages with and challenges it. Trauma scholar Dori Laub expresses the most common understanding of 9/11, referring to it as “an experience of collective massive psychic trauma.” [30] While “trauma” is a term that defies easy definition, a “traumatic experience” can be understood as one that cannot be completely engaged in the moment of encounter, an experience too negative to fully comprehend in relation to oneself. [31] Drawing on Cathy Caruth, as well as other scholars of trauma, Irene Kacandes argues that “In fundamental ways trauma is connected to incomprehensibility,” be it an inability to fully experience an event or to clearly name or describe it. [32] In essence, trauma occurs when an event is too upsetting, too horrible, for someone to fully comprehend as it occurs. A victim of trauma cannot truly understand what has happened as something that has happened to them, and subsequently cannot (consciously) tell their story. Most approaches to trauma tend to position it as the cause of clinically recognizable symptoms requiring some sort of treatment or “cure.” Ann Cvetkovich, in contrast, takes a less pathologizing approach to what trauma can mean, one more attuned to the experiences of everyday life. She takes as her working definition of trauma “a social and cultural discourse that emerges in response to the demands of grappling with the psychic consequences of historical events.” [33] Elegies’ final section draws on understandings of trauma in order to ask audiences to “grapple” with a variety of perspectives on the events of 9/11. The two songs in the 9/11 section of Elegies represent trauma lyrically, musically, and through specific moments of physical performance. The first song, “Goodbye / Boom Boom,” features two stories: a husband calling home, presumably from the towers, to say goodbye to his wife and child, and the architect grieving for his buildings. Two singers, Keith Byron Kirk and Carollee Carmello, perform the bulk of the number, with Kirk playing the husband while Carmello sings for both his wife and the architect. Lyrically, the song’s narrative is a bit confusing; for example, the wife “turns the TV on, and scrolling down is a list of tiny names. The place he works is in flames,” suggesting that somehow the victims were being named even as the tragedy was still in progress. The husband, leaving a message for his wife, sings that their child was “the first of an expected four. I’m thinking we won’t have many more,” although since he knows he’s dying, “any” would seem a more appropriate word choice. [34] The slightly off-kilter moments in the lyrics may be disorienting for audience members, who are trying to make linear sense of this story as they have of the others in the show. I would argue, however that the evocation of this very disorientation is a skillful choice on Finn’s part, as it produces for the audience an echo of traumatic affect. Similarly, Carmello sings the wife’s part in third person: “ she turns the TV on”; “still her feet held firmer”; “when he hung up she went to bed,” but also performs her physically. When Carmello sings that “she turns the TV on,” for example, she lifts her hand as if turning on the television with a remote control, embodying the story even as she narrates it in third person. [35] The character cannot narrate the story as her own, a hallmark of trauma. Carmello’s affect throughout much of the song also offers a clear performance of trauma. While Kirk, singing in first person as the husband, performs looking at her, she does not face him at all. In fact, she spends much of the song frozen, staring into space or at the imagined telephone with almost no expression as her husband leaves his farewell message. The choice to play the sequence through stillness and a conspicuous lack of (obvious) emotion resonates with descriptions of traumatic affect, particularly in relationship to 9/11. [36] Certainly, the lyrics support this reading of her performance. As the machine plays the husband’s message, she cannot answer the phone and say her own goodbye because “her feet were made of lead.” She is helpless, paralyzed by the suddenness and immensity of loss—of trauma. Finally, at the close of the song, Kirk and Carmello join together to beg for a chance to try again, to “restart the day” and “say it never happened.” As their voices wrap around one another in a passionate plea, they ask in a harmonized wail, “why won’t the picture fit the frame?” In this moment, the foundation of trauma is laid bare for the audience: the events don’t, can’t, fit our frame of understanding. This section of Elegies also represents trauma through musical and vocal choices. In “Goodbye / Boom Boom,” the wife begins to show more emotion after her husband hangs up. The tempo of the piano accompaniment accelerates moving into this section, from a gentle, almost rolling sound to a more pounding, percussive rhythm. Carmello’s vocal quality becomes increasingly harsh as she sings fragments of thoughts, each punctuated with a “boom” and a strong chord from the piano: “Boom—her son at school. Boom, boom boom—life shattered,” before coming to the final musical breakdown. Rather than yells of anger or a legato ballad of sorrow, she breaks down into a series of four repeated “booms,” each accompanied by a crashing, almost dissonant chord. While she has sung the word “boom” throughout the song, it has primarily been smooth and relatively legato, with a tight, pure “oo” sound. In this section, the vowel becomes muddier, her opening consonant becomes more percussive, and her vocal quality becomes darker and almost guttural. It sounds, in many ways, like a child’s temper tantrum. This is not to say that it seems petulant, but rather that it captures that quality of childhood rage and despair that comes from an inability to understand the world around you, or to articulate your frustration—a description that also applies quite usefully to trauma. “Looking Up,” the second song in the section, opens with a lament for the towers and the hole they have left in the sky: “Looking up, seeing nothing but sky / In a blink of an eye / Where something once rose high, and higher—/ Now, nothing does.” This emphasis on the changed skyline is also part of the normative narrative around 9/11. Judith Greenberg, for example, emphasizes the importance of the towers themselves to the experience of 9/11 as a trauma: “The towers now overwhelm in their absence. . . . A profound dislocation is created when part of our landscape is missing.” [37] Betty Buckley performs this number as a solo; as she sings, long vocal rests throughout the song suggest the difficulty in finding words for the experience. As the song continues Buckley often sings on an “ahh” in between verses, and in the final section words fail entirely as she moves to syllables, “da da di,” etc. As she begins singing the nonsense syllables, Buckley gestures as though lost. Then, gradually, her delivery increases in confidence and clarity. There still aren’t words for what she needs to express, her performance suggests, but now she at least knows what she means , and feels comfortable expressing it through melody and dynamics. Although characters occasionally sing on nonsense syllables throughout the show, that technique is especially prevalent in this number. This failure of language emphasizes that it is simply not possible to tell this story literally. Even as Elegies follows normative discourses around 9/11 through its performance of trauma, however, it calls into question the (hetero)normative perspective implied by the idea of “national” trauma. Certainly, heteronormativity has been a structuring element in the normative narrative of 9/11; finding a place for queer subjects has been a challenge. [38] Judith Butler points out that “queer lives that vanished on September 11 were not publicly welcomed into the idea of national identity built into the obituary pages.” [39] Erasing queer bodies from national histories of any kind is obviously problematic, but removing them from traumatic histories, which typically call forth a kind of public grieving, has particularly disturbing implications. Removing queer people from the ranks of the grievable arguably represents a larger erasure. As Sara Ahmed, drawing on Butler’s work, suggests, “queer lives have to be recognized as lives in order to be grieved. In a way . . . queer losses cannot be admitted as forms of loss in the first place, as queer lives are not recognized as ‘lives to be lost.’” [40] Writing queer losses into history, then, implies a wider intervention; acknowledgment of loss in the past implies lives worth recognizing in the present. Scott Bravmann argues persuasively that, History helps circumvent the censorship, denial, and amnesia that have continued to inform so much of lesbian and gay existence. Public celebrations such as the commemorations of the Stonewall riots, the annual Harvey Milk memorial march in San Francisco, and various AIDS-related memory projects such as the Names Project Quilt provide gay men and lesbians with powerful collective forms of historical recollection that animate the present in a variety of complex ways. [41] Notably, the examples Bravmann cites are memorializations of arguably traumatic events: riots following systemic and often violent oppression; assassination; AIDS. The imperative for queer people to write ourselves back into history in meaningful ways, as lives worthy of recognition and grief, seems particularly strong in relationship to moments of violence, of loss—of trauma. While I am arguing that challenging the notion of queer losses as publicly ungrievable is a key part of Elegies’ overall project, in “Goodbye / Boom Boom,” Finn does not explicitly address the invisibility of queer victims of 9/11. The couple singing their goodbyes and their grief is heterosexual. Yet through performance—rather than narrative or text—this number implicitly honors queer lives and losses as well. Its ability to do so comes, in large part, from the lack of actor-character congruence in Elegies . The five performers all play multiple roles over the course of the evening, although Finn does not often make it easy to decipher the identity of a given character. In fact, only two songs feature a character explicitly naming him or herself. While careful attention and contextual clues suggest the narrator’s identity in most other songs, some openness remains. In a few songs, most notably “Infinite Joy,” it is impossible to identify the character with any certainty. Additionally, while the actors play multiple characters, characters are also played by multiple actors: for example, at least four, and possibly all five, of the performers play Finn at some point in the evening. This points to a further complication, Finn’s (and director Graciela Daniele’s) lack of adherence to traditional identity categories in parceling out roles. Of the five actor-singers, two are female and three are male. Four are white, while one of the men, Kirk, is African American. Kirk is actually the first of the performers to sing as Finn during the show, in the number “Mister Choi and Madame G.” The performers are also of varied ages, appearing to range from mid-to-late twenties to late fifties. Their sexual identities and religions are unmarked. The identity of “William Finn,” a white, Jewish, gay man in his fifties, then, is performed by several people over a range of varied identity positions, some congruent with the “real” individual, some visibly incongruent. This lack of actor-character congruence is the key to Elegies’ queering of 9/11; the actors in this song have played a variety of other characters over the course of the evening. Even within “Goodbye / Boom Boom,” Carmello sings as/for two characters: the wife and the architect. Doubling her in this way—and having her play the second character across gender (pronouns mark the architect as male)—reminds the audience of the multi-layered relationship between characters and actors in this production. Marvin Carlson writes eloquently about the ways audiences are haunted in their reception by elements from past performances, and notes that actors’ bodies are not exempt from this effect. In fact, an “actor’s new roles become, in a very real sense, ghosted by previous ones.” [42] If this is true in productions separated by long spans of time, it seems evident that this effect also operates within a single production when an actor is obviously playing multiple roles. Since “Goodbye / Boom, Boom” comes at the end of the production, Kirk and Carmello carry all the roles they have performed just under the surface of the ostensibly heteronormative couple they portray. So Carmello’s wife is haunted by Finn, as well as Monica; Kirk’s husband carries Arthur Salvatore and Finn just under his skin. Both Carmello and Kirk have performed as queer people and have sung in honor of queer people over the course of the evening, and that queerness haunts their performances here. At the end of “Goodbye / Boom, Boom,” Borle and Rupert leave their chairs to join Carmello and Kirk for a final chorus of “booms.” Bringing in the additional singers—not just as voices, but as visible bodies—further emphasizes that the scope of 9/11 was not limited to the nuclear family unit. Of course, Borle and Rupert also carry their various roles with them, bringing further heterogeneity to the moment. In the end, the array of bodies, and the residue they carry from the evening’s performance, reminds us that despite the familiar, heteronormative narrative, the events of 9/11 did not only affect those who fit into that mold. Arguably, the very notion of presenting a nuclear family unit (parents with a child), gay or straight, as the focus of grief can be problematic from a queer perspective. Eng, for example, suggests that this approach causes “certain deprivileged losses [to be] summarily erased, as alternative narratives of community and belonging, too, are diminished. . . . The rhetoric of the loss of ‘fathers and mothers,’ ‘sons and daughters,’ and ‘brothers and sisters’ attempts to trace a smooth alignment between the nation-state and the nuclear family.” [43] Eng’s point, that grieving a national tragedy through the figures of nuclear family members erases those who live outside those structures from the larger body of the nation, is an important one. But of course, even those who choose not to replicate those structures are still implicated in them, as queer people are also sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, and even fathers and mothers. As Ahmed notes, “Queer lives do not suspend the attachments that are crucial to the reproduction of heteronormativity, and this does not diminish ‘queerness,’ but intensifies the work it can do.” Highlighting “the gap between the script and the body, including the bodily form of ‘the family,’” she suggests, may invoke a certain cognitive dissonance that helps point out the fallibility of the “script(s)” followed by normative society. [44] In Elegies , beginning with a heterosexual couple and their nuclear family unit allows space to acknowledge the normative narrative, while leaving room for a queer re-imagining—a useful reparative project. Elegies advocates for the inclusion of gay and lesbian bodies and lives in histories of national traumas, and encourages audiences to question the idea that historical events and narratives were inevitable by performing how things might have been, as well as how they were. Tellingly, while the text and score of this musical contain the seeds for its queer interventions, it is in performance that those interventions find their full expression: without the actors’ bodies and voices, and their engagement with the audience, Elegies would be unable to fully accomplish its progressive work. Future productions may also find ways to make other, extra-textual losses that occurred after the musical’s moment of creation part of the experience as well. For example, when I attended the Los Angeles premiere of Elegies in 2004, the show was performed as the closing event for the Canon Theater. Demolished following the production, the Canon was one of the few remaining mid-sized theatres in its part of Los Angeles. While the audience knew the event was a goodbye to the theatre, this was also staged in the performance. The final chorus of “goodbyes” were sung as the back wall and stage door were revealed, emphasizing the soon-to-be emptiness of the space. In this moment, production choices expanded Elegies’ repertoire of grievable losses to include a cultural space, and to add the history of the Canon Theater to the histories memorialized onstage. Through performance, Elegies enacts a reparative history as it gently reminds audiences that there are also other narratives available for telling the (hi)story of 9/11, and that queer losses incurred that day must also be reckoned with. By placing that performance alongside a wide range of losses over the course of the musical, Finn also makes another important reparative move. By juxtaposing 9/11 with other losses, from the personally world-changing loss of his mother, to the more peripheral loss of an English teacher whose name we never know, to a community ritual decimated by AIDS, to other spaces or losses, like the Canon, perhaps yet to occur, Elegies queers our understanding of 9/11 as a unique event requiring particular reactions. Without minimizing the tragedy or the trauma, he encourages us to place it into a broader context: one grief among many, and one we might respond to in any number of ways. This approach, I think, resonates with Jill Dolan’s moving consideration of the role of empathy in performance and in performances’ response to tragedy. Calling for “the space of performance [to] be harnessed to imagine love instead of hatred,” she expresses profound hope that performance can “continue to grace our lives with meaning, generosity, understanding, and memory, however provisional and fleeting” even—or perhaps especially—in the face of a tragedy like 9/11. [45] Elegies’ reparative response to the events of 9/11 and to the project of public memorialization more broadly seems to me to do precisely this work, encouraging us to share in Finn’s love for these people, places, and things, and to make more complex, nuanced, and potentially hopeful sense of traumas and tragedies endured, and perhaps those still to come. References [1] First performed on Sunday and Monday nights at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center (on the set of the production then taking place on the Newhouse stage), Elegies featured five performers: Christian Borle, Betty Buckley, Carolee Carmello, Keith Byron Kirk, and Michael Rupert. It was directed by Graciela Daniele. Performance descriptions are taken from my viewing of the archival recording of this production, housed at the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Elegies: A Song Cycle . Dir. Graciela Daniele. Perf. Michael Rupert, Keith Byron Kirk, Carolee Carmello, Betty Buckley, and Christian Borle. (Lincoln Center Theater. Mitzi E. Newhouse, New York. Rec. 18 April 2003). Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York. NCOV 2724. [2] Falsettos is a compilation with revisions of Finn’s earlier off-Broadway trilogy of one-act musicals: In Trousers (1979), March of the Falsettos (1981), and Falsettoland (1990), with the bulk of the material coming from the latter two shows. [3] Michael Warner, introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory , ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxvi. [4] I use the term public here not solely in the sense of a theatrical public, which Michael Warner describes as “a concrete audience, a crowd witnessing itself in visible space” that “has a sense of totality. . . . A performer on stage knows where her public is, how big it is, where its boundaries are, and what the time of its common existence is.” While a specific performance of Elegies certainly creates such a finite public, as a musical the show as a whole has a far broader reach, since people who may never see a live performance can obtain the original cast album. It can be taken up by anyone who, for any reason, finds themselves hailed to pick it up and listen to it, and there is no way to know the parameters of the public formed through it. For this reason, I consider Elegies as constituting what Warner describes as a textual public, one which is “in principle open ended” and that “exist[s] by virtue of [its] address.” Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 50, 155. [5] Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, introduction to 9/11 in American Culture , ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2003), xvi. [6] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction , ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 10. [7] Ibid., 17. [8] Ibid., 24-25. [9] Tavia Nyong’o, “Period Rush: Affective Transfers in Recent Queer Art and Performance,” Theatre History Studies 28 (2008): 45. [10] For more on the relationship between performance, history, and temporality, see Charlotte Canning, “Feminist Performance as Feminist Historiography,” Theatre Survey 45, no. 2 (2004); and Freddie Rokem, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press , 2000). [11] David Eng, “The Value of Silence,” Theatre Journal 54, no. 1 (2002): 94. [12] See, for example, Ann Cvetkovitch, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 47; and Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York, Routledge, 2004), 159-161. [13] David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, introduction to Loss: The Politics of Mourning , ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 4. [14] Stacy Wolf, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 33. See also D. A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). [15] William Finn, Selections from Elegies: A Song Cycle (n.p.: Alfred Publishing, 2006), 22-23. [16] Ibid., 59-60. [17] Reviewer Suzanne Bixby, writing about a Boston production, makes a similar argument, declaring that “‘Anytime (I Am There)’ says everything there is to say about how we stay connected to people who are gone from our lives – and how they stay connected to us.” Suzanne Bixby, “Rev. of Elegies: A Song Cycle , by William Finn. Speakeasy Stage Company, Boston Center for the Arts,” Talkin’ Broadway , 10 May 2007, http://www.talkinbroadway.com/regional/boston/boston78.html, (accessed 6 February 2015). [18] Finn qtd. in Richard Ouzounian, “Alive with the Sound of Music: Triple Tony Award Winning Composer Captivates in the Way He Sees Dead People,” The Toronto Star , 8 February 2007, http://www.thestar.com/article/178862 , (accessed 6 February 2015). [19] Quotations from Elegies that aren’t available in the published vocal selections are my transcriptions from the cast album. William Finn, Elegies: A Song Cycle (New York: Varese Sarabonde, 2003), Original Cast Album. [20] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 37. [21] According to his 1995 New York Times obituary, Bolek Greczynski died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a type of cancer often found in AIDS patients. Although the word AIDS is never used in describing his death, AIDS has already been brought up in earlier songs and so is present in the audience’s mind. It seems likely that most audience members will read the lingering death of a gay man, who continually “grew thinner” as his illness progressed, as AIDS related. [22] Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 137. [23] Finn, Selections from Elegies , 20. [24] Ibid., 16-17. [25] I want to thank Ann Cvetkovich for reminding me of this fact. [26] Crimp, Melancholia , 196. [27] The title also echoes Alan Jackson’s country song written just after 9/11, “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning).” The similarity in titles suggests a connection between the personal loss Finn is honoring and the more “public” events that he will attend to next. [28] Harry J. Elam, Jr., in “A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy: A Response to September 11, 2001” Theatre Journal 54 no. 1 (2002): 102. [29] Ann Cvetkovich, “Trauma Ongoing,” in Trauma at Home after 9/11 , ed. Judith Greenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 61. [30] Dori Laub, “September 11, 2001—an Event without a Voice,” in Trauma at Home after 9/11 , ed. Judith Greenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 204. [31] Cathy Caruth, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 7. [32] Irene Kacandes, “9/11/01 = 1/27/01: The Changed Posttraumatic Self,” in Trauma at Home after 9/11 , ed. Judith Greenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 171. [33] Cvetkovich, An Archive, 18. [34] Finn, Selections from Elegies , 95. [35] Although this performance strategy—narrating a character’s action in the third person—resonates with Brechtian acting techniques, in the case of Carmello’s performance the distancing effect is twofold. The primary image for the audience is a character distanced from her life due to a traumatic event. The more typically Brechtian notion of distance between actor and character is also potentially present, but less focal. [36] Laub, for example, claims that “following the events of September 11, we witnessed an instantaneous sense of paralysis, a helpless confusion.” Laub, “September 11,” 205. [37] Judith Greenberg, “Wounded New York,” in Trauma at Home after 9/11 , ed. Judith Greenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 25. [38] Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 157. [39] Butler, Precarious , 35. [40] Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 156. [41] Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4. [42] Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theater as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 67. It is worth noting that the performer who becomes most associated with Finn in the present moment over the course of the show is Michael Rupert, who originated the lead role of “Marvin” in Finn’s Falsettos —a show which deals with the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Rupert’s presence in this production capitalizes on this ghosting effect, as the echo of Marvin in his performance will, for many audience members, make the presence of AIDS even more obvious than it is textually. [43] Eng, “The Value of Silence,” 90. [44] Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 152. [45] Jill Dolan, in “A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy,” 106-07. Footnotes About The Author(s) MICHELLE DVOSKIN is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre & Dance at Western Kentucky University. She has been published in The Oxford Handbook of American Drama and The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical , as well as Broadway: An Encyclopedia of Theater and American Culture . Her current research interests focus on musical theatre as queer historical practice, as well as the queer feminist potential of the diva in musicals. 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. 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Michael Y. Bennett Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 1 Visit Journal Homepage James Purdy as Playwright: A Retrospective Reading of A Day After the Fair and The Paradise Circus Michael Y. Bennett By Published on March 5, 2015 Download Article as PDF James Purdy (1914-2009)—a prolific American writer of fiction, drama, poetry, and essays—has been known almost exclusively as a novelist, recognized for his early portrayals of gay characters and themes. Accordingly, scholarship has focused almost entirely on his well-respected novels. Purdy’s most notable contribution to the theatre is indirect, by way of adaptation of his novel, Malcolm (1959), by Edward Albee in 1966. This article considers two of Purdy’s minor plays that span a large swath of his career. Why Purdy now? And why two of his minor plays? There has been a recent turn in Purdy scholarship that has been gathering steam to examine his plays, which have been mostly ignored by academia. In addition to the publication of James Purdy: Selected Plays in 2009, since 2000, four of the seven articles published on Purdy have been about his plays. Douglas Blair Turnbaugh documented Purdy’s career as a playwright and recounts how Purdy told Turnbaugh that he “would just as soon write plays as novels.” [1] Though Turnbaugh does not comment on this statement, this suggests that Purdy scholars should give his plays continued prominence. Turnbaugh claims that Purdy has an inherent theatricality and a flair for dramatic dialogue. [2] This is particularly evident in Albee’s adaptation of Malcolm . Similarly, Matthew Stadler writes, “Talk, in Purdy’s world, is the instrument of revelation.” [3] Purdy does not dwell on scene-setting exposition, character background, or speculative psychological depth. [4] Purdy focuses, instead, on “the awkwardness and abruptness of real speech.” [5] Like Stadler, Michael Feingold argues that Purdy does not pay much attention to plot. [6] Feingold discusses Purdy’s non-traditional dramatic style, which is characterized by anecdotal drama, and explains how the plays are about “why life is so full of suffering and why human beings cause each other so much pain.” [7] Purdy’s reputation as a playwright has historically suffered for two reasons. First, the success of his novels has turned the finite amount of attention towards his novels (and, therefore, largely away from his plays). And, second, what scholarship that has been written about Purdy’s plays has focused almost solely on the structure of his plays (and, largely, in comparison to the structure of his novels). While it is important that academic journals have begun to publish work on Purdy’s plays, the fact that these articles do not really consider the content of the plays, has not done much to further his reputation as a serious playwright to be studied . Besides his prolific output of novels (and poems), James Purdy wrote, in total, eleven full-length plays and twenty shorter plays during his many-decade career. While many of Purdy’s plays were produced in non-notable theatres with limited runs—between the 1966 publication of his first short play, Mr. Cough Syrup and the Phantom Sex , and the 2009 publication of his fifth collection of plays, Selected Plays , published only months after Purdy’s death—, most of Purdy’s plays were published either in book collections or in literary journals/magazines during his lifetime.Unlike other scholars, I do not focus on structure, but instead, read his two plays about circuses and clowns through the idea of “clowning around,” playing off of the well-studied and complex idea of the carnivalesque, as theorized by Mikhail Bhaktin. This essay focuses on one of Purdy’s earlier published plays, A Day After the Fair (written in the early 1970s and first published in 1977), and one of his plays first published in a recent anthology, The Paradise Circus (written in 1991 and published in 2009). Though their dates of publication vary by almost thirty years, interestingly enough, both of these plays revolve around the circus. The figure of the clown haunts the pages, offering a unique opportunity to assess a change in Purdy’s thinking with similar characters occupying similar environments in both plays. While reading these plays, we may ask, what is a clown? and what is a circus? This line of inquiry gets us far; however, there is a much larger issue at stake when we examine the figure of the clown: Purdy’s characters only become themselves when they don the mask of another. Using the figure of the clown in such a manner is a sophisticated technique to explore this (above) idea—an idea that is not entirely without precedent in the history of theatre (e.g., becoming the “brother” in Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan and “Bunburying” in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest ). In the earlier play, A Day After the Fair , as Joseph Skerrett says in “James Purdy and the Works: Love and Tragedy in Five Novels,” tragedy is “played out against a backdrop of more than vaguely symbolic chaos in the natural order and/or disruption of the social order” [8] as the younger destroys the older in order to reverse the hierarchy. Love is a dangerous and destructive force here, as in Purdy’s earlier novels, because the characters cannot conceive or pursue it purely. [9] However, in the later play, The Paradise Circus , though the social order is disrupted in the beginning of the play as Arthur sells his sons and Arthur is incapable of pursuing love in the correct manner, the boys come back and the witch doctor becomes the doctor once more—restoring the social order—and Arthur does learn how to love, even though he quickly dies thereafter. Circuses are scary places in Purdy’s early works: the clowns are outcasts, and their makeup cannot hide the pain. However, by the time we get much later in his career in The Paradise Circus , life, in the end, can produce smiles. As these two plays represent his earlier and later career and both contain clowns, they offer a unique opportunity to see Purdy contemplate similar ideas and characters, but arrive at a different conclusion, demonstrating a fundamental change in Purdy’s outlook over the years. In interpreting the content of these two plays by Purdy through investigating the complex characters of the clowns, this essay aims to legitimate Purdy as a playwright and deserving of further scholarly inquiry. In A Day After the Fair , there are two grown-up brothers who are clowns. The older brother, however, will not let the younger very innocent brother assume the role of a clown (not letting him put on his makeup or costume), because the older brother feels as though he is the master clown. Like the younger brother’s lover who is a hired killer, the younger brother must become a killer, must become cold and calculating like his older brother. Only in killing his older brother, can the younger brother put on his makeup and finally become a clown. Like The Good Person of Szechwan , the previously-innocent younger brother must don another personality to live the life that he wants. The Paradise Circus , set in 1919, is about the relationship between a father and his two sons. Arthur Rawlings is mourning the death of his son Rainforth, a captain in WWI. Arthur forsakes his two younger sons, Joel and Gregory, because they do not live up to the memory of their older, now dead, brother. Joel and Gregory spend their lives working on merry-go-round wooden horses. When Senor Onofrio of the Paradise Circus meets the two boys, he propositions Arthur, who is known to be a miser. For ten thousand dollars, Onofrio will buy the two boys for the circus. If it does not work out and the boys return, he will have to return the money. At first, Arthur is shocked, but then he reasons that his sons do not love him as much as Rainforth did and agrees to the deal. After a number of years, he misses his son and wants them to return. Spurning the advice of the country doctor, Arthur turns to a witch doctor, Alda Pennington, for advice. She convinces Arthur that he must burn the ten thousand dollars, which he does. A little later the two sons miss home and run away from the circus and return home. They have grown up and claim to have hearts of stone when their father greets them again. Onofrio comes to Arthur to get his money back, but when Arthur tells him that Alda burnt it, Onofrio goes to Alda. Alda tells him that ever since he bought those boys he has not been able to perform with women. Alda says that if he ever wants his manhood back, he must leave town, forget the money and never return. Soon after Joel goes to Alda to find out if his father really burnt the money. She gives the remaining ashes to Joel. By the time Joel returns he is too late to hear what his dying father said to Gregory. Arthur told Gregory that he loves them and his dying wish was to see the stone removed from their hearts. Both sons are touched and they have appeared to regain their emotions, ending the play in an embrace. Many of Purdy’s other plays also feature types/variations of complex role-reversals. Dangerous Moonlight (unpublished to date) is a hauntingly sadistic, cold, and calculating play about making the best of a no-win situation. The action between mother and daughter, who have grown up in the lap of luxury, revolves around Val Noble, a Stanley Kowalski-like brute who lacks even the pride that Stanley exhibited in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire . Val is merely satisfied and accepts who he is—a veritable animal, a practical beast, whose needs are quite basic: first sustenance (taking the form of a large roast of beef) and then sex. By the end of the play, the three have made an agreement that the daughter will remain Val’s wife, while the mother will take the place of the daughter and become Val’s lover. In True (1977), Chester, a thirteen year old boy who witnessed his brother commit a murder ends up killing his brother, to demonstrate to him that he is not a liar and is true; that, “he will not grow up to be like his brother.” Here, Chester must become his brother, a killer, in order to become himself. Or Jack, in Down the Starry River (unpublished to date), is a washed-up drag performer. By the end of the play, Jack discovers that in order to make himself happy, he needs his costume to become his daily outfit; he needs to wear dresses not as an act, but in order to be himself. Donald Pease writes that Purdy laces his fiction with orphans, abandoned children, foundlings and outcasts. [10] In A Day After the Fair , the two brother-clowns are circus folk: certainly societal outcasts. Joel and Gregory in The Paradise Circus , are symbolically orphaned as Arthur sells them to the circus. The play A Day After the Fair has a pessimistic ending as the younger brother can only turn to violence in order to become what he wants. This holds true with what Pease writes when he says that there is an irreconcilable gap in their world and the world that cannot “adopt” them. [11] However, there is a very different ending in The Paradise Circus . The two brothers, who were symbolically orphaned, are reunited with their father at the end of the play as each party seems to forgive and love the other. This focus on outcasts and innocents is found throughout Purdy scholarship. Part of the reason for this reoccurring theme is that, as Skerrett documents, as a gay man, Purdy identified with a socially marginalized race. In an interview Skerrett cites in “James Purdy and the Black Mask of Humanity,” Purdy—aligning and/or identifying himself with what he sees as a powerless and stigmatized member of society—discusses that in dealing with his landlord, he felt like an oppressed black person: “They treat you like an old nigger tramp. . . . I feel like an old nigger after I’ve talked with him. I just feel like saying, ‘Well, white boss, you sho got to me.’” [12] Purdy expressed the same sense of oppression when he talked to Christopher Lane in a 1998 interview based on his sexuality. Purdy felt that his lack of recognition, stemmed from his perception of The New York Times as homophobic. [13] Reed Woodhouse writes how Purdy also felt personally attacked by members of the gay movement for not being “gay enough.” [14] Because of this, Purdy could most likely identify with his characters, and as Frank Baldanza says in “James Purdy on the Corruption of Innocents,” “A prominent feature in the microcosm of James Purdy’s six novels and numerous short stories is the relationship between a young innocent and the corrupt adult world in which he must make his way.” [15] The social outcast and orphan figure prominently in his two plays that I discuss here. In A Day After the Fair and The Paradise Circus , Purdy captures the human in the guise of a clown-suit. In order to live life, one must clown around in a world that we know to be a circus. Like a clown, Purdy’s characters must assume another self in order to be true to their own selves. In order for Purdy’s characters to live the lives that they want, they must assume the role of another: they must become another to become oneself. Though full of obvious play and humor, Purdy’s circuses, however, are no laughing matter. These transformations are painful to all involved; even clown makeup cannot hide the pain, and when the clowns fall, or get hit on the head, they really get hurt. In makeup, clown performers exaggerate their bodily expressions, and clowns take on almost universal guises. It is an easy leap to imagine a modern day circus as a Bhaktinian carnival: The body and bodily life have here a cosmic and at the same time an all-people’s character; this is not the body and its physiology in the modern sense of the words, because it is not individualized. The material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed. This is why all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable. [16] It is the body of the clown that becomes the focal point and not the speech. We focus on their makeup and actions. And it is in their action that the clowns grow and renew themselves. Clowns operate through degradation, but also by overcoming degradation until they do it correctly. As Bhaktin says, “the material bodily principle is a triumphant, festive principle.” [17] In the face of degradation, clowns triumph over folly. Bhaktin explains how regeneration comes out of degradation: Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one. To degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth take place. Grotesque realism knows no other lower level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving. [18] At the moment when Purdy’s characters face degradation are they renewed. By permanently donning the mask of another, by degrading themselves and reducing their existence to a new bodily existence, by directly dealing with their orphaned status, they become themselves. The short play A Day After the Fair begins appropriately with the scene being set: “ A dilapidated unfurnished room in a lonely city near which loom up enormous skyscrapers and bridges .” [19] Immediately we think of the degradation that the two clown-brothers, Neil and Arnold, encounter every time they look out of the window. Their surroundings are indicative of success and human progress, though of the lonely sort, and the two live in a dilapidated room, reflecting their failures and the process of continual worsening conditions. The play begins with Neil playing cards by himself and wishing that he is allowed to once again put on his clown suit, which his older brother, Arnold, forbids. Instead of listening to Arnold, Neil puts on the clown makeup: “I’ll put on my Clown’s face too, though Arnold’s forbidden it. . . . And it will make me lose the blues. . . . ” (3). There is something about his ordinary state that saddens Neil, and this may be in part due to. Maybe part of it is the reminder of his poverty-stricken state. The assumption of the carnivalesque being cheers him up, but also makes him feel more like himself. “I was a Clown just like him,” Neil states (3). For reasons not entirely clear to the audience, Neil was stripped of his Clown title by the Clown Master. Neil and Arnold come from a family of clowns: I said I was a clown at heart, and I need to live with Arnold. . . . We are the only clowns! My father was a clown, and his father. And before him my great grandfather was a juggler. We have always followed the circus. (5) They have a heritage, but Neil’s clown identity was stripped away. Neil is in the precarious position of both returning to his old identity—one that no longer exists—and creating a new identity. The plot of the play is a series of complex love triangles. Oswin is married to Elga, who promised Neil’s mother to take care of Neil, but Oswin loves Neil, offering to take Neil away from his overbearing older brother, Arnold. Neil loves Oswin, but also feels the same, at least obedient, love for his brother, Arnold. Elga is in love with both Arnold and Oswin (and has a weird motherly love for Neil). Arnold is in love with Elga, but has a demanding love for Neil. And wrapped up in this series of intertwining love triangles, the Clown Master seems to have had relations with all of the characters, too. The basic action of the play has Oswin, in some sort of revenge for Arnold, kill the Clown Master. Meanwhile, Neil poisons Elga and in turn, Neil kills Arnold. The love triangles afford the characters the ability to take on different roles, ones not determined by obligation. Oswin is obliged to be Elga’s husband, but Neil offers Oswin the possibility of being a lover. For Elga, too, she is obliged to be Oswin’s wife, but Arnold offers her the possibility of being a lover, as well. Neil is Arnold’s brother, but Oswin also offers Neil the possibility of being a lover. In a sense, all characters are trying to become lovers, trying to shed their obligatory mates. These characters become emboldened through love and held back by obligation. In assuming the roles of lover these characters can be free of the parts of themselves that is wrapped up in obligation. But it is not just the idea of taking on another role that frees the characters from obligation. Instead, the assumption of these other roles is only successful with an accompanying degradation. As Bhaktin says, it is only through degradation that there can be a birth. Actually, in the case of Oswin, there is a rebirth. Oswin is described as an assassin, and Oswin is in a similar situation as Neil. In assuming the role of assassin, Oswin is returning to an old identity that no longer exists. Does he return to an old self, or is he reinventing himself once more by once again becoming an assassin? It is an obligatory act, though. Arnold, through force and persuasion convinces Oswin to assassinate the Clown Master. For Oswin, killing the Clown Master, and literally degrading his body as he cuts out his tongue, frees Oswin of Arnold’s overbearing demands. Once Oswin accomplishes this task, he expects to find himself free to pursue Neil. Through assuming the role of an old/new self, degradation is allowed to occur, paving the way for freedom from obligation. The ultimate act of degradation and birth or rebirth comes from Neil’s character. Neil’s obligation to his brother is the one most firmly established. One can always divorce a wife, but a brother will always be a brother. By killing Arnold, Neil destroys part of his natural-born lineage as a clown. Like Oswin, Neil cuts out Arnold’s tongue: this degradation raises the question of whether Neil is returning to clownhood or is reinventing himself as a clown . But what it, ultimately, determines is that Neil will be the only clown. He assumes the privileged position of that title. And, finally, in the murder of his brother, Neil becomes the overbearing brute that his brother was, bullying Oswin. Neil, in freeing himself from his brother, has, in part, assumed the role of his brother. What is it about being a clown that metaphorically fits the play? First off, clowns represent both social outcasts and misfits. Not being satisfied with their role as outsiders, they yearn to become a part of society. However, clowns have a subversive means of achieving their desired goals, and they are successful through roundabout ways. For instance, they stumble until they find a certain, usually wacky, method of success. For Neil, degradation offers a way of subverting the natural order of birth and hierarchy. By toppling his brother, Neil is able to assume his old/new true and free self. The Paradise Circus opens up with an author questioning Arthur about his son, Rainforth. The author is writing a book about soldiers from the American Revolution up until WWI. Rainforth received many citations and won many medals and, as the author says, deserves to be in the book. Arthur describes Rainforth only in opposition to his two younger sons. He says, “My two youngest boys can’t hold a candle to their brother, that’s certain . . .They’re retarded boys. Never finished school . . .” [20] Arthur really has nothing to tell the author about his son except about his name: “The world wants everything ordinary. And both his name and character were extraordinary. Rainforth was right for him, whether people like it or not” (88). This sets up a classic case of a parent favoring one child and forsaking others. As a result of Arthur’s preferential treatment, his two sons, obviously, are detached from him. And because the boys are detached from Arthur, he agrees to “sell” his sons. The rest of the play, then, concerns Arthur’s attempt to buy back his sons’ love. The situation is simple; the resolution is complex. Before Arthur “sells” his sons to Onofrio, he meets with the family doctor, Dr. Hallam. Dr. Hallam is both the raisonneur , the critical outside observer, and a confidant to Arthur, much like James Herne’s famous homeopathic doctor, Dr. Larkin, in his classic play, Margaret Fleming (1890). Hallam correctly diagnoses the problem: Sometimes young men can get sick for sheer want of a little encouragement and downright affection, Rawlings. . . . And all they hear from you, if you will pardon my frankness, is a steady diet of praises for Rainforth. (91) If Arthur could follow Hallam’s simple prescription, the conflict in the play could have been avoided. But the memory of Arthur’s perfect son haunts him. In the face of Rainforth’s supposed perfection, everybody would be a disappointment. As soon as Onofrio offers to “buy” his sons, Arthur hits upon this point: “they have been a bitter disappointment to me, both of them” (95). And so three years have past and Arthur is dying to see his sons. It is not for another year until he actually sees them. Hallam warns Arthur how much they have changed. They have grown beards and have become much stronger even though they still use Arthur’s last name. Their meeting is short and polite. As Joel says, “we weren’t sure you would want to see us” (103). After the boys leave, Arthur tells Hallam, “I wouldn’t have knowed them from Adam” (103). The boys have transformed and indeed look like the “first son.” The boys have taken on a “magisterial” aura (102), and have supplanted Rainforth in might and in Arthur’s mind. Arthur’s sole preoccupation, which used to be his “grief for Rainforth” (96), is getting his two sons to love him. Arthur cannot accept the prescription that Dr. Hallam gives him. Because of Arthur’s unwillingness, or inability, to follow the doctor’s orders,we get the first of two degradations that produce growth. In Purdy’s circus, even the raisonneur and confidant must don a different guise. The “doctor” becomes a “witch” in order to be a doctor. Arthur says that he has had enough of doctors and decides to visit the local witch doctor to see if she can help him get his sons back. The traditional remedy for the situation, giving his children encouragement and showing more love, gives way to an untraditional remedy from an untraditional healer, a witch doctor. The audience must be weary of Alda Pennington before she even says a word. The stage directions read, Antique furniture everywhere, beautiful carpets and mirrors. Fresh flowers. An air of restrained wealth and comfort, not the house one would associate with a midwife or “witch.” (104) We know that Alda must be good at what she does, or at least good enough to trick people out of their money and make enough to buy antique furniture and beautiful carpets. But we might also look at it in another way. This is a person in touch with reality. We do not see the normal collection of ghastly thingamabobs that a “witch” would collect. Instead her decorations are sensible, even refined. She has one foot in magic, but the other is in a life of privilege. Her magic, then, is less foreign. And the pills that she prescribes are easier to follow than if she was a prototypical witch doctor. Like Dr. Hallam, she is both raisonneur and confidant. She quickly assesses the situation: RAWLINGS : They did come to see me . . . But without wanting to . . . They were cold as the brook after snowfall . . . Hardly said a word. ALDA : Just as they were trained. (106) After years of paternal neglect, Joel and Gregory naturally have nothing to say to him. They were, in fact, trained not to love Arthur. Dr. Hallam’s medicine would have worked it seems, if Arthur worked in usual ways. But he sold his boys. And an unusual medicine is needed to remedy that. Alda tells him, The very first thing you must do in order to regain your hold on life and in fact bring back the boys you have lost, is to burn Onofrio’s money . . . Here, before my eyes . . . (109) Alda, then, becomes a carnivalesqe doctor, one who deals in performance and bodily gestures. Her medicine is one of exaggerated excess, where the action is degrading and almost self-destructive. But these actions are done to re gain a hold of one’s life. It is not enough that Arthur gets rid of the money. Alda tells him that he cannot donate the “blood money” to charity (34). He must burn it. He must symbolically rid himself of the “bargain” that was reached with Onofrio, who freed him of his sons, and will thereby free him from his own guilt, actions and despair. Arthur’s change as initiated by Alda, leads to the second of two degradations. Arthur must burn his own fortune and that of his sons’. Arthur is a miser, who, in part, defines himself by his money. He must destroy that part of himself. Alda says, “I would have staked everything on your not returning” (114). She thinks it impossible for him to take on this challenge. “I thought you at least would go on being yourself, resisting everything and everybody, that not even the lightning would touch your pride” (114). By becoming another, by becoming the opposite of a miser, one who would literally burn his own money, Arthur has become the man he always could be, a good father. In this destruction, something burns anew. When Arthur burns the money, he burns the intangible to make room for the tangible, his sons. Once the two degradations take place, that is, the degradation of a doctor to a “witch doctor” and Arthur burning his precious money, the end of the play features the rebirth of the Arthur. Arthur, paradoxically, is dying. But there is still time for this new Arthur to make an impact on the lives of his sons. And with this, Dr. Hallam returns. Now that the unnatural deed of selling his sons has been remedied by the unnatural act of burning the money, traditional medicine can once again take over. On his deathbed, Arthur says to Hallam, Greg and Joel. What can I say, what can I give them. HALLAM : You want my opinion? RAWLINGS : Oh I suppose, though your opinions always take the wind out of my sails . . . Well, go on give it to me, give me your unvarnished say, so why don’t you, though, I’ll probably choke on the words when I hear them. HALLAM : (pacing the room, his head lowered) I can only tell you what I think I’d say if I had two fine boys like you have, if also I had done to them what you have done. RAWLINGS: Sold them like cattle you said once. HALLAM : Did I now? Ah, well . . . RAWLINGS : And what would you say if you was in my stead, Doc. HALLAM: I would say . . . ( hesitates ) I would hope one day they would find it in their hearts to overlook my failings, and that when they were my age they would understand how hard it is to tell those we love how much we love them. (143) And this is exactly what Arthur tells Gregory (Joel was at Alda’s at the time). Even in the act of dying, something is reborn, not just in Arthur’s heart, but the stones are lifted from the hearts of his sons. As the Passover saying goes, “Our story begins with degradation, our telling ends with glory.” As evidenced by these two plays, maybe there was a softening in Purdy’s heart over the course of the years. A Day After the Fair is utterly pessimistic and tragic. However, there are signs of hope and the possibility of love, albeit brief, at the end of The Paradise Circus . In Purdy’s early novels and plays, there are numerous instances of “orphans” as societal outcasts who will never fit in and will always grasp for the love of family. This holds true in A Day After the Fair . The tale of the orphan is, as Frank Baldanza says in “Playing House for Keeps with James Purdy,” “a recurrent Ur -fable of the lonely, desperate orphan, cut off from any family intercourse in childhood, who spends his brief career ‘playing house’ with intense, doomed seriousness, frustrated in his search for metaphorical family relationships that will provide the authority, security, and warmth of familial feeling.” [21] But The Paradise Circus is different. Most of the play follows this same pattern, but forgiveness and love are ultimately shared among the characters at the end. However, maybe the more elegant way to explain this shift is to return to the idea of Bhaktin’s carnivalesque. Early in his career, Purdy hurled his orphans “down to the lower reproductive stratum.” There, in the “fruitful earth and the womb,” Purdy’s orphans could incubate and experience a “new birth,” so that years later these orphans are “continually growing and renewed.” References NOTES: Though much expanded here in this essay, some of the arguments about clowns and, especially, the section on The Paradise Circus come from my short article “Clowning Around in James Purdy’s The Paradise Circus ,” Notes on Contemporary Literature 38.3 (May 2008): 7-10. Earlier versions of this chapter were also presented at two conferences: “Clowning Around in James Purdy’s The Paradise Circus .” 16 th Annual American Literature Association Conference. Boston, May 28, 2005 and “Role-Reversals in Purdy’s A Day After the Fair.” 18 th Annual American Literature Association Conference. Boston, May 26, 2007. [1] Douglas Blair Turnbaugh, “James Purdy: Playwright,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 20.2 (1998): 73. [2] Ibid. 73-74. [3] Matthew Stadler, “The Theater of Real Speech,” The James White Review 17.1 (Winter 2000): 7. [4] Ibid. [5] Ibid. [6] Michael Feingold, “The Basic Question: James Purdy’s Plays,” The James White Review 17.1 (Winter 2000): 40. [7] Ibid. 40-41. [8] Joseph Taylor Skerrett, Jr., “James Purdy and the Works: Love and Tragedy in Five Novels,” Twentieth Century Literature 15.1 (April 1969): 25. [9] Ibid. 26. [10] Donald Pease, “False Starts and Wounded Allegories in the Abandoned House of Fiction of James Purdy,” Twentieth Century Literature 28.3 (Fall 1982): 335. [11] Ibid. 335-36. [12] Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., “James Purdy and the Black Mask of Humanity.” MELUS 6.2 (Summer 1979): 81. [13] Christopher Lane, “Out with James Purdy: An Interview,” Critique 40.1 (Fall 1998): 72. [14] Reed Woodhouse, “James Purdy (Re)visited,” Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review 2.2 (Spring 1995): 16. [15] Frank Baldanza, “James Purdy on the Corruption of Innocents,” Contemporary Literature 15.3 (Summer 1974): 315. [16] Mikhail Bhaktin, Rabelais and His World, Trans. by Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) 47. [17] Ibid. [18] Ibid. [19] James Purdy, “A Day After the Fair,” in Two Plays (Dallas: New London Press, 1979) 3. All subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. [20] James Purdy, “The Paradise Circus,” in Selected Plays (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publishers, 2009), 87. All subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. [21] Frank Baldanza, “Playing House for Keeps with James Purdy,” Contemporary Literature 11.4 (Autumn 1970): 488. Footnotes About The Author(s) MICHAEL Y. BENNETT is Associate Professor of English and affiliated faculty in Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where he teaches courses on modern drama. He is the author of The Cambridge Introduction to the Absurd (forthcoming 2015); Narrating the Past through Theatre (2012); Words, Space, and the Audience (2012); and Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd (2011/Pb 2013). He is the editor of Oscar Wilde’s Society Plays (forthcoming 2015); with Benjamin D. Carson, Eugene O’Neill’s One-Act Plays: New Critical Perspectives , (2012/Pb 2014); and Refiguring Oscar Wilde’s Salome (2011). In addition, he is also Editor of The Edward Albee Review . Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Refusing the Reproductive Imperative: Sex, Death, and the Queer Future in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom "Just Saying Our Goodbyes": Elegies' Queer Interventions into the History of 9/11 James Purdy as Playwright: A Retrospective Reading of A Day After the Fair and The Paradise Circus Sur la Pointe on the Prairie: Giuseppina Morlacchi and the Urban Problem in the Frontier Melodrama Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jordan Schildcrout Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 1 Visit Journal Homepage Refusing the Reproductive Imperative: Sex, Death, and the Queer Future in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom Jordan Schildcrout By Published on March 5, 2015 Download Article as PDF Apocalyptic narratives, based on fears and fantasies about the end of the world and the destruction of humanity, often turn on a character’s success or failure in producing or protecting a child. In such dramas, the survival of a child represents humanity’s hope for the future, and characters go to great lengths to ensure the existence of the next generation. As Lee Edelman has argued in his critique of the ideology underlying such narratives, “reproductive futurism” mandates that the fight for the child is the fight for the future, thus privileging reproductive heteronormativity and stigmatizing the non-reproductive or queer as “the negativity opposed to every form of social viability.” [1] Indeed, certain anti-queer ideologies, based on a loose mixture of biblical narrative and Darwinian theory, argue that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people are inherently detrimental to the survival of humanity. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that most apocalyptic narratives see queer people as, at best, irrelevant, and, at worst, to blame for the destruction of the human race. Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s widely-produced comedy boom [with a small b] (2008) invokes the dictates of reproductive futurism but playfully subverts them, astutely “queering” the typical end-of-the-world fantasy by placing the fate of humanity in the hands of two characters who fail to reproduce. [2] This apocalyptic sex farce follows the travails of a gay male biologist and the female journalist who refuses to have sex with him, even though they are literally the last people on earth. Nachtrieb’s play was originally developed at Brown/Trinity Playwrights Repertory in Providence, Rhode Island, and then premiered off-off-Broadway at Ars Nova in New York City in March 2008, directed by Alex Timbers. Nachtrieb’s 90-minute, one-set, three-character comedy soon had dozens of productions, from major regional theatres such as the Seattle Repertory Theatre and the Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, D.C., to smaller alternative venues in Ithaca, Iowa City, Dallas, and Pasadena. The Theatre Communications Group (TCG) cited boom as the most-produced play of the 2009-2010 season, [3] and by the beginning of 2015, it had over 100 productions in the US and abroad—including Argentina, Germany, Malaysia, and Mexico. Most theatre critics reviewed boom enthusiastically, admiring its synthesis of farcical humor and apocalyptic themes. Many noted the “edgy” and sexy energy of the comedy, praising it as “screwball,” “oddball,” and “wacked-out,” but had difficulty articulating the play’s more thoughtful underpinnings. [4] Ben Brantley of the New York Times astutely recognized the play’s concern with “our enduring fascination with and need for myths about the beginning of life as well as its end,” while Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune myopically dismissed the play because he didn’t find it “credible.” [5] Critics tended to reference the fact that Jules is gay, but they did so parenthetically, as if his homosexuality were simply a funny obstacle to the goal of reproduction. In failing to understand how Jules’s homosexuality functions in the play, theatre critics overlooked the ways in which this wacky comedy presents a challenge to widely-held assumptions about reproduction and the role of queer people in creating the future. Staging the Apocalypse: A Future Without Queers and Queers Without a Future Stories about the end of the world appear in many societies and in many eras, and they inevitably bear the traces of the cultures that produced them, expressing anxieties over real world problems such as war, nuclear destruction, disease, environmental disaster, racism, and poverty. In plays, films, and novels about the apocalypse, the narrative’s optimism or pessimism about overcoming such problems often depends on whether a child, as symbol of the future, survives. For example, both Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) and Liz Duffy Adams’s Dog Act (2004) are apocalyptic comedies that contain hope for the future, concluding with the birth of a child or the promise of heterosexual mating. [6] In twenty-first century cinema, Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), based on the novel by P. D. James, and John Hillcoat’s The Road (2009), based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy, both offer a grim but hopeful story in which a child survives in a hostile and decaying world, thanks to the sacrifices of a heroic father or father figure. [7] A bleaker future, marked by the failure of reproduction or the death of a child, is depicted in plays such as Endgame (1957) by Samuel Beckett, Marisol (1992) by José Rivera, and Fucking A (2000) by Suzan-Lori Parks. [8] In Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), a mother desperately tries and fails to save her young son from the coming apocalypse, and the film ends with the world evaporating in a blinding white light. [9] In these apocalyptic plays and films that focus on the fate of a child, LGBT characters are typically not central to the story of the future. The diminishment or absence of LGBT people within many fantasies of the future is not surprising, given the powerful rhetoric that situates queer people as antithetical to the future of families, the nation, and humanity itself. Such anti-queer rhetoric relies on three key arguments to create the link between queer sexuality and the end of humanity: 1) the wrath of God against a society that tolerates queer sexuality, 2) the prevalence of HIV/AIDS among men who have sex with men, and 3) the non-reproductive nature of same-sex relations. The struggle against such rhetoric can be seen in the political sphere, where the gay rights movement has fought for the decriminalization of same-sex relations, the health and dignity of those living with HIV/AIDS, and the rights of families headed by LGBT people. In the realm of culture, queer theatre artists have created plays that often ask more complex questions—and, in some cases, offer more subversive answers—about the queer future. In the American theatre, one can see how plays have responded to each of the three key anti-queer arguments that link LGBT people with the end of humanity. Certain religious leaders interpret the biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18-19) as evidence that God will eradicate whole populations, not simply for being homosexual, but for tolerating homosexuality within the culture at all. Therefore, anti-gay forces have blamed the very existence of queer people within U.S. borders for everything from hurricanes and earthquakes to terrorist attacks—as prominent televangelist Jerry Falwell famously did in the days immediately following September 11, 2001. [10] In some cases, the “threat” posed by the existence of LGBT people extends to the destruction of life on this planet as we know it. Take, for example, Harold Camping, a Christian minister with a popular radio show, who predicted the end of the world would occur on 21 May 2011. As Scott James wrote in New York Times , Camping believed that this destruction would occur because “God has been angered by mankind’s sins, like the growing acceptance of homosexuality.” [11] In response to the use of religious ideology to vilify queer people, some plays have attempted to reclaim religious narratives for LGBT people, including Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi (1998) and Paul Rudnick’s The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told (1998). [12] Although both plays employ elements of camp, they also contain sincere attempts to undermine the religious rhetoric that imagines queer people as “abominations” who will bring about destruction. McNally’s play depicts a gay man whose life parallels that of Jesus Christ, ultimately bringing grace and salvation to other queer characters. Rudnick’s comedy imagines a gay couple, Adam and Steve, first in the Garden of Eden and then in modern-day New York City, with Adam eventually serving as a sperm donor for a lesbian who gives birth, allowing a lesbian couple and a gay couple to collectively raise the child. When Adam asks what destroyed Sodom, Steve simply answers, “Tourists.” [13] Both plays have proven popular in productions around the country, but they have also met with protests and even death threats. To reposition queer people on the side of creation rather than destruction within the biblical narrative is a subversive and therefore controversial act. The devastation caused by AIDS has also figured prominently in cultural narratives about apocalypse. During the relatively brief era between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Global War on Terrorism, Peter Coviello wrote that “AIDS unseated nuclear warfare as the defining apocalyptic threat to American health and security” and also brought about “the full-scale and unilateral vilification of homosexuality.” [14] Coviello emphasizes the political ramifications of this shift, noting that “the epidemic thus presents to the American public a threatened civic apocalypse whose undeniable menace tacitly sanctions the mobilization of any number of state forces.” [15] The most acclaimed and influential play to confront the relationship between AIDS, government, and the future is Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1992), which boldly imagined a gay man with AIDS at the center of a cosmic battle over the fate of humanity on earth. [16] Angels call on Prior Walter, a drag queen suffering from the effects of a weakened immune system, to become a prophet who will tell humanity to stop moving forward, but Prior refuses this prophecy and instead declares, “The world only spins forward. We will be citizens.” [17] It’s not people with AIDS, but rather greed and self-interest, that threaten the ideals of America, and Kushner imagines Prior Walter and other queer characters moving into the future as part of the national fabric. The third major argument that conflates queer sexuality and the apocalypse focuses on reproduction. Studies of LGBT families have shown that “37% of the more than 8 million LGBT adults in the United States report having had a child,” proving that, while queer sexuality may not be reproductive, many queer people are. [18] But anti-gay arguments assume that when it comes to the Darwinian drama of the perpetuation of the species, queer people—and the acceptance of queer people—will lead to a biological “dead end.” This rhetoric can typically be found in arguments against the political rights and social acceptance of LGBT people, as seen in a 2011 editorial by conservative columnist Jeffrey Kuhner in the Washington Times : By its very nature, homosexuality cannot fulfill the primary function of sex: procreation and the reproduction of the human race. It is inherently a socially barren act. A homosexual society is a childless one—doomed to extinction. [19] In the homophobic imagination, queer people are assumed to have no role in the future, and, indeed, they play an active role in destroying the very possibility of a future, because they do not bear children. The theatre has contradicted this notion of “childless homosexuals” by offering numerous representations of LGBT parents, many of them appearing in the most widely produced gay plays and musicals. In some cases, bisexual characters have children from previous heterosexual relationships, as in Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968); and many plays depict gay and lesbian lovers taking parental roles in relation to the other partner’s biological child, as in Jane Chambers’s Last Summer at Bluefish Cove (1980), Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman’s La Cage aux Folles (1983), and James Lapine and William Finn’s Falsettos (1992). [20] Other plays depict gay characters as non-biological parents: as able helpers to their heterosexual friends, as in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958); as foster parents, as in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy (1982); and as adoptive parents, as in The Kid (2010), a musical based on a memoir by Dan Savage. [21] Some plays show queer families going through the biological process of pregnancy and childbirth, including Paula Vogel’s And Baby Makes Seven (1993) and Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide… (2009). [22] All of these plays serve to construct queer people as reproductive and involved in nurturing children. But must queer people reproduce or raise children in order to be seen as legitimate members of society? Can non-reproductive people serve only to signify the end of humanity in our fantasies of the future? The future of queer people and the role of queer people in the creation of the future—known among cultural critics and scholars as “queer futurity”—have been much discussed in recent scholarship. In particular, queer theorists including Lee Edelman, José Estaban Muñoz, and Jack Halberstam have contributed new perspectives on our understanding of queer futurity. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Edelman argues that, symbolically, queers are presumed to be outside the reproductive social order, and therefore stand in opposition to the innocence, goodness, and hope for the future that “the child” symbolically represents. [23] In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009), Muñoz, while acknowledging the need to resist the reproductive imperative, argues against the homonormative politics of pragmatism that simply demand a place at the existing table. [24] Instead, Muñoz looks to art and performance as inspiring utopian visions of a queer future that is neither heteronormative nor homonormative. In The Queer Art of Failure (2011), Halberstam ingeniously finds optimism in “queer failure,” since the queer’s lack of success by heteronormative standards, including reproductive sexuality, can create resistance and viable alternatives to the dominant culture and ideologies. [25] These theories of queer futurity will help illuminate how Nachtrieb’s boom wrestles with dominant ideologies about sex, reproduction, and the future. In this comedy, Nachtrieb subverts and rewrites the apocalyptic narrative by recasting the usual roles, creating an end-of-the-world play with no parents, no children, and no new-born infant. Instead, it gives voice to the queerly non-reproductive and examines their role in making—or unmaking—the future. Apocalyptic Sexuality: Exploding the Reproductive Imperative The play boom takes place at a museum existing in the distant future, where Barbara, a vivacious but rather harried middle-aged docent, welcomes us to her exhibit. Here we can watch two very lifelike automatons enact the historical struggles of Jules and Jo, a man and woman surviving in an underground research lab after the rest of human life has been destroyed by a giant comet hitting the earth. Standing behind her futuristic operating console, Barbara serves as emcee, stage manager, dramaturg, chorus, and musician for this exhibit-performance. She is, perhaps, an unreliable narrator, and her supervisors, displeased with the dramatic license she’s taken over the years, decide to shut down her exhibit. We are watching the final run of an exhibit about humanity’s final run on earth. Except that humanity clearly did not end, because Barbara stands before us, evidence of the survival of human beings into the future. She is simultaneously the mother-creator of this exhibit and the child-creation of the forbearers depicted in the exhibit. Near the end of the play, however, we learn that Jules and Jo did not reproduce. So how is it that Barbara exists in the future? At first boom seems to be a play about sex, but it soon reveals itself as a play about reproduction, which is not the same thing. Jules is a graduate student in biology who has discovered that human life is about to be destroyed by a giant comet hitting earth, but he is unable to convince his fellow scientists of his findings. Desperate to save humanity, he places an ad on Craigslist for a woman who is interested in “intensely significant coupling” (18). Jo arrives at Jules’s lab, which he has converted into a bunker stocked with food and baby supplies—and there are also four fish in a tank, which quietly bubbles away through the entire play. Jules, because he is socially awkward and terminally unhip, might be described as a “nerd,” and his role as the New Adam is further complicated by the fact that he is gay. Jules has never had sex of any kind before, but he identifies himself as homosexual—based on what he clinically describes as the “non-randomness of [his] erections” (19). Perhaps one of the reasons Jules has never had sex is that, as a biologist, he sees sex strictly as a matter of reproduction; indeed, he seems terrified when Jo first enters and demands the “world changing” sex promised in Jules’s ad. The comedy of the aggressive woman chasing the demure man is an inversion of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, in which the male is ardent and the female is coy. This transgression of normative gender roles indicates the play’s queer leanings, and Jo expresses a very queer understanding of utopia when talking about sex. She explains to Jules the thesis of her current journalism assignment: Random sex as the last glimmer of hope in a decaying society.… No past. No future. All that matters is the moment. [Two people] meet to fulfill each other’s carnal needs, to find a moment of freedom, release, of sensory bliss that makes them forget how motherfucked up everything is. In no-strings sex, hope is still possible. (19-20) As José Muñoz reminds us, “Utopia lets us imagine a space outside of heteronormativity,” and here Jo (a straight woman with a masculine sounding name) recognizes the limitations of the present, eschews what Muñoz calls the “pragmatic politics” of neoliberal progress, and finds hope in a “no-strings” sexual ethos usually associated with non-reproductive or queer sexuality. [26] Once Jo realizes that this gay man is not what she expected, she attempts to leave, but she is stopped by the sound of the apocalypse. As Barbara dramatically plays the timpani, a low rumble grows louder and louder, finally exploding in a deafening boom. The stage then goes completely dark and silent, with only the fish tank still lit and bubbling, until Jules’s generators kick on and we see that both Jules and Jo have survived. Now the play turns from sex to reproduction, since the future of humanity depends on it, and the roles are reversed as Jules pursues the reluctant Jo. “We have to rebuild the human race!” cries Jules (32). Jules has completely absorbed the mandates of what Lee Edelman describes as reproductive futurism. Edelman argues that The Child is the fetishized symbol of the heteronormative social structure, and that “queerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children.’” [27] Jules, even though he is a gay man, is fighting for the child who represents the future of humanity on earth, the comic version of Clive Owen’s character in the film Children of Men (2006), who heroically risks his life to protect the world’s only infant. But Jules is no Clive Owen. He’s a bumbling nerd who comes up with ridiculous ways to try to impregnate Jo, each of them laughable failures, involving turkey basters, a booby-trapped toilet, and scenarios employing alcohol and a Jake Gyllenhaal mask (39). Even while his crazy schemes to create a child are farcical, the comedy is darkened by the fact that Jules is trying to force Jo to have a baby against her will. Around the time that boom was frequently produced across the country, America witnessed a spike in attacks on women’s health and reproductive rights, which rekindled debates about a woman’s authority over her own body, especially when it comes to questions of sex and reproduction. [28] In depicting Jules’s treatment of Jo, this play gives us a woman who is essentially a victim of kidnapping, attempted rape, and what Margaret Sanger famously called “enforced motherhood.” [29] To comprehend why Jules, an otherwise affable loser, is doing these horrible things, it is helpful to understand him as the disciple and representative of biological science. Darwinian orthodoxy holds that men with all their sperm are supposed to be promiscuous, but women with precious few eggs are supposed to be choosy. As biologist Joan Roughgarden writes, the theory of sexual selection holds that “a male is naturally entitled to overpower a female’s reluctance lest reproduction cease, extinguishing the species.” [30] In other words, the importance of that great Darwinian goal, the perpetuation of the species, trumps a woman’s right to choose and her authority over her own body. Nachtrieb’s play puts Darwin to the test by taking its inherent fear about the death of the species at face value: if the perpetuation of the species literally depended upon an act of sexual coercion, would it be “natural” and morally acceptable? The play’s answer is clearly no. It satirizes Jules’s mania for reproduction, and the fact that he is a gay man shows how ideologically constructed (rather than “natural”) this mania actually is. He tries to play the role assigned to him by Darwin, but he fails in the act. Which raises the play’s trickier question: Why does Jo refuse to reproduce? Unlike Jules, she is heterosexual, but she won’t play the role assigned to her in the Darwinian scheme and instead takes on the role of Edelman’s anti-child queer. Jo bluntly states: “I hate babies. They bother me physically, philosophically, and symbolically” (33). In refusing motherhood, Jo embodies what Edelman calls “the negativity opposed to every form of social viability” or, in Freudian terms, the death drive. [31] After the boom of the apocalypse, her death drive goes into overdrive. Against Jules’s insistence on the continuation of the species, Jo argues that “Maybe it’s time to end our reign of terror and die and decay and become soil.… Look at all the acts humans commit across the planet with casual, unconscious cruelty. We deserve to be blown up” (34). Furthermore, faced with the end of the world, Jo actually wishes to die—but she has an over-developed self-preservation instinct that renders her unconscious whenever she is in physical danger, and therefore she cannot cause harm to herself. So Jules needs Jo to create life, and Jo needs Jules to end her life. In this fight between Jules and Jo, between reproductive futurity and the queer death drive, the audience can perhaps see the dramatization of an internal conflict. What is the role of the queer person in reproductive futurity? If you are the last man or woman on earth, do you accept or refuse the imperative to reproduce? That imperative is supported by strong forces, including scientific, religious, and political discourses, and Jules represents the acceptance of that duty. Jo, on the other hand, represents what, as José Muñoz reminds us, Herbert Marcuse called “The Great Refusal,” the protest “against the repressive order of procreative sexuality.” [32] One of the ironies of the play is that the expected social roles have been reversed: the gay man sides with reproductive futurity, while the straight woman declares the Great Refusal. This refusal to reproduce has long been a theme in Western culture, and even a cursory glance at a few key examples will show the wide range of possible significations that can be found in these repudiations, which might be sinful, mad, virtuous, or revolutionary. God slew Onan because he “spilled his seed on the ground” in order to avoid impregnating his dead brother’s wife (Genesis 38:8-10), and many early Christians, certain that the End of the World was at hand, believed there was no point in producing children, preferring instead to focus on spiritual salvation. [33] The women of Aristophanes’s classical anti-war comedy Lysistrata (411 BCE) declare a sex strike, refusing to create children “borne but to perish afar and in vain” in the war. [34] The melancholy prince of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1601) shuns Ophelia by telling her it would be better to be locked away in a nunnery than “be a breeder of sinners” (III.i.122). In modern drama, the heroine of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1891) chooses suicide over motherhood, and Tennessee Williams’s Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), despite his family’s desire for him to produce an heir, refuses to create new life with his wife, Maggie. Resistance to “enforced motherhood” has been important throughout the history of the feminist movement, with many battles fought over contraception, sex education, abortion rights, and women’s authority over their own bodies. But the significance of motherhood can be especially fraught within various feminisms. Some writers take an essentialist view of the ability to mother as a source of empowerment, often despite the oppressions of patriarchal “pronatalism,” while others have viewed pregnancy and child-rearing as enslavement within the patriarchy, as a hindrance to female agency and autonomy. [35] Scholar Joyce Meier illuminates this tension when she writes about the social conditions behind the refusal of motherhood in African-American drama and literature, from Angelina Grimke’s Rachel (1906) to Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). In these narratives, women choose “sexual abstinence, abortion, and infanticide as strategies of resistance” against a racist social order that subjects black children to slavery, lynching, and poverty. [36] Audiences attending boom may find their understanding of Jo’s refusal of motherhood shaped to some extent by their familiarity with the drama of non-reproduction as it has played out in history, religion, feminist theory, and fictional representations. Ultimately, the play validates Jo’s “queer” choice not to reproduce, and Jules relinquishes his agenda of reproductive coercion. Jules and Jo have spent the entire play fighting about their personal responsibility to perpetuate the species, and in the end Jo wins the argument. Knowing that they can survive for only so long on limited supplies, they open the lab door, letting in the floods created by the comet hitting the earth, and presumably they drown. The final twist of the play [spoiler alert] is that this suicidal act is what actually perpetuates the species. Those four fish, silently swimming in their bubbling tank throughout the whole play, are now liberated by the flood, becoming the ancestors of humans like Barbara, who will exist 65 million years later—which, not coincidentally, is the span of time between the extinction of the dinosaurs and the emergence of homo sapiens . So Jules and Jo did save the human race, each in their own inadvertent way, since he nurtured and cared for those fish, and she liberated them. But inadvertent is the key word here. Both Jules and Jo are Darwinian failures, but by chance their failures lead to Barbara’s future. This, then, is the play’s argument: the future itself is queer, and the line from Point A to Point B is not a straight path. In her final speech, Barbara reminds the audience that the existence of humanity depends upon “millions and millions of lucky coincidences” and that “the world will just keep on spinning and moving and changing and adapting” (52). Here Nachtrieb seems influenced by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who argued in his best-selling book Wonderful Life (1989) that homo sapiens are “a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree.” [37] Gould notes that “small and apparently insignificant changes” can impact the future in substantial ways, [38] and his theory of contingency posits that evolution does not follow an inevitable path of “progress” but is instead the result of “a staggeringly improbable series of events… utterly unpredictable and quite unrepeatable.” [39] Although finding the dramatic and ironic potential inherent in this contingent view of human existence, Nachtrieb also contradicts Gould’s thesis by creating a fantasy in which millions of years of evolution are, in fact, repeatable, resulting in human beings who create museums, play musical instruments, and tell stories about their origins. Endings and Beginnings The play boom mocks our human arrogance for presuming that we could control the destiny of the species even if we tried, and while we are obsessing about the cataclysmic boom, it would be wiser to listen closely and appreciate the constant bubble of nature and life that either will or will not carry on, either with us or without us. Traditionally, tragedy wrestles with fate and ends in death, while comedy ends in (heterosexual) marriage and celebrates life. In its own way, boom mashes the two genres together, finally accepting fate and death, but also bringing together Jo and Jules as a non-reproductive “couple” who accidentally create new life. Nachtrieb crosses the fine line between tragedy and comedy by highlighting the slippage between endings and beginnings, and our inability, because we cannot know the future, to distinguish between them. Other plays about our fears of annihilation, including The Skin of Our Teeth and Endgame , are built with cyclical structures, ending as they began and promising, if not the hope for new life, at least the hope for one more day. One can also see the conflation of beginnings and endings in the popular misinterpretation of the Mayan calendar and its “prediction” of the apocalypse in 2012, which falsely imposed linearity on a cyclical system, seeing “the end” in what is actually a new beginning. [40] Similarly, that moment when Jules and Jo open the door is simultaneously the end of one world and the beginning of another. Barbara’s museum exhibit presents both a tragedy and a comedy, a tale of death and birth, of the end and the beginning. [41] Nachtrieb, who double majored in theatre and biology at Brown University, has written a play that tests conventional notions about the perpetuation of the species, and in doing so he also challenges the reproductive imperative that has often been used to hinder the social inclusion and political equality of LGBT people. Like much of the best science fiction, boom does not directly address political issues but creates an imaginary world that allows the audience to consider more clearly the ideology at work behind a defamiliarized reality. While many plays provide depictions of good gay parents in response to the accusation that homosexuality is a biological dead end, boom challenges the very premise of that accusation. In the process, it also addresses the situation of anyone, regardless of sexuality, who may not comply with the reproductive imperative. Perhaps this is one reason why the play has been particularly successful at smaller “fringe” and university theatres that tend to attract younger audiences, who may be questioning how sex functions in their own lives and what they may or may not “owe” to the future. Of course people who choose to reproduce or raise children are contributing to the future, and I don’t believe that this play (or this essay) is meant to diminish the important role of parents, no matter the sexuality or the relationship status of the parent. Instead, I believe the play expands our understanding of who contributes to the future, including those who do not biologically reproduce but may help to build the future in other ways. Jules, for all of his neuroses, is not selfish, and we see him nurture the fish in his lab, caring for them even under the most dire circumstances. Jo’s radicalism and commitment to her own liberation ultimately lead to the liberation of those fish, too. So within the play’s fantasy, the ideal is a combination of responsibility to others (Jules) and a commitment to individual liberty (Jo), and when these two characters finally unite, they inadvertently fulfill their “destiny” as the new Adam and Eve. It’s also worth noting that Jo’s journalistic habit of writing down all of her experiences in Jules’s lab leads to the creation of the documents that will serve as the historical basis for Barbara’s museum exhibit. Language, knowledge, and narrative are among the gifts that Jo gives to the future. Through this fantasy of apocalyptic doom and new beginnings, boom engages with arguments about the position of queer people in society and in the future, especially around the question of procreation. Nachtrieb’s play is ultimately a comedy because, while it threatens its non-reproductive characters with doom, it also liberates them from the burden of the reproductive imperative and exonerates them for their “failure” to procreate. Seen from this perspective, Nachtrieb’s utopian fantasy aligns with Halberstam’s view that “under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.” [42] The play directly argues against the use of reproductive futurity as an ideological weapon to enforce conformity or oppress the non-conforming. If nature is indeed based on chaos and chance, then the burden of mandatory reproduction is lifted, and all our anxieties about our duties to Darwin and to the future vanish. Once they accept their failure, Jules and Jo can finally embrace each other and face the end—which is actually a new beginning—together. Unlike apocalyptic narratives that focus on the production or protection of a child, boom gives the stage to two non-reproductive characters who give voice to their fears and anxieties about reproduction, and then are ultimately relieved of them. Nachtrieb’s play argues that 65 million years in the future, the rhetoric of the reproductive imperative, which says that queers have no role in creating the future, is just so much insignificant noise. None of us can know our role in creating the future. The deafening boom of “the end” may not be as momentous as we imagine, perhaps not even meriting a capital B. Meanwhile, from the quiet but persistent bubbling, new worlds beyond our expectations may emerge. [43] References [1] Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 9. [2] Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, boom (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2009). All subsequent references are incidated in parentheses. [3] “Top Ten Most-Produced Plays,” Theatre Communications Group. http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/attopten.cfm (accessed 19 January 2015). [4] Nelson Pressley, “The Elements Unite to Create Woolly’s Boom ; Production Crackles with Quirky Writing, Earnest Characters,” Washington Post (12 November 2008), C4; Bert Osborne, “When A Blind Date Predictably Goes Boom : Comedy About Two Outcasts a Change for Aurora Theatre,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution (23 September 2009), D1; Kerry Lengel, “Offbeat Boom Delivers Apocalyptic Belly Laughs,” Arizona Republic (1 November 2009), AE4, www.proquest.com , (accessed 19 January 2015). [5] Ben Brantley, “Meeting Cute on the Eve of Destruction,” New York Times (21 March 2008), E3. Chris Jones, “Not With a Bang at Next Theatre, but a Muddle,” Chicago Tribune (16 September 2009), 3.3, www.proquest.com , (accessed 19January, 2015) [6] Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth , in Three Plays (New York: Harper Perennial, 1985); Liz Duffy Adams, Dog Act: A Post-Apocalyptic Comedy (New York: Playscripts, Inc., 2009). [7] Children of Men , directed by Alfonso Cuarón (2006; Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2007), DVD; The Road , directed by John Hillcoat (2009; Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2010), DVD. [8] Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958); José Rivera, Marisol (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1994); Parks, Suzan-Lori, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. “Fucking A.” in The Red Letter Plays . (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2004). [9] Melancholia , directed by Lars von Trier (2011; Los Angeles, CA: Magnolia Home Entertainment, 2011), DVD. [10] John F. Harris, “God Gave U.S. ‘What We Deserve,’ Falwell Says,” Washington Post (14 September 2001) C3. [11] Scott James, “From Oakland to the World, Words of Warning: Time’s Up,” New York Times , 19 May 2011,http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/us/20bcjames.html (accessed 14 June 2012). [12] Terrence McNally, Corpus Christi (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1999); Paul Rudnick, The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 2000). [13] Rudnick, 85. [14] Peter Coviello, “Apocalypse from Now On,” in Queer Frontiers: Millennial Geographies, Genders, and Generations , ed. Joseph A. Boone et al. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 42, 50. [15] Ibid., 50. [16] Tony Kushner, Angels in America: Perestroika (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994). [17] Ibid., 148. [18] Gary J.Gates, “The Real ‘Modern Family’ in America,” CNN, 25 March 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/24/opinion/gates-real-modern-family (accessed 10 January 2014). [19] Jeffrey Kuhner, “Obama’s Homosexual America,” Washington Times , 24 February 2011. < http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/feb/24/obamas-homosexual-america/ > (accessed 13 June 2012). [20] Mart Crowley, The Boys in the Band (New York: Samuel French, 1968); Jane Chambers, Last Summer at Bluefish Cove (New York: JH Press, 1982); Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein, La Cage aux Folles (New York: Samuel French, 1987); William Finn and James Lapine, Falesettos (New York: Plume, 1993). [21] Shelagh Delaney, A Taste of Honey (New York: Grove, 1959); Harvey Fierstein, Torch Song Trilogy (New York: Samuel French, 1982); Patrick Healy, “A Gay Adoption Becomes a Musical,” New York Times , 6 May 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/theater/07kid.html (accessed 26 January 2014). [22] Paula Vogel, And Baby Makes Seven (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1993); Michael Feingold, “Review: The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism, with a Key to the Scriptures ,” Village Voice , 11 May 2011, http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-05-11/theater/the-intelligent-homosexual-s-guide-to-socialism-and-capitalism-with-a-key-to-the-scriptures/full/ (accessed 26 January 2014). [23] Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). [24] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009). [25] J. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). [26] Muñoz, 35. [27] Edelman, 3. [28] “Editorial: The Campaign Against Women,” New York Times . 20 May 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/opinion/sunday/the-attack-on-women-is-real.html (accessed 13 June 2012). [29] The entrapment and coercion of women for the sake of reproduction in a decaying future society was most famously imagined by Margaret Atwood in her novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), made into a film starring Natasha Richardson in 1990. In this dystopian future, a patriarchal fascist authority categorizes women as wives, whores, or handmaids, who must bear children in a form of reproductive servitude. [30] Joan Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 168. [31] Edelman, 9. An interesting example of the refusal of motherhood in an apocalyptic narrative can be found in the 1967 Czech film The End of August at the Hotel Ozone . After a nuclear war which seems to have killed off the world’s male population, a band of feral young women roam the countryside, killing animals for food and vandalizing the remnants of a dead society. At an abandoned hotel, they come across an old man who represents culture, domesticity, and the possibility of reproduction. In the end, the women murder the man and continue on their way through the countryside. The film seems to be a horror show about men’s fear of empowered women, but I believe a resistant feminist reading is also possible. Thanks to Susan Stryker for bringing this film to my attention. [32] Muñoz, 134. [33] Elizabeth Abbott, A History of Celibacy (New York: Scribner, 2000), 48. [34] Aristophanes, Lysistrata , trans. Jack Lindsay (London: Fanfrolico Press, 1926), accessed through Project Gutenberg, < http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7700/7700-h/7700-h.htm >. [35] Ann Snitow, “Feminism and Motherhood: An American Reading,” Feminist Review 40 (Spring 1992), 32-51; Katharyn Privett, “Dystopic Bodies and Enslaved Motherhood,” Women: A Cultural Review 18:3 (2007), 257-281. [36] Joyce Meier, “The Refusal of Motherhood in African-American Women’s Theater,” MELUS 25:3-4 (Autumn-Winter 2000), 117-139. [37] Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 291. [38] Ibid., 287. [39] Ibid., 14. [40] G. Jeffrey MacDonald, “Does Maya Calendar Predict 2012 Apocalypse?” USA Today , 27 March 2007, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/2007-03-27-maya-2012_n.htm (accessed 15 January 2014). [41] This slippage between apocalypse and genesis is neatly depicted in the poster design for the Woolly Mammoth Theatre production in Washington, DC. The image shows a group of comets approaching the surface of the earth—or perhaps a group of spermatozoa approaching an egg. The “heads” of two comets/spermatozoa form the double “o” of boom , signifying both the end and the beginning in the same graphic. [42] Halberstam, 2-3. [43] I’d like to thank Nick Salvato and Sara Warner for inviting me to present an early version of this essay at the Resoundingly Queer Conference at Cornell University. I’m grateful to the editors Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson for their support, and to David Foley, Libby Garland, and the anonymous readers at JADT for their extremely helpful suggestions during the revision process. This article is dedicated to all the scientists in my family and to my partner in the fishbowl, David Zellnik. Footnotes About The Author(s) JORDAN SCHILDCROUT is Assistant Professor of Theater & Performance at SUNY Purchase. He is the author of Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater (University of Michigan Press), and his scholarship has been published in Theatre Journal , Journal of American Culture , and Journal of Popular Culture . He also works as a dramaturg, most recently on a revival of Paula Vogel’s And Baby Makes Seven at the New Ohio Theater in New York City. Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Refusing the Reproductive Imperative: Sex, Death, and the Queer Future in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom "Just Saying Our Goodbyes": Elegies' Queer Interventions into the History of 9/11 James Purdy as Playwright: A Retrospective Reading of A Day After the Fair and The Paradise Circus Sur la Pointe on the Prairie: Giuseppina Morlacchi and the Urban Problem in the Frontier Melodrama Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

Catherine M. Young Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines Catherine M. Young By Published on Download Article as PDF Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines: Woman’s Work. By Jessica Silsby Brater. Methuen Drama Engage Series. Series editors Enoch Brater and Mark Taylor-Batty. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama Press, 2016; Pp. 255. The Methuen Drama Engage Series “offers original reflections about key practitioners, movements and genres in the fields of modern theatre and performance.” Prior to the publication of Jessica Silsby Brater’s Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines: Woman’s Work , the series published books on Ibsen, Brecht, and Howard Barker. As the first book in the series to assess a woman in theatre, Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines underscores the importance of an ongoing commitment to recuperative scholarship that plumbs the archives, asks new questions, and approaches subjects in deliberately interdisciplinary ways. Ruth Maleczech’s own interdisciplinarity as a performer, director, and co-artistic director informs the content and structure of the book. What are the lived experiences and public profiles of women in collaborative performance ensembles? How is artistic and logistical labor distributed and documented? Yolanda Broyles-González has taken up these crucial questions in her work on El Teatro Campesino (1994), while Helen Krich Chinoy’s posthumously published research on the Group Theatre acknowledges such power imbalances (2013). Silsby Brater’s project contributes to this mode of inquiry, her subtitle “Women’s Work” signaling that Maleczech’s labor was gendered. Maleczech, along with other company members mainly known for performing, was consistently sidelined by critical and journalistic privileging of Mabou Mines co-artistic director Lee Breuer (Maleczech’s former husband and the father of her two children). The project is indebted to now-canonical feminist theatre studies frameworks forged in the late 1980s and 90s, as well as James Harding’s more recent analysis of feminist performance and the American avant-garde (2012). In addition, Silsby Brater builds on Mabou Mines scholarship by Iris Smith Fischer (2011), Alisa Solomon (2002), and Bonnie Marranca (1977, 1996). She focuses on Maleczech’s work from 1980 until her death in 2013 because it was from the 1980s onward that Maleczech’s independent vision as a director developed (27). In her assertion that the the book “functions in part as a recuperative history,” (28) Silsby Brater contends that “the full significance of Maleczech’s work has been ignored in part because she was a woman and in part because she was best known as a performer” (28-29). The fact that theatre and performance scholarship often privileges writers and directors over performers further demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary analyses of interdisciplinary artists. In her multivalent approach to Maleczech’s work, Silsby Brater draws on video documentation of a dozen productions and several interviews with Maleczech, her family, and other collaborators. These oral histories reveal a dense, interconnected web of personal and artistic affiliations. Silsby Brater is writing at the intersections of ethnography, performance studies, and theatre history, accessing her mentee/mentor relationship with Maleczech by combining intimate knowledge of the subject with expertise in the subject matter. The book’s eleven production stills bring another dimension to the work, showing readers a diversity of staging approaches. From the glass flasks and beakers used to play Marie Curie in Dead End Kids (1980) to the ethereal puppetry and trapeze in Red Beads (2005), Mabou Mines’ avant-garde aesthetics show Maleczech’s facility with various performance modes over decades. Founded in 1970, Mabou Mines, The Wooster Group (founded in 1975), and, of course, The Living Theatre (founded in 1947) have become increasingly canonized as the key collaborative ensembles of the American avant-garde, even as they are marginalized in traditional accounts of US theatre history. Each group represents a different permutation of influence by Europeans working outside the aesthetics of realism, most prominently Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, and Jerzy Grotowski. Silsby Brater’s introduction offers basic biographical information and places Maleczech in her cultural context, identifying the similarities and differences she shares with other key women of the US avant-garde based in New York City, including Judith Malina, Elizabeth LeCompte, Ellen Stewart, and JoAnne Akalaitis, a Mabou Mines co-artistic director. This helpful treatment allows readers to consider the specific aesthetics and innovations sometimes obfuscated by broad terms such as “American avant-garde” or “downtown performance.” Silsby Brater contends that Maleczech’s “singular focus on the representation of women on stage sets her apart” (10) from her contemporaries. In addition, Silsby Brater details Maleczech’s investment in the work of Samuel Beckett, and the influences of the Berliner Ensemble, Herbert Blau, and Grotowski on Maleczech’s expansive oeuvre. Maleczech’s body of work is analyzed in four thematically organized chapters that focus on the roles women play on and off stage. Chapter One, “Ordinary Women,” takes up Maleczech’s performances as Annette in Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Through the Leaves (1984) and her turn as Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (1996) to argue that Maleczech elevated the seemingly unimportant, i.e. women without social status. In the second chapter, Silsby Brater flips the script by focusing on “Extraordinary Women.” Her evaluation of Dead End Kids , Belén: A Book of Hours (1999), which Maleczech directed, and Lucia’s Chapters of Coming Forth by Day (2007) allows Silsby Brater to thematically connect three distinct performance histories across decades. The chapter highlights Maleczech’s non-hierarchical collaborative directing approach, which contrasts with Akalaitis and Breuer’s styles. “Family Drama,” the third chapter, reads Mabou Mines’ production of Lear (1990) alongside the autobiographical Hajj (1983) in order to explicate how the two very different shows unsettle “the traditional notion of the father figure” (109). The theme of financial resources in both works allows Silsby Brater to discuss the stress Mabou Mines experienced in “keeping the company solvent” (114). Artistic issues were often family issues. The fourth chapter, “Mother-Daughter Collaboration” extends scholarship on productions written and directed by Breuer involving performances by Maleczech and their daughter, Clove Galilee. Silsby Brater also takes up Maleczech’s second and third directing projects, Wrong Guys (1981) at The Public Theater and Samuel Beckett’s adapted short story Imagination Dead Imagine (1984), which featured a levitating hologram image of Galilee. With her interdisciplinary approach and use of oral history, Silsby Brater offers the reader remarkable stories of motherhood in the avant-garde. Mabou Mines’ pathbreaking approach to collaboratively funding childcare still seems progressive today. Silsby Brater then pivots to close reads of the work that so often masks the reproductive labor required to bring it to fruition. In this, her scholarship contributes to theatre studies’ increasing attention to the unresolved dilemmas of combining family life and theatre. Silsby Brater not only places Maleczech more fully within the American avant-garde, but within the theatre history canon, connecting Maleczech’s actor-manager-director status to performance traditions including noh and commedia dell’arte, and to specific figures such as Caroline Neuber and Molière. Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines: Woman’s Work explicates the aesthetic and interpersonal complexities of a sustained avant-garde performance practice and the invisible labor women often shoulder. It will interest researchers of experimental and avant-garde performance, women in theatre, US performance history, and New York City’s downtown theatre scene. In addition, I hope it inspires more scholars to recuperate neglected figures of theatre history. References Footnotes About The Author(s) CATHERINE M. YOUNG New York University, Tisch School of the Arts Guest Editor for Special Issue: Bruce McConachie Editorial Board for Special Issue: Meredith Conti Allan Davis John Fletcher Ju Yon Kim Scott Magelssen Julia Walker Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Acting in the Academy: The history of professional actor training in US higher education. Peter Zazzali. London, New York: Routledge, 2016; Pp. 219. 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Deric McNish Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Deric McNish By Published on June 4, 2017 Download Article as PDF Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices . By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Charles Ney’s Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices is an illuminating and much-needed resource for directors, scholars, students, and Shakespeare aficionados. Between 2004 and 2015, Ney interviewed a veritable “who’s who” in the American Shakespeare scene. He selected 65 directors to participate in this study, an impressive feat as these are among the most prolific practitioners and artistic directors in the United States. Any of the interviewees in Charles Ney’s book could be the subject of an entire monograph, but Ney demonstrates a remarkable ability to curate this wealth of wisdom in a way that is compelling and easy to follow. Rather than presenting the interviews as self-contained essays, he has taken the much more useful approach of extracting and collating advice from each interviewee and organizing it based on topic. He identifies common approaches and creates convincing categories in which each director can be viewed. The book is engaging as a straight read-through, but it’s equally useful for the reader that wants to skip ahead and explore concise essays on various topics, such as approaches to table work, or how to navigate tech and previews. These practices are invaluable for directors of Shakespeare, but can be more broadly applied as resources for directing any kind of live theatre. A prolific director himself, Ney no doubt has his own informed opinions about how to approach directing Shakespeare, and yet he manages to serve as a fair and impartial conduit for each interviewee’s ideas. He transmits a variety of approaches without prejudice, saying “… there is more that can be learned by setting those judgements aside” (28). He is present in this work, not as a director, but as a keen scholar organizing a chaotic cacophony of ideas. Still, his underlying tone in this book is that of a person with great reverence for the artistic process and great respect for a diversity of approaches. Part I includes an introduction to each director’s career and attempts to identify their major beliefs and aesthetic sensibilities. Part II focuses on preproduction, how the director prepares to work with designers and actors. Part III explores the various approaches to rehearsal, with focuses on table work, staging, speaking the language, and middle stage rehearsals. Part IV, titled “Finishing the Production,” explores tech and dress, as well as the added element of the audience. Ney intends this book “to be a framework in which to view an individual’s work” (1). It accomplishes that and much more. A director can read Ney’s book and apply this framework to their own process. For example, a “Shakespeare as a Contemporary” director takes artistic license to promote the text’s relevance to the present. Conversely, an “Original Practices Director” works as a “director archeologist,” using Elizabethan staging practices to reveal possibilities in the text (31). The “Invisible Director” aims to “erase the traces” of the director (31) while the “Interpretive Director” actively attempts to collaborate with Shakespeare while putting forth a strong artistic vision for the play. For each of these approaches, Ney provides examples of specific directors’ processes. Categorizing directors based on their theoretical or practical approaches is challenging, but Ney makes convincing arguments for his breakdowns, while acknowledging that any individual director will defy those at times, based on the practical demands of their production or the nature of collaboration. These approaches are sometimes contradictory in a way that feels invigorating, as Ney creates a dialectic between powerful voices. The book then presents a breakdown of the common elements of production – selection, casting, concept, table-work, rehearsals, tech, previews, performance, etc. – and each section offers reflective advice from a number of directors. Ney doesn’t allow the discussions to become a collection of disconnected essays, but curates this information, extracting relevant information and placing it in appropriate sections. He develops useful categories and identifies major themes in each chapter. He sometimes identifies which approach is dominant, but never which approach is right. One can assume, based on the success of the interviewees, that every approach delineated has merit. The reader is invited to pick and choose. He manages to contextualize without getting in the way. These directors’ voices shine through. Ney’s contribution is unparalleled, in part because of his specific focus on the rich community of directors in the United States. A 1990 book by Ralph Berry called On Directing Shakespeare featured 12 interviews, including Trevor Nunn and Peter Brook, with no specific geographic focus. The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare , edited in 2008 by John Russell Brown, includes interviews with 31 directors (4 of which were American), and each chapter focused on a different director’s approach. Nancy Taylor’s 2005 book, Women Direct Shakespeare in America , focused on feminist performance theory in practice during the 1990s. Elizabeth Schafer took a similar approach in 2000 with her Ms – Directing Shakespeare: Women Direct Shakespeare . Countless instructional books exist that focus on directing Shakespeare, but each of those only focuses on one author’s specific approach. Ney’s book astonishingly avoids privileging one approach over another. This is a study that attempts to truly capture diverse approaches and contextualize them. Each interviewee generously throws open the doors to their process and the result is instructive. There were moments when I craved more examples from specific productions to illustrate points, or to more clearly set up the contrast between directors, but I understand this would have made things lengthier and perhaps cumbersome. This book is an effective snapshot of an incredibly diverse body of work and a must read for Shakespeare directors, scholars, and enthusiasts. References Footnotes About The Author(s) DERIC MCNISH Michigan State University Guest Editor for Special Issue: Bruce McConachie Editorial Board for Special Issue: Meredith Conti Allan Davis John Fletcher Ju Yon Kim Scott Magelssen Julia Walker Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Acting in the Academy: The history of professional actor training in US higher education. Peter Zazzali. London, New York: Routledge, 2016; Pp. 219. 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David Coley Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. David Coley By Published on June 4, 2017 Download Article as PDF The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. The work of David Henry Hwang represents an intersection of many of the most prominent concerns of late 20 th century and early 21 st century drama. His plays tackle numerous facets of identity politics, such as race, gender, sexuality, and ancestry. Esther Kim Lee’s extensive survey of Hwang’s theatrical output traces all of these themes through his successes, failures, and participation in cultural discourse. Combining her own work with that of three other scholars in the final chapter, Lee’s work functions as history, analysis, and criticism, providing a portrait of one of American theatre’s most notable dramatists. Hwang is best known for his Tony Award-winning play M. Butterfly , and though it does occupy its own chapter, much more room in this text is devoted to his other works, some of which are rather obscure. This attempt at a comprehensive survey is somewhat undercut by the relative absence of discussion of his work on musicals, most of which, with the exception of Flower Drum Song , are summed up in a couple of pages. Hwang’s position on these projects as a script doctor, rather than as primary author, may contribute to the scant attention Lee pays to them. Still, despite some gaps, Lee deftly covers most all of Hwang’s plays in an accessible and thorough manner. Lee’s approach with each text is to summarize the major plot points, but then delve into the subtext of each work and how it connects with the overall concerns of Hwang as a dramatist. She starts with a trio of plays from the beginning of Hwang’s career that reflect his early grappling with some of the themes listed above as well as the culture of his home state of California. FOB (an acronym for Fresh Off the Boat) shows Hwang exploring different types of immigrant and minority experiences in America through two contrasting Chinese American characters. Lee explores the influence of Sam Shepard on this work, as well as Hwang’s wrestling with the “dilemma of assimilation” (12). The other two plays in that first (informal) trilogy, The Dance and the Railroad and Family Devotions see Hwang dramatizing the immigrant experience through its dual challenges: fitting into a new culture while maintaining one’s own. Lee follows Hwang as he expands his thematic vision to include other cultures and ideas, incorporating Japanese stories and settings in The House of Sleeping Beauties and The Sound of a Voice . The reason for this is not just a sense of interculturalism, but also to explore gender. As Lee writes, “The Japanese tradition provides the cultural underpinnings for more rigid gender divisions, which Hwang uses to examine how gender is embodied and performed in the game of power and love” (38). She also discusses Rich Relations , one of Hwang’s notable failures that saw him turn from ethnicity as a theme before returning to it in his most famous play, M. Butterfly . Lee spends the entirety of her third chapter on that text, reviewing the scholarly, critical, and commercial responses to the play. The play would launch Hwang to a new level of prominence that would drive his career in unexpected ways. The book chronicles how Hwang’s notoriety led to him being drawn into protests over whitewashing in the casting of the Broadway musical Miss Saigon . His experiences with that controversy would make its way into his play Yellow Face , which Lee covers in the fifth chapter. Before that, the fourth chapter is devoted to Hwang’s 1990s output, consisting of Bondage , Face Value , another notable failure which closed during Broadway previews, Trying to Find Chinatown , and his successful return to Broadway in Golden Child . In his recent works, Hwang has continued to explore the intersecting concerns of race, gender, and globalization, as Lee notes, in texts that draw on the personal experiences of himself and his family. Hwang’s metatheatricality evolves to provide multiple perspectives on a given plot or character, with the combination of fiction and nonfiction exemplifying his style in several of his plays. Golden Child and Yellow Face , in particular, manifest this tendency. Lee writes that in Yellow Face , “…the characters wear multiple masks, and it is impossible to tell which mask is the ‘real’ one, or whether ‘realness’ exists at all” (114). The last two productions Lee covers, Chinglish and Kung Fu , a play about Bruce Lee, both deal with travel and communication between the United States and China, though the former brings together most all of the themes present in Hwang’s work more potently than the latter. After Lee reaches the end of Hwang’s oeuvre, she brings in three other scholars to give further critical analysis on previously discussed texts. The final chapter contains three short essays in which Josephine Lee compares Hwang’s 2001-updated script of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song to its 1958 original, Dan Bacalzo examines multiple versions of Golden Child , and Daphne Lei explores the globalized context of Chinglish . Esther Kim Lee’s prose deftly mixes biographical information with textual analysis, crafting a highly readable study that should be useful to both new and seasoned scholars. The breadth of the textual analysis is impressive, with the authors analyzing multiple versions of certain texts to trace Hwang’s evolution as an artist. Those interested in Hwang’s work will find plenty to enrich their understanding, while those studying Asian American theatre will find his work placed within that discourse. Details about specific productions are also found throughout, though the focus remains on the written texts. Those hoping for a larger analysis of production aesthetics and the ways in which Hwang’s texts have inspired particular design choices may find it lacking, but the book will certainly lead devotees of the author to further study of his contributions to the American stage. References Footnotes About The Author(s) DAVID COLEY St. Gregory’s University Guest Editor for Special Issue: Bruce McConachie Editorial Board for Special Issue: Meredith Conti Allan Davis John Fletcher Ju Yon Kim Scott Magelssen Julia Walker Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Acting in the Academy: The history of professional actor training in US higher education. Peter Zazzali. London, New York: Routledge, 2016; Pp. 219. 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Jennifer Joan Thompson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage Acting in the Academy: The history of professional actor training in US higher education. Peter Zazzali. London, New York: Routledge, 2016; Pp. 219. Jennifer Joan Thompson By Published on June 4, 2017 Download Article as PDF Acting in the Academy: The history of professional actor training in US higher education . Peter Zazzali. London, New York: Routledge, 2016; Pp. 219. In Acting in the Academy, Peter Zazzali marshals some rather grim employment data provided by Actors Equity Association to argue that it is now harder than ever to be a stage actor in the United States (9). This is not only due to the decreasing number of jobs in theatre, but also to the increasing number of graduates of professional BFA and MFA programs entering the field every year. In light of this imbalance, Zazzali conveys the urgent need for educators within these programs to ask whether it is efficacious, and indeed, ethical, to continue training large numbers of actors for the stage. Acting in the Academy thus functions as a systemic critique of the current acting profession told through a history of mid-twentieth and twenty-first century actor training in US higher education and, ultimately, an argument for training programs to better address the realities of the current profession and equip students to transform it. Zazzali locates the origin of the imbalance in the acting job market in the historical relationship between regional theatre and actor training programs in US higher education. He traces this history through the formation, decline, and legacy of the League of Professional Theatre Training Programs—an organization established to develop curriculum, set standards, and hold accountable participating MFA and BFA programs training actors for professional theatre careers. He examines how the curriculums of League schools developed to meet the demands of regional theatres for resident companies of actors and charts how these programs and their pedagogies continued to proliferate, despite the eventual decline of these regional companies and the displacement of employment opportunities from stage to screen. In light of the shifting demands of the profession, Zazzali argues that training programs ought to embrace an “entrepreneurial” model aimed at giving actors the skills to create their own work and put themselves at the center of their careers. Though there have been many studies on the history and theory of US actor training, as well as a handful of studies on US not-for-profit theatre by practitioners and scholars such as Robert Brustein (2009) and Donatella Galella, Zazzali’s is unique in tracing the relationship between the two. Additionally, his work builds on projects such as Ellen Margolis and Lisa Tyler Renaud’s collection of essays, The Politics of American Actor Training (2011) , which examines the socio-politics of actor training, by situating these questions within a historical context and grounding them in archival and testimonial data. By employing sociocultural and institutional perspectives, Zazzali thus poses an important intervention into scholarship on actor training that has ramifications for the current state of the field. Although the majority of Zazzali’s investigation is historically grounded in the life of the League and its constituent programs (1965-1987), the long-term implications of his work are underscored by the study’s structure, which is bookended by chapters on the current state of the profession and actor training. In chapter one, Zazzali employs sources including employment statistics and interviews with actors, educators, and casting directors to argue that many programs perpetuate a training model that no longer equips students to navigate the realities of the profession. Saddled by debt and trained primarily for the stage, graduates confront a profession dominated by television, film, and celebrity. Though many of the educators he interviews thoughtfully seek to adapt their programs to better prepare students for these realities, they acknowledge that there is a kind of systemic crisis at hand (11). Zazzali proceeds to situate this crisis in the history of the League and its constituent training programs (chapters two through four). Arguing that the League is the “most important development in US actor training since the Group Theatre” (5), he contextualizes its emergence within the culture boom of the 1960s and the regional theatre movement that sought to employ an ensemble of actors capable of performing works in repertory. To meet these demands, universities established BFA and MFA programs, several of which organized to form the League in 1971. With financial support from the NEA, the League set standards of recruitment and developed a “psychophysical” pedagogical template—a combination of elements of Stanislavsky’s method with rigorous physical and vocal training that remains dominant in programs today. Zazzali’s study demonstrates that much of today’s training pedagogy emerged from the specific needs of regional theatres and the institutional structure of the League. However, Zazzali notes that the task of vocational actor training was not always a symbiotic match for bureaucratic university systems. Departing from W. McNeil Lowry’s assertion that they existed in “an uneasy dichotomy” (64), Zazzali examines the fraught field of institutional dynamics that shaped the development of these programs. In the third chapter, Zazzali focuses on three case studies in particular—Carnegie Tech, Juilliard, and the American Conservatory Theatre—to explore how administrative policies, funding structures, and bureaucratic infighting had an impact on these programs and their pedagogies Chapters five and six return to the profession. Zazzali examines the League’s dissolution alongside a consideration of the careers of alumni from each of the three case studies. Through the lens of these individual careers, Zazzali explores how the shift in job opportunities from stage to screen emerged in tandem with an increasing commercialization of the profession overall, including an emphasis on celebrity and a pressure for actors to “brand” themselves. Actors increasingly sought work in television and film—positioning their careers in a medium that required very different skills than had been provided by their psychophysical training. In the concluding chapter, Zazzali examines the ways in which former League schools have equipped actors to navigate this new landscape. Of particular interest to Zazzali are Juilliard’s initiatives to connect students and their work to community service organizations, as well as curricular modules—such as at Carnegie Mellon and NYU—that encourage students to cross disciplinary boundaries and create their own work. Deeming this an “entrepreneurial” approach, Zazzali posits that it can put actors at the center of their careers. The success of PigPen Theatre—which emerged out of CMU’s Playground program—is a testament to the long-term ramifications of this work on graduates’ careers. Acting in the Academy is both an institutional and sociocultural history of US actor training beginning in the mid-twentieth century, as well a systemic critique of the current profession. Ultimately, Zazzali argues that programs ought to embrace an entrepreneurial model that “promotes self-reliance, innovation, initiative, and most crucially, serving society” (184). This social focus is essential, he argues, because it could generate an increased demand for what actors do, and provide them with the tools to reshape the state of the profession. Though a shift in actor training alone will likely not create a wholesale restructuring of the profession, challenge the dominance of television and film, or reverse the industry’s commercialization, Zazzali makes an urgent and ethical case for training programs to respond to the changing demands of the profession and to give actors the tools to shape that profession themselves. This book will thus be of interest to historians of actor training and twentieth century US theatre, as well as anyone involved in the education of actors. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JENNIFER JOAN THOMPSON The CUNY Graduate Center Guest Editor for Special Issue: Bruce McConachie Editorial Board for Special Issue: Meredith Conti Allan Davis John Fletcher Ju Yon Kim Scott Magelssen Julia Walker Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Acting in the Academy: The history of professional actor training in US higher education. Peter Zazzali. London, New York: Routledge, 2016; Pp. 219. 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Clara Jean Wilch Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Clara Jean Wilch By Published on June 1, 2017 Download Article as PDF Global climate change has been a major issue of concern and political debate in the US and internationally for over 20 years, marked notably by the Kyoto Protocol in 1992. While politically-fraught contention still surrounds the rhetoric of how climate change is discussed, from a scientific perspective, the physical mechanics by which greenhouse gases raise atmospheric temperatures have long been documented and understood. Due to their molecular structure, gases, including CO 2 and methane, capture and reradiate infrared photons, and as these gases accumulate in our atmosphere, heat that would otherwise leave our biosphere is trapped. [1] It is also not a subject of scientific controversy that such greenhouse gases are mined and released by human activities like industry and agriculture, and that they are continuing to rise to the highest levels experienced in our atmosphere in over 800,000 years. [2] No human, scientist or otherwise, can predict the future with certainty, but evidence has mounted to indicate climate change is occurring, and even the most conservative projections of continued climate change indicate major consequences for life on earth. In the words of the environmentalist and author Bill McKibben, “Global warming is not some distant problem waiting to appear, some hypothetical trouble we should start preparing for. The world is already changing with deadly speed. Every time we burn coal and gas and oil, we send carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and now that carbon dioxide is trapping enough heat to create a new planet.” [3] The need for a response is pressing as climate change becomes increasingly an issue of social consequence. The international NGO Oxfam has found that levels of famine are worsening in already financially impoverished regions as a result of climatic change and unpredictability. They report that roughly 26 million individuals have been forced from their homes and regions by climate change and project that “200 million people may be on the move each year by 2050 because of hunger, environmental degradation, and loss of land.” [4] The reality of global climate change thus far is that though emissions are generated disproportionately by wealthy and industrialized nations, ecological challenges have fallen disparately to the world’s poorest populations. Political scientist and environmental policy scientist Frank Biermann draws from several large government studies to caution, “climate change could ‘seriously exacerbate already marginal living standards in many Asian, African and Middle Eastern countries, causing widespread political instability and the likelihood of failed states’… migration… will be ‘uncontrolled and generate significant social and economic impacts… States and cities that are unable to cope are likely to seek international humanitarian assistance of unprecedented scale and duration.’” [5] Humanity might already be in the process of facing monumental difficulties including huge populations of dispossessed people, international chaos, or perhaps a plan for global governance which will help mitigate major disasters, and ideally, curb their magnitude. International conferences aimed at slowing or halting climate change have occurred, but significant action has been absent or inadequate, lagging far behind evidence and demand in the opinion of experts. [6] This is exemplified by the longtime refusal of the US and other primary polluters to ratify a major international effort to confront carbon emissions, the Kyoto Protocol, a disagreement that has been categorized as “an impasse between rich and poor nations.” [7] While the 2015 UN Paris Agreement demonstrated unprecedented international solidarity to lower carbon emissions, [8] recent changes in leadership in key carbon contributors like the US and Britain threaten to undermine or undo this hopeful development. Within academia, a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene has been proposed to contextualize climate change and other contemporary human-driven planetary changes within deep time. While the idea had some predecessors, the Anthropocene as such was first introduced by chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer in 2000, and has since been widely studied and theorized within and beyond the sciences. [9] By acknowledging a departure from the 10,000 year-plus Holocene epoch that characterized modern, agricultural human history, the Anthropocene seeks to capture the contemporary age as a dawning geological period threatening substantial changes to “earth’s ecological assemblage as a whole.” [10] The Anthropocene squarely defies narratives that would deny the existence of wide-spread, irreversible climatic change, and underlines other global changes including oceanic acidification and widespread extinction events. Inherent in its naming—“The Human Epoch”—is the indication that these changes are intrinsically linked to human activity. By extension, proposing this new epoch forcefully overturns philosophical and political thinking that conceives of social and natural realms as separate or autonomous entities. In Socionatural Relations in the Anthropocene , Manuel Arias-Maldonado discusses the implications of this new epoch within a historical survey of changing conceptions of “nature” and its relationship to man. His wide-ranging work shows that our present biological and environmental status as summarized by the hypotheses of climate change and the Anthropocene “are arguably the most fruitful examples of…new ‘cooperation through dialogue’ among the sciences.” [11] He also asserts the deep and irreversible entanglement of social and natural systems that characterizes our time, despite deeply entrenched traditions of dualistic thinking stemming from philosophers including Descartes; Arias-Maldonado urges us to confront “the relation between the cultural and the material,” as much of what is evidenced in our worldly reality clashes with widely held beliefs. [12] Today, we are faced not just with the challenge of trying to address carbon emissions but also the human consequences of environmental changes already underway, and in the face of widespread indifference and denial. These complex, vital and urgent issues, while still demanding rigorous scientific study, belong also to the work of artists and scholars who help to shape the narrative of how we conceive of and feel about climate change, how we conceive of ourselves as humans, and how we conceive of our capabilities to act cooperatively and altruistically. An issue already affecting the so-called “third world” should become the concern of privileged nations before the necessity of mass-migration requires it. Only a world-wide response can address this global occurrence. Limitation of major discussions of climate change to the scientific and political realms, along with forces like bipartisan divisions and economic loyalties within major responsible nations like the US have resulted in little to no policy change or collective action. A new approach is required that constructively brings together the challenges of those dramatically affected by climate change, the abstract emotional distress of those already concerned, and the minds of those ignoring these issues. This article aims to illustrate the powerful need to grow a populous translocal community connected through an awareness of the Anthropocene as it dawns. Translocalism reframes the effort to think about and react to climate change from the abstractions of “the world” to a collection of communities, in which one’s specific locale (of culture, activity and familiar or knowable people) is connected and related to many other specific locales within and across national boundaries. The massive population upheavals climate change portends endanger the continuation of contemporary nation-states, and social formations adapted to the Holocene may be mal-adapted for the Anthropocene. Regardless of future circumstances, a reliance on government-led proposals and actions has not yet proved sufficient for creating significant change in the acquisition and use of materials that contribute to atmospheric carbon levels. I propose that there is great potential to begin an alternative discussion and movement that might grow, harness and direct the energy and action demanded by the challenges of climate change through translocal performances. Considering the current modes of global connection, I propose that this translocal effort to confront evolving matters of climate justice and environmental responsibility occur through a web-based social media platform dedicated to creativity and communication. I begin by discussing how, from a philosophical, historical and cognitive perspective, performance can spur societal and governmental action through the generation of emotions, narratives and altruistic acts. Next, I seek an understanding of how previous efforts to address climate change through performance in different media have both succeeded and failed in generating empathy and community. Finally, I propose an aspirational blueprint that attempts to generate effective altruistic action through an Internet-based community. The aim is to move thoughtfully from older to newer to possible future media formats of representing and understanding this particular concern, with the understanding that creative input is needed as much as edification. Perhaps confronting global upheaval with creativity and media seems like an incongruous and unrealistic proposal from the outset. Yet concern about climate change has not yet coalesced into a powerful mass movement on political or civil fronts in part because representations of it have produced nearly as much division and debate as action. In her book Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice , the philosopher Martha Nussbaum illuminates myriad instances of how the arts’ appeal to emotional connection and understanding has played essential roles in organizing significant and sustainable progress in national and international issues. Her basic premise is that the structures and habitual practices of societies are predominately shaped by emotionally significant narratives, and that love, defined as “a delighted recognition of the other as valuable, special, and fascinating” is the key emotion which produces sustained movement toward optimally equal and just systems . [13] Analyzing art and speeches, Nussbaum articulates how many historically monumental actions were enabled by narratives that informed public emotions, ideals and norms through performance . How we respond to global climate change is inextricably connected to how we think and feel about the crisis, and history demonstrates the importance of public performance to creating a shared emotional context that shapes belief. In a discussion of performance, ethics and history, theatre scholar Bruce McConachie explicitly compares the challenges of global climate change today to the work of the American Abolitionist movement. [14] McConachie shows how the success of the latter depended upon performances of narratives, including sermons, the speeches of Frederick Douglass, and Henry Ward Beecher’s practice of staging reverse slave auctions. Such performances produced public emotions of sympathy for the lives of slaves and were crucial to the movement’s eventual political effectiveness. This emotional investment helped to create a widespread willingness to undergo tremendous economic and mortal sacrifice during the Civil War. McConachie’s parallel emphasizes the fact that our current ecological crisis is also a matter of social justice, in which inaction has and will cause devastation to human lives. Further, it validates the possibility of a social willingness to withstand short-term economic losses for the long-term good (as, for example, oil companies and their associates would be required to do in countering the trajectory of climate change). McConachie includes a discussion of some extant efforts to create a performance-based response to activities and emotions pertinent to climate change, and writes that the Internet may be the most appropriate medium for addressing such a large-scale issue. If the challenge and approach broadly outlined seem daunting, Kitcher’s Ethical Project gives substantial reason for optimism by providing evidence for the prehistoric evolution of humanity’s now inherent capacity for altruism (acting against one’s own interest for the good of others). Kitcher argues that cooperation and egalitarianism born of a behavioral and cognitive ability to empathize—to take the perspective of others—conferred greater survival success to our ancestors than to those who behaved primarily with indifference or hostility. [15] Therefore, the human ability to relate to one another with compassion or to act altruistically is a genetic inheritance that does not need to be created wholesale in our efforts to act pro-socially in the cases of climate justice. According to Kitcher’s model of human cognition, societal failures to meaningfully confront climate change do not reflect an inherent inability to care about the welfare of others, but the peripheral positioning of this concern with regard to a given social group. Geographic distance from populations being most affected by climate change now or temporal distance from future generations who will suffer later can relegate climate change to the periphery. Fortunately, personal identification with the significance of others is not difficult to achieve. According to Nussbaum, just focusing attention on strangers (as in listening to a news story) can generate an appreciation of their importance, at least in the short term. McConachie draws attention to one cognitive basis for this reality: mirror neurons create the same neuronal activity in a human viewing intentional movement as does the movement in the brains of the viewed. These movements include emotionally involved facial expressions; so, for instance, the experience of seeing someone smile is cognitively similar to smiling. It stands to reason that simply but persistently focusing on the social plight that global climate change is creating will trigger the predisposed tendency to feel compassion for other human beings, identify empathetically and act with altruism. Performance’s activation of empathy and emotions through attention to others and storytelling has historically contributed to justice and progressive change, and can be effective in the case of climate change. Of course, performance has already been deployed to address this global crisis. The most well-known example is the 2006 documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth , an effort to educate global viewers about climate change and a call to redirect human action with greater environmental responsibility. This film brought the discussion of climate change to public attention and succeeded in familiarizing many with the issue. On an emotional register, however, the film may have unintentionally contributed to dividing public opinion, particularly in the US. Compassion and love are not the only emotions to which humans are predisposed. Nussbaum describes how the capacity for disgust, genetically reinforced through its benefits to survival throughout history, has been redirected socially as an intuitive defense against our mortality. She describes “projective disgust” as a powerful emotion that underpins systemic inequalities like racism, sexism and homophobia, in which groups of “others” are designated and defined by an association with the gross (bodily fluids and odors, for example) in order to reinforce a psychologically comforting separation for individuals from their own bodily and mortal nature. Along with the related emotions of shame, fear, and envy, disgust counters sympathy and involves the separation and “othering” of individuals in a psychologically satisfying way. [16] These constructions of human emotion and behavior can contribute to a widespread phenomenon that Jonathan Haidt has termed “groupishness,” which, like altruism, is a part of humanity’s genetic heritage because of its ability to confer success to individuals loyal to a specific group in cases of competition over evolutionary history. [17] An Inconvenient Truth is emphatically centered on Al Gore, who narrates the film and is the visually dominant figure throughout. The film documents a presentation about the science and ramifications of global climate change which Gore made throughout the world, interspersed with narrative segments about his upbringing, family and political career, including personal photographs and scenes of his daily life. In situating its call to action intimately within Gore’s life, the story becomes as much an account of climate change as one man’s mission to stop climate change in the face of widespread opposition. For people who never saw the film, the very premise—Al Gore advocating for climate change awareness—reinforces and may have helped generate the notion that climate change belongs to the American Democratic Party’s agenda, or that it is an interest of the wealthy and powerful. This construct is highly susceptible to the hard-wired reactions of groupishness (along political lines) and of envy (which Nussbaum writes is directed toward people perceived to have more status or wealth), [18] both of which disrupt compassion and create a sense of difference and exclusion. The centrality of this political figure seems to have promoted the human tendency to groupishness in some, widening fissures along class and party lines, and may have inadvertently helped de-universalize an inherently global issue. This is not to dismiss the significance and successes of this film in bringing attention to climate change, but an attempt to understand its potential limitations so that future efforts to create performed narratives might be more or differently effective in promoting compassion and united action around the issue. The potentially problematic narrative structure of An Inconvenient Truth is related to its media structure as a movie. Director Davis Guggenheim’s decision to blend climate change information with Gore’s life story drew from the reality of Gore’s committed activism, capitalized on his notoriety, and satisfied generic expectations of the feature movie format for a dramatic plot and engaging emotional and character through-line, while the film in turn provided publicity and accessibility for the content’s message. However, political polarization around climate change also suggests the major potential flaw of positioning climate change as the message of any single authority. The trouble is not Gore, but the ease with which a message about ecological responsibility can be dismissed or corrupted when it is closely associated with any one person. The media landscape has changed significantly since 2006, as the Internet has become a sophisticated, central tool for accessing information, entertainment and communication, and (where computers and web-connectivity are affordable) a primary focus of attention. Social media use among Internet users, for example, grew from 6% of those over fifteen years of age in 2007 to 83% by 2011, 1.2 billion people worldwide. [19] Although film remains an important and massively popular medium, its accessibility to both viewers and creators through the Internet and related technologies has broadened immensely and its formats have diversified. As the Anthropocene reshapes our existence at an accelerating rate, new media dissemination forms have transformed communication. Within the realm of video, the key Internet platform is YouTube, which was launched in 2005 and became the third most trafficked site on the Internet in 2011. [20] While technology and cultural theorist Johanna van Dijck defines YouTube as essentially an alternative to television that maintained many of the same technologies as TV, she states that it departs from traditional audio-visual media in significant ways. Specifically, she highlights the “novelty of having users upload self-produced or pre-produced audiovisual content via personal computers from their home to anybody’s home—that is, networked private spaces.” [21] YouTube enables the translocal distribution of professional and amateur productions by users to users, who have freedom to explore this eclectic and ever-expanding collection at will. A key to understanding the nature of the Internet interface generally is the flexible multiplicity of choices available to the user. Cultural studies scholar Berteke Waaldjak summarizes this element of the Internet experience: “Several new media scholars … stress the importance of the metaphor of the plurality of windows, enabling a less defined subject position: the user can see and relate to several things simultaneously, alternating between immediacy and hyperimmediacy, between transparency and opacity, between immersion and distance.” [22] Film primarily creates an immediate, immersive experience for the viewer through sustained attention to a linear narrative. The Internet video, conversely, is one of countless subjects of attention simultaneously available to Internet users, who can dissociate from that narrative and alternate or recalibrate their attention to multiple subjects as desired. A consequence of YouTube’s free-to-all upload capabilities in the “multiple window” environment has been the proliferation of shorter-form videos whose formats, consumption and use can depart radically from movie media. Van Dijck describes short form “snippets,” videos of less than ten minutes, as “resources rather than as products… meant for recycling in addition to storing, collecting, and sharing… posted on video-sharing sites to be reused, reproduced, commented upon, or tinkered with. [Snippets] function as input for social traffic and group communication or as resource for creative remixes…touted as typical of YouTube’s content.” [23] Individuals and organizations working to combat climate change have utilized YouTube and short-form snippets. Frequently, the resulting videos are documentaries aimed toward viewer education and engagement, not unlike An Inconvenient Truth . Due to their shorter form and reliance on cost-free YouTube dissemination, however, they are much more efficiently and cheaply produced than a full-length film and can respond quickly to of-the-moment events in climate and climate-related action. One illustration of such communication comes from 350.org, a grassroots organization aimed at combating climate change and founded by environmentalist Bill McKibbon. 350.org has posted several videos on the UN conference that culminated in the Paris Agreement. The short form alleviates the pressure to produce a strict “beginning, middle and end” narrative with specific character development, but 350.org videos still work to generate emotional engagement and promote empathy between viewers and the people depicted. In their one-minute YouTube snippet, “Global Climate March- Solidarity and Resilience,” piano music and text overlay photographs and video of climate activists who gathered worldwide on the eve of the global summit in early December, building rhythmically to those who gathered and performed protests in Paris despite security measures prohibiting a large-scale march after the local terrorist attacks on November 13th. [24] The text describes the images of shoes that thousands of would-be protestors laid out symbolically in the streets where the march had been scheduled to occur. The same technique documents indigenous people leading a prayer for victims of climate change and terrorism outside of the Bataclan, the nightclub center of the lethal attacks just weeks before. Portraits of protestors of different genders, ages and ethnicities in various emotional states appear throughout, communicating the presence and power of resilient and cooperative resistance to inaction. This video promotes a sense of inclusive empathy in the viewer through both its written narrative and its diverse images of human faces, whose wordless expressions of joy and sadness cue emotions through the spectator’s mirror neurons. The presence of varied visual social indicators and an absence of specific narrative information about the subjects are conducive to enabling widespread identification without providing fodder for envy (wealth or position) nor leaving wide room for disgust: viewers of most ethnicities, ages and gender can visually identify with someone portrayed, so the collective “subject” of the video is fairly invulnerable to body-focused projective disgust, which would group the protestors as “others.” The juxtapositions of a contemporary lethal terrorist act and the impending threats of climate change to human lives eloquently cast climate policy as an issue of basic justice, especially in regard to the equitable valuing of human life. By implying a connection between the atrocities committed against indigenous communities, the sudden violence of the 2015 Paris attacks, and lethal weather events linked to climate change, this video imbues climate issues with the combined emotional impact of major historical and very recent tragedies— and with a related sense of urgency. Certainly, the groups documented are not impervious to disgust or rejection. For example, some viewers might react with “groupish othering” and rejection of the subjects because of their status as protestors. However, the shared emotional event of the Bataclan shooting is a powerful framework for promoting a broad coalition. Nussbaum notes the power of tragedy and public grieving in promoting a shared sense of human vulnerability conducive to empathy and, eventually, shared hope. [25] This video also creates a narrative of empowerment by demonstrating the mourning and persistence of marchers in a wide and unified effort against tragic and preventable death. In addition to potentially activating an inclusive emotional significance in viewers, the video promotes viewer hope and involvement, concluding with a written message to “share this video” on social media outlets. [26] The snippet “Video On Climate Change,” also available through YouTube, deploys some of the same tactics as “Climate March,” particularly in focusing on a diverse selection of people expressing concern about climate change. This video was produced by Oxfam, a grassroots charity organization to combat world hunger that was founded in Great Britain after World War II, and has since expanded internationally. In this video, the subject is climate change in the context of agriculture, where increasingly unpredictable growing seasons and extraordinary weather events are threatening food quality and availability. The video combines instrumental music, the voice-over of a poem about climate challenges, tracking landscape shots of flooded and drought-dried environments, and testimonials regarding climate change from female farmers and organizers in the Philippines, Bolivia, Zimbabwe, and the UK. [27] The women attest in their native languages (subtitled in English) to observations of climate change in their communities and fields, and discuss their perspectives and efforts to rally support and promote sustainability. More so than 350’s video, Oxfam’s is representing a specific demographic. Conceivably, a viewer could react in self-protective, projective disgust by categorically “othering” the female farmer/laborer subject; diverse languages and localities, coupled with the topic of the universal need for food, could also promote a sense of inclusive relevance for the viewer. Summarizing the challenges brought by climate change in the stories of specific people creates an emotional narrative and visual capacity for connection through mirror neurons with suffering individuals. The focus on personal stories invites viewers to consider the video subjects, and increases their potential for significance to the viewer (without, of course, universally guaranteeing it.) This enables empathy, the painful recognition of another’s trouble, and in turn, the desire for altruistic participation, specifically prompted as the women discuss climate change as a shared responsibility. The tragedy of hunger and hardship, like the tragedies in 350.org’s video, is used to create a connecting acknowledgement of human vulnerability that is converted into hope. The music and poem begin somberly, as the women discuss their difficulty, and become more uplifting with the entrance of trumpets and the stanza “join the chorus, let’s make a difference,” as the women are shown smiling and educating others, demonstrating their hope and determination. The conclusion is a frame that promotes a specific campaign by Oxfam to bolster Europe’s role in growing food and a specific gateway for people to mobilize their altruistic desires. This video relies less on a linear narrative structure than those discussed previously, imaging people’s homes and daily lives rather than events, and presenting mood motifs based in empathetic sadness and the relief of hope. A particularly effective dimension of this video is how the geographic distance between the selected subjects illustrates the shared difficulties these climate events have on people from varied continents, cultures and economies. This reinforces the truly global impact of climate change and creates a sense of a translocal community that may motivate action. The word “global” has more complex meanings in a social context than in its geographical use. Mass media and communication scholar Fabienne Darling-Wolf writes that the lived reality of globalization exists predominately as bidirectional influences between local communities. The model of globalization Darling-Wolf wishes to promote pushes against the dominant theory of hegemony subsuming local differences, though she acknowledges an imbalance of influence linked to economic inequity. Simultaneously, local groups (villages, towns, subsets of cities) take in information, culture, even climate change itself, and process them with their own tools and ideas. Forces like Western culture and climate change are widespread, but they manifest in experiences, interpretations and reactions that are hybrids of the particular characteristics of that instance of influence (a certain imported fashion trend, or a specific abnormal weather event) mixed with local characteristics and values. Still, understanding a culturally globalizing world and even the capacity to imagine it are dependent on representations: “the notion of the global would not exist, at least not in its current form, without the media.” [28] In Oxfam’s snippet, the vision of the global is defined by what Darling-Wolf refers to as “local-to-local links,” [29] achieved here through interwoven images and narratives of small farmers and farming communities. The video maps a global reality of specific, unique and kindred communities. Darling-Wolf writes that translocalism is the ideal mode for understanding ongoing cultural globalization in which “we can learn from both the differences and similarities between contexts about the nature of larger processes of globalization.” [30] This approach is significant in the context of climate change because it promotes the inclusion of diverse political actors and ideologies representative of the global action and/or the policy at stake, and shifts away from Western hegemony embodied by US leaders alone. A global discourse about climate change and possible responses that perpetuate the dominance of Western hegemony can be highly divisive, according to Heather Smith. She observes that constructions in which “global” is understood “as a means by which to externalize the environment, deny the local and provide a sense of distance and detachment… as a solution as embodied in multilateral processes that are state-centric” have allowed the wealthy and powerful to “deny responsibility” and have alienated communities of would-be participants in confronting climate change. [31] A video like Oxfam’s may appeal to communities that are resistant to endorsing any global action for fear of western hegemony by instead illustrating a translocal vision of the global—connectivity through shared experience and causes resulting in cooperation rather than cooptation under one dominating authority. Critically, both Oxfam and 350.org’s videos, while arguably promoting greater empathetic inclusivity and more diversified visions of community, are professional products curated by large organizations with their own influence and authority, and could themselves generate political, class or ideological differences and groupish opposition. YouTube is also available to individuals outside of the audio-visual production professions, however, and the climate justice advocacy and education videos available on that site present a greater plurality of producers and tactics than there is room to discuss. They include theatrical, animated and humorous approaches to climate change, conducive to a broad range of cognitive and emotional experiences. For instance, in comedy and political satire particularly, projective disgust, envy and shame are used to promote positive change. Internet videos demonstrate the ability of such “negative” emotions to reinforce groupishness and solidarity conducive to climate justice when they are directed toward ecologically irresponsible corporations and leaders (see Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah or The Young Turks for examples). Such techniques in performance could be particularly important to the public’s role of holding governments accountable for the promises of the Paris Agreement. Other YouTube videos and websites instruct viewers in how to behave with ecological responsibility in their own lives and consumer choices to reduce their carbon footprints. [32] One can safely suppose that the mission of finding a perfect video which is universally effective in motivating every individual viewer to care about climate change and to altruistically act with greater ecological responsibility is not possible. However, there is an inherent ability of performance forms to generate interest, empathy and altruism, and a diversity of performance modes are crucial in making this issue resonate with larger, more diverse audiences. Audiences that respond by distancing themselves from one depiction of climate change or “othering” its concerned spokespeople could be moved to empathy or altruism by another depiction. Yet audio-visual content is still a product for consumption, and motivating a change in viewer perspectives is only a small first step toward reigning in carbon emissions, or ameliorating the effects of climate change. Myriad psychological tendencies underpin an avoidance of climate change as a topic; George Marshall outlines these in his book, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. He argues that even among populations that accept climate change as a serious and human-driven threat, silence about climate change remains common among individuals and private sentiments rarely translate into action. [33] Among his conclusions is that concerned people need to personally engage this issue in their lives and social circles. Active participation and input are required to maintain and spread growing empathy and environmental responsibility, to generate innovative approaches to combating emissions and their ramifications, and to build a committed translocal community prepared to respond with meaningful support in the case of, say, mass migrations of climate refugees. This requires a dialogic and dynamic interface. The Internet is already dominated by social media platforms conducive to exactly such personal and dynamic interaction. As Dijck notes, social media websites enable the creation of media content by users, and the exchange of this content between them. Social media has become a “new online layer through which people organize their lives” and it “influences human interaction on an individual and community level, as well as on a larger societal level, while the worlds of online and offline are increasingly interpenetrating.” [34] Social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube itself have come to define communities for a growing number of people. There are limitations to using one’s personal social media to disseminate or promote any activism. “Sharing” 350.org’s Climate March video with one’s Facebook friends, as the video prompts viewers to do, may help attract some attention but only continues a mode of essentially passive, if good-willed, media consumption. Besides this, personal social networks connect people who predominantly share one another’s cultural and social context in most cases and do little to broaden the message into new, differently-minded communities. Furthermore, these established sites, because they are the means by which active users “organize their lives,” are already rife with information spanning wide ranges of relationships and interests. The multiple window phenomenon of divided and ever-shifting attention is intrinsic within the structure of Facebook where one’s “shared” climate video might appear in juxtaposition (and competition) with an amusing cat video, news of a friend’s wedding, and a video concerning a different cause or protest. In short, dominant social media websites are neither the ideal platform for concentrating interest nor for generating action. A new social media platform uniquely dedicated to bi-directional communication about global climate change, environmental responsibility, and altruistic support for climate change victims could create a dynamic, innovative and effective contribution to climate justice and preparedness. Given the increasing inter-disciplinary academic awareness of the level of flux in which our planet and societies are mutually entwined, and the great uncertainty inherent to this upheaval, such a forum would seek to provide a transnational ground for a citizenship of the Anthropocene, unified in empathy, creativity and action, whatever the Anthropocene comes to be. I believe that such a site, drawing from the user-sharing formats of existing platforms but filling an uninhabited niche, could rally interest and would meet a demand for active involvement and community around these issues. While highly effective organizations already exist, their websites function primarily in the one-way production of professional media and static information. When US Internet users search “climate change” on Google, the most ubiquitous search engine, the current top results are all within the scientific and informational realm, and represent an important but limited perspective that does not present dynamic opportunities for involvement. In A History of Communications , Marshall Poe differentiates the Internet from the audio-visual form as being dialogic rather than monologic, and having a structural tendency towards egalitarianism, pluralism, and individualism, all elements conducive to this ideally cooperative yet diverse translocal global community. [35] Yet scholars have attested that Internet media is not necessarily very “new” at all, and most of the easily searchable media associated with climate change demonstrates this in essentially providing virtual versions of traditional media (books, movies, etc.). The structural possibilities and connectivity of the Internet could be utilized to greater effect in confronting the major issues of the Anthropocene. The website platform proposed might include existing media representations about climate justice as a foundation for generating interest, empathetic investment and educational information. Primarily, however, it would encourage users to express and interpret their lived, local experience of global climate change. Inviting creative forms like video, photography or writing, this site would act as a global canvas for envisioning climate change on a specific and human scale. It would aim to create an investment in and outlet for the personal stories and ideas of people in their confrontations with climate change and the Anthropocene as experienced by individuals. These could conceivably range from video of live plays or performance art about climate change to documentation of one’s thoughts or activities (gardening, farming, etc.) coming from anyone compelled to share. Like contributions, contributors could span a vast range of demographics and experiences, from people displaced from their homes by extreme weather events to comfortable urbanites discussing practices by which they work to engage in environmental responsibility. The diversity created by this non-professional content would provide still more dimensions for empathetic effectiveness and alternative modes of legitimacy, which are potentially challenged in the case of organizational or political productions. Presenting scientific research beside the lived experiences and observations of a Bolivian farmer, for instance, could have a synergistic effect in generating interest, while providing a dedicated platform where each user might feel heard. YouTube, as discussed, is open to user generated content, but the vast majority (over 80%) of users are strictly passive consumers. [36] Presumably many of these passive users have not felt empowered or motivated to generate content. The existence of a dedicated portal would provide inspiration, motivation and an audience for people concerned with climate justice, and hopefully draw new involvement through the egalitarian diversity of input and representations. While technological (in)availability would have major ramifications for the proposed platform’s content, the German statistics aggregator statistica.com estimates the current number of smartphone users globally at around two billion and rising, [37] a tremendous number of potential users across the globe who could access and submit text, photo and video (or any medium they are compelled to use). All media creations and participation would be encouraged. An altruistically-inspired game designer, for example, might provide a dynamic virtual world for better understanding climate change through an experimental manipulation of energy-use scenarios in a way that could engage and educate visitors. The central guiding principle would be a lack of limitations and specific directives. The guiding purpose of the platform would be an open invitation for individuals to create their own forms and shape their own narratives, to transform isolated personal experience of confusion, fear, or frustration through some concrete public contribution. Creativity is conducive to the formation of meaningful community; one can easily imagine how the exchange of new, expressive works might engage and connect users to one another in a powerful emotional camaraderie around a historically divisive and often privately-kept concern. Localism entails immediate visibility, direct contact and personal relationships between citizens, while translocalism is communication and contact between locales of different regions and nations, a globe-spanning network built from nodes of tangible, meaningful, collaborative communities. The website platform would exist to enable a translocal network of novel and non-commercial consideration of climate change as a social issue, and as a tool to encourage unmediated engagement and discussion within peoples’ non-virtual lives and localities. The broad invitation to create would (ideally) inspire open performances and public theatre, sparking avenues for education and empathy in live audiences, beyond the virtual platform and its economically restricted accessibility or ideologically-specific appeal. The Emergency Circus, a clown group that travels internationally to play and perform comedy with refugee families and other dispossessed groups, publishes video documentation on YouTube; it is just one model for creative performance action that breaks from the economic limitations of Internet-based activism, specifically relevant in the case of climate refugees. The proposed network would be conducive to a rhizomatic increase in ideas and inspirations, undercutting the dominant capitalist-driven notions that limit climate activism to consumerist choices. A benefit of a new platform is that existent forums like Facebook and YouTube conform to the interests of commercial sponsors, a distorting factor that would ideally be absent in the proposed site. Discussion boards in a diversity of languages would allow for dynamic conversation and debate in which new ideas might be innovated and shared, and personal connections and relationships might be forged. Despite the obstacle of language differences, the site would define its mission in translocal terms, and would hopefully attract a diversity of people given the global influence of its cause. In time, perhaps multi-lingual contributors and translators would enable increased cross-cultural communications. Through person-to-person international communities, one can imagine the formation of significant, material support in case of climate catastrophes. Were climate change to radically alter environments globally, the translocal community could conceivably form a base-line plan of action and communication resource in emergencies. The website might also allow for collaborative efforts to keep governments in check regarding protocols like the Paris Agreement; already, voluntary scientific observation teams gather to collect data for a diversity of ecological projects and this model could be easily formed to fit an active citizen team invested in climate accountability. Simultaneously, this platform would likely face difficulties, potentially including website promotion, user activity like “trolling,” submission of scientifically unsound information, or evolving through curation into another static authority. The primary defense against these challenges would be dynamic openness to user suggestions and ideas. This proposal is speculative, a gesture toward how this global crisis might be networked between localities, and an optimistic argument that they ought to be because pluralism and empathy are powerful tools. 2016 was the hottest year on earth in historical record (breaking the records set by 2015 and 2014), while the span of global sea ice was at a near-record low. [38] Environmental transformation has serious social consequences that are unfolding all the time; a recent report shows that terrorist groups including ISIL and Boko Haram have begun using climate-related natural disasters and resource shortages in their recruitment and control tactics. [39] While some people face dire realities like food and water shortages, large populations of developed nations live in frustrated anxiety about evolving climate change. According to a recent Gallup Poll, an increasing majority of Americans across political groups “worry” about climate change either a fair amount or a great deal. [40] Yet the US government is in talks to abandon or scale back its commitment to the Paris Agreement. [41] We must put our concern to use, push beyond the isolation of anxiety, support one another, amplify public will, and develop and coordinate practical strategies. We cannot wait for a grand solution and perfect resolution of this crisis. We are all citizens of this new epoch, the Anthropocene, and there can be no better focus of our attention and creative power than the dynamic global crisis of climatic disturbances to our geographies and subsistence. We must connect with one another to communicate and innovate approaches on individual and community levels, and to help one another take responsibility in our individual actions, through a translocal network that thrives on the limitless diversity of human perspectives provoked by climate change. This is an open-handed offer to anyone motivated and able to act on this proposal to please do so, in collaboration with me or independently. The more individuals who publically share their investment and dedication to acknowledging and confronting climate change, the better – and there is no time to waste! References [1] Graciela Chichilnisky and Kristen A. Sheeran, Saving Kyoto: An Insider’s Guide to How it Works, Why it Matters and What it Means for the Future (London: New Holland, 2009), 9. [2] Chichilinisky and Sheeran, Saving Kyoto, 20. [3] Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Times Books, 2010), 13. [4] Alex Renton, “Oxfam Briefing Paper- Summary,” Oxfam International, last modified July 2009, https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/bp130-suffering-the-science-summary.pdf [5] Frank Biermann, Earth System Governance: World Politics in the Anthropocene (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014), 8. [6] McKibben, Eaarth , xiv. [7] Chichilinisky and Sheeran, Saving Kyoto, 4. [8] Carol Davenport, “Nations Approve Landmark Climate Accord in Paris,” New York Times , December 12, 2015. [9] Manuel Arias-Maldonado, Environment and Society: Socionatural Relations in the Anthropocene (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2015), 73. [10] Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 66. [11] Arias-Maldonado, Environment and Society , 9. [12] Ibid., 4. [13] Martha Craven Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 176. [14] Bruce McConachie, Evolution, Cognition and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). [15] Philip Kitcher, The Ethical Project (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). [16] Nussbaum, Political Emotions , 34. [17] as cited in McConachie, Evolution, Cognition and Performance. [18] Nussbaum, Political Emotions , 34. [19] José van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4. [20] Ibid., 110-111. [21] Ibid., 113. [22] Berteke Waaldijk, “A Historical Comparison Between World Exhibitions and the Web,” in Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology , ed. Marianne van den Boomen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 107. [23] van Dijck, Culture of Connectivity , 118-119. [24] “Global Climate March- Solidarity and Resilience,” YouTube video, 1:04, posted by “350.org,” December 2, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWPpibC7Kt4. [25] Nussbaum, Political Emotions , 267. [26] “Global Climate March.” [27] “Oxfam Video on Climate Change,” YouTube video, 8:20, posted by “Slow Food,” June 16, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuc38-Q6TBs. [28] Fabienne Darling-Wolf, Imagining the Global: Transnational Media and Popular Culture Beyond East and West (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2015), 12. [29] Ibid., 3. [30] Ibid. [31] Heather A. Smith, “Disrupting the Global Discourse of Climate Change: The Case of Indigenous Voices,” in The Social Construction of Climate Change: Power, Knowledge, Norms, Discourses , ed. Mary E Pettenger (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), 201. [32] “How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint,” YouTube video, 2:31, posted by “Howcast,” March 31, 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7zwrzEyzkA. [33] George Marshall, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). [34] van Dijck, Culture of Connectivity , 4. [35] Marshall Poe, A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). [36] van Dijck, Culture of Connectivity , 116. [37] “Number of smartphone users worldwide from 2014 to 2020 (in billions),” Statista, accessed January 2, 2017. https://www.statista.com/statistics/330695/number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide/. [38] Jugal K. Patel, “How 2016 Became Earth’s Hottest Year on Record,” New York Times , January 18, 2017, accessed April 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/science/earth/2016-hottest-year-on-record.html. [39] Ben Doherty, “Climate Change Will Fuel Terrorism Recruitment, Report for German Foreign Office Says,” Guardian , April 19, 2017, accessed April 20, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/apr/20/climate-change-will-fuel-terrorism-recruitment-adelphi-report-says. [40] Lydia Saad and Jeffrey M. Jones, “U.S. Concern About Global Warming at Eight-Year High,” Gallup , March 16, 2016, http://www.gallup.com/poll/190010/concern-global-warming-eight-year-high.aspx. [41] Coral Davenport, “Policy Advisers Urge Trump to Keep U.S. in Paris Accord,” New York Times, April 18, 2017, accessed April 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/us/politics/trump-advisers-paris-climate-accord.html . Footnotes About The Author(s) CLARA JEAN WILCH received her BA in Biology from Occidental College and MA in Theatre Studies from the University of Pittsburgh. She will begin as a PhD student of Performance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles in Fall of 2017. She thanks JADT and its editors for bringing an interdisciplinary approach and ever-necessary attention to the topic of the Anthropocene. Guest Editor for Special Issue: Bruce McConachie Editorial Board for Special Issue: Meredith Conti Allan Davis John Fletcher Ju Yon Kim Scott Magelssen Julia Walker Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Acting in the Academy: The history of professional actor training in US higher education. Peter Zazzali. London, New York: Routledge, 2016; Pp. 219. 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Theresa J. May Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Theresa J. May By Published on May 14, 2017 Download Article as PDF In 1994 Una Chaudhuri challenged theatre artists to provide new visions of what it means to be human within an ecological context, writing that the art of theatre must participate in “a transvaluation so profound as to be unimaginable at present.” [1] As the environmental crisis entered a new era of globalization in the 1990s, the embodied, immediate, and communal art of theatre became an apt site for illuminating the personal and social impact of significant ecological change. In the past two decades theatre artists and scholars have spun counter narratives and invented alternative forms that resisted environmental and cultural imperialism by exposing its mechanisms, amplifying the voices of those places and peoples it has silenced or ignored, and advocating ecological reciprocity between and among land and people. [2] When I first used the term “ecodramaturgy” in 2010, I sought to acknowledge and coalesce this praxis, and to emphasize the ways it might imaginatively intervene to forward environmental justice, sustainability and democracy. [3] Meanwhile, the fate of humans and other life forms on the planet continues on a trajectory of unparalleled risk. Scientists have suggested that we live on the cusp of a new epoch, the Anthropocene—in which human-caused changes to earth systems have outpaced all “naturally occurring” geologic, biologic, and atmospheric factors. Debate continues about whether the Anthropocene began with the age of colonization, the rise of extractive capitalism and the industrial revolution; or more recently, just after WWII when the planet saw an exponential increase in population, coupled with a rise in fossil fuel use, consumer consumption, urbanization, and nuclear radiation. This rise in CO2 in the planet’s atmosphere during the baby-boomer era is known as “the Great Acceleration.” The arts are vital in such times of crisis not only to imagine all that is at stake, but to enter feelingly into what Jeremy Davies calls “the predicament of living in the fissures between one epoch and another.” [4] In what follows I look first at Harvest Moon by José Cruz González (1994), which in many ways is emblematic of ecodramas that sought to expose the impacts of industrial and agricultural capitalism on land and communities. The play argues for environmental justice and affirms sustaining values of community, family and culture. I then turn to Burning Vision by Marie Clements (2003), an ecodrama reflective of the looming realities of the Anthropocene, which include trans-global interdependencies, irreversible exposures and losses, and generational breakage. The purpose of juxtaposing these two (separated only by a decade and which share much in common) is not to make predictions based on uncertain scenarios of “before” and “after” tipping points, but rather to search for what might become the stories of what Donna Haraway calls “ongoing and living worlds.” Stories and performances are the very expression of what she calls a necessary “tentacular thinking” that continuously reaches out, nurturing the “generative recursions that make up living and dying.” [5] Cruz González and Clements both employ a-chronological storytelling, moving freely and fluidly between times and places in works that demonstrate the shared vulnerability between people and land. Both expose environmental racism and capitalist imperialism; both reclaim people’s traditional rootedness in and rights to land; and both use theatre to presence the dead among the living, re-member lives lost, hearts broken, and histories forgotten. Both are instructive on ways to live in the fissures, but each envisions and embodies resilience differently. In Harvest Moon , hope resides in generational continuity as the play affirms the activist vision of a world in which sustainability and justice are possible. In Burning Vision , tentacular tellings embody what Haraway calls “co-presence”—neither hope nor despair, but a state of bearing witness to the breakage and living and loving through it. A Continuum of Shared Vulnerability: Harvest Moon The environmental justice movement of the 1980s and ‘90s represented the single most important conceptual gain in environmental thought of the late 20 th century. [6] In 1991 the Environmental Justice Summit redefined “environment as the places where people live, work, play and worship,” demanding attention and redress for those (women, children, communities of color, and the poor) who have been disproportionately impacted by the shadow sides of industrial/consumer capitalism, such as landfills, incinerators, toxic waste sites, and other “sacrifice zones.” [7] The EJ movement dismantled the longstanding conceptual binary of “nature” vs “culture,” asserting a human place in, not apart from, the natural world. It claimed urban environments as spaces worthy of environmental concern and ecological tending, and demanded that environmental organizations examine the white privilege of their most ardent proponents and heroes. In many ways the conceptual openings of the EJ movement were responsible for the recognition that theatre has been always/already rife with ecological ideologies and implications. Ecodramaturgy emerged to emphasize the intersectionality of community, identity, the body and the land, and to celebrate the power of communities and individuals to enact meaningful change in the creation of a more just and sustainable world. Many Chicano/a and Latinx playwrights had engaged ecological issues in their works long before ecotheorists ever articulated such a project, illuminating a continuum of shared vulnerability between lands and peoples, and revealing the complex ways that oppression and displacement from homeland, family, history, heritage, and language has had consequences for human and environmental health. Yet, with the exception of Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints and the work of Teatro Campesino, Latinx theatre has been underrepresented in studies of ecotheatre. [8] Harvest Moon is an act of remembrance, resistance and resilience through which José Cruz González tells the history of four generations of a Mexican-origin American family. [9] Their stories assert the presence and vitality of the family’s real-world counterparts in a century of North American environmental history. Developed and workshopped as part of the Seattle Group Theatre’s 1991 Multicultural Playwrights Festival, Harvest Moon premiered at the Group Theatre in 1994, at a time (like ours) of heated national debate about immigration Particularly in the western states, debates over bi-lingual education and citizenship for the children of undocumented workers were becoming increasingly polarizing and xenophobic. (Proposition 187, denying many basic services to non-citizen residents, had just been approved in California.) [10] The action begins as Cuauhtemoc, a contemporary young man of the early 1990s, returns to the mural his mother (Mariluz) painted before she died. [11] On a wall “near a harvest field” in “a valley filled with dozens of farms” so that it will “greet the farmworkers on their way to work and on their way home,” the mural, like the land itself, is an archive of his family’s history and cultural heritage. Cuauhtemoc “carries a backpack and a small tree seedling wrapped in burlap. He looks at the mural…searches for a place to plant the tree…begins digging a small hole but discovers something”—his mother’s paintbrush buried in the soil. In this moment Cuauhtemoc encounters his mother’s spirit, and what was “faded and overgrown with weeds” comes to life around him (11-14). Cuauhtemoc encounters his parents, grandparents, and great grandparents, and is able to forgive his mother (who died when he was a small boy) for spending so much time during her final days painting a mural rather than playing with him. [12] His ancestors’ stories of commitment, skill, cunning, and sacrifice become the ground on which he stands. Like the tree Cuauhtemoc plants for his mother, the play lives into and informs his life going forward, arguing not only that social, economic and environmental justice are integrally connected, but also that making sustainable and just choices requires us to remember our histories, listen to the stories of our ancestors and the land itself. Muralists like Mariluz helped transmit the stories that birthed the mythos of Aztlán, rooting the movimiento in a shared ancestral story, and siting that history in the neighborhoods, streets, alleyways, underpasses, and parks of the communities whose story they told. [13] Murals like Judith Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles or Chicano Park in San Diego function as a visual representations of oral histories, proactive and public assertions of presence that (re)claim both past and future. Inspired by a mural that he passed on the way to school as a young man, Cruz González suggests that theatre, like a mural, may be best understood as a visual form that can summon history much in the way that memory functions—associatively, anachronistically, emotionally—treating spaces and places of habitation as archives of memory and records of human action. [14] Throughout the performance, actor/characters move into and out of tableaus that bring to life the history that the mural represents, transforming history into flesh and blood presence on stage. As memory associates with memory, the story moves in and out of time periods, and characters appear at various ages in significant moments in their lives. As memories connect and collide in the space of the theatre, the audience also encounters the full arc of 20 th century American environmental history—a history in which Mexican-origin Americans are present and integral. Working the generations backwards from 1990, we might imagine that Cuauhtemoc was born in the late 1970s; his mother, Mariluz, was born in the early 1950s, growing up and coming of age during the movimiento and witness to the early years of the farmworkers’ movement in California. Her parents, Ruben and Gloria, were born during the Dust Bowl and Depression; Henry and Lupe, Cuauhtemoc’s great-grandparents, would have come to the United States from Mexico in the years following the Mexican Revolution of 1910, when economic and political turmoil caused many to emigrate in search of work and safety. Woven into this arc, other significant moments in the environmental history of the continent come to life. [15] A first generation US citizen, Ruben came of age during WWII, when the US government instituted the bracero program that sought Mexican guest workers for US fields, canneries, and slaughterhouses. Soto, Henry’s friend, and a kind of uncle figure in the play, remembers “an army of laborers. Hundreds of men attacked the harvest each day. There’s not enough work for us all and yet we come by the truck loads” (17). Laborers in the booming post-WWII California agricultural industry lived in barracks without adequate food, clean water or sanitation. “I’m surprised these old barracks are still standing. I can’t believe we ever lived in them. The Grapes of Wrath or what?” muses a 17 year old Mariluz. Her reference is a reminder to the audience that the hardships endured during the Depression and Dust Bowl by white families like John Stienbeck’s beloved but fictional Joads were also felt by Mexican-origin Americans. [16] Cesár Chavez’s family was one among many landowners in the southwest who lost land in the farm consolidations and liquidations precipitated by the drought of the 1930s, and who came to California looking for work in the growing agricultural industry. [17] In this way, Cruz González couples the experiences of Anglo American workers’ struggle to unionize for just wages and healthy living conditions in the 1930s with the farmworkers movement of the 1960s, and the experiences of economic immigrants in the 1990s. Union organizing in the 1930s resulted in labor laws that improved working conditions and wages across many industries, but farmworkers were excluded from guarantees and protections that white workers gained. Meanwhile, the influx of white farmworkers to California as a result of the Dust Bowl migrations displaced Mexican-origin workers. Many were deported to Mexico, including, ironically, families who had lived on and worked the land since California was part of Mexico. [18] It was not until 1978 that farmworkers won a minimum wage on par with other workers; and they are still not adequately protected from industry toxins. In 1994 Harvest Moon resonated with ongoing debates over so-called guest worker programs under H-2A, as well as larger questions about immigration, citizenship, and the economic migration that promises to increase as a climate change proceeds. [19] The generational perspectives of his mother, grandparents, and great-grandparents help Cuauhtemoc understand that the politics of unionizing, immigration, green cards, and the undocumented are personal, and shaped by the history his elders have lived through. In a scene set in the 1960s, some family members are inspired by the young Cesár Chavez and the organizers who have come to town. Ruben’s wife, Gloria, becomes a union organizer, but the older Henry warns against making trouble. “We have no papers,” he reminds Lupe. Henry’s fears are multiple and layered, including not only the immediate threat of deportation, which would separate great grandparents from children and grandchildren, but also a justified fear of violence. Throughout the 1930s and ‘40s, union organizing frequently was violently suppressed by state and local law enforcement who carried out the bidding of agribusiness. [20] Soto, on the other hand, is both a US citizen and a decorated WWII veteran, and his legal status allows him to stand up and speak out in a way that Henry and Lupe cannot. As he puts on his WWII uniform to proudly participate in a UFW rally (United Farm Workers of America), we learn that he supports an extended family in Mexico. Through these family elders, Cuauhtemoc learns the complicated ways in which each generation carries Mexico within them; the way each lives in the borderlands, regardless of citizenship. The environmental justice movement of the 1990s fueled public outrage over farmworkers’ exposure to pesticides. Companies like Monsanto sold miracle chemicals promising bigger crop yields, but the shadow of such harvests comes to rest in the bodies of farmworkers and their families. In a party scene (also set in the early 1960s), Soto arrives with tomatoes for Lupe. “ Hijole , those tomates are huge,” Henry exclaims. The harvest was good, Soto tells her, but while the patrons are vacationing in Europe and buying new trucks. The workers have only “a few centavos in our pockets, some tomates the size of grapefruit” (21-22). Post WWII agro-chemicals that made California the “breadbasket of the world” (and the 5 th largest economy in the world by century’s end) did not trickle down to farmworkers. Mariluz remembers that she and her brother Manuel worked alongside their parents and grandparent in the pesticide-laden fields. As the scene comes to life, Ruben shouts at the sun, exhausted from the heat. “This shit is robbing me!” Henry tells him to drink some water and get himself under control because the patron is watching. “I don’t need water! It’s dignity!” he shouts. “We live in an old bracero barrack. We bathe outside from a pipe. My children are always sick …” (31-32, my emphasis). Ruben’s rage at dehumanizing conditions is redoubled as the sound of an approaching crop dusting plane overtakes the scene. “Where are the children?” Gloria runs at the airplane, shouting the name of the grower, pleading for the safety of her children. “Don’t spray Mr. Matterson!” and then “It’s too late.” Exposures to pesticides and herbicides have been at the center of the UFW’s concerns since the beginning of La Causa . In 1969, Chavez testified before the House of Representatives about the grave dangers of economic chemicals—part of the increased mechanization of food production. His testimony cites the regular practice of spaying workers, including children, in an unregulated industry, and the illness, injury and death that occurred with regularity in the fields. [21] We later learn that Mariluz’ father Ruben died of heart failure while working in the fields, a reminder that farmworkers suffered increased health risks and shorter life expectancy as a result of labor and living conditions. Mariluz, who comes of age during the movimiento , is part of a growing Mestiza consciousness that prized newly reclaimed heritage. [22] Even after her diagnosis, Mariluz spends what little time she has left painting the mural, making sure her own son has a record of his history. Some key agricultural pesticides were regulated in the 1970s and ‘80s, including DDT (banned in 1972 in the US). But the then new Republican governor of California, George Deukmejian, refused to enforce regulations and hold growers accountable to the law, prompting Chavez to organize a second grape boycott with its goal to ban the “economic poisons” suspected of causing higher incidences of cancer in farmworkers when compared to the general population. Mariluz’ premature death from pesticide-related cancer in the early 1980s indicts the government’s disregard for the health impacts of pesticides on families like Cuauhtemoc’s. In another scene set in the 1970s, Mariluz’ brother, Manuel, announces he has joined the Navy. Mariluz worries he will be sent to Vietnam, a war in which Mexican-American soldiers took risks and gave their lives in higher numbers than Anglo soldiers, in part to signal their “American-ness” in the face of racism at home. In Vietnam they were exposed (together with others who served in combat) to chemical herbicides and pesticides. Defoliant weapons like Agent Orange used in Vietnam were not so different from chemicals used regularly in the fields. [23] Throughout the play Cuauhtemoc is haunted by the Jaguar Warrior, who appears in the play at moments when courage and ferocious resistance are required. Played by the actor who plays Ruben, the Jaguar Warrior connects Ruben’s anger at systemic injustice with the mythic fierceness of Aztec warriors who fought the conquistadors, and for whom his grandson is named. The Jaguar Warrior binds human and animal together with the story of Aztlán, rooting the struggles of the twentieth century in an older, sovereign, connection to the land on both sides of the border. The Jaguar Warrior entreats Cuauhtemoc to recognize himself, yet Cuauhtemoc demands, “What do you want from me? […] Who are you?” After his journey through his mother’s mural stories, Cuauhtemoc begins to understand the Jaguar’s answer: “ In Lak’ ech .” “ Tú eres mi otro yo ,” Mariluz translates. “You are my other self” (73). Mariluz’ impulse to paint a mural of her family history comes when she is diagnosed with cancer. Like the trees her family the mural will live on in real time and space, nourishing a community‘s future long after her individual death. The mural is “alive before you, transcending time and space just like the ancients did long before Einstein!” she explains to Cuauhtemoc (13). At the end of the play, Cuauhtemoc returns to his seedling. “I am planting a fruit tree for you….I now know why I’m planting it.” Mural and tree give flesh to the past in a way that changes the future. The mural is a message of empowerment and pride, and a reminder of a lineage of belonging, and like the tree, requires cultivation: It is meant to call forth a consciousness in Cuauhtemoc that will empower him in the world, and that he must tend within himself. In this way, painting the mural, planting the trees, and the performance of the play itself are acts of habitation : life-giving, sustaining actions that contribute to the vitality and ecological health of the community. But as Cruz González’ memory of the mural that had fallen into disrepair on his school route suggests, both the mural (community history) and the trees (ecosystems of that same community) need to be tended. Anchored in the counter-narrative of a Chicano/a imaginary that provided a foundation to the movimiento , Harvest Moon connects myth and history to geography and personal lived experience: Tú eres mi otro yo . We are bound to one another and to the land in ways that transcend time and national borders. The land is our other self; what we do to the land we do to ourselves. “Can the dead forgive the living?” Cuauhtemoc asks. Can the dead forgive us for making the same mistakes they made? In Harvest Moon , human destinies are linked to one another and to the planet in ways that will require not only a recognition that “ Tú eres mi otro yo ,” but also a reckoning with the costs of having ignored for too long our human interdependence with one another and with the more-than-human world. Enter the Anthropocene The interdependency celebrated in Harvest Moon as a kind of generational continuity between past, present and future is increasingly under threat. Our shared vulnerability with the natural world has ruptured into an entirely contingent, and in many ways random, chance of survival. Where is theatre’s efficacy in a world that has sown the seeds of its own destruction? In the section that follows I use Marie Clements’ Burning Vision , to illuminate an ecodramaturgy for the Anthropocene. In The Birth of the Anthropocene , Jeremy Davies follows argument and counter argument as stratigraphers struggle to agree on the epoch’s beginning. [24] Davies also weighs the “backlash” against the idea of the Anthropocene in light of its ethical, political and social implications. Cultural theorist Donna Haraway pushes back against dangerous cultural interpretations of the Anthropocene, arguing that naming this new epoch “Anthro” perpetuates a human exceptionalism that, ironically, may include our own extinction. Why quibble over a name? Once our collective bones and material remains of our varied dreams are laced into earth’s geologic tapestry of deep time as a thin strand of stone, what does it matter? Names matter because they privilege points of view and can accumulate imprecise meanings in the popular imagination, like debris settling into consciousness, and in this way, Haraway suggests, they may not only name but call forth a particular future. Naomi Klein, Jason W. Moore and others suggest that humans as a species are not the cause of climate change, certainly not all humans equally. It is not humans, but capitalism—that economic juggernaut that rides roughshod over the planet in ever increasing extractive speed and efficiency, gouging its “marks in earth’s rocks, waters, airs and critters” – that is the geologic force of epoch proportions. The Capitalocenes and the Anthropocenes are both counterfeit Haraway argues, because each tends to succumb “to abstract futurism and its affects of sublime despair and its politics of sublime indifference,” ignoring the grieving voices of mothers (human and non-human), and forgetting the work of spiders, microbes, rocks and moisture, for these too are working to “save” the planet. [25] Both terms, she argues, perpetuate and privilege those very aspects of collective human-ness that fueled the engines of climate change—technological supremacy, managerial science, western chauvinism and determinism, along with historicity that fails to account for, or even be concerned about, the lived experience of people, creatures, and places. [26] The annihilative forces of industrial capitalism, including fossil fuel use, nuclear testing and radiation, and consumption-based cultures, are products of colonization that has been (and still is) played out on and in human and other animal bodies, ecologies, and geographies. To be clear, Haraway does not take issue with the science (among scientists there is no debate that human-caused climate change will precipitate geologic shifts, marking the planet forever). Rather, she cautions against the Anthropocene’s seemingly implicit vision : scenarios of mass extinction, economic collapse, human death, and the end of so-called civilization as we know it. As these narratives layer into the popular imaginary, they naturalize catastrophe and invite an attitude of “game over,” which in turn nurtures dis-compassion, disconnection, and intellectual distance from lives and living that will be ongoing. It is precisely this aspect of her critique that has been useful in thinking through the potential contribution of theatre in the age of the Anthropocene, asking: what visions of our intermingled future will we call forth? Davies might dismiss Haraway’s quibbling as nonsense, and indeed such discussions may seem academic to those who attend community meetings to strategize in the face of rising seas. As Davies points out, the term has many uses and a wide girth of meanings that invite not only geoengineering trajectories, but philosophical and political ones. The term itself, he suggests, is a wake-up call that provides “an opportunity to comprehend the environmental calamity in its full dimensions.” [27] In the Anthropocene, he argues, “environmental movements will need to be concerned above all with environmental injustice and with fostering ecological pluralism and complexity in the face of the simplifying tendencies of the Holocene’s final phase.” [28] Urging a “living within the crisis” that parallels Haraway’s emphasis on earth systems kinship, Davies calls for “vigilant resistance against the searing away of multifaceted socioecological systems and their replacement by vulnerable, saturated monocultures” in order to insure that the “jerky crossing between epochs can be cushioned by upholding states of life—both ecosystems and human societies—that are variegated, intricate, and plural, one in such lively forces of all kinds contend with and interweave with one another.” [29] The Anthropocene also requires creative and critical methodologies for decolonizing (not just de-capitalizing); specifically for naming the ways in which climate change has been a product of historical patterns of white supremacy predicated on land taking, rapacious extractive practices, slavery, and rampant disregard for the rights of life and land. It will be some time before cultural theorists and scientists find cohesive ways of talking about the future of earthlings, and so this paper does not seek to reconcile the disparate and protesting voices that endeavor to chart a path of maximum compassion into the unknown. The tension between Haraway and Davies is useful, however, because it suggests an ecodramaturgy that not only foregrounds the disproportional effects of climate change, tracking the intersectional ways that gender, ethnicity, and economics inform the severity of impact, but also one that puts the shoulder of theatre to the wheel of envisioning a future, helping humans and non-humans inhabit the ambiguities and contingencies of relentless transition. While this direction is not terribly different from what I urged in 2006, when I wrote that ecodramaturgy must map “the connections between social injustice, human and other bodies, and environmental exploitation,” the urgency is greater in the face of recent political events. [30] Indeed, the usefulness of theatre has increased not only as a provocateur of activism, but as a means to engage in embodied and affective exploration of ways-of-connecting, coping and grieving. Stories that envision apocalypse, Haraway contends, are luxuries of the (yet) un-endangered. Her advice to dramatists is to heel close to the site of impact: the embodied experiences of creatures including humans living-with and dying-with one another. De-centering not only the human, but the primacy of biological notions of kindship, and taxonomies altogether, she urges envisioning kinship across all matter (“making oddkin”), and attending to our individual and collective response-ability in these times. In this way theatre can take a stance that Haraway calls “staying with the trouble”—neither driven by activist hope, nor elitist despair (despair is always a mark of elitism: elephants, refugees and coral reefs have no such luxuries), but “tuned to the senses” and mindful of “mortal earthlings thick copresence.” [31] Theatre can help us develop the kind of soulful muscle that staying with the trouble will require. Just such a poly-attentive a way-of-being-in-the-world is apparent in Marie Clements’ Burning Vision , as it illuminates a web of ecological, cultural and personal consequences of the atomic age. For some stratigraphers the birth of the Anthropocene, could be “set with unimprovable specificity on July 16, 1945, ‘at 05:29:21 Mountain War Time’…This is the moment of the Manhattan Project’s first nuclear weapon test, Trinity: white light in the pre-dawn New Mexico desert.” [32] Whether this geologic moment will ultimately be the “golden spike” matters less than the specter of annihilation that both the bomb and the Anthropocene have unleashed in the collective imaginary. Burning Vision is a tentacular story of the making of the first atomic bomb that foregrounds multiple and multiplying relationships across time, space, culture and species (including species of mineral). The action begins on August 6, 1945, with a countdown followed by the “sound of a long, far-reaching explosion that explodes over a long, far-reaching time,” and then a cascading flash of detonation (20). The arc of the play transpires in the split second between that first flash of light and its reign/rain of sudden death, and the stories of the play’s 18 characters are told by the light of the earth-shattering, history-destroying, human-made culmination of what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls the plundering of the planet. Clements’ Burning Vision presences and makes visible the lived experiences of humans whose bodies were plundered in the service of the forces that precipitated climate change. [33] Written in four “movements” like an orchestral score, Burning Vision is meant to be embodied, not read. Dramatic structures of beginning/exposition, middle/action, end/resolution are non-existent. This is a play about being in the middle. Like an Escher painting, the middle moment is a site of intersection where form is undone in a process of becoming. Local places, individual people and creatures, diverse and specific cultures across the globe, and different historical moments across time collapse into one another in a kind of double and triple exposure. The play blurs the boundaries of space/place and ruptures any sense of geographic logic, as characters in Japan emerge from the bottom of a lake in Northern Canada, or a factory worker from Pittsburgh descends into the belly of the earth where he meets a woman who works as a radium dial painter from the 1920s. Unfathomable time is both expanded and compressed. Like the “deep time” geologists assign to the Anthropocene, the bomb turns our gaze back on this moment of now, asking how we will be-in-relation as the world changes utterly. The play also insists on another kind of time: an intersecting, simultaneous time that bends upon and within itself, defying rational chronology in favor of the embodied present of the theatre. The voices and images of each movement emerge, overlap, intersect and collide. Between each movement, the sound of caribou hooves on tundra give voice to a time immemorial when traditional Dene communities follow the migration of caribou around Great Bear Lake in the Northern Territories. [34] Through the sounds of hooves and the voice of the Dene elder and prophet, the action of the play proceeds and comes round to where it began: the moment of “now,” the middle moment. Burning Vision presences a time-space that Laguna Pueblo poet and theorist Paula Gunn Allen explains as an “achronology” particular to indigenous authors: a “tribal concept of time [that is] timelessness.” Similarly, a tribal concept of space is multidimensional. Gunn Allen’s time-space is similar to contemporary physics in that the self is conceived “as a moving event within a moving universe.” [35] The play’s achronological structure allows a searing vision to rupture the hegemonic assumption that humans are separate from one another, other critters, the planet, or our collective earth-history. But it does something more, something essential to the project of living in the Anthropocene—affirming survivance even as evidence accumulates to the contrary. In Decolonizing Methodologies , Linda Tuhiwai Smith recognizes that scholarly and creative deconstruction of hegemonic systems (like those that precipitated climate change) provides “insight that explains certain experiences,” but does not “prevent someone from dying.” [36] Decolonizing, Smith argues, consists of (re)claiming (stories, lives, land); celebrating (culture, women, survivance); indigenizing, or “centring of the landscapes, images, languages, themes, metaphors and stories in the indigenous world”; and from that vantage point envisioning a different future, a way forward. Burning Vision carries out what Smith calls “indigenizing projects,” not only by dissembling the ideologies and systems of plunder that make all humans “test dummies,” but asserting improbable intimacies and incongruous solidarities. Burning Vision grew out of Clements’ desire to trace her First Nations/Dene family history in the Northwest Territory, a history which in telling reclaims stolen lands. “I had taken a trip to the Great Bear Lake region with my mother. I wanted to tell this story of my family’s genetic connection to the history of the land up there, and to the running of uranium.” [37] The play follows the hand-to-hand route of the “black rock”—from which both radium and uranium are harvested and plutonium is made—from the theft that set claim to it and the miners that unearthed it, to the Dene ore carriers, boatmen, stevedores, and “sandwich girls,” that worked along its watery passage across Great Bear Lake and down the Mackenzie River to Fort McMurray, where it was loaded on trains bound for Ontario refineries and, ultimately, the labs and test sites of the Manhattan Project. Staying with the trouble—that is, insisting on the primacy of relatedness—Clements accounts for the disproportional impact that uranium mining had (and climate change is having) on Dene communities. Weaving together the stories of those who worked on and in the mine with the stories of Japanese characters in Hiroshima, where the material stolen from Dene land was ultimately ignited, Clements challenges how we remember and whom we remember, creating a transnational countergeography that makes previously invisible relationships explicit. “What was extraordinary to me,” Clements said, is that “one person’s decision not only impacts that person and their community, but has an effect beyond, in this case, an effect that encompasses the whole world.” In a similar way, theatre can ground the abstraction of the Anthropocene in human decision, desire, and agency. The “money rock,” as the Dene called it, was claimed by the Labine Brothers, white prospectors who laid claim to the ore and founded El Dorado Mine on Great Bear Lake. According to the oral account of Dene elders (which carry the same authority as written eye witness accounts under Canadian law), the whites traded sacks of flour for the ore: “They say it was…Beyonnie, who first found the money rock at Port Radium. Beyonnie gave it to the white man, for which he received a bag of flour, baking powder and lard about four times.” [38] Signaling the land theft operative in their extractive capitalist exploits, the brothers thrash about in the dark of the theatre, collide with walls and objects, and discuss what to trade for their claim. “What’s an Indian gonna do with money? We’ll give him some lard and baking powder and he can bake some bread. Sure! What the hell! What the hell is an Indian going to do with a rock anyways, at least he can eat the bread.” [39] Meanwhile, in the center of the stage, the rock itself waits, fearing discovery. In Dene worldview the ore is a living being, personified in the play as Little Boy, a “beautiful Native boy…the darkest uranium found at the center of the earth.” Little Boy is “discovered”, chased, captured; then escapes and runs away, desperate to “go home”, back to his place in the earth. But once loose upon the earth he cannot return. Discovered in the beam of a flashlight, the boy runs for his life; like the many children who ran away from Canadian Indian boarding schools, his place in the world has been destroyed. His new place is not one he chose, rather one precipitated by the commodification of his rock-flesh as part of the first atomic bomb. Throughout the play’s tentacular weaving of a trans-national, trans-temporal, trans-species, inter-cultural community, Rose, a young Métis woman makes bread. A kind of payment for the ore from which the bomb was made, bread calls attention to the flesh of human bodies and that of the plants and animals we take for sustenance. She describes herself as a “perfect loaf of bread” that “is plump with a rounded body and straight sides. I have a tender, golden brown crust which can be crisp, or delicate. This grain is fine and even, with slightly elongated cells; the flesh of this bread is multi-grained” (58). Each of us is just such a grainy substance, and we make and unmake ourselves, Rose suggests, by the way we engage the elements of the earth. In the first Movement, Rose carries a sack of flour over her shoulder. As she walks, a thin stream of flour leaks out, inscribing a circle in the space of the stage—a circle in which the audience is implicitly included. She mixes the ingredients—a recipe learned from her mother. “Substances meeting like magic” she says (39). “Flour, yeast, salt, sugar, lard, liquid. Bread” (59). By the third Movement, the sacks of flour become indistinguishable from the sacks of uranium ore carried by Dene workers. The wind mixes the white flour leaking from Rose’s sack with the black dust that infects the environment. “The wind’s blowing it everywhere,” Rose observes, “The kids are playin’ in sandboxes of it, the caribou are eating it off the plants, and we’re drinkin’ the water where they bury it…I guess there’s no harm if a bit gets in my dough” (103). Both bread and ore are material aspects of the earth’s body-becoming-human-body, permeable, interwoven. Fat Man and Little Boy, non-human characters named after the actual bombs dropped by the US on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, become oddkin to humans. Fat Man is a “test dummy” living in an above-ground Nevada test site, where mock homes, complete with foodstuffs, canned goods, appliances, and manikins representing the stereotypical 1950s nuclear family, were constructed to test the deadly effectiveness of “the gadget.” Fat Man animates the mindset that made the bomb; ideology incarnate, he is an all-American male, a “living room soldier” (94). Both Little Boy and Fat Man demonstrate Jane Bennet’s notion of “vital matter,” in which the distinction between life and non-life is dubious at best. [40] All matter, she argues, has a kind of life that can come to life, with which humans and other critters interweave, and to which humans have obligations as oddkin. By the fourth Movement, Fat Man realizes that, he too is expendable, one whose body and labor have been commodified in the military-industrial project of nuclear arms superiority. Even Fat Man is radicalized when he discovers that, like the ore, the lake, and the air itself, his life force has been mined. Finally aware of his connection to the others, outraged and embattled, he screams at the Brothers Labine: “This is my neighborhood, you hear me … you…you…liar. […] you are all a pack of goddam liars!” (115) Great Bear Lake is one of the largest and deepest freshwater lakes in the world, and its presence percolates through the soundscape of Burning Vision . The lake is the center of life for traditional Dene who depend on it for sustenance. Dene villages fished for trout and followed the seasonal migration of caribou herds around the lake. Clements draws on and bends a Dene legend that tells of a medicine man who journeys to the heart of Great Bear Lake. As the story goes, after a “trout steals the medicine man’s hook…he dives deep into the lake’s abyss” to retrieve his hook. There he “takes on the spirit of the loche” and finds the “living, breathing heart, called the Tudzé” that gives life to the world of plants, animals and human beings. In Clements’ play, Eldorado’s wet-mine tunnels become liminal passageways that extend to the other side of the earth. At the moment of the atomic blast in Hiroshima, a Japanese fisherman named Koji, holding a trout he has just caught, looks up and cries out, “Pika!”—the Japanese word for the brilliant flash of atomic detonation and meaning “the light of two suns.” Koji falls into darkness, journeys through the heart of the earth, and surfaces (like a trout) in Great Bear Lake. Two Dene stevedores aboard the Radium Prince haul him out of the water; Rose gives him dry clothing, and the possibility of new life. Koji’s path mirrors a 1998 journey taken by six Deline residents from Port Radium, Canada, to Hiroshima, Japan, on the anniversary of the atomic bomb to convey the Dene people’s regrets and sorrow that ore from their land was used in this destructive way. [41] Meanwhile, a Dene Widow keeps a vigil fire for the ore-carrier husband she has lost to cancer caused by radiation exposure. Foregrounding the ways humans are commingled with the land, as well as asserting the longstanding kinship of Dene with their traditional lands, Clements’ play suggests that ceremonial remembering and grieving in relation to loss of land and loved ones may be a right response to climate change.In “Climate Changes as the Work of Mourning,” Ashlee Cunsolo Willox argues that “grief and mourning have the unique potential to expand and transform the discursive spaces around climate change to include not only the lives of people who are grieving because of the changes, but also to value what is being altered, degraded, and harmed as something mournable.” [42] Traditional Dene practice is to burn the earthly possessions of those who die so that they may cross over, but the Widow cannot let go of her lover’s clothes, especially a jacket that she made and beaded. The Widow knows that the land resides in the fabric of our bodies: “I miss the smell of sweat on his clothes after a long day hunting. I miss how the land stayed in the fabric even when he got inside the cabin” (44-45). She pulls him to her in a dream, calling on their historic kinship with the earth, and resisting the doomsday change that her waking hours struggle to comprehend. “There are plenty of trout and caribou to last us till we die” (70). Yet, each day she wakes to his absence. Like the theory of the Anthropocene, Clements’ characters are concerned with remains—those traces that contain stories. “It is always the little things of his that take my breath away. The real things like a strand of his hair lying on the collar of a caribou hide jacket he loved…the real things like the handle of his hunting knife worn down from his beautiful hands that loved me. The real things…” (87-88). Koji also sites/sights the real, the “little things,” as his spirit roams the post-blast “landscape of notes.” “There are notes left on anything that still exists. On pieces of houses, on stones shivering on the ground, on anything that did not perish…hope remains nailed to what has survived…a tin box of pictures, a rock wall, a rice bowl…a chair, a typewriter, a neighbor, a woman” (51-52). Remains point both toward past and future. Both nuclear holocaust and the cataclysm of climate change provoke questions of what remains, but also what carries on? For philosophers and cultural workers, the questions of the Anthropocene also include, what is called forth ? For it is a vision, and as a collective imaginary has power to recast what it means to be a human. The danger, Haraway argues, in the apocalyptic vision of the Anthropocene (like the vision of nuclear annihilation) lies in forgetting that individuals, families, and communities of earthlings will live through the troubles ahead, even as many already have. After the bomb is dropped, Fat Man muses, “only Indians and cockroaches will survive”—a reminder to those who imagine the collapse of “civilization as we know it,” that indigenous people of North America have already lived through that particular cataclysm once to survive and thrive (83). Burning Vision invites a radical shift in world views, staging an anthropoScene that lives through and loves into the future. Rose, we implicitly understand, dies of cancer from the radioactive dust in her bread; but the child she conceived with Koji, the Japanese fisherman who fell through the world, lives on with the Widow, who tells him: “You look like her. You look like him. You are my special grandson. My small man now. My small man that survived. Tough like hope” (121). In this way, Burning Vision resists narratives of annihilation, and instead demands survivance, participating in what Haraway calls “threads of reciprocating energies of biologies, arts, and activisms for multispecies resurgence.” [43] In recent years ecodramaturgy has emphasized theatre as a way of knowing at once imaginative, affective, immediate, embodied, and communal, suggesting both new methodologies and meanings as scholars and artists work together to exercise a vigorous engagement with ecological ideas, communities and geographies. [44] This proactive ecodramaturgy moves beyond the call for new works and sustainable production practice to envision, as Chaudhuri writes, “putting the vast resources of lived embodied performance at the service of the program of radical re-imagination called for by the perilous predicament we find our species—and others—in today.” [45] What that theatre looks like, how it feels, and how it interfaces with the community it serves is an anthropoScenic task: to bear witness to the unfolding present and presence, making visible and palpable the interwoven ways, as Harawy writes, “we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all .” [46] Perhaps a significant aspect of theatre’s anthropoScenic leverage lies in the ways it can reimagine and revitalize the relationships between and among communities (human and otherwise) and places (material and imagined) even as they continue to be at risk. Going forward, anthropoScenic ecodramaturgy must not only foreground environmental justice, using theatre to illuminate the lived experience of people and non-human others feeling the disproportional impact of climate change, it must also forge theatre as a place of infinite enmeshment of us-ness, of unexpected intimacies across previously isolated differences with shared ecological vulnerabilities that enliven living through this epochal transition. Staying with the trouble includes understanding compassion as action, and offering a vision of how to inhabit a living-if-turbulent present. “[M]any different paths forward are possible,” Davies writes, reminding us that “the chaotic nature of the crisis means that the flap of any given butterfly’s wings might have disproportionate influence on the new world…” [47] This is time for butterfly wing theatre: conceived as a state of vigilance, a practice of humility, the work of mourning, the necessity of anger, a comic send up of the why-can’t-we-fix-this frustration of test dummies, and an invitation to honor our oddkin of radioactive rocks, caribou, sturgeon, and women pregnant with the future child of a future child who will see our marks and hear our voices across time, and like the Dene See-er, look back at a history that has not yet happened, saying in another tongue, “ Tú eres mi otro yo.” References [1] Una Chaudhuri. “’There Must Be A Lot of Fish in that Lake’: Toward and Ecological Theater,” Theater 25.1 (Spring/Summer 1994): 24. [2] . Ecodramaturgy is concerned with three interwoven aspects of theatre: 1) the lived experience of those represented in and present on stage (human and more-than-human), 2) the mode, means and methodology of production, and 3) the larger cultural context or historical moment of production, including theatre’s relatedness to the community it serves, and the politics into which it speaks. The first use of “ecodramaturgy” appeared in my “Kneading Marie Clements’ Burning Vision ,” Canadian Theatre Review , 144 (Fall 2010): 5-12. See also, “Beyond Bambi: Toward a Dangerous Ecocriticism,” Theatre Topics 17.2 (September 2007): 95-110; Wendy Arons and Theresa May, Readings in Performance and Ecology , eds., New York: Palgrave, 2011; “Ecodramaturgy and/of Contemporary Women’s Playwriting.” Contemporary Women Playwrights , eds. Lesley Ferris and Penny Farfan (New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2013: 181-196. [3] The ecodramaturgy of the 1990s stressed theatre’s potential power to serve as a provocateur of change and a harbinger of transformation, and includes theatre making grounded in an activist ecological sensibility, as well as historiographic and critical projects that work to sharpen our ecological imagination. See May, 2007, “Some Green Questions to Ask a Play,” 96. [4] Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Oakland: University California P, 2016), 2. [5] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University P, 2016), 33. [6] Giovanna Di Chiro, “Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environment and Social Justice,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature , ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 298-320; Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (San Francisco: Island Press, 2005), Chapter 7. [7] See, for example, Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, eds. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics and Pedagogy (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002); Ronald Sandler, and Phaedra C. Pessullo, Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). [8] With the exception of Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints , Latinx plays and productions receive scant ecocritical attention—a gap that runs the risk of reinscribing the persistent “whiteness” of both mainstream environmentalism and theatre. See, for example, Cless, Downing. “Ecotheatre USA: The Grassroots Are Greener,” TDR 8.2 1996: 41-5; Linda Margarita Greenberg, “Learning from the Dead: Wounds, Women, and Activism in Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints,” MELUS 34.1 (2009): 163-185W; and Arons and May, 2014. [9] Here, I follow environmental historian Devon G. Peña, using Mexican-origin Americans to register the intersection of culture and shifting boundaries of nation states. Peña deploys this term as inclusive of those who claim American citizenship, but also those without papers but with a long-standing claim to the land, as well as those economic migrants who have “returned” to live and work on land that prior to 1849 was part of Mexico. Devon G Peña, Mexican Americans and the Environment: Tierra y Vida (Tucson: U Arizona Press, 2005). [10] See Herbert Dittgen, “The American Debate about Immigration in the 1990s: A New Nationalism after the End of the Cold War?” Stanford Humanities Review , 5.2 (1997). https://web.standford.edu Accessed 4 April 2017. [11] Cuauhtemoc was the Aztec warrior who ruled Tenochtitlan at the time of Spanish invasion and ultimate conquest (1520-21). The character name is itself indicative of the reclaiming of indigenous heritage that was foundational to the movimiento . [12] José Cruz González, Harvest Moon (Woodstock IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2002). All subsequent quotations from the play will be indicated in paraenthesis. [13] The Great Wall of Los Angeles , designed by Judith Baca, reclaimed the Tujunga Wash of the Los Angeles River; the murals of San Francisco’s Mission District by Juana Alicia and other muralistas throughout the 1970s and ‘80s reclaimed and renewed neighborhoods and alleyways; and Chicano Park in San Diego arose out of direct action by a community whose home-places had been destroyed in the construction of the Interstate 5 freeway and the Coronado Bay Bridge. See Lucy R. Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (New York: New Press, 1990), 170-71. [14] Similar strategies are employed by playwrights addressing climate change and climate justice in their work. See, for example, the Howlround series on Theatre and Climate Change curated by playwright Chantal Bilodeau. www.howlround.com . [15] See Peña, Mexican American Environmental History ; Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (Tucson: U Arizona Press, 1996, 1998). [16] See, for example: Don Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1996) [17] Ilan Stavans, ed. “Chronology,” in Cesár Chavez: An Organizer’s Tale: Speeches (New York: Penguin Group, Inc.), 2008: xxxvii. [18] Sarah Wald, The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Framing since the Dust Bowl (Seattle: University of Washington Press), 2016. [19] Useful analysis of the H-2A program and its historical context can be found in “No Way to Treat a Guest: Why the H-2A Agricultural Visa Program Fails U.S. and Foreign Workers” compiled by Farmworker Justice. www.farmworkerjustice.org . [20] See Pulido, Chapter. 3. [21] Stavans, An Organizer’s Tale, “Before the House of Representatives,” 65-74. [22] See Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books (1987), 2007). [23] Agent Orange and other herbicides were used against Vietnamese farmworkers—irony across geographies, cultures and nation-states that Luis Valdez ironizes and indicts in his play, Vietnam Campesino . See Jorge Huerta, Chacano Theater: Themes and Forms (Tempe, AZL Bilingual Press, 1982), 86-91. [24] For slightly differing narratives of the first use of the term “Anthropocene,” see Davies, 42-45; Haraway, 44-47; and Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Un-natural History (New York: Pacador / Henry Hold and Co., 2014), 107-110. [25] Haraway, 4. [26] See Haraway Chapter 2. [27] Davies, 194, and generally,“Conclusion: Not Even Past,” 193-209. [28] Davies, 6. [29] Davies, 6, 194; Haraway, 34. [30] May, 2007, 101. [31] Haraway, 4. [32] Davies, 102-104. [33] Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Speigel and Grau, 2015), 149-152. [34] See Kerry Abel, Drum Songs: Glimpses of Dene History (Montreal: McGill Queen’s U Press, 2005). [35] Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 69-70. [36] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (University of Otago Press, 1999), 3, and 142-162. [37] Personal interview. 12 Nov. 2009. [38] Cindy Kenny Gilday, “A Village of Widows,” in Peace, Justice and Freedom: Human Rights Challenges for the new Millennium , eds. (Gurcharan S. Bhatia, et al, Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2000), 108. [39] Marie Clements, Burning Vision (Vancouver, BSL Talon Books, 2003), 37. All subsequent quotations from the play are from this edition and will be cited in parenthesis. [40] See Jane Bennett, Vital Matter: the Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010), 1-19. [41] Clements, 17. [42] Ashlee Cunsolo Willox, “Climate Change as the Work of Mourning,” Ethics and Environment , 17:2 (Fall 2012): 141. [43] Haraway, 5. Thank you to my quick-witted colleague, Tricia Rodley, for her trope of “anthropoScenic,” during my process of revision. [44] See Una Chaudhuri and Shonni Enelow, Research, Theatre, Climate Change and the Ecocide Project (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 1-21. [45] Chaudhuri and Enelow, 2. [46] Haraway, 4, my emphasis. [47] Davies, 200. Footnotes About The Author(s) THERESA J. MAY is Associate Professor at the University of Oregon. Her research explores intersections of ecology, cultural studies, and embodied performance. Previous publications include: Salmon is Everything: community-based theatre from the Klamath Watershed (OSU Press, 2014); Greening Up Our Houses (Drama Book 1994); co-editor of Readings in Performance and Ecology (Palgrave, 2011); articles in Theatre Topics , Canadian Theatre Review , Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism , Journal of American Drama , Theatre Insight , American Theatre , and Howlround; chapters in Performing Nature (Peter Lang, 2005), Community Performance: A Reader (Routledge, 2007); Contemporary Women Playwrights (Palgrave, 2013). She is co-founder of Earth Matters on Stage (EMOS) ecodrama festival, and co-founder of ASTR’s Ecology & Performance working group. Guest Editor for Special Issue: Bruce McConachie Editorial Board for Special Issue: Meredith Conti Allan Davis John Fletcher Ju Yon Kim Scott Magelssen Julia Walker Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Acting in the Academy: The history of professional actor training in US higher education. Peter Zazzali. London, New York: Routledge, 2016; Pp. 219. 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Shelby Brewster Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Shelby Brewster By Published on May 14, 2017 Download Article as PDF A new food cart appeared on Rivington Street in Manhattan in May 2015, serving up a brand-new confection. Living up to their reputation for pursuing the latest food trends with unbridled passion, here New York City residents encountered a new culinary delicacy: smog meringues. Using a combination of scientific techniques and culinary processes, chefs whipped up a number of egg meringues infused with sulfur, nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, and hydrocarbons, all air pollutants. Visitors could choose from three smog varieties; different combinations of chemicals replicating the air quality of several global cities, each meringue infused with the taste of Mexico City, Los Angeles, or Beijing. An installment of the ongoing performance piece Smog Tasting , this food cart is the invention of the artist think tank Center for Genomic Gastronomy. Since its founding in 2010 by artists Zach Denfeld and Catherine Kramer, the Center has worked internationally, creating lectures, performances, exhibitions, and publications. Each of their pieces is designed “to map food controversies, to prototype alternative culinary futures, to imagine a more just, biodiverse and beautiful food system.” [1] Casting themselves as “food phreakers,” Center artists are committed to open access, operating under the principle that food technology and culture should be open and available to all, not kept secret within scientific laboratories or corporate offices. I turn to the work of The Center for Genomic Gastronomy in order to examine how a politics for the Anthropocene, a practice of ecological thought and radical coexistence, might be approached through performance. Geologist Paul Crutzen suggested in 2000 that the weight of human action on Earth has been so massive that it has altered the geological record, necessitating the delineation of a new geological era. The essential definition of the Anthropocene, as indicated by its etymology, is the age of the human. However, as Jedediah Purdy rightly claims, “to define the Anthropocene is to emphasize what we think is most important” in the relationship between humans and nature. [2] Some have pushed back against a perceived universalization of the human within scientific discourses of the Anthropocene. For example, Christophe Bounneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argue that depicting the Anthropocene as “the new epoch of humans, the age of man,” simplifies the diversity of humanity and glosses over the complex historical, social, and economic processes that compose and create ecological change. [3] In particular, Bounneuil and Fressoz point to the sharp increase in income inequality and take so-called anthropocenologists to task for not adequately including discussions of wealth disparity in their analyses. [4] Others, such as Donna Haraway and Jason W. Moore, have favored the term “Capitalocene” over Anthropocene as a mechanism to foreground the contributions of capitalism to environmental change. [5] Although capitalism is inextricably bound up in the Anthropocene, Haraway and Moore’s formulation of the Capitalocene is not sufficient to address its effects. As Dipesh Chakrabarty eloquently demonstrates, any critique of the Anthropocene that solely addresses global capitalism remains lacking: “these critiques do not give us an adequate hold on human history once we accept that the crisis of climate change is here with us and may exist as part of this planet for much longer than capitalism or long after capitalism has undergone many more historic mutations.” [6] A history of the Anthropocene must also take the long view of deep history and consider humans as a species. The challenge of such a history, as Chakrabarty explains, entails holding together “intellectual formations that are somewhat in tension with each other: the planetary and the global; deep and recorded histories; species thinking and critiques of capital.” [7] A politics for the Anthropocene, then, necessitates both a practice of critiquing capital while also pursuing species thinking. Recognizing the impact of manmade economic systems on the infinitely interconnected global ecological system, paired with an epistemological shift that reconceives humans as species, might begin to address the urgencies of the current ecological and historical moment. The exigencies of the Anthropocene demand not just a new political party plank or proposal. What we need, as Bruno Latour writes, is “the total transformation of what it means to do politics (so as to include nonhumans) and what it means to do science.” [8] But how might such a transformation be accomplished? What does this politics look like? Latour’s particular instantiation of politics involves taking the agency of nonhuman agents seriously, and allowing for their participation in the political process. Unsurprisingly, this is a difficult concept to imagine: how can entities as dissimilar (and nonhuman) as Artic foxes, the Pacific Ocean, and electrical grids equally participate in a political process? While I do not profess to have an answer to this dilemma, Latour’s focus on composition can also provide a useful beginning place for imagining a new politics for the Anthropocene. In Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy , Latour defines politics as “the entire set of tasks that allow the progressive composition of a common world.” [9] Under the threat of global warming, shrinking polar ice caps, and food and water scarcity, the common world, that shared by humans and nonhumans alike, must be collectively composed anew to ensure the continuation of life on the planet. This common world should take seriously the agency of nonhuman entities, not merely for their use value for human progress, but as deserving of surviving and thriving. In tandem with the recognition of the value of the nonhuman should be a reconceptualization of the position of humans within the global ecological system and the scale of deep history. This is what Chakrabarty calls species thinking. Thinking humanity as a species helps destabilize the long-held nature-culture divide. Casting Nature as pristine, green, and largely undisturbed by human intervention prior to the Industrial Revolution is neither productive nor accurate. As Purdy explains, “Because we shape everything, from the upper atmosphere to the deep seas, there is no more nature that stands apart from human beings. There is no place or living thing that we haven’t changed.” [10] Any politics for this new geological epoch will necessarily involve rethinking the place of humans within the global ecological system and the very meaning of nature. Throughout his work, Timothy Morton has argued for replacing nature with ecology, particularly because the idea of Nature as “a holistic, healthy, real thing” actually prevents environmental justice. He advocates for replacing Nature with ecology, with “radical coexistence.” [11] Ecological thought, then, means thinking through the sheer interconnectedness of the global ecological system—Morton refers to this as “the mesh.” [12] A practical politics for the Anthropocene must begin with the realization that humanity does not stand outside of the environment, but rather is a species woven into this mesh. As “a practice and a process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings—animal, vegetable, or mineral,” thinking ecologically can begin the political project of balancing human flourishing with that of the planet as a whole. [13] The question of what non-anthropocentric environmental justice will look like in practice, and on the global scale which the crises of the Anthropocene necessitate, is only beginning to be explored. These Anthropocenic crises can be difficult to apprehend because of the scales of deep history and global ecology. For example, Morton calls global warming a “hyperobject,” something withdrawn from humans because of its massive space and time scales. Therefore, hyperobjects “exhibit their effects interobjectively ; that is, they can be detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects.” [14] For example, I cannot feel global warming directly . I cannot touch it or taste it. But I can feel the unseasonably warm February temperatures recently recorded in Pennsylvania. Both thinking ecologically, a recognition of the interconnectedness of humans as a species within the global ecological mesh, and apprehending hyperobjects, entities with spacetime scales so massive that they cannot be directly encountered, can be achieved through art. Through their particular aesthetic characteristics, the performances created by the Center for Genomic Gastronomy enact ecological thought and reveal the hyperobject of climate change. By questioning contemporary capitalist consumption and gesturing toward radical coexistence, the performances I consider here point to a future in which humans, as individuals and as species, might inhabit the world differently in the Anthropocene. Specifically, the Center addresses the challenge of a politics for the Anthropocene through food. Simultaneously an individual and social practice, eating is one of the most evident ways in which human activity is wrapped up in global ecologies. We all have to eat. More than simply the relationship between food producers and consumers, as researchers Lisa Chase and Vern Grubinger have argued, global food systems involve a “much more complex and broad-reaching set of interactions that go far beyond the production, processing, and distribution of food to include the connection of food to the health of people and the environment.” [15] Particularly in the last 150 years, food systems have become increasingly industrialized. Food has become a commodity produced and controlled by a small number of corporate entities with a vested economic interest in marketing particular (often processed) foodstuffs to global markets. [16] The industrialization of food systems, coupled with the exponential growth of the human population, is a major cause of climate change. G. BeVier of the Gates Foundation reported in 2012 that global agriculture, including both crops and livestock, use approximately seventy percent of fresh water resources. [17] Livestock agriculture constitutes the single largest use of land on Earth, occupying “30% of the world’s ice-free surface, contributes 40% of global agricultural gross domestic product…all while using vast areas of rangelands, one-third of the freshwater, and one-third of global cropland as feed.” [18] At the same time, ecological change has contributed to food insecurity for some populations, particularly in the global south, as the effects of climate change result in the reduction of certain crops like wheat. [19] In spite of the very real agricultural impacts of climate change, environmentalist movements advocating for sustainability have proven unable to provoke large-scale political action. For Eduardo Mendieta, politics describes, “that which has to do with the creation of collective possibilities through deliberation, in which a collectivity addresses itself both as subject and object of its deliberations.” [20] The political is “about projecting and making possible collective or communal futures. The future is always the product of politics. But there is no future that is not projected from some actuality, some present.” [21] A politics for the Anthropocene, then, must apprehend the present to project a possible collectively composed future. Crucial first steps to this political project include recognition of the urgencies of global ecological change (global warming is real), consideration of nonhuman entities beyond their usefulness as resources for human activity, thinking ecologically, and taking the long view of deep history through species thinking. While they do not advocate a complete overhaul of current politics, the Center’s performances enact these first steps, showing us a glimpse of a politics for the Anthropocene through performance, a glimpse through a projection of the future from the present. Following Mendieta’s provocation, I will explore three of the Center for Genomic Gastronomy’s performances: De-extinction Deli (2013), Planetary Sculpture Supper Club (2011-3) , and Smog Tasting (2015) . These pieces both reveal the operations of current global food systems and imagine what future ones might look like. As what I term speculative performances, they call forth and embody possible ecological futures and alternative culinary presents. I take inspiration for this term from the genre of speculative fiction, most often popularized as science fiction or sf. As science fiction scholars have demonstrated, the critical capacity of speculative fiction lies in its ability to juxtapose the familiar and the strange. Darko Suvin, following Brecht, called this cognitive estrangement in his seminal 1979 work Metamorphoses of Science Fiction . Works of speculative fiction are “always already critical theory,” encapsulating both the realistic, or cognitive, and the marvelous, or estranging. [22] Gerald Alva Miller has argued that via cognitive estrangement, science fiction narratives create virtual spaces in which critical discourses are not only illuminated or explicated, but enacted and performed. [23] Science fiction critic L. Timmel Duchamp postulates that the significant distinction between works of narrative science fiction and philosophy is the process of “fleshing out the experiment,” making social, political, and scientific changes “personal, intimate, and emotionally authentic.” [24] If, as Duchamp argues, speculative narratives can flesh out critical discourse for readers, speculative performances, like those created by the Center, quite literally give critical discourse flesh. Through performance, the interactions and encounters of bodies in action, the Center gestures toward the critical futures of the Anthropocene, enacting a practice of species thinking and capitalist critique. By navigating the complexities of current food systems through performance, the Center for Genomic Gastronomy projects multiple possible futures through gastronomic interventions, asking participants what their place within those futures might be. Ultimately, through these performative imaginings, the beginnings of a more connected, more just, more thoughtful politics for the Anthropocene might emerge. “Yesterday’s Meat Tomorrow:” The De-extinction Deli A neat wooden market stand sporting a black and white striped bunting is the centerpiece of the Center’s performance De-extinction Deli (2013) and its second incarnation De-extinction Deli (To-Go) (2016). Reminiscent of a butcher’s counter or a food cart, the De-extinction Deli is “a fantastical market stand designed to highlight the emerging technologies, risks, and outcomes of the growing movement to revive, rear, and possibly eat, extinct species.” [25] Visitors to the stand have the opportunity to learn about and engage with the discourse of de-extinction in a number of ways. Center artists, co-founder Zack Denfeld clad in a butcher’s apron in particular, attend to the market stand and answer questions about this newly emerging scientific endeavor. Butcher paper take-aways featuring infographics and artistic renderings of extinct species also serve to inform visitors of various ongoing de-extinction efforts. The Deli also displays several glass vials of “Certified De-Extinct Habitat,” samples of the foodstuffs and botanical species necessary for several extinct species to survive. Visitors can cast their votes in a public poll consisting of three questions: Should humans revive extinct organisms? Would you eat a de-extinct organism? If so, which of tomorrow’s specials would you choose: Passenger Pigeon, Aurochs, or Pyrenean Ibex? The votes are publicly tallied on a chalkboard, and visitors receive a small button bearing the image of their preferred de-extinct culinary special to display on their lapels. The De-extinction Deli features a number of paper placemats explaining the various methods of de-extinction currently employed by scientists and the various species that they target in their efforts. These methods include the modification of existing species with genetic material from extinct species and the use of genetic material to breed clones of species that have more recently disappeared. The most popular de-extinction endeavor, spearheaded by Dr. George Church and the Harvard Woolly Mammoth Revival team, seeks to introduce particular genetic traits to Asian elephants to “revive” the extinct Woolly Mammoth and repopulate the Siberian tundra. In 2014, the team successfully spliced mammoth DNA into the genome of an Asian elephant, a significant step toward creating a mammoth embryo. Other de-extinction groups are working on so-called Revive and Restore projects under the auspices of The Long Now Foundation. Specific projects include The Great Passenger Pigeon Comeback, ongoing since 2012, and the Heath Hen Project, in progress since 2014. [26] Efforts such as these tout potential benefits for biodiversity and conservation by casting these particular animals as keystone species essential for the survival and/or restoration of their ecosystems. Praised as a particularly fashionable conservation effort, with its science fiction resonances, de-extinction is attractive. As ecologist Josh Donlan explains, de-extinction may be successful precisely because it has the support of “average citizens.” As many as fifty percent of Americans believe that scientists will bring back an extinct animal via cloning by 2050. [27] By focusing on “charismatic” species like the Woolly Mammoth or Passenger Pigeon, however, the de-extinction discipline seems to ignore the long history of extinction and the human actions that contributed to it in the first place. The growth of the human species at the beginning of the Holocene, about 12,000 years ago, coincided with the mass extinction of megafauna, including the Woolly Mammoth. While scientists remain divided on the exact role of human hunting practices in this extinction, some scholars have cited these events as the beginning of the Anthropocene itself. For example, in Extinction: A Radical History , Ashley Dawson argues that the extinction of megafauna marks the beginning of humanity’s significant alteration of the planet. Approximately 60,000 years ago, as the rapidly increasing human population spread across the globe’s landmass, facilitated by the invention of language, they hunted megafauna into extinction. [28] Of course, the Woolly Mammoth extinction predates the institution of global capitalism. However, rapid population and industrial growth has resulted in an increase in species extinctions. In 2014 the World Wildlife Fund announced that half of the planet’s animals had disappeared in the previous forty years. The same report found that to sustain the current rate of global consumption, one and a half Earths would be needed. Four planets are needed to match the U.S. rate of consumption. [29] De-extinction Deli, by advertising mammoth meat for future consumption, forces participants to consider the purpose of reviving extinct species or reinvigorating disappearing populations. I do not mean to suggest that Dr. Church intends his resurrected Woolly Mammoths to become the latest culinary trend. But by casting them as such, the Center prompts the question: if the social, cultural, and economic practices that lead to extinction persist, why revive and restore extinct species at all? Through speculative performance, the Center exposes these practices and opens up the rhetoric of de-extinction to critical interrogation by “average citizens” who are not necessarily part of the de-extinction discipline, but who are part of the global food system. The past, present, and future of human food systems collapse within this small market stand, as De-extinction Deli draws from the evolutionary past to envision a culinary future through contemporary practices of consumption. As yesterday’s meat, each of the species on offer once served as a food source, not just for humans but for other species. By advertising them as soon-to-be available for human consumption, this performance strikes at critiques of capitalism that de-extinction rhetoric ignores. Practices of consumption are intricately entwined with extinctions, one of the most visible consequences of massive ecological change. Precisely because they were yesterday’s meats, targeted for consumption by the human population, several of the species showcased at the De-extinction Deli were destroyed. Scientists behind the de-extinction movement, like Dr. George Church, while rightly advocating for the ecological importance of said species, do not address the potential impact of contemporary consumptive practices on any de-extinct species. By asking participants not only whether species should be de-extincted, but also if they would consume such an animal, the Center brings human culinary practices into the debate. One of the takeaways the Deli provides visitors is a butcher paper infographic depicting a Woolly Mammoth as a butcher’s chart, delineating the twenty-two different cuts of meat that could be taken from a single animal. Casting the present practice of butchering cattle onto the past species of the Woolly Mammoth, the Deli performs a possible culinary future in which once-extinct animals not only re-inhabit the Earth but also embody a new gustatory possibility. As “tomorrow’s special,” de-extinct species become analogous to products like Kobe beef: relatively rare, prohibitively expensive, and only available to those with the resources to pay for them. By asking participants to place an order one for the species and publicly display that order with a badge, the Center opens up space for critical examination of de-extinction rhetoric in light of human consumption. Moving the de-extinction discourse out of the realms of scientific possibility and conservation into niche gastronomic production foregrounds the contemporary consumptive capitalist impulse that continues to contribute to species extinction. Moreover, by professing their desire to consume a future de-extinct species, participants become implicated in the flow of capital intertwined with the Anthropocene. If scientists are successful in their efforts to undo thousands of years of human action that contributed to extinction, and the Woolly Mammoth, Aurochs, and Pyrenean Ibex reappear, “will they have a place on deli shelves?” [30] With the inclusion of samples of “Certified De-Extinct Habitat,” De-extinction Deli also prompts questions of the resources necessary to maintain possible populations of Mammoths and Aurochs. Will the future ecological system be able to support any de-extinct species, particularly in light of currently disappearing habitats that are a major cause of the current uptick in loss of animal species? Might market demand for these new culinary delicacies result in destruction of other species’ habitat, reminiscent of the domination of cattle production within the United States, a major contributor to a number of ecological challenges, including water scarcity and air pollution? In its future-oriented speculative form, the De-extinction Deli both educates participants and complicates the discourse of de-extinction by bringing in questions of capital, consumption, and consumers. The Deli made another appearance several years after its debut as De-extinction Deli (To Go) inside London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. All of the components of the original market stand remained, with the addition of another interactive piece. Visitors could choose to write and mail a postcard to researchers within the de-extinction field. The postcards featured images from the Deli’s butcher paper infographics and photographs of hypothetical dishes made with de-extinct species: the Passenger Pigeon accompanied by a banner reading “See why they went so fast the first time,” the Pyrean Ibex by “(B)Raising the Dead,” and the Heath Hen by “Revive and Reheat.” [31] Visitors checked a box indicating whether they believed we should not de-extinct these species, de-extinct, or de-extinct and eat them. Additional space was provided for visitors to explain their choice. Postcards were addressed to The Long Now Foundation, Revive and Restore, the Harvard Woolly Mammoth Revival team, San Diego Frozen Zoo, and the North East Science Station. [32] The Center borrows this tactic from Stewart Brand. In 1966 Brand led a postcard campaign that targeted NASA and demanded they release satellite images recently taken of the whole Earth. Brand is now President of the Board of Directors of The Long Now Foundation, one of the organizations leading de-extinction efforts. The Center claims to parallel Brand’s “hopeful/paranoid” question by asking exactly who de-extinct species are for and why they are being revived. [33] By sending these postcards, the Center provokes both critical thinking about human consumption and direct political intervention into de-extinction discourse, facilitating an interaction between scientists and citizens, a divide that has proven difficult to bridge. The De-extinction Deli uses present culinary practices to interrogate the possibilities for de-extinct species in global food systems. As a speculative performance, the Deli entails hypothetical rather than actual consumption, projecting a gustatory future from the actualities of the present. Although each of the future specialties at the De-extinction Deli is hypothetical, the performance interrogates the possible act of consuming them: the ethical, social, scientific, and political ramifications at the intersection of de-extinction and consumption. Through De-extinction Deli , in the absence of actual eating of food, Center artists and Deli visitors enact critical thought on the practice and meaning of human food systems. In light of the ecological changes we are currently witnessing, what will sitting down to dinner in the Anthropocene look like? Coming to the Table: The Planetary Sculpture Supper Club The Center’s recurring performance installation The Planetary Sculpture Supper Club first convened in July 2011, in Portland, Oregon. Center artists collaborated with Special Snowflake Supper Club and Gorilla Meats Co. to create an eight-course meal designed to point toward the numerous ways that humans sculpt the planet and the biosphere. Since its debut, the Supper Club has been convened in Bangalore, India (2011); Leiden, Netherlands (2012); Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (2013); Portland, Oregon (2013); Lisbon, Portugal (2013). Although the menus featured at each performance vary, the questions the Center claims guide their design inspire all the meetings of the Supper Club : “What preferences, constraints, biases or assumptions determine the genomes that comprise our food system? Which food system? How big is it? What role should individuals, communities, governments, or businesses have in determining the genomes that make up our food systems and ecological-systems?” [34] Reminiscent of De-extinction Deli’s butcher paper infographics, the menus and placemats given to participants of the Supper Clubs explain the ingredients of each dish and, perhaps more importantly, the culinary and scientific discourses they are imbricated in. At some meetings of the Supper Club Center artists (including Zach Denfeld in his ubiquitous apron) guide diners through their experience of the meal as a supplement to the detailed menus also provided. As explained on the Planetary Sculpture Supper Club placemat, these dinners are “an opportunity to explore the co-evolution of gastronomy and larger ecological, technological and political systems.” [35] Venues for the Supper Club have included museum spaces, festivals, dining halls, and pop up restaurants. No matter the venue, each convening of the Supper Club has a similar dramaturgy: participants sharing a meal around one or several large tables in a communal experience. I will focus on the 2013 performance at Pittsburgh’s Center for PostNatural History. The supper was held within the Exhibit Hall at a large table placed amidst the Center for PostNatural History’s collection of photographs, taxidermic animals, and other ephemera cataloguing humanity’s various interventions into the natural world. [36] Like each Planetary Sculpture Supper Club menu, the Pittsburgh menu was designed to reveal attitudes toward food and to lay bare the often invisible ways that scientists, farmers, and consumers have altered the genomes of our food. Center artists worked with students from Richard Pell’s PostNatural Art Studio at Carnegie Mellon University to design the following menu: Apéritif: Three Milks: Alive, Dead & Resurrected Tasting Flight : A Selection of Five Sugars Amuse bouche: Invisible: Root Vegetable Stew with Waxworm Roux, Imposter: Lumpia ‘Wax Moth’ atop a Honey-Chile Sauce, Immaculate: Waxworm Soft Shell Taco with Chile Marrón Main: Producer: Seaweed Salad, Primary Consumer: Boiled Shrimp Tossed in an Old Bay Blend, Secondary Consumer: Pan-Fried Catfish, Secondary Consumer: Seared Lemon-Pepper Pike, Tertiary Consumer: Blackened Alligator in a Citrus Honey Sauce Digestif: Frackfluid and Baileys Dessert : Lemon Curd, Avocado & Sour Cream Tartlet served with a Miracle Berry. [37] Through the act of consuming these dishes, coupled with the pedagogical tool of the menus, the Center strives to recast humans as “agents of selection,” revealing the ways in which food choices, even on an individual level, can impact global ecology. Whereas the De-extinction Deli performed the possibility of the new culinary specialty of de-extinct species in the absence of any actual consumption of food, the Supper Club performs a speculative gastronomy by reassembling actual ingredients in new combinations. None of the ingredients here are hypothetical. Instead, via techniques of cognitive estrangement in which familiar foodstuffs are reshaped via strange, unusual culinary techniques, the Center aims to provoke diners to see themselves as a part of a global ecological system, rather than outside or superior to it. The Center takes advantage of a recent trend in high-end dining, an intense focus on the scenography and dramaturgy of the dining experience. As Joshua Abrams explains, “few encounters are simultaneously as intimate and as social as eating.” Because they “[draw] focus to taste through a Brechtian process of making-strange alongside a conscious engagement with the visual arts of design,” chefs challenge diners to actively engage with their experience of eating and reconsider what it really means to fulfill a biological need as basic as eating in the Anthropocene. [38] The scenography of the Pittsburgh Supper Club in particular contributes to the kind of estranging effect that Abrams identifies. It is precisely this estrangement that the Center deploys to provoke questions about humanity’s role in the global food system through this performance. The meal takes place among a plethora of ephemera that represent how humanity has changed the natural world. One of the Center for PostNatural History’s primary specimens, for example, is the taxidermic body of a BioSteel goat genetically modified to produce spider silk in its milk for the purpose of manufacturing pharmaceuticals. This mise-en-scène, by foregrounding the degree of human action in the biosphere, will hopefully spark a similar interrogation of the courses being served. The meal’s second course particularly reflects the Center’s focus on food changes on a molecular scale. A tasting flight of five sugars, this course pairs the natural sweetener sucrose, derived from plants like sugar cane, with the artificially created aspartame, sucralose, and saccharin. Each of these substances is created by molecular manipulation within scientific laboratories. Tasting them alongside naturally derived sucrose ideally forces consideration of how scientific technology is changing our food, not only on the visible scale of which varieties of vegetable are available year-round, but also on the invisible, molecular level. The tasting presentation includes the brand names under which these substances can be found in grocery stores (Sweet’N Low, Equal, Splenda, Truvia), recognizing the role that capitalist free markets play in this food system. As the Pittsburgh Supper Club ’s scenography highlights humans’ interventions in the food system on a molecular scale, some of the dishes themselves prompt diners to recognize how they are interwoven into the macrocosm of the planetary ecological system. By creating the food chain, the Pittsburgh meal’s main course facilitates the self-recognition the Center calls for, accepting the impact of our food choices on the global ecosystem: “ Producer : Seaweed Salad, Primary Consumer : Boiled Shrimp Tossed in an Old Bay Blend, Secondary Consumer : Pan-Fried Catfish, Secondary Consumer : Seared Lemon-Pepper Pike, Tertiary Consumer : Blackened Alligator in a Citrus Honey Sauce.” [39] This course itself encapsulates the structure of the food chain into a single plate, reinforced by its description on the menu. Beginning with the producer species, in this case seaweed, the course follows the chain of links between producer and consumer species. A culinary microcosm of the food web, the synthesis of seaweed, shrimp, catfish, pike, and alligator within a single course is a gastronomic manifestation of the macrocosmic ecological system. The links of the food chain are revealed through the practice of cooking and underlined by the explanation of the course on the menu. In the act of consuming this course, producer and consumer species alike, the human participant becomes the quaternary consumer, the apex predator. I argue that participants’ consumption of this course, accompanied by the menu description that underscores the ecological connections between these particular species as part of the food web, is an exercise in “species thinking.” Dipesh Chakrabarty aligns species thinking with deep history, recognizing that as a particular kind of species, humans, “in the process of dominating other species, acquire the status of a geologic force.” [40] By positioning humans as species in relation to others, the Pittsburgh Supper Club, and the main course in particular, facilitates species thinking. Through the consumption of all of the links in this particular food chain the diner’s place in it becomes clear: seaweed->shrimp->catfish->pike->alligator->human. At the same time, other courses in the Supper Club highlight the disproportionate impact humans as a species have on the biosphere. Humans are both like other species (they are part of the food chain) and not like other species (they exercise massive influence at all levels of the biosphere). Bruno Latour describes this particular condition of the Anthropocene: “micro- and macrocosm are now literally and not simply symbolically connected.” [41] The ecosystem of the seaweed plant which composes the Supper Club’s Seaweed Salad no longer simply contains its habitat and consumers—shrimp, catfish, pike, alligator. Now the economic pressures of the global seafood industry, market demand, environmental activists, and governmental regulatory policies are part of that ecosystem. In this particular dish, capitalism shows itself in the trademarked Old Bay Seasoning, a blend of seafood seasoning manufactured by Fortune 1000 company McCormick & Company. As captured by this particular dish, the realm of human action does not sit above or outside of ecological systems. Instead, human tastes and choices, both on the individual and corporate scale, are entangled within the ecological structures of the food chain. The Center underscores these connections through the dinner’s menus and placemats, and the artists’ presence at the event. By recasting meals in this way, the Center prompts questions central to ecological change: how do humans, as individuals and species, influence the genomes of the global food system? Once this question is considered, diners can then begin to determine whether their roles are effective for the continued survival of the global ecosystem, or not. Through the microcosm of the dinner table, Planetary Sculpture Supper Club interrogates food systems on both the micro and the macro scale, from the minutiae of sugar molecules to the intricacies of the food chain. As an exercise in species thinking, participants in the Planetary Sculpture Supper Club might reconceptualize themselves as agents of selection that are part of the food chain, not outside of it. Both De-extinction Deli and The Planetary Sculpture Supper Club take on the politics of human food systems through speculative performances, as practices of consumption and culinary choice have played a central role in the ecological change that marks the Anthropocene. In the Center’s particular speculative style, food can also become a tactic to intervene in the discourse of climate change. Tasting Smog In their 2011 Smog Tasting project, Center artists took culinary techniques out of the kitchen, making egg meringues in areas with high air pollution. Center artists Zack Denfeld and Catherine Kramer were on location in Bangalore, India, when they were inspired by Harold McGee’s seminal culinary book On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. McGee describes meringues, a light dessert made from beaten egg whites and sugar, as up to ninety percent air. Any particulate matter hovering in the air becomes trapped inside the meringue. Armed with egg whites and whisks, Center artists went out into the streets of Bangalore and whipped up meringues flavored with the air pollution from several locations around the city. In 2015, the Center built a Smog Synthesizer, an “experimental food cart” that used scientific techniques to recreate the air pollution from a number of cities and times to infuse them into meringues. Scientists often replicate the atmospheres of different locations within the lab for research purposes. This process is achieved by injecting precursor chemicals into a chamber and exposing them to UV light. The Smog Synthesizer food cart features several such chambers. By whipping the egg whites into a meringue within them, the manufactured air becomes infused into the dessert. With support from the Finnish Cultural Institute and the New Museum’s IDEA CITY festival, this cart debuted at the 2015 meeting of the World Health Organization in Geneva, followed by an appearance on New York City streets for the Ideas City Festival. Center artists, with collaborator Nicole Twilley of Edible Geography, recreated a London peasouper, a 1950s Los Angeles photochemical smog, and present-day Atlanta under an air quality warning. Each of these smogs has a particular chemical makeup as well as contemporary resonances as they have come to represent particular types or genres of pollution that scientists use to categorize air quality. The London fog, with a high sulfur content, is quite common in present day Beijing, and the Los Angeles smog resembles the air quality of contemporary Mexico City. [42] Center artists took the Smog Synthesizer cart out onto New York City streets and served up these three unique meringues to festival-goers and passersby. Here, rather than performing a speculative future of food, the Center deploys a gastronomic device, the egg meringue, as a tactic in an act of speculation. What if we ate air pollutants instead of breathing them? Would there be further action to ameliorate the effects of air pollution? Via the culinary vehicle of eggs, air, and sugar, in Smog Tasting the Center makes visible the complex and often invisible consequence of major global industry. Through the whipped eggs and sugar, the hyperobject of air pollution is captured and tasted. Smog Tasting opens up the space in which the hyperobject can be seen, thought, experienced, and tasted. The relationship between the “aesthetic properties” of the meringues and the air, to use Morton’s term, captures the hyperobject, making it intelligible to human participants. The most common reaction that people participating in the smog tasting cart performance have had, according to Center co-founder Zack Denfeld, has been a questioning one: are the meringues safe to eat? He responds by asking whether it is safe to breathe. [43] Because the medium of air is largely invisible, and the hyperobject of climate change difficult to grasp, the question of whether the air is safe becomes obscured in daily life. The properties of the meringue, its composition as ninety percent air, renders it an aesthetic object capable of gesturing toward the hyperobject that is climate change. As a bodily function, breathing is largely unconscious, automatically controlled and regulated by the brain. Eating, however, is a conscious act. Smog meringues remove pollution from the air, the medium of the unconscious physical process of breathing, and infuse it into a consumable object, revealing the pervasiveness of air pollution through the act of eating. And through the performative action of consuming a smog meringue participants taste the consequences of climate change. This performance in particular takes on a DIY flavor. On their website the Center encourages students or community groups to use egg meringues to capture the air quality in their own environs. The materials necessary to create a smog meringue are readily accessible: eggs, sugar, bowl, whisk, oven, and polluted air. Hypothetically, anyone could hypothetically create their own smog meringues. The batter can be tested for its pollutants and then mobilized as a sort of “Trojan treat.” By mailing the confection to politicians and business magnates, the smog meringues can secret the consequences of air pollution to those bearing more responsibility for climate change, or with more power to fight it. [44] The Center hopes that the gustatory experience of tasting smog can spur critical self-examination on the part of those in power. By recreating location-specific air outside of their original contexts in the Smog Tasting Cart, the Center also performs a speculative geography, asking what if the air in New York or Geneva was as polluted as the London peasouper? This speculative geography reveals one of the most complicated aspects of the Anthropocene: climate change is simultaneously local and global. While its causes are tied to global economic systems, and its effects are entwined within the global ecosystem, the consequences of these massive environmental changes are not distributed equally across the world’s locations or populations. As major metropolitan centers both Geneva and New York City have their own issues with pollution. State and national governments monitor air quality daily and will issue warnings about traveling outside. Consuming an egg meringue with the taste of other cities’ air pollution draws attention to local air quality as well as necessitates consideration of the states of other, more distant, locales. The Smog Tasting Cart collapses the local and global, gesturing toward a critical pitfall in the idea of the Anthropocene that must be addressed in the pursuit of ecological justice and any politics for the Anthropocene: unequal distribution of effects and responsibility for climate change. The ecological and economic consequences of the pervasion of capital into nature, of which air pollution is just one example, are unequally distributed to lower-income populations. Bringing the air quality of Mexico City to New York City via the vehicle of an egg meringue lays bare the sometimes-invisible network of capital, in this instance between the United States and Mexico, making visible its ecological effects. Recreating the air from one locality to another provokes the question of whether it is safe for the people of Atlanta, Beijing, and Mexico City to breathe as well. Regardless of whether the International Union of Geological Sciences decides to officially declare that we are living in the epoch of the Anthropocene (as of this writing that designation has not been officially made), the realities of massive ecological change cannot be denied. In Bonneuil and Fressoz’s words, “we have passed the exit gate from the Holocene. We have reached a threshold.” [45] Many of the changes we are currently witnessing are potentially irreversible. The Arctic ice is melting. Species are disappearing, whether or not scientists might resurrect them, along with their habitats. Fossil fuel extraction continues largely unabated. The question becomes, then, how to survive in the Anthropocene, and what a politics for this new era looks like. While a complicated and complex thing that is difficult to apprehend and comprehend, like climate change or quantum physics, this politics begins with thinking of or speculating about alternative ways of being. Or, in the case of the Center for Genomic Gastronomy, alternative ways of eating. Their subversive use of culinary customs first implicates audiences in their participation within flows of capital. By playing with possible food futures in De-extinction Deli, revealing the enmeshment of the human species within the food web in Planetary Sculpture Supper Club, and discovering what air pollution tastes like in Smog Tasting , the Center’s performances expose their participants’ place within global systems so that they might renegotiate that place in the future. Their speculative performances encapsulate a multiplicity of possible food futures, twisting existing culinary practices to project different ways of seeing the connectivity, the mesh, of global ecology. Not simply an intellectual exercise, not just thinking of interconnectedness, but an embodied practice of species thinking that opens up critical questions of how humans and nonhumans alike might survive the Anthropocene. In 1973, prolific science fiction novelist Ursula K. Le Guin urged the need for more speculative cultural production, because “an improbable and unmanageable world is going to produce an improbable and hypothetical art. At this point realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.” [46] The Anthropocene is nothing if not improbable and unmanageable. Speculative performances, like those created by the Center for Genomic Gastronomy, can not only make sense of the immensity that is global ecological change, in all its manifestations, but also point the way toward a politics of the Anthropocene. And perhaps, as Donna Haraway has written, “make possible partial and robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperation and recomposition.” [47] By simultaneously encapsulating anti-capitalist and species thinking, as a move toward a politics for the Anthropocene, performance can begin that process of recomposition. References [1] “About,” The Center for Genomic Gastronomy , accessed December 2, 2016, http://genomicgastronomy.com/about/. [2] Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 2. [3] Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2015), 4. [4] Ibid., 70-1. [5] Both Jason W. Moore and Donna Haraway have developed this term. See Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159-165; and Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism , ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016). [6] Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 212. [7] Ibid., 213. [8] Bruno Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto,’” New Literary History 41 (2010): 476. [9] Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy , trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 53. [10] Purdy, After Nature, 2-3. [11] Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 10. [12] Ibid. , 5. [13] Ibid., 7. [14] Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1. [15] Lisa Chase and Vern Grubinger, Food, Farms, and Community: Exploring Food Systems (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2014), 1. [16] See Anthony Winson, The Industrial Diet: The Degradation of Food and the Struggle for Healthy Eating (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013). [17] G. BeVier, “Global Food Systems: Feeding the World,” Reproduction in Domestic Animals 47, suppl. 4 (2012): 77. [18] Mario Herrero, et. al., “Biomass use, production, feed efficiencies, and greenhouse gas emissions from global livestock systems,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States 110, no. 52 (December 24, 2013): 20,888. [19] See Bonneuil and Fressoz, Shock of the Anthropocene , 24. [20] Eduardo Mendieta, “Globalization, Cosmopolitics, Decoloniality: Politics for/of the Anthropocene,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Political Philosophy, ed. Andrew Fiala (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 217, emphasis mine. [21] Ibid., 217-8. [22] Gerald Alva Miller Jr., Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 3, 15. [23] Ibid., 16. [24] L. Timmel Duchamp, “How to Do Things with Ideas,” in Sci Fi in the Mind’s Eye: Reading Science through Science Fiction , ed. Margret Grebowicz (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 2007), 69. [25] “De-extinction Deli,” The Center for Genomic Gastronomy, access November 23, 2016, http://genomicgastronomy.com/work/2013-2/deli/. [26] See http://reviverestore.org. [27] Josh Donlan, “De-extinction in a crisis discipline.” Frontiers of Biogeography 6, no.1 (2014): 27. [28] Ashley Dawson, Extinction: A Radical History (New York: OR Books, 2016), 34-5. [29] Carrington, Damian. “Earth has lost half of its wildlife in the last 40 years, says WWF.” The Guardian . September 30, 2014. [30] “De-extinction Deli.” [31] “De-extinction Deli (To Go),” The Center for Genomic Gastronomy, accessed January 2, 2017, http://genomicgastronomy.com/work/2016-2/de-extinction-deli-to-go/. [32] Each of these organizations participates in the de-extinction movement in some way. Under the auspices of The Long Now Foundation, Revive and Restore contributes to biodiversity and conservation specifically through genetic rescue of species. The Northeast Science Station, led by director Sergey Zimov, oversees the Pleistocene Park, a conservation habitat for species like reindeer and bison. Zimov hopes to eventually populate this area with revived Woolly Mammoths (see http://www.pleistocenepark.ru/en/). The San Diego Frozen Zoo, part of the Beckman Center for Conservation Research, houses over 10,000 different samples of genetic material from approximately 1,000 species groups. The True Nature Foundation, a loosely associated group of scientists and local research groups, is spearheading the project to de-extinct the Aurochs out of their office in The Netherlands. [33] “De-extinction Deli (To Go).” [34] “Planetary Sculpture Supper Club: Portland,” The Center for Genomic Gastronomy, accessed November 30, 2016, http://genomicgastronomy.com/work/2011-2/supper-club/. [35] “PSSC: Dublin Grow Your Own,” The Center for Genomic Gastronomy, accessed January 2, 2017, http://genomicgastronomy.com/work/2013-2/pssc-dublin-grow-your-own/. [36] See http://postnatural.org. [37] “Planetary Sculpture Supper Club: Pittsburgh,” The Center for Genomic Gastronomy, accessed November 30, 2016, http://genomicgastronomy.com/work/2013-2/planetary-sculpture-supper-club-pittsburgh/. [38] Joshua Abrams, “Mise en Plate: The Scenographic Imagination and the Contemporary Restaurant,” Performance Research 18, no. 3 (2013): 11. [39] “Planetary Sculpture Supper Club: Pittsburgh,” emphasis mine. [40] Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 214. [41] Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto,’” 481. [42] Nicola Twilley, “Smog Meringues,” Edible Geography: Thinking Through Food, May 30, 2015, http://www.ediblegeography.com/smog-meringues/. [43] Ibid. [44] “Smog Tasting,” The Center for Genomic Gastronomy, accessed December 8, 2016, http://genomicgastronomy.com/work/2011-2/smog-tasting/. [45] Bonneuil and Fressoz, Shock of the Anthropocene, xiii. [46] Ursula K. Le Guin, “1973 National Book Award Acceptance Remarks” (speech, New York City, April 12, 1973), K.U. Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction, http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/Ursula-K-Le-Guin_NationalBookAward-Speech_1973.pdf. [47] Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene,” 160. Footnotes About The Author(s) SHELBY BREWSTER is a doctoral student in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and a 2015-16 Provost Humanities Fellow Predoctoral Fellow. She is interested in science and technology studies, digital performance, and science fiction studies. She has presented work at ATHE, ASTR, CATR, and Comparative Drama. Her current research explores how theatre and performance artists use speculative strategies, usually confined to science fiction literature, to critique the relationship between humans and their environments, as well as to imagine new ways of being human. Guest Editor for Special Issue: Bruce McConachie Editorial Board for Special Issue: Meredith Conti Allan Davis John Fletcher Ju Yon Kim Scott Magelssen Julia Walker Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Acting in the Academy: The history of professional actor training in US higher education. Peter Zazzali. London, New York: Routledge, 2016; Pp. 219. 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