Search Results

Donatella Galella Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Donatella Galella By Published on May 21, 2022 Download Article as PDF “Look, this country’s a disaster in so many ways,” actor Raymond J. Lee belts with ferocity in David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori’s 2019 musical Soft Powe r. [1] Yes! At the concert celebration of the Kennedy Center’s fiftieth anniversary in 2021, he softened, “Look, this country’s still hurting in so many ways.” [2] Yes . With increased public attention to rhetorical and physical attacks against Asians and Asian Americans, works like Soft Power have received more attention, and this very issue on “Asian American Dramaturgies” has felt more urgent. But does the price of admission to the stage and legibility to the public need to be a spectacularization of recent anti-Asian violence? As #StopAAPIHate trended on social media, it was exhilarating and exhausting to witness some colleagues come into consciousness and care about the existence of systemic anti-Asian racism, given how histories of colonization, incarceration, and assimilation haunt Asian Americans. Still, Lee delivers his next line in Soft Power with hope held over a long note, “But we have the power to change.” [3] Asian American theatre and Asian Americanist thinking offer criticality and possibility. As Dorinne Kondo writes in Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity , “Dramaturgical critique deploys research, theory, and scholarship for reparative ends.” [4] Ambivalence remains, because even as representation matters, visibility politics must go beyond the surface. In this special issue, the first that the Journal of American Drama and Theatre has dedicated to Asian American theatre and performance, I asked, “What can Asian American dramaturgies do? What can we do with Asian American dramaturgies?” The following pieces offer a range of answers. Inspired by Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather Nathans’s co-edited 2021 special issue “Milestones in Black Theatre,” “Asian American Dramaturgies” consists of short pieces from interviews with artists to interventions in academia. To set the stage, the issue begins with a roundtable of Dorinne Kondo, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Sean Metzger, Karen Shimakawa, and myself reflecting on the field of Asian American theatre and performance studies. The following dramaturgical readings give much-needed attention to the politics of whiteness and possibilities of music and history in Young Jean Lee’s and Lauren Yee’s plays (Christine Mok, Jennifer Goodlander, and Kristin Leahy with Joseph Ngo). A photo essay and interviews put the spotlight on major Asian American theatrical institutions and on Hawaiian artistic-political epistemologies (Roger Tang, Jenna Gerdsen, and Baron Kelly). kt shorb, Al Evangelista, and Amy Mihyang Ginther consider their own artistry and writing as putting Asian American dramaturgies into practice from strategies of re-appropriation to refusal and deprivation. Bindi Kang and Daphne Lei provide inside looks into their crucial dramaturgical work on recent Asian American theatrical productions. In the final piece, Ariel Nereson brings readers back to Kondo and Yee and invites us all to teach Asian American dramaturgies. Including this introduction, these fifteen contributions join the past fifteen articles that JADT has published with some engagement of Asian American theatre and performance, from analyses of US dramas performed in Asian countries to meta-critiques of canonical Asian American plays in the US theatre landscape. I share this bibliography in order of publication: Brian Richardson, “Genre, Transgression, and the Struggle for (Self) Representation in U.S. Ethnic Drama,” JADT 8, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 1-18. Hsieh-Chen Lin, “Staging Orientalia: Dangerous ‘Authenticity’ in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly ,” JADT 9, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 26-35. Robert Ji-Song Ku, “‘Beware of Tourists if You Look Chinese’ and Other Survival Tactics in the American Theatre: The Asian(cy) of Display in Frank Chin’s The Year of the Dragon ,” JADT 11, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 78-92. Byungho Han, “Korean Productions of A Streetcar Named Desire ,” JADT 13, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 36-51. Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, “Listening with the Third Ear: Kabuki, Bharata Natyam and the National Theatre of the Deaf,” JADT 14, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 35-43. Dan Kwong, “An American Asian in Thailand,” JADT 14, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 44-54. Dan Balcazo, “A Different Drum: David Henry Hwang’s Musical ‘Revisal’ of Flower Drum Song ,” JADT 15, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 71-83. Jon D. Rossini, “From M. Butterfly to Bondage : David Henry Hwang’s Fantasies of Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Gender,” JADT 18, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 55-76. John S. Bak, “Long Dong and Other Phallic Tropes in Hwang’s M. Butterfly ,” JADT 21, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 71-82. Ashis Sengupta, “‘Coming Out of the Closet’: Re-reading The Boys in the Band and On a Muggy Night in Mumbai ,” JADT 22, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 33-50. Kee-Yoon Nahm, “Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men ,” JADT 27, no. 2 (Spring 2015), https://jadtjournal.org/2015/04/24/visibly-white-realism-and-race-in-appropriate-and-straight-white-men/ . Wu Wenquan, Chen Li, and Zhu Qinjuan, “Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China,” JADT 27, no. 3 (Fall 2015), https://jadtjournal.org/2015/11/20/arthur-miller/ . Esther Kim Lee, “Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance,” JADT 28, no. 1 (Winter 2016), https://jadtjournal.org/2016/03/23/strangers-onstage-asia-america-theatre-and-performance/ . Stephen Hong Sohn, “Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew’s Wonderland ,” JADT 29, no. 1 (Fall 2016/Winter 2017), https://jadtjournal.org/2016/12/17/calculated-cacophonies-the-queer-asian-american-family-and-the-nonmusical-musical-in-chay-yews-wonderland/ . Arnab Banerji, “Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018,” JADT 32, no. 2 (Spring 2020), https://jadtjournal.org/2020/05/20/finding-home-in-the-world-stage-critical-creative-citizenship-and-the-13th-south-asian-theatre-festival-2018/ . I offer warm thanks to my comrades who made this special issue possible. The guest editorial board members Arnab Banerji, Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Broderick Chow, Chris A. Eng, Esther Kim Lee, Sean Metzger, Christine Mok, and Stephen Sohn offered careful feedback to the authors and encouraging words, emojis, and punctuation marks to me. Managing Editors Dahye Lee and Emily Furlich communicated clearly and attended well to details. Co-Editors Jim Wilson and Naomi J. Stubbs patiently answered my questions. Book Review Editor Maya Roth thoughtfully reached out and curated her section to engage with our issue’s theme. Finally, I appreciate the American Theatre and Drama Society membership that elected me, enabling me to propose and edit this special issue. Asian American dramaturgies have unfinished work to do, not for mere inclusion but for radical shifts in telling stories, redistributing resources, and knowing differently. As the author-character DHH concludes in Soft Power with fragile optimism, “Good fortune will follow. If we somehow survive,” the ensemble intones, “In America.” [5] References [1] Play and lyrics by David Henry Hwang, music and additional lyrics by Jeanine Tesori, “Soft Power,” Public Theater Opening Night Draft, 11 October 2019, 92. [2] Reynaldi Lindner Lolong, “Democracy,” YouTube video, 2 October 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKdj3jQTatc (accessed 30 April 2022). [3] Hwang and Tesori, 92. [4] Dorinne Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance and the Work of Creativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 197. [5] Hwang and Tesori, 93. Footnotes About The Author(s) Donatella Galella is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside. She researches how systemic racism shapes contemporary American theatre from the ways white institutions capitalize on blackness to the persistence of yellowface in musicals. Her essays have been published in journals including Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and books including Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture, and Identity and Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Her book America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington DC’s Arena Stage (University of Iowa Press) was an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research and a Finalist for the 2020 Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

John Bray Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl John Bray By Published on June 12, 2020 Download Article as PDF The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl. Amy Muse. London: Methuen Drama Critical Companion Series, 2018; Pp. 215 + xv. Amy Muse’s The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl offers an insightful reading of the works of one of the U.S.’s most prolific contemporary playwrights. Since the premiere of Passion Play at Trinity Rep in 1997, Ruhl has won a number of accolades demonstrating her significance, including the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award (2003), the Fourth Freedom Forum Award from the Kennedy Center (2004), and a MacArthur Genius Award (2005). She has also twice been named a Pulitzer Finalist ( Dead Man’s Cell Phone (2005) and In the Next Room or the vibrator play (2009)). Ruhl began writing plays in Paula Vogel’s dramatic writing course at Brown in which she wrote Dog Play, where she was able to unpack her grief at having lost her father while making the focalizer of her play the family dog (“played by a person wearing a dog mask and an apron”) (xi). Thus, Muse situates Ruhl with the “artist-thinkers” that William Demastes labels the “new alchemists,” in Muse’s words, the “artists and scientists who are re-enchanting the world through a grounding in the world” (xiii). For Muse, Ruhl’s gift of re-enchantment lies in her ability to weave works that blend the empirical and the spiritual. While not the first critical book on Ruhl (that honor belongs to James Al-Shamma’s Sarah Ruhl: A Critical Study of the Plays , published by McFarland & Co. in 2011), The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl presents an important addition to critical examinations of Ruhl’s plays, even if her analysis could sometimes go further. In the Preface, Muse discusses why she structures the book not chronologically, but according to Ruhl’s “artistic and ethical concerns” (xv). Ruhl’s works, Muse argues, “call for a more phenomenological than ideological mode of analysis,” thus situating Muse as a guide through the ways in which Ruhl creates modes of feeling and transcendence by inviting audiences into conversations with the stage, rather than looking at the stage as a place for detached analysis (xiv). The next four chapters are each super-titled with a quote from Ruhl, reinforcing this sense of conversation. Muse’s first chapter deals with Ruhl’s influences, as well as her adaptations of Chekhov and Woolf, in order to demonstrate how Ruhl is more interested in writing about “Moments of Being” rather than presenting realistic representations for the stage (23). In chapter two, Muse considers four of Ruhl’s plays – Eurydice , Demeter in the City , Melancholy Play, and Scenes from Court Life or the whipping boy and his prince . She reads each work to activate an interplay with “the actual and magical” resulting in plays that on the surface feel “whimsical,” but are rather “philosophical comedies that plumb the depths with a light touch” (61). Chapter three deals more directly with Sarah Ruhl’s approach to dramatic structure; here Muse demonstrates that Ruhl, much like Maria Irene Fornes, is less interested in creating characters driven by psychological objectives and more in bringing characters into a room together where their reckonings are rich with pre-Freudian defined desire. In Chapter Four, Muse situates Passion Play, The Oldest Boy, To Peter Pan on Her 70 TH Birthday, and How to Transcend a Happy Marriage with medieval Mystery Plays and plays born out of rituals. As with the Mystery Plays, Muse argues, these works of Ruhl’s have less to do with preaching morality and serve better as invitations to experiences that are holy and invisible. Each of these four chapters ends with a “Coda,” rather than a conclusion, evoking the musicality of Ruhl’s plays. For Chapter Five, Muse departs from the layout of previous chapters and interviews two artists who are well acquainted with Ruhl’s works: Sarah Rasmussen and Hayley Finn. Rasmussen is the Artistic Director of the Jungle Theatre in Minneapolis and served as assistant director for the Broadway production of In the Next Room or the vibrator play . Finn is the Associate Artistic Director of the Playwrights Center of Minneapolis and a former classmate of Ruhl’s. She directed the first workshop production of Eurydice (129, 131). One resonant moment arises when Rasmussen describes how her childhood play impacted her views of directing: “I was entranced by how a small, made up story can sound out larger truths in our lives” (qtd. 135). Rasmussen’s notions of childhood make-believe feeds well into the sense of wonder, myth, and staging of the invisible truths that guide Ruhl’s plays. Chapter Six features three critical essays: “Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play and Contemporary Medieval Performance” by Jill Stevenson; “From Pontius Pilate to Peter Pan: Lightness in the Plays of Sarah Ruhl” by Thomas Butler; and “Arrested Dev-elopement: Myth-Understanding Father-Daughter Love in Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice” by Christina Dokou. Each essay demonstrates different paradigms for nuanced, in-depth discussion of Ruhl’s plays. Muse closes with an Afterword, “I Had Hoped to Give Them Pleasure,” in which she considers how writing this book may be a little premature; after all, Ruhl is a midcareer writer who will likely continue having a rich and lustrous career. In the final paragraph, Muse avers that Ruhl’s plays “are not so much about love, intimacy, communion, and transcendence as they are vehicles which the audience and the theater makers experience these pleasurable states” (177). Following the Afterword, the book includes a Chronology of major milestones in Ruhl’s personal and professional life. Muse’s writing is infectious. It is much like listening to a die-hard fan unpack their thoughts and feelings and getting swept up in their unabashed love. The only drawback is that, at times, Muse ignores possibilities for further inquiry by foregrounding summaries of Ruhl’s plays rather than her own analysis. For example, Muse makes passing mention of criticisms of Ruhl being not political enough in her writing, and yet, Ruhl has written political plays. Indeed, as authors such as Lauren Gunderson have argued, simply writing a play can be seen as a political act given our historical moment. Nonetheless, Muse’s The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl will prove to be necessary and exciting reading for our next generation of dramatic critics and dramaturgs alike. References Footnotes About The Author(s) John Bray University of Georgia Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography Introduction: Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship “La conjura de Xinum” and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the “Toxic Mound Tours” Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Eleanor Russell Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 1 Visit Journal Homepage Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics Eleanor Russell By Published on November 6, 2019 Download Article as PDF Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics . Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017; Pp. 232. In Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics, Soyica Diggs Colbert explores how post-Civil Rights Movement cultural products and performances of blackness re-map black ontologies and histories. In an extraordinary display of interdisciplinary rigor, Diggs Colbert describes—to name only a few examples—how Toni Morrison’s “flying Africans,” George Clinton’s spaceship, Beyoncé’s “Partition”-ary (re-)entanglements with Black pasts, and acts of marching, realize the “webs of affiliation” between contemporary black performances and their revolutionary antecedents. She writes, “ Black Movements explores how artists actively engage with certain pasts and jettison others to remember, revive, and reimagine political movements that seem to have stalled” (7). “Black movements,” as such, inaugurate and name the field of relation between Black presents and Black pasts by way of articulations of black identity, subjectivity, and comportment in revolutionary performance. Diggs Colbert’s previous monograph, The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage (Cambridge, 2011) prefigures the role of discursive interplay and performer-reader engagement that is the basic premise of Black Movements. The new book extends the line of thought that the black body, through acts of repetition, can be conjured—or, importantly, erased—by discursive, spatial, and temporal realignments and points of relation that perform revolutionary potential and fervor. The book’s virtuosity lies in the navigation of a plethora of scholarly and political positions. Diggs Colbert deftly summarizes and positions herself between the Afro-pessimist/Afro-optimist debate in African-American studies. In particular, she deploys ideas of opacity and elision toward the theorization of black performance in terms of supplementarity and revolutionary excess. Though drawing from Joseph Roach’s work on surrogation and Butlerian performativity, as well as many other scholars, the work’s greatest strength lies in Diggs Colbert’s treatment of her case studies as theories and/or theorists in their own right rather than merely reflections of pre-determined scholarly positions. Toni Morrisons’s ellipses, for example, make audible the revolutionary capacities of being silenced, functioning as a kind of praxis; Black Movements suggests the duty of the scholar, then, is to articulate how that theory always-already plays out in black life and, in Morrison’s case, via the performativity of text. In chapter one, Diggs Colbert argues that the ellipses empower the reader to become an archivist, interpreter, and writer; as such, just as the characters carve out complex and agentive identities and modes of relation in Beloved, for example, so does the reader, in the Morrison-encouraged expansion of what the act of reading includes. The conceptual breadth and sheer variety of case studies considered in terms of performance type and genre is a strength. This range makes it possible for Diggs Colbert to account for the idiosyncracy, hybridity, and, ultimately, opacity at the heart of black performance —and of black life and politics in performance. The consequence of this variety, however, is that it sometimes leads to a lack of clarity or impact. Specifically, the chapter on marching shows a prodigious command of how the spatial reorganization and mass comportment of, in one example, the Silent Parade in New York City in 1917 works. Diggs Colbert remarks on how the act of marching configured black bodies, costume, and accumulation in order to take up space and make “audible,” per se, the experience of being silenced. The same is true for Diggs Colbert’s discussion about the March on Washington in 1963: “Harnessing comportment in service of social reorganization clarifies how imagination and embodied action work together to shape political spheres as physical locations and ideologies” (154). Yet considering, as she often references, how foundational the publicity of Emmett Till’s brutal murder in 1955 was to the inauguration of the Civil Rights Movement and —the murder, famously, a reaction to Till allegedly whistling at a white woman—the audibly sonic (as opposed to performative silence) elements of anti-black racism and subsequent organizing are unexpectedly absent from this chapter. An odd omission, too, because Till’s supposed act—the whistle—and the act of marching itself in its most formal extreme—foot raised high, crash to the ground, triumphant and war-like— so loud. Obviously, silence as a performative can call attention to the ways that Till and others were literally silenced by being murdered. However, for a work of such breadth and investments in the phenomenology of black life (Fanonian citations abound, especially in the Introduction), the aural frame reads muted. Black Movements offers a conceptual, formal, and multidisciplinary approach to the spaciotemporal re-alignments forged by contemporary black movements with black pasts. In a necessary intervention, Diggs Colbert both critiques and elaborates upon critical race theory and black political radicalism in the fields of performance studies, African American studies, theatre history, and sociology. Black Movements was awarded an Honorable Mention for the Joe A. Calloway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theatre. It is a significant book, one that should be read alongside the scholarship of Saidiya Hartman, Daphne Brooks, Amber Jamilla Musser and other black feminist thinkers. Like Beyoncé reflecting back on Josephine Baker, Black Movements’ s looks to the legacies of black performance in order to imagine and build black futures. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Eleanor Russell Northwestern University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative By Published on April 8, 2021 Download Article as PDF Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative, edited by Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, presents a powerful, multifaceted record of historical and contemporary casting practices from leading American artists and scholars. The book casts an intentionally wide net, reflecting on how various communities, including Middle Eastern, Native American, African American, Latinx, as well as multilingual and disabled communities, have been impacted by the politics of casting. The book is relevant for theater artists, critics, administrators and educators of institutions that fund and produce theater. In Casting a Movement, the writers offer incisive analysis of the ways race and representation define meaning in the theatre, aiming to understand how race and racism have been reinforced and institutionalized through casting practices. Casting a Movement intentionally includes both theatre practitioners and scholars and opens with three introductory essays by Liesl Tommy, Syler, and Banks, respectively, which offer a framework and language for the subsequent 21 contributions. Reflecting on an award-filled career of directing on and off Broadway and television, Tommy underscores the importance of language in articulating social and political nuances that inform questions of casting. Syler emphasizes that “casting is inherently a political act” that is never neutral because the decision about which bodies to include already communicates information that “evokes cultural assumptions associated with skin color, gender, sexuality, and ability” (4). Banks revisits the metaphor of “the welcome table,” present in both a Spiritual and James Baldwin’s unfinished final play, as an aspiration for an inclusive space (both physical and ideational) in which artists of various backgrounds are invited to engage in each other’s art-making. In this essay originally written in 2012, Banks interrogates such terms as “nontraditional” or “color-blind casting” that anticipate the powerful expressions of “We See You, White American Theater” (www.weseeyouwat.com ) published in 2020. Following these introductory essays, the book’s first part traces a trajectory from the language of “colorblind casting” to “color conscious casting.” Appropriately, this first part begins with Ayanna Thompson, whose writing about Shakespeare and classical productions has exposed the persistent falsity of “colorblindness” in theatre pedagogy (34). Next, Justin Emeka traces his own journey as a director: “[b]y reimagining the presence of Black and Brown life within the context of Eurocentric plays, I use theater as a tool to teach people to look for Black and Brown life where they have been trained by omission to ignore it” (47). In the third essay Brian Eugenio Herrera discusses the persistence of “whitewashing,” or the use of white actors in casting when the roles were originally written for non-white characters as a pernicious mechanism of erasure (51). In the volume’s second part, Arab-American playwright Yussef El Guindi, artistic Director Torange Yeghiazarian (Golden Thread Productions), and scholar Michael Malek Najjar consider challenges for Middle Eastern American/North African American actors in the academy, in training programs, and in the professional setting (72). As Najjar puts it in reference to August Wilson’s touchstone essay “The Ground on Which I Stand:” “Wilson’s view on African American theatre [about the pernicious effect of colorblind casting] is a helpful guide for other minoritarian theater communities” (76). Aptly, since actor Christine Bruno points out, “[d]isabled people are America’s largest minority, representing twenty-five percent of the population,” the book’s third part focuses on issues of casting and disability. Bruno, Carrie Sandahl, and Victoria Lewis consider efforts by advocacy groups on behalf of actors of color and those with disabilities (85). Sandahl makes a clarion call for those in the academic and professional theatres to take shared “responsibility for improving opportunities for theater artists along the whole pipeline”—from educational programs to the theatre, film and television industries (94). The book’s fourth part widens its perspective even further to address casting and multilingual performance, an often-neglected topic. This part, opens with a poetic rumination on storytelling and cultural ownership by playwright Caridad Svich. Next Eunice S. Ferreira and Ann Elizabeth Armstrong argue the benefits of multilingual theater for developing an audience attuned to and welcoming of difference. Reflecting the growing role of Native American theatre in the last decade, the fifth part highlights the pluralism of Native American theater voices. Ojibwe and Oneida performance artist Ty Defore (Gilzhig), echoes the previous section and offers a poem, “Journey,” that suggests paths for greater connection across diverse communities. This is an especially important chapter symbolically and ideationally for a book that calls for the imperative of intersectionality in addressing world challenges. Jean Bruce Scott and Randy Reinholz (Choctaw) discuss the evolution of the Native Voices at the Autry as a theatre that places Native narratives centrally to create “a more inclusive dialogue about what it means to be ‘American’” (147). Courtney Elkin Mohler articulates decolonial practices in contemporary Native theater. In the sixth part, the book turns to questions of stereotype in casting processes. Mei Ann Teo, for instance, acknowledges in our historic moment “a sea change” when “Asian American and Asian heritage stories are finally being told in the mainstream” (173). In powerful affirmation of intersectionality, Dorinne Kondo analyzes what she calls the “reparative creativity” of artists of color who use “multiracial collaboration and cross-racial casting” as strategies of resistance to exclusion in the theater industry and society (177). “Refusing a neat ending,” in her words, Donatella Galella sees an ongoing process of fighting for improved conditions of people of color and “cross-racial casting as a struggle over power—representation and the redistribution of roles” (191). The book’s final part reverberates with many of the themes across essays, asserting a politics of inclusion and visibility evoked by Canadian/American playwright Elaine Ávila’s title “Reaparecer” (reappear). The section ends with Priscilla Page’s essay on Collidescope: Adventures in pre- and Post-Racial America and Brandi Wilkins Catanese’s further analysis of the ongoing performance project— juxtaposing it with Daniel Banks’s working through of the welcome table. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative is a timely work whose significance goes beyond the discipline of theater to add to the national conversation on institutionalized racism. Read alongside recent political, social and artistic developments, including the Black Lives Matter movement, theatre closures precipitated by COVID-19 and the political upheavals of the Trump presidency, it remaps the field. How we want to return to theatre-making, how we will address questions of equity, diversity and inclusion in the face of persistent racism and institutionalized white supremacy are driving issues for the artist-writers in this important anthology. Erith Jaffe-Berg University of California, Riverside The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 33, Number 2 (Spring 2021) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative The Theatre of August Wilson Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Introduction to “Milestones in Black Theatre” Interviews and Afterviews on "Milestones in Black Theatre" Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Re-Imagining America and Theater: Race, Representation, and Form Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Karen Bowdre Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 3 Visit Journal Homepage Ida Wells-Barnett and Chicago’s Pekin Theatre Karen Bowdre By Published on November 16, 2014 Download Article as PDF Karen Bowdre/ Ida Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) is well known as an anti-lynching advocate and activist, but she is less well known for her involvement with the theatre. In this essay, I argue that she played an instrumental role in creating new attitudes concerning the theatre and artistic expression. She engaged in persuasion campaigns in the early twentieth century that stretched the moral boundaries African American communities placed on entertainment. In order to affect this cultural shift she sought to bring the dramatic arts to Chicago through the Pekin Theater shortly after its re-opening in March 1906. The Pekin Theater was the city’s, and one of the nation’s, first theatres owned, managed, and operated by African Americans.[1] In her artistic crusade she battled not only the biases held by middle and upper-class African Americans toward the theatre but also the religious and moral panic patronizing the theatre often brought about in these communities. Her intervention took place over fifteen years prior to Art Theatre Movement, or Little Theatre Movement, and Alain Locke’s “Steps Toward the Negro Theatre,” published in 1922. It also came a decade before W. E. B. Du Bois’s defined Black Theatre as theatrical works “about us [African Americans], by us, for us, near us.”[2] Though Wells-Barnett can be linked to uplift ideology, she disrupted uplift tenets by being a female leader with a lower class background.[3] While Wells-Barnett gained class status from her job as a journalist as well as international recognition as a reformer, her gender and her original class status (her parents were slaves and later working people), as well as her attitudes about Black leadership, complicated her “elite” position. Nevertheless, she used her voice to create new spaces for Black cultural expression. Using the chapter from Wells-Barnett’s autobiography, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, entitled, “A Negro Theater,” this essay delineates how Wells-Barnett challenged, through her words and deeds, the low opinions various African American communities held regarding the theatre. Wells-Barnett was one of the most influential African American women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[4] She was a teacher, journalist, editor, newspaper owner, anti-lynching advocate, and an activist for the social and political equality of Black Americans. Her anti-lynching crusades in the United Kingdom heightened the awareness of the crime throughout the United States and abroad, while her articles inspired African Americans to challenge racial oppression. Though born enslaved in 1862, her emancipation came when she was three years old. The premature death of her parents and youngest brother due to yellow fever in 1878 led to Wells-Barnett’s decision to leave college and become a teacher to support her family.[5] One of the first events that reflects Wells-Barnett’s refusal to willing submit to racial oppression occurred during her time as a teacher. While sitting in the ladies’ car on a train from Memphis to Woodstock, Tennessee, in 1884, the conductor demanded she move to the other car..[6] She refused on the basis that she had bought a first class ticket. When the conductor realized she would not move, he tried forcefully to remove her, and Wells-Barnett responded by biting him. The conductor then obtained assistance from a baggage man to remove her, and she got off the train refusing to remain on it in the smoking car. She then hired a lawyer and sued the railroad company. Initially, she succeeded in her suit, but, when the railroad company appealed the decision, the state Supreme Court reversed the decision. Wells-Barnett’s disappointment in the reversal was not only because of the betrayal of her initial lawyer and his retaliation against her, (for he did not appear concerned about winning the appeal and Wells-Barnett removed him from the case, and the debt generated by the court cases), but also because she hoped this ruling would extend to all African Americans.[7] In spite of this set back, she published an account of this lawsuit in the Living Way, a weekly religious newspaper.[8] This incident was demonstrative of how Wells-Barnett resisted the status quo in several areas of her life. She did not tolerate discrimination and consistently challenged the Jim Crow laws that dehumanized Black people. She documented injustice, and through her writings she hoped to go beyond delineating racial oppression in order to encourage African Americans to mobilize and demand equality. Wells-Barnett’s strong sense of self, and her belief that all African Americans should have full rights as citizens, contrasted sharply with the white sentiment towards Blacks in the South. Her writings also reflected her passion for Black Americans to experience the benefits of citizenship.[9] Another event that reflects Wells-Barnett’s morality and willingness to stand for her beliefs was between 1900 and 1901 when the pastor of the Bethel A.M.E. (African Methodist Episcopal), Reverend Abraham Lincoln Murray was accused of making inappropriate advances towards a married female member whose spouse was on the church board. After receiving promises from the one of denomination’s leaders, Bishop Abraham Grant, that Murray would be removed from his position, the Bishop acceded to the opinion of the congregation and allowed Murray to return to the pulpit. She was shocked that “such immoral conduct” was being condoned and let the Bishop know that in spite of her long attendance at the church, (married there and establish Chicago’s first black kindergarten at the church), she and her family would be leaving the church.[10] Shortly after becoming a member of her new church, Grace Presbyterian, Wells-Barnett was asked to lead the men’s Bible study. In this group, she and the young men, ranging in age from eighteen to thirty years old, examined the Scriptures and discussed ways to apply the Word to their lives. From her writings it is very clear that the Bible inspired her to take action against injustice in all of its forms. Hence, it was not surprising that her Bible study would follow in her footsteps. Disturbed by the riots in Springfield, Illinois that led to three Black men being lynched in 1908, some members from the Bible study and Wells-Barnett formed the Negro Fellowship League in order to address racial violence and discrimination.[11] These episodes make clear that Wells-Barnett’s personal convictions and her faith emboldened her to stand for what was right even if these actions did not line up with Black male leaders. Her knowledge of the Bible and her desire for justice would not allow her to follow pastors, particularly when she knew they were not living to the standard put forth in God’s word or advising members on issues where their knowledge was often limited such as the dramatic arts. The start of her anti-lynching activity occurred when a close friend and two of his associates were lynched in March 1892, the year in which the number of recorded lynchings reached an all-time high. Prior to their deaths, Wells-Barnett, like many African Americans, believed that mob violence by whites directed against both Black men and women was due to the presumed rape of white women. Since Wells-Barnett knew her friend and his partners did not commit this crime, she was motivated to question not only the death of these men but also the majority of lynchings. Through her research, she found that the only “crime” her friend and his colleagues had committed was being a business competitor to the white grocer in town. The death of her friend started a chain of events that shaped and altered her life significantly. At this time she co-owned and edited Memphis’s Black newspaper, the Free Speech and Headlight, and she wrote an editorial that refuted the charge that these men died because they were rapists. Wells-Barnett emphasized that the men owned a business that put them in competition with a white grocery store and this was the central reason for the false rape charges. She also intimated that in addition to lynchings being triggered for economic reasons, not rape, they were also the result of the discovery of consensual sexual relations between African American men and European American women. After her editorial was published, an angry white mob destroyed the newspaper office while other associates of Wells-Barnett were attacked. Thankfully, they all survived. Wells-Barnett was in New York City when the Free Speech’s office was assailed and did not return to Memphis because of the threats on her life. A month after the destructive events in May 1892, she wrote an article for the New York Age that was later published as the pamphlet Southern Horrors, her first examination of lynchings using data and interviewers from primarily white sources.[12] Her desire for African Americans to experience the rights and benefits of citizenship was not limited to the political and economic arenas. She saw the potential for creativity in the performing arts that compelled her to contest the negative attitudes some African American communities held toward the theatre. For her, the possibilities the Pekin allowed Black performers, producers, writers, musicians, and audiences were worth the battle and effort to change the viewpoint many Black communities had toward the dramatic arts. Wells-Barnett worked to create artistic spaces of independence for African Americans. As the country became more segregated and opportunities for Blacks grew more limited, she supported various outlets that encouraged Black improvement or uplift. One of these activities was the dramatic arts. Wells-Barnett was a long time “theatre bug,” and as a young woman she studied the “part of Lady Macbeth’s ‘sleepwalking scene’ for a public reading.”[13] In a chapter from her autobiography, she discussed her efforts to encourage other Blacks to attend quality African American entertainment in the Chicago area in 1906. In the early twentieth century, the stage was still considered morally dubious.[14] Her retelling of the events that culminated in the success of the Pekin Theater, indicates that she felt the dramatic arts were a part of the full range of activities, political, economic, and social, that Black people should be able to experience without bias and prejudice. After meeting Bob Cole in Buffalo, New York, where she was delivering an address, she noted, “Mr. Cole remarked that Chicago had an institution of which we ought to be proud. He spoke of Mott’s Amusement Hall in connection with this saloon, and he said the decorum of the place was what had attracted his attention, and the acts put on there he thought quite creditable.”[15] Wells-Barnett stated she had “never been to Mr. Mott’s Amusement Hall and this was the first complimentary criticism I had ever heard about it.”[16] Hearing this positive review of the amusement hall from the renowned Mr. Cole made an impression on Wells-Barnett. As part of the Cole and Johnson vaudeville team, Cole significantly influenced early Black musical theatre. The shows his company performed moved away from minstrel stereotypes and brought in talented artists who did not rely on blackface caricatures. With this endorsement, it was not surprising that when Wells-Barnett was invited to the opening of Robert Motts’s Pekin Theater. She happily obliged. Her invitation stated that Motts “had abandoned the saloon.”[17] The removal of the drinking establishment and its conversion into a theatrical space along with Cole’s recommendation were positive actions that Wells-Barnett desired to encourage. The more steps Motts took towards making the theatre a reputable place, the more Wells-Barnett believed she could commit to supporting it. Moreover, removing the alcoholic establishment from the property created an opportunity for women to attend the theatre, as good Christian women, especially since those from middle-class Black families would not patronize a business serving liquor. Wells-Barnett was excited about the new opportunities this recent establishment could provide for African Americans. She wrote, “I at once went to his place and saw Mr. Motts for the first time to my knowledge and told him that I had come to congratulate him on the change of business - that the reports I had from his place had given me many a heartache and that we, Wells-Barnett and her husband, would be very glad to cooperate with him in his new venture.”[18] Shortly after receiving the invitation, she visited Motts. Though this was her first meeting with him, in her usual forthright manner, she did not hesitate to tell him how his previous business practices aggrieved her. Her boldness in this and other endeavors demonstrated why she often proved a formidable opponent or ardent promoter. Fortunately for Motts, Wells-Barnett and her spouse assisted Motts in this unique endeavor. Motts’s business associates had not been as supportive of his new theatre venture as he had hoped. As Wells-Barnett commented, “Realizing his disappointment, I told him that if he would give me use of the place in which to have a benefit for the [Frederick] Douglass Center, I was sure I could bring to him the support he ought to have, and at the same time make some money for the center.”[19] Wells-Barnett was aware that in order for campaigns for justice or businesses to succeed, they needed support, financially and otherwise. She was also conscious that her efforts would meet with some resistance. For some in Chicago’s African American communities, Motts’s theatre would always be linked to drinking, gambling, and other unsavory activities.[20] Nevertheless, Wells-Barnett was willing to go against popular opinion to do what she felt was right. Despite Mott’s past actions, Wells-Barnett felt the theatre was a worthwhile undertaking because it would be a space for the development of African American dramatic and musical talents. However, these activities would need financial support. With her past experiences as an activist for equality and justice for Blacks, Wells-Barnett was more than capable of raising funds and obtaining new patrons for the theatre. The money gleaned from the benefit would be used by the Fredrick Douglass Center, an organization founded in 1904 by Celia Parker Woolley, a white Unitarian minister and pastor from the north side of Chicago, to assist in its operations. The Douglass Center was created to foster communication between African Americans and European Americans “to promote better race relations, remove discriminatory practices, and encourage equal opportunity.”[21] While Wells-Barnett was aware that having the second annual benefit for the Douglass Center at the Pekin Theater would raise eyebrows, she moved forward with the fund raising event confident that after seeing the theatre and enjoying the various performers at the benefit, many in Chicago’s African American communities would start to regularly visit the theatre.[22] Using her connections, Wells-Barnett called together female associates to plan the benefit. “When some of them objected, I said that now Mr. Motts was engaged in a venture of a constructive nature, I thought it our duty to forget the past and help him; that if he was willing to invest his money in something uplifting for the race we all ought to help.[23] Wells-Barnett did have a challenge in convincing her colleagues that Motts had changed. According to Wells-Barnett biographer, Mildred Thompson, Robert T. Motts was a “reputed gambling lord.”[24] In spite of his reputation, she willingly invested her time and gathered support for this enterprise. The fact that he was developing a creative, theatrical space for African Americans was exciting to her. Since one of her lifetime goals was to see the improvement of Black people from all walks of life and because Motts’s theatre would provide opportunities for African Americans performers, writers, directors, stage managers, and musicians to advance and excel in their crafts, this plan resonated deeply with her. When one of the women complained that the project was merely free publicity for Motts, Wells-Barnett stated that “I, for one, was quite willing to give him the benefit of all the advertising we could do.”[25] Her prior experiences made her very aware that enterprises often succeeded or failed based on publicity. She knew that the theatre could succeed but that the “right” publicity would be essential for this success as some potential patrons may have to be persuaded to understand the benefits. This statement also marked Wells-Barnett’s active participation in the project. Once she gained Motts’s approval of her plan, she set about to execute a successful fund-raiser. Wells-Barnett’s passion for this plan was evident as she outlined Motts’s project: “I described the beautiful little gem of a theater which he had created; told of the stock company of colored actors he had gathered together; of the Negro orchestra composed entirely of our own musicians, and how all employees from the young man in the box office were members of our race, and how proud I was to see a payroll upward of a hundred persons employed by him.[26] Her description of the theatre as a “beautiful little gem” was further evidence of her attachment to the project.[27] Whatever history had been tied to the theatre she was willing to be one of the authors of its new history. The success of this new theatre would not only aid Motts but also enrich the lives of those who enjoyed dramatic entertainment as well as the lives of the employees. African American men and women in the theatrical arts would have a venue where they could hone their skills. And, based on the success of the enterprise, the acting troupe would be able to broaden and expand because they would have a permanent residence. Additionally, Black musicians would also have the chance to increase their technical and artistic proficiency. Aside from these advantages the theatre would provide, Wells-Barnett added one more. As she remarked, “I felt that the race owed Mr. Motts a debt of gratitude for giving us a theater in which we could sit anywhere we chose without any restrictions.”[28] Being able to choose where one sat was no small thing for Black people in the early twentieth century. Jim Crow laws had stripped away the rights of African Americans and segregated them at this time, making every day a day of indignity for them. Hence, Motts providing a theatre went beyond employment opportunities and a space for artistic performance and enjoyment; it also meant freedom from unjust treatment when engaging in leisure activities. Having spaces in which African American women (and men) could exist without fear of racial oppression was critical for the development of an identity outside of societal expectations. These spaces were usually all-Black and the stage became a place where people felt there was an opportunity for self-expression. While Black entertainers could not be entirely free when they performed before European American audiences, there were fewer inhibitions when they performed for African American audiences. Actresses could portray dramatic and romantic figures – parts they were not encouraged to take on in front of majority crowds.[29] In addition to the increased freedom performers had in Black theatres, patrons had expanded freedom as well. African American audiences were not relegated to the balcony or “nigger heaven” as they would be in segregated white venues. They could choose their seats and how they would enjoy their entertainment. Gaining these options through this space is clearly one of the reasons the creation of an African American theatre was so important to Wells-Barnett. She was able to see the wonderful potential, creatively and otherwise, that this establishment could bring to Black people. Wells-Barnett’s organizational skills were well suited for theatre fund-raising. After selecting 100 women to be patronesses, the group established ticket prices. “The price of the tickets was raised from twenty-five, thirty-five, and fifty cents to $1.50 to $2.00 for box seats. Being a novel idea, it became very popular.”[30] Like any good economic strategist, Wells-Barnett knew what she could ask of her contributors. She was clearly targeting African American women of middle class or higher standing because the cost would not have been practical for other communities. The endeavor became very popular, and she attributed part of the success of the project to the creativity of her committee. Another reason for the benefit’s future success was because of the interest it generated in local churches. In addition to lobbying for spaces where African Americans could develop their artistic talents, Wells-Barnett tackled reservations Blacks may have held against the theatre on religious grounds. In her campaign to alter attitudes, she directly addressed concerns about the Pekin and its former reputation by providing the facts she knew about the establishment from her interactions with owner Robert Motts. These were the same tactics and techniques she deployed in her anti-lynching work where she was able to confront the lie of rape and other character attacks on lynching victims through her interviews with those involved in the lynching and her research on what actually triggered these murders. While some may have been intimidated to challenge church leaders, Wells-Barnett took on Chicago clergy’s myopic view of the dramatic arts through her literal battle with religious leaders because she orchestrated a benefit for the Douglass Center at the Pekin Theater. The benefit fundraising efforts proceeded smoothly until one of the local pastors heard about the event. According to Wells-Barnett, “Rev. A. J. Carey, Sr., then pastor of Bethel A.M.E. Church, preached a sermon which he prefaced by saying that members of his church had received invitations to be patronesses at the benefit at the Pekin Theater and had asked his advice. He then launched out into a denunciation of the movement, the theater, and the owner.”[31] As pastor of one of the major African American denominations, Reverend Carey was very influential in Chicago. Hence, his sermon rebuking those associated with the fundraiser may have intimidated other women. Wells-Barnett, however, was not one to shy away from a challenge. She was cognizant of the negative associations many held regarding the theatre, but she also knew that talented men, like Bob Cole, were creating art that celebrated the Black experience. She would not allow the short-sightedness of Reverend Carey and other clergy to inhibit opportunities for African American development. Moreover, Wells-Barnett was not deterred by Carey’s remarks because he had supported the previous Bethel A.M.E. pastor Abraham Lincoln Murray, who had been accused of sexual harassment. She had left Bethel A.M.E because of Murray’s actions and the fact that the church’s leadership did not remove him from his post.[32] The Pekin Theater would be a respite for Black women and men from racial oppression, provide a space for performers to further develop their artistic abilities, and for theatre-goers to experience open-seating. Undeterred by Reverend Carey, Wells-Barnett viewed the incident as positive publicity. She sarcastically observed that “Mr. Carey was serving splendidly as a press agent for the benefit. He wrote a synopsis of this sermon which he sent to every Negro newspaper on the South Side.”[33] Carey’s efforts to publicize his sermon throughout Chicago could have influenced many African Americans not approached by Wells-Barnett’s committee. Her attitude toward Carey reflected that of a woman experienced with verbal intimidation. Clearly, Reverend Carey had forgotten this woman knew how to overcome threats, verbal and otherwise, as she did in the years when she campaigned against lynching. Moreover, she did not view his attack on the benefit as being directed against her but against the theatre (and possibly it’s morally questionable owner Motts). She was also aware that Carey’s intention to derail the event would very likely not come to fruition; she had confidence that Black people would see the Pekin Theater as a chance for cultural entertainment. And she knew how to thwart Carey’s attempt to circulate his sermon through city newspapers. As a former journalist and editor, Wells-Barnett retained her connections with newspapers even after she had retired from that profession. One of those editors gave her a copy of Carey’s text. She learned that another editor from the Chicago Conservator had planned to publish the sermon.[34] At this point, Wells-Barnett’s husband, Ferdinand, assisted his wife by hiring a lawyer, Edward Wright. “Mr. Wright thereupon prepared a notice which was served upon the owner of the Conservator, the editor, and the Western Newspaper Union which printed it. The notice declared that if the article [Carey’s sermon] denouncing the benefit appeared all three would be sued for damages in the name of the center.”[35] This series of events demonstrated not only Wells-Barnett’s conceptualization of herself outside of societal expectations (Black or White), but also her skills as a strategist. Her knowledge of press operations assisted her in circumventing Carey's attack. The employment of a lawyer was clearly demonstrative of Wells-Barnett's past approaches to challenges, but ironically, her maneuvers appear to have confused her male opponents, who did not anticipate a woman acting in such a manner. Needless to say, the article was not published, but the fracas did not end there. Reverend Carey was a resilient foe and the following Sunday he "gave us another hour's denunciation from his pulpit. He read the notice which had been served on the editor, signed by Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Robert T. Motts, [and he described them as a] would-be race leader and the keeper of a low gambling dive.”[36] Carey went on to deliver another sermon at another church, Olivet Baptist, and continued his disparaging remarks. While his comments regarding Motts were not surprising, his phrase describing Wells-Barnett revealed his contempt at being challenged by a woman. Carey's attempt to disregard her multiple contributions to African American communities displayed his desperation. He was clearly not accustomed to people, especially women, disagreeing with him, and Wells-Barnett's disregard and determination to follow her own well developed morality provoked his ire. Furthermore, his attempted dismissal of Wells-Barnett was demonstrative of the sexism other Black male leaders like Carter Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois showed as well.[37] As a devout Christian and Bible teacher, Wells-Barnett knew that one should respect pastors and clergy. Nevertheless, her knowledge of the Bible, as well as her sense of self, would not allow her to blindly follow the direction of misguided leaders. She not only resisted white hegemonic notions of Black femininity, but Black male sexism as well. She occupied a unique position because though she was an influential African American female leader in Chicago in her later life, she did not conform to elitist notions of class. If she had conformed to Black ideas regarding the theatre at the turn of the century, she would have sided with Carey and the other clergy. Moreover, she learned from Motts first-hand how his theatre would operate and the kinds of material to be showcased. If Motts’s plans had been morally objectionable, she never would have held her fund-raising event at the Pekin Theater. Although the support of local clergy would have made the campaign for the theatre less controversial, Wells-Barnett did not allow the opinions of uninformed church leaders to persuade her. Carey continued his campaign against the theatre and brought his concerns to an alliance of ministers. These clergy formed a committee and attempted to stop the benefit by appealing to Mrs. Wooley, a Unitarian pastor and founder of the Douglass Center, to stop the center’s involvement and promotion of the theatre.[38] As part of their request, the group of clergy “promised to set aside a Sunday and take a collection for the benefit of the center if it really was in need of money.”[39] The willingness of the clergy to redirect their own church offerings to the center exposed how serious they were in wanting to prevent the benefit from occurring at the theatre. The pastors had apparently forgotten that one of the three families Mrs. Wooley contacted when she decided to establish the center was the Barnetts. The Ministerial Alliance had also not foreseen the strength of the connections that Wells-Barnett had developed in Chicago. Not only was she notable for her national and international social activism and her work in Chicago (she established a kindergarten for Black children at Bethel A.M.E. Church and a women’s club was named after her), her husband was an attorney and prominent politician. “Mrs. Wooley heard them through, reminded herself of their opposition to the establishment of the center itself, and that at no time during its existence had the ministers ever visited her in body before, simply told them she had asked Mrs. Barnett to give some one big thing, out of which money might be made for the needs of the center and that she did not feel justified in interfering with the plans I had made.”[40] The pastors had not anticipated that their previous opposition to the center would have future ramifications. Mrs. Wooley created the center because she wanted a place where African Americans and whites could meet, discuss issues, and improve relations between the races. Since these men had resisted the center, Mrs. Wooley now was leery of their offer of assistance, even if it was from their own offerings. Wooley’s support may have had more to do with not wanting to cross Wells-Barnett on this particular issue as the women did not always see eye-to-eye.[41] Wooley also “declined to accept their offer of a collection, reminding them that their churches all were in debt and she thought they would need their offering for themselves.”[42]This statement, from Wells-Barnett’s autobiography, concurred with her distrust of those who abused their pastoral authority – these clergy had not determined the facts, attempted to incite their congregations against the theatre, condemned its owner, and were willing to use their offerings as a bribe for an establishment, the Frederick Douglass Center, which they found reprehensible two years ago. Since none of these men was her pastor, and they proved to be questionable regarding the Pekin Theater, Wells-Barnett felt justified in disregarding the request of the clergy. Wells-Barnett encountered two other setbacks prior to the benefit. The first came from the editor of the Daily News. Wells-Barnett had wanted the paper to print her announcement of the event. Charles Fay, the editor, declined to do so based on the past reputation of the theatre. Though this was disappointing, she was able to use other newspapers to publicize the event. The second impediment was the cancellation by one of the groups performing for the benefit. Anna Morgan ran a successful studio and “had promised to have that year’s graduating class give us a play.”[43] Unfortunately, Morgan did not notify Wells-Barnett of her change of plans until after “tickets and some literature had been printed.”[44] Though Morgan did offer to repay Wells-Barnett for the expenditures incurred, Morgan felt she had to cancel this engagement “because she had learned of the Pekin’s notorious reputation; that the young ladies in her school of acting had come from the best families of the city and that she could not afford to take them into such a place.”[45] Morgan had been able to train women from reputable families and was concerned for the reputation of her students. One could argue that she had legitimate apprehension in light of Motts’s and his establishment’s character. What complicated and nullified her concern was the fact that Wells-Barnett and her colleagues were sponsoring the event. Wells-Barnett would not have attached herself to an occasion that would impugn the reputation of African American women. Most of her activism involved making it clear to the general public that Black women were hard working and virtuous. Morgan’s withdrawal may have been encouraged as a final effort on the part of the Ministerial Alliance. Clearly disappointed by Morgan’s actions, Wells-Barnett’s response exemplified her frustration with those who allowed themselves to be controlled by public opinion. “My reply to Miss Morgan was not very diplomatic, I grant, but I said to her that her young ladies could not have a very secure hold on their reputations if giving one night’s performance would cause them to lose them.”[46] Though Wells-Barnett was active in dispelling myths about the moral degeneracy of African American women, she also knew there were times when one had to honor prior commitments. One performance at the Pekin Theater for the Frederick Douglass Center should not mar the reputation of Morgan’s students. For Wells-Barnett, addressing injustice and inequality often demanded functioning outside of societal norms. If she had adhered to the mores of educated, middle-class African Americans, she never would have started her campaign against lynching. Fortunately, Wells-Barnett believed that the issue of lynching (and other injustices) urgently needed to be exposed and stopped. Since she knew she was a woman of high moral standards, Wells-Barnett did not allow sexist ideologies to prevent her from being in the public sphere. “In spite of all the opposition,” Wells-Barnett writes, “the benefit was a huge success. The society leaders vied with each other in their box parties and the house was filled with the most representative members of our race. It gave them a chance to see what perhaps they would have been years in realizing, what a very auspicious effort was being made right here in our town by a man who sincerely wanted to do better things.”[47] The event’s success was not only demonstrated by the amount of money raised, $500 which was the average cost of a car in 1906, but also viewed as an achievement by the local papers who praised the event as well.[48] It also was a triumph because Wells-Barnett was confident the event had planted a positive vision about the theatre in the minds of others. Through the benefit, many Blacks witnessed that the theatre was not disreputable. The Pekin provided a space where African American performers, writers, and musicians could operate and develop their respective skills without having to cater to European American audiences. The Chicago American noted in 1906 that it was, “the only theater in the country, probably the only regular playhouse in the world, owned, managed, and conducted by colored people, presenting with a stock company of colored artists, original musical comedies, farces and plays written and composed by colored men in this city.”[49] In March 1906, the first play presented in the remodeled theatre (a fire had destroyed the interior of the theatre) was the three-act musical comedy The Man from ‘Bam, written by Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, who went onto to write the Broadway hit and Black musical comedy Shuffle Along in 1921, “book by Collin Davis, lyrics by Arthur Gillespie, and music by Joe Jordan.”[50] In its initial months, the theatre exhibited new and mostly original productions, usually musical comedies or farces, every two to three weeks. Other shows performed at the Pekin were “The Mayor of Dixie, Two African Princes, My Friend From Georgia, In Zululand, Captain Rufus, Count of No Account, One Round of Pleasure, and Doctor Dope.”[51] The Pekin’s stage manager was Charles Sager, its producing director was J. Ed. Green, the resident director of music was Joe Jordan, and its composers Will Vodery and Lawrence Freeman.[52] Some of the acting talent developed at the Pekin “included Lawrence Chenault, J. Francis Mores, Charles Gilpin, the prima donnas Lottie Grady and Rosa Lee Tyler, Pearl Brown and, later, Abbie Mitchell.”[53] Green was an actor, playwright, and manager as well as the producing director. In addition to Gilpin, who gained national prominence in Eugene O’Neill’s play, The Emperor Jones, Green and actor Harrison Stewart were two of the brightest stars of the theatre according to theatre scholars Errol Hill and James Hatch. Hence as Wells-Barnett noted, “It has been a very great pleasure to remember that many of the leading actors and actresses in the race got their first training in Bob Motts’s stock company. The same is true of the musicians.”[54] Shortly after the benefit, prominent Black organizations in Chicago used the Pekin for events and one of the pastors who vowed never to step foot in the theatre made a speech there for a political meeting. With the theatre’s increased popularity, Motts tried to build upon its reputation. He sent “two recent productions [Captain Rufus and The Husband] to New York during the summer for a short two-week stay at Hurtig and Seaman’s Music Hall in Harlem” in 1907.[55] Though Motts seemed to have wanted to attract investors to his theatrical endeavors, his scheme made New Yorkers desire their own all Black playhouse with performers and musicians. Wells-Barnett’s efforts to alter attitudes about the theatre in Chicago occurred simultaneously to critics of the stage gaining importance in national newspapers. Black newspapers informed Black communities about political, economic, and social events, and many papers also shared their views on how these events affected African Americans. These organs also covered African American entertainers and were not shy about criticizing performances they felt perpetuated racist ideas about Blacks. Sylvester Russell was the first African American theatre critic to receive recognition nationally. He was a former singer and wrote for the Indianapolis Freeman from approximately 1900 to 1910 and later for the Chicago Defender.[56] Scholar Henry T. Sampson notes that Russell’s “graphic and detailed show reviews and other theatrical commentary” reflect the ways Black entertainment was viewed by a “contemporary observer.”[57] Though some performers disliked his criticism, it gained favor when entertainers and audiences realized his desire was to improve the quality of African American performance.[58] As Russell grew in stature, other Black newspapers hired writers to examine the dramatic arts. Another prominent writer is Lester Walton, who wrote for The New York Age as their drama (and later film) critic. Like Russell, Walton was involved in the theatre as a song writer, playwright, manager, and producer both prior to and after his assignment with The Age. Walton was a founding member of the Frogs, Inc., a theatrical club in New York City with other African American entertainers such as Bert Williams and George Walker.[59] Walton and Russell brought seriousness and respectability in their examination and review of Black entertainment and their writings along with Wells-Barnett’s bringing new audiences to the Pekin theatre change how African Americans thought about the performing arts. As perceptions about the theatre changed, the Pekin inspired other African Americans nationally to create local legitimate professional Black theatres. Wells-Barnett observed that “other parts of the country encouraged by our success also established theaters of their own among our people and many of them were called Pekin Theaters.”[60] According to Bernard Peterson, there were at least seven other Pekin Theaters in existence in the early twentieth century and the Indianapolis Freeman noted in an article dated 10 May 1910 that there were 53 Black theatres “owned and managed by Negroes.”[61] Though she had faced opposition, Wells-Barnett belief in the importance of this project created a vision that went beyond Chicago. Theatres for African Americans throughout the nation spoke of self-reliance and entrepreneurship along with the formation of Black theatrical companies, managers, and musician staffs. Though not all of the theatres were owned and operated by African Americans, these were spaces where Blacks did not have to endure discrimination and had the opportunity to develop artistically. With the benefit of hindsight (she wrote her autobiography in the 1920s or 1930s), Wells-Barnett could celebrate the success of the Pekin Theater. Not only was it a theatre with an African Americans stock company, it was the first and for many years the only playhouse where plays were created and produced by Black talent.[62] Wells-Barnett swayed public opinion in African American communities at a time when Black women were invisible and not considered human beings by the larger public. It was also a time when ideologies in Black communities, particularly middle-class groups, restricted women’s work. While some African Americans would have been troubled by the career of a married woman, the public life of Wells-Barnett demonstrated how women could conduct themselves in public. Interestingly, she found the stage a place where a greater opportunity for African American self-expression existed. Despite the moral concerns regarding entertainment and the racist images and imaginings about Black women throughout American culture, she worked to dispel myths regarding the theatre; she would not allow public perception of proper female behavior to prevent her from challenging negative attitudes about the theatre. Her belief in herself empowered her to constantly consider the possibilities and not the barriers. Moreover, Wells-Barnett desired to inspire others and ensure that African American achievement in the dramatic arts and beyond would not stop with her death. Karen Bowdre is currently an independent scholar, who has published on African American media and romantic comedies in Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Falling in Love Again: The Contemporary Romantic Comedy, and Cinema Journal. Her research interests include race and representation, gender, early African American theatre history, adaptation, romantic comedies, telefantasy, and telenovelas. Her book Shades of Love: African Americans and the Hollywood Romantic Comedy is forthcoming from University of Illinois Press. She is also the co-editor of From Madea to Media Mogul: Critical Perspectives on Tyler Perry which is forthcoming with University of Mississippi Press. [1] According to Professor Edward Robinson, the Pekin first opened as the “Temple of Music” on 18 June 1905 and was rebuilt in 1906. See Edward A. Robinson, “The Pekin: The Genesis of American Black Theater,” Black American Literature Forum 16, no. 4, Black Theatre Issue (Winter 1982): 136-138. The only mention of Wells-Barnett’s work with theatre I have found was in Errol Hill and James Hatch’s comprehensive work on Black theatre: Errol Hill and James Hatch, A History of African American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 191. [2] Hill and Hatch, History, 216-217. Errol Hill ascribes Du Bois’ description of Black theatre to an article believed written by the latter in The Crisis, XXII:3 (July 1926), 134 titled “‘Krigwa Players’ Little Theatre Movement.” See Hill, “Black Black Theatre in Form and Style,” The Black Scholar 10, no. 10, Black Theatre (July/August 1979): 29-31. Another example of a Black female intellectual and her contributions to theatre being overlooked can be found in Monica Smith Ndounou’s exceptional essay on Anna Julia Cooper. Ndounou, “Drama for ‘Neglected People’: Recovering Anna Julia Cooper’s Dramatic Theory and Criticism from the Shadow of W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (Fall 2012): 25-50. [3] Uplift ideology is described by Kevin Gaines as a “self-help ideology” employed by the Black elite to separate themselves as being better than other African Americans because of their education and class status. Gaines views these elites as being ministers, intellectuals, journalists, and reformers and throughout his text references Wells-Barnett as an elite. Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 13, 44-45, 79-80. Though Gaines does acknowledge her elite position was often dismissed by sexist Black men, she does not fit neatly in this category, as her views about class alter over time. For example, when Wells-Barnett had two suits pending in the Tennessee Supreme Court regarding her removal from the ladies car of a train, she resented the fact that affluent Blacks used their money to “bypass the indignities of discrimination rather than [defend] their race.” Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 57. [4] Historians Mia Bay and Paula Giddings document how during Wells-Barnett’s lifetime her accomplishments were not acknowledged by other African American leaders and in Black history; both attribute this to sexism operating within Black communities. Bay, To Tell, 3-13. Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Amistad, 2008), 1-7. [5] Since Wells-Barnett was a significant figure prior to her marriage to Ferdinand Barnett in June 1895, many biographers only use her maiden name when discussing her prior to her marriage. In this chapter, my main focus is her work for the Pekin Theatre (when she was married) but in order to give background information, I also reference her achievements prior to her marriage. In order to avoid confusion, I use her married name throughout my text. [6] This incident shows the changing nature of Jim Crow laws. Wells-Barnett had ridden this same route on the ladies car in the past without problems or altercations. [7]. Bay delineates the lawyer controversy in her biography of Wells-Barnett. The initial lawyer on the case, Thomas Cassells, was an important African American lawyer and politician. Because of his disinterest, she fired him and hired James M. Greer, a European American. Cassells became one of Wells-Barnett’s lifelong enemies. Bay, To Tell, 45-58. [8] Mildred I. Thompson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman, 1893-1930 (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1990), 11-14. [9] Bay notes the importance of Reconstruction to Wells-Barnett and how it and her parents shaped her ideas concerning equality and rights. Bay, To Tell, 15-17. [10] Alfreda M. Duster (ed), The Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), 298, Giddings, Ida: A Sword, 439 and Bay, To Tell, 281. [11] Giddings, Ida: A Sword, 472 and Bay, To Tell, 282. [12] Wells-Barnett’s best known pamphlets are Southern Horrors (1892), A Red Record (1895) and Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900). Giddings, Ida: A Sword, 1-3. [13] Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 281-2, Giddings, Ida: A Sword, 12. [14] Robert Allen unpacks several transgressive moments on theatrical stages such as burlesque that include women impersonating men and creating a spectacle that unnerved middle class audiences and critics. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). [15] Duster, The Crusade, 289. Bob Cole was another notable African American vaudeville entertainer. In addition to being a talented performer and part of the Cole and Johnson team, he was also a stage manager and playwright for his own stock company. For more information on Cole and Johnson see Seniors’, Beyond Lift Every Voice and Sing: The Culture and Uplift, Identity, and Politics in Black Musical Theater (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2009), 178. [16] Duster, The Crusade, 289-290. [17] Ibid, 290. [18] Ibid. [19] Ibid. [20] Giddings reports that once members of various African American groups realized the benefit for the Douglass Center would be held at the New Pekin controversy surrounded the event. Giddings, Ida: A Sword, 458. [21] Giddings, Ida: A Sword, 447. [22] Giddings, Ida: A Sword, 453-461. [23] Duster, The Crusade, 290. [24] Thompson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, 112. [25] Duster, The Crusade, 290. [26] Ida Wells-Barnett describing the Pekin Theatre and owner Robert Motts. Duster, The Crusade 290. [27] Ibid. [28] Ibid. [29] Aida Overton Walker, a choreographer, actress, and singer, discussed the limitations forced on African American performers: You haven’t the faintest conception of the difficulties which must be overcome, of the prejudices which must be left slumbering, of the things we must avoid whenever we write or sing a piece of music, put on a play or sketch, walk out in the street or land in a new town. No white can understand these things. Every little thing we do must be thought out and arranged by Negroes, because they alone can know how easy it is for a colored show to offend a white audience. Let me give you an example. In all the ten years that I have appeared in and helped produce a great many plays of a musical nature, there has never been even the remotest suspicion of a love story in any of them. During those ten years I do not think there have ever been a single white company which has produced any kind of musical play in which a love story was not the central motive. Now, why is this? It’s not accident or because we don’t want to put on plays as beautiful and artistic in every way as do white actors, but because there is a popular prejudice against love scenes enacted by Negroes. This is just one of the ten thousand things we must think of every time we make a step. The public does not appreciate our limitations, or, rather, the limitations which other persons have made for us. Chicago Herald, dated 10 January (year missing) clipping, Robinson Locke Collection, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. [30] Duster, The Crusade, 291. [31] Ibid. [32] Giddings, Ida: A Sword, 439. [33] Duster, The Crusade, 291. [34] In 1878, Ferdinand Barnett founded the Chicago Conservator, one of the first African American newspapers in the Chicago area (see Thompson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, 48). Later, Wells-Barnett would join the staff of the paper and become an editor. This incident occurred after both had sold their interest in the paper. [35] Duster, The Crusade, 291. [36] Ibid, 291-292. [37] Wells-Barnett was upset Carter Woodson had not mentioned her anti-lynching work in his history of significant African Americans. See Linda O. McMurry's To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 336. And Patricia A. Schechter in her essay, The Anti-Lynching Pamphlets of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1920, http://dig.lib.niu.edu/gildedage/idabwells/pamphlets.html (accessed 8 Oct. 2014), observes that "(a)t her death in 1931, for example, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) journal, The Crisis, that her work had been "easily forgotten" and "taken to greater success "by others." [38] Thompson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, 94. [39] Duster, The Crusade, 292. [40] Ibid. [41] Though Wooley desired interracial interactions between African Americans and European Americans, she had a definite bias against poorer Blacks. She felt that “the ‘hordes’ of southern blacks, most of them ‘ignorant and dissolute,’ who ‘lowered the standard of the colored population in our midst’” Giddings, Ida: A Sword, 456. Wells-Barnett’s knowledge of how lynching victims were criminalized enabled her to have a view that people can “change for the better.” Ibid, 457. [42] Duster, The Crusade, 292. [43] Ibid, 293. [44] Ibid. [45] Ibid. [46] Ibid. [47] Ibid. [48] Giddings, Ida: A Sword, 458. Information regarding 1906 from website http://local.aaca.org/junior/mileposts/1906.htm. Accessed 8 Oct. 2014. [49] Hill and Hatch, History, 192. [50] Hill and Hatch, History, 192-193. [51] Ibid, 193. [52] While the other positions were listed by Hill and Hatch, the composers were listed by Bernard L. Peterson, Profiles of African American Stage Performers and Theatre People, 1816-1960 (Westport, Greenwood, 2000), xi. [53] Ibid. [54] Duster, The Crusade, 293. [55] Hill and Hatch, History, 194. Captain Rufus was written by J. Ed. Green and Alfred Anderson and the music came from H. Lawrence Freeman and Joseph Jordan; the play was set in the military and a musical comedy. The Husband was written by Miller and Lyles. [56] Peterson, Profiles, 220. Sylvester Russell wrote for The Chicago Defender’s “Musical and Dramatic” Column along with other writers. See Anna Everett’s Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949 (Durham: Duke UP, 2001), 18-35, for examples of Russell’s film criticism as well as Russell’s, 36-41. [57] Henry T. Sampson, The Ghost Walks: A Chronological History of Blacks in Show Business, 1865-1910, (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1988) 282 [58] Ibid, 293 [59]Peterson, Profiles, 252-253. Lester Walton was The New York Age’s theatre critic and editor of the column “Music and the Stage.” [60] Duster, The Crusade, 294 [61] Hill and Hatch, History, 199 [62]Ibid, 205-206. Ida Wells-Barnett and Chicago’s Pekin Theatre by Karen Bowdre ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 26, Number 3 (Fall 2014) ©2014 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee Table of Contents: Ida Wells-Barnett and Chicago’s Pekin Theatre by Karen Bowdre History is Distance: Metaphor, Meaning, and Performance in Serenade/The Proposition by Ariel Nereson Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Histories, Futures, and Queer Lives by Vanessa Campagna “Persian Like The Cat”: Crossing Borders with "The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour" by Tamara L. Smith www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2014 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Ida Wells-Barnett and Chicago’s Pekin Theatre History is Distance: Metaphor, Meaning, and Performance in Serenade/The Proposition Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Histories, Futures, and Queer Lives “Persian Like The Cat”: Crossing Borders with The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Nathalie Aghoro Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Nathalie Aghoro By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF by Nathalie Aghoro The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 2 (Winter 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Musical variations, the pursuit of belonging, and a persistent specter: These constitutive elements of the three experimental plays by Quiara Alegría Hudes known as the Elliot Trilogy speak of tragedy. They are imbued with the trauma of war, nostalgia, and alienation—a theme that George Steiner identifies as crucial for the dramatic form in his article “‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered.” For Steiner, “the necessary and sufficient premise, the axiomatic constant in tragedy is that of ontological homelessness . . . of alienation or ostracism from the safeguard of licensed being. There is no welcome to the self. This is what tragedy is about.”[1] Hudes’s central protagonist Elliot seeks to recover a sense of home in a society removed from the realities of war he experienced as a soldier in Iraq. Over the timespan covered by the three plays Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue (2012), Water by the Spoonful (2012), and The Happiest Song Plays Last (2014), the playwright redefines tragedy when she sends her hero on a quest for redemption after a fatal error in judgment. But even when he seems on the cusp of overcoming it, the haunting echoes of his past as well as a family curse catch up with him and threaten to shatter his world. The tragic is at the center of the Elliot Trilogy’s plot, but formally the primary dramatic impulses are theatrical experimentation with form and the inclusion of musical variety as each play focuses either on the classical fugue, free jazz, or classical Puerto Rican music. The plays differ in their structural composition and their aesthetic concerns, an instance that reflects the formation process of the trilogy. In an interview with Anne García-Romero, Hudes explains that she “did not set out to write a trilogy, but a few years after . . . Elliot, . . . [she] felt there was still more story to tell, and more structural and stylistic experimentation . . . to do in regards to music and playwriting.”[2] The plays reflect this evolution of the creative process, since they work effectively as standalone productions as much as they present a conceptual and topical arc that unites them into a three-movement oeuvre. Both a composer and a playwright by training, Hudes combines her vocations in the 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue by developing a musical structure for a theatrical staging that poetically reflects on loss and suffering. The second play, Water by the Spoonful, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 because of its “imaginative . . . search for meaning” that emerges from an experimentation with virtual, actual, and theatrical space and an exploration of family and community in the twenty-first century.[3] The tragic dimension in Water by the Spoonful is realized as there is no escape from past fatal mistakes—neither in real life nor online. While in the first two plays Elliot is haunted by the first person he killed as a soldier in Iraq and struggles with the untimely and avoidable death of his little sister as a child, The Happiest Song Plays Last marks a departure from tragedy that still retains the tragic, but merely as one among other more prominent themes. As Hudes explains in a video interview for the 2014 Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Elliot is “poised to overcome” his past troubles in the last part of the trilogy and the play explores this orientation toward the future from a personal and social perspective.[4] This becomes particularly apparent in the renewed formal engagement with music as an auditory medium that, for Hudes, is capable of uniting people in celebration while simultaneously addressing grave social conditions with critical lyrics to promote political change.[5] Indeed, the drama does not lose the nostalgic undertones and dissonances established in the previous plays. However, a bittersweet hopefulness—uncommon for classical tragedy—takes over with the Puerto Rican troubadour tradition that Hudes introduces into performances of The Happiest Song Plays Last through the sound of the cuatro which is the national instrument of Puerto Rico. This article will explore how the Elliot Trilogy reconceptualizes traditional elements of tragedy—such as the psychological isolation of the tragic protagonist or the intersections between the worldly affairs and the realm of the dead—for twenty-first century concerns with formal experiments that link the classical genre to the contemporary stage. The Elliot Trilogy repositions the isolated, tragic subject in a network of human connections by highlighting the intersubjective threads that run into danger of being unacknowledged or hidden from view and by exposing the dynamics of alienation in the process. When the tragic intersects with theatrical experiment in the Elliot Trilogy, apparently incompatible spheres converge, harmonize, and sometimes clash, challenging what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible,” of “what is visible or not in a common space.”[6] This productive friction in Hudes’s plays turns the stage into a space for the negotiation of contemporary communal concerns and thus invites us to think about tragedy’s sociocultural significance today. Therefore, I will discuss how the dramatic usage of music echoes the characters’ alienation, how the supernatural and other virtual dimensions resonate with an actual world of suffering and fate, and how formal experimentation in the Elliot Trilogy exposes the hamartia of the characters and conveys their struggle to find a new sense of normalcy after their loss of innocence. Tragedy and the Staging of the Sensible Defining tragedy as the drama of alienation means to implicitly link its characters to the absolute absence of companionship. The tragic fate is cast as unique. It is the lonely path of a singular individual caught, according to Steiner, in “the logic of estrangement from life, of man’s ontological fall from grace.”[7] In this vein, a hero’s isolation is the minimum requirement for the unfolding of tragedy. In Aristotelian terms, the hero’s alienation resides in a fatal action, the hamartia, and as soon as it is performed “fallen man is made an unwelcome guest of life or, at best, a threatened stranger on this hostile or indifferent earth (Sophocles’ damning word, dwelt on by Heidegger, is apolis).”[8] The estrangement thus sets the acting subject apart. Even if it remains unsaid in Steiner’s definition of the term, tragedy therefore implies a world populated by human beings, a polis or a community that differs from and eventually interacts with the tragic hero. To conceive of the hero’s homelessness means to relate the uniqueness of tragic fate to discursive practices about citizenship, community, and belonging. To be alienated means that there are processes at play that shatter the hopes for meaningful, intersubjective interactions. Hence, the tragic hero stands in relation to a community (on stage as well as off stage during the performance in front of an audience) and from the dialectical engagement with these relations emerges the political potential of tragedy. Tragedy is a dramatic threshold that renders the blind spots of a community visible by negotiating social practices from the perspective of the tragic lone hero at its margins. If, as Rancière writes in The Politics of Aesthetics, “artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility,” the theatrical experimentation with tragedy’s tropes and characteristics engages simultaneously with the politics of alienation and belonging.[9] When Rancière writes about the politics of the arts, he locates the political in the everyday communal dynamics that influence human perception and in the different possibilities of participation that the division of labor, common space, and time entail. He argues that “the distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed.”[10] Such a division has influence on what is palpable, whose voices and actions can be heard, who can be seen and recognized as a member of the community, and who is granted (political) agency. Rancière calls the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts.[11] In other words, the system of in/visibility that governs a community functions through delineations of inclusion and exclusion. Theater is particularly apt to make the distribution of common ground and difference palpable because the theatrical performance simultaneously represents and embodies fictional characters and events. The shared space with living bodies on stage allows the spectators to tap into the various registers of sensory perception available to them and to connect them to a communal experience. When Plato and Aristotle seek to deal with “the split reality of the theatre” by either ascribing to it the function of enacting or practicing the ideal form of community as Plato does or through catharsis representing the world with the purpose to purge the social body from unwanted emotions as in Aristotle’s view, they set the conditions for theater to serve contradictory political purposes.[12] In his discussion of these differing artistic regimes, Rancière observes that the tragic stage simultaneously carries with it, according to Plato, the syndrome of democracy and the power of illusion. By isolating mimesis in its own proper space and by enclosing tragedy within a logic of genres, Aristotle . . . redefined its politicity. Furthermore, in the classical system of representation, the tragic stage would become the stage of visibility for an orderly world governed by a hierarchy of subject matter and the adaptation of situations and manners of speaking to this hierarchy. The democratic paradigm would become a monarchical paradigm.[13] This malleable political potential of the stage can be understood as the precondition both for the states of community that it makes palpable and for the subversions of the boundaries that the distribution of the sensible establishes. Hudes challenges the distribution of the sensible in national discourses of collective drama as well as in the private institution of the family through the lens of tragedy. In the Elliot Trilogy, the protagonist’s function as a soldier in wars fought overseas by the US emplaces his actions in a space and time that the civilian community that he rejoins after each tour does not share with him. As such, the very function that determines the protagonist as a national subject instead of a ruler—as someone who serves his country—irrevocably alienates him from the everyday lives of the society he lives in. Consequently, Hudes’s plays are a departure from the monarchical paradigm of the Aristotelian tragedy. They complicate the subject matter of the nation and the interpellation of the individual as national subject with the personal experience of alienation and the precarious state of belonging. Her reconceptualization of tragedy acknowledges the complexity of social and political dynamics in the twenty-first century that is exceedingly high because the global directly ties in with the local. Globalized interconnections expose that there are no simple truths and that the individual needs to navigate their actions as a human being, citizen, and inhabitant of the world simultaneously. Musical Echoes: Tragedy, Dissonance, and Alienation Music is the major acoustic experimental dimension that connects Hudes’s work to tragedy. In his early treatise The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche emphatically posits that music engenders tragedy in classical Greek drama. He writes “that tragedy arose from the tragic chorus, and was originally only chorus and nothing else” and he thus elevates it to “the true primal drama.”[14] Consequently, he locates the chorus as the site were tragedy takes place while rejecting A. W. Schlegel’s understanding of the chorus as the “ideal spectator,” or as Nietzsche describes it, “the epitome and concentration of the mass of spectators.”[15] For Nietzsche, this idealized definition of the chorus does not take into account the diegetic function of the chorus: “the true spectator, whoever he might be, must always remain aware that he is watching a work of art and not an empirical reality, while the tragic chorus of the Greeks is required to grant the figures on the stage a physical existence.”[16] However, the chorus also does not merely react to the dramatic actions on stage,[17] but serves as a threshold between both “a living wall that tragedy pulls around itself to close itself off entirely from the world and maintain its ideal ground and its poetic freedom.”[18] Along these lines, the embodied music of the chorus connects the actuality of the performance with the fictional action. It is the invisible fabric that separates the tragic hero from the world and simultaneously has an effect on the audience because it translates her or his actions and, hence, promotes processes of understanding and making sense that allow the spectators to relate the drama on stage to their own lives. Poised at the interstices of human alienation and intersubjective connection, Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue lends itself to entering into a dialogue with Nietzsche’s position on the classics from a contemporary perspective – thinking its musical and formal experimentation as the resonant location from which tragedy materializes. The structure of Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue mirrors the structure of the musical genre by the same name. It is divided into preludes and fugue scenes in which four characters take turns in speaking lyrical dialogue sentences. One voice sets the melody and the others join in to create the counterpoints and interweaving parts of the musical whole. The voices of Elliot, his father, adopted mother, and grandfather join forces to relate the experience of three generations of a Puerto Rican family as members of the US military. When the chorus introduces a scene with the grandfather as a soldier in 1950 Korea, they complement each other to provide a description of the fictional space that remains invisible due to the minimalistic stage design: GINNY: A tent. No windows, no door. Walls made of canvas. A floor made of dirt. The soil of Inchon, Korea is frozen. GRANDPOP: Sixteen cots they built by hand. Underwear, towels, unmade beds. Dirty photos. GINNY: That is, snapshots of moms and daughters and wives. . . . GRANDPOP: A boy enters.[19] Only when these last words are spoken, the enactment of the scene begins while the oratory mode continues with two more voices eventually joining in. Hence, the chorus of four voices initiates the action. Without them, the drama could not play out as it does. They introduce each of the three male family members and, together, they bring them to life with their speech. At the same time, their communal effort counterpoints the isolation experienced by the soldiers in the field and the silence regarding their war experiences that they keep to themselves when they come back home. The tragedy, one could argue, happens between these voices – in their musical entanglement as well as in the temporal asynchronicity that keeps them from coming together in perfect harmony. In one of the preludes, Elliot’s grandfather, who owns a flute on which he plays Bach for his comrades during the war, explains the tensions that govern the fugue: Of everything Bach wrote, it is the fugues. The fugue is like an argument. It starts in one voice. The voice is the melody, the single solitary melodic line. The statement. Another voice creeps up on the first one. Voice two responds to voice one. They tangle together. They argue, they become messy. They create dissonance. Two, three, four lines clashing. You think, Good god, they’ll never untie themselves. How did this mess get started in the first place? Major keys, minor keys, all at once on top of each other. (Leans in) It’s about untying the knot (35). The dissonance of the voices pitches the harmonic unity of a shared experience against the isolation of the individual in a situation where lives are lost and nobody wins. When Elliot is injured in Tikrit, the multiplicity of voices recounting the incident clashes with his isolated and solitary position: POP: Seventy-four barbs chew into his bone. GRANDPOP: It is not a sensation of rawness. GINNY: It is not excruciating pain. POP: It is a penetrating weakness. GRANDPOP: Energy pours out of his leg. GINNY: Like water from a garden hose. ELLIOT: Sarge! POP: The boy knows he is trapped (41). Throughout the trilogy, Elliot’s injured leg will serve as a reminder that he has left his physical—and also psychological—integrity behind in an event that cannot be genuinely shared with family or civil society. In the passage above, the fugue resonates with the distance and the sense of alienation that separates and simultaneously unites the four characters. Overall, the temporal layering of the respective wars in which the family members served emphasizes that the war experience remains invariably the same in the 1950s, 1960s, and in 2003. García-Romero argues that by “utilizing the fugue structure, Hudes sets up the expectation of a multi-vocal landscape which surrounds one main theme or idea” underlining “that the impact of the subject of military service is all pervasive and that regardless of generation or military conflict, the devastation of war is universal”.[20] In Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, the grandfather’s commentary that the fugue is all “about untying the knot” can also be considered as a self-reflexive commentary on the joint experimentation with musical and theatrical aesthetics. The tragic tone is supported by the minor key of the grandfather’s flute when he plays a Bach tune several times throughout the entire play: “Minor key, it’s melancholy,” says the grandfather when he assumes the function of the narrator for a moment (36). However, scenes serving as preludes fragment the fugue and thus disrupt the process of melancholic resolution, reflecting that all members of the family choir have their individual stories that they do not necessarily share. The sense of alienation that results from any war experience inhibits the potential for perfect harmony. Supernatural Frictions and Musical Improvisation In Water by the Spoonful, the potential for dissonance to resolve into harmony vanishes even further as tragedy takes over the everyday. Early in the play, Elliot’s cousin Yazmin, a music professor, introduces free jazz as the governing aesthetic principle: Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, 1964. Dissonance is still a gateway to resolution. . .. Diminished chords, tritones, still didn’t have the right to be their own independent thought. In 1965 something changed. The ugliness bore no promise of a happy ending. . . . Coltrane democratized the notes. He said, they’re all equal. Freedom. It was called Free Jazz but freedom is a hard thing to express musically without spinning into noise. This is from Ascension, 1965.[21] The play’s experimentation with jazz aesthetics echoes its concern with the impossibility of both personal and collective traumata to be reconciled into a single and simple narrative of good versus evil that promises but ultimately is incapable of providing solace. The repercussions of violence and death permeate all actual and virtual spaces that the characters inhabit and force them to navigate the complex and intricate affective networks caused by tragic flaws. Water by the Spoonful exposes the uncanny layers of human suffering by tying them to the sonification of noise and freedom in free jazz. The repercussions of Elliot’s past actions become a haunting personification that continues to exist in the now of the world on stage, a spectral tear in the split coexistence of Yazmin’s lecture hall and the sandwich shop Elliot works at after his return. The ghosts from his past are literally trapped in-between worlds and the musical tunes reconceptualize the tragic device of the specter as they render the complexity and democratic dissonance of trauma narratives audible. While Yazmin plays Coltrane for the audience, a ghost appears on stage. The man goes to Elliot and addresses him in Arabic, disrupting his everyday activities. The apparition takes on the form of a civilian Elliot killed during the war, and his appearance in the second part of the trilogy can be understood as an element of dramatic escalation or theatrical noise. In Rancière’s words, the specter and Elliot are interlinked through their respective “bodily positions and movements” that visualize “the parceling out of the visible and the invisible” on stage.[22] The collision of the supernatural with the actual world acts out the distribution of inclusion and exclusion in the communal perception. In the first play, Elliot merely has nightmares about him, but in Water by the Spoonful, the remnant echo from the war becomes an anthropomorphic, supernatural manifestation that only Elliot perceives and renders it difficult for him to perform his task. GHOST: Momken men-fadluck ted-dini gawaz saffari? ELLIOT: That’s three teriyaki onion with chicken. First with hots and onions. Second with everything. Third with extra bacon. Two spicy Italian with American cheese on whole grain. One BMT on flatbread. Good so far? GHOST: Momken men-fadluck ted-dini gawaz saffari? (18). Without looking the ghost in the eye, Elliot is perturbed when the specter appears but tries to remain professional as he continues his conversation with a customer while the ghost insists on asking Elliot the same question over and over again. It translates into a concern of legal status: “Can I please have my passport back?” (11). The passport—Elliot always carries it in his pocket—acquires a symbolic value on stage for the freedom that Elliot took from a man, i.e. the freedom to live, but also the freedom to pass borders, and, ultimately, to pass peacefully over the threshold to the afterlife. The clashing of languages and the asymmetrical communication situation with an inaudible third party on the phone emphasize their entanglement in the conflict between two nations that holds them captive. The discrepancy between the food order and the struggle for life and freedom could be read as an instance of dramatic irony that underlines the urgency which pervades the situation. In The Happiest Song Plays Last, we finally learn that the passport represents a constant reminder to Elliot’s hamartia or, in other words, the fatal misjudgment that he confesses when he acknowledges that he “knew he was a civilian” in front of his family: “At first I thought it was an AK in his hands. Split second before I shoot, I’m like, that’s a cricket bat. And then I pulled the trigger and took his face off. How am I supposed to tell anyone that?”[23] As long as the passport is not returned to its owner, the suffering continues for all parties involved. Since the passport cannot be returned despite the attempts Elliot makes to send it to the civilian’s family, the suffering continues indefinitely without any prospect of forgiveness or absolution. “Man makes ghost, man keeps ghost,” says one character near the end of The Happiest Song Plays Last (83) and in a pivotal moment when Elliot meets Ali, an ex-Iraqi Armed Forces soldier, the only possibility for resolution is that they can acknowledge each other: “No forgive. I cannot forgive. But you know real who I am. I know real who you are. Witness for each other” (36). The mutual recognition evoked in the scene rejects the possibility of a happy ending while still offering an avenue for reconciliation. It suggests that Elliot’s confession can be considered as the impetus for transforming the haunting memories of the past, the noise, into a jarring, yet encompassing narrative that consists of multiple, dissonant layers told collectively. As García-Romero observes, Hudes adopts the four principles of “cultural multiplicity, supernatural intervention, Latina identity, and theatrical experimentation” [24] established by the teacher and playwright María Irene Fornés in her dramatic productions. The ghost highlights how closely connected these aspects are in Hudes’s work.[25] On the one hand, the specter is a manifestation of the multiple invisible convergences between hybrid cultural identities and the complex histories emerging from conflict that are potentially silenced. On the other hand, the specter itself is a theatrical experiment. The impossible presence of the dead materializes on stage as a reminder of the potential for fatal misjudgments that haunts every violent confrontation, thus opening up a space for the collective negotiation of the invisible repercussions of war and its silencing effects on the human subject such as trauma or death. Human Connections and Haunting Specters of Alienation Alienation thwarts the successful pursuit of belonging for the characters in the Elliot Trilogy. Any form of human connection that they establish is frail and precarious, but they persist in their search for an allegiance to family and community. In Water by the Spoonful, the additional staging of the virtual dimension of the internet as a potential space for human connections furthers the dominant theme of belonging. The chat room complements the other spatial layers of the lecture hall, the realm of the dead, and Elliot’s living environment. Staged at the same time, these spheres resonate with the formal commitment of Hudes to the delineated free jazz aesthetics since their simultaneity shows how Elliot and other characters seek to overcome their sense of isolation. All spaces are equal and prone to intersect at any time throughout the play. Thus, the theatrical stage is fraught with spatial overlaps and the various actions in different places and spheres often intersect in dissonance, threatening to “spin . . . into noise” (18). The experimental engagement with digital space or, more precisely, the virtual promise of second chances in life upheld by an online community takes center stage in Water by the Spoonful. Scenes in the experiential world alternate with staged conversations in an online chat room and a virtual self-help group hosted by Elliot’s birth mother, a recovered drug addict. Her motivation is only revealed when the separation of her online and offline identities collapses and the virtual clashes with the real world. This happens when Elliot walks in on her in a café where she is meeting an online community member who needs advice. ELLIOT: I looked at that chat room once. The woman I saw there? She’s literally not the same person I know. (To John) Did she tell you how she became such a saint? JOHN: We all have skeletons. ELLIOT: Yeah well she’s an archeological dig. Did she tell you about her daughter? (51). During this encounter, two conceptions of community meet: the online communities that emerged in the digital age and the traditional institution of family that Christopher Perricone considers as a classical tragic theme: “It is essential to Aristotle’s idea of tragedy . . . that it be a family affair.”[26] Perricone argues that the principle of cooperation and support in the family is routinely violated in Greek drama. He writes: “In tragic families, mothers . . . kill their children. Fathers . . . kill their children. Sons routinely kill their fathers. Brothers and sisters . . . kill each other . . . . Tragedy, insofar as it is implicitly a family affair, should not happen. Family members should cooperate.”[27] In Water by the Spoonful, Elliot’s mother did not offer support because she left her small children to their own devices when they fell sick with the stomach flu, an error in judgement that ends in the death of Elliot’s younger sister. Instead of following the doctor’s orders to “give . . . [the] kids a spoonful of water every five minutes,” she leaves them alone to take drugs (52). Neglecting the easiest task leads to tragedy, as Elliot points out: “But you couldn’t stick to something simple like that. You couldn’t sit still like that. You had to have your thing. That’s where I stop remembering” (52). During the confrontation in the café, the mother’s attempt to reinvent herself online fails. In the end, both mother and son are trapped in a cycle of suffering and trauma caused by their respective share in another person’s loss of life. The hamartia becomes a flaw that is passed on from one generation to another. For Perricone, “the ultimate cause of tragedy—is that tragedy hits a Darwinian ‘nerve.’ That ‘nerve’ is the power of the family and the place of the family in the human condition . . . . Think of tragedy as the Darwinian cautionary tale, par excellence.”[28] Along these lines, Water by the Spoonful taps into the classic material of Greek tragedy and reconfigures it for contemporary purposes. In The Happiest Song Plays Last, tragedy becomes a universal matter for several families because of Elliot’s involvement in the war and his hamartia. “Our son is marked. He is going to inherit this,” says Elliot’s pregnant girlfriend Shar, when she learns about the killing of Taarek Taleb (84). The mark of tragedy that she fears her child will inherit echoes the devastation of the remaining family in Iraq. According to a letter that Elliot shares with her, the son who witnesses the violent death of his father does not talk anymore. In the letter, Ali, whom he asked to find the man’s family and to give them the passport that has been in his possession over the years, describes the wife’s account of the situation: “American soldier shoots him in face. He is pretending surprise. American soldier spits on body, she says. American soldier takes wallet and runs away” (83). The roles of father and husband in her account personalize the previously unnamed Iraqi civilian and turn the haunting ghost into a fully fleshed out human being. At the same time, the main protagonist, Elliot, becomes an anonymous American soldier whose actions in this role expose the demise of human ethics in times of war. “I can’t get rid of this,” Elliot says, referring to both the passport and the act itself, after reading the letter (84). The hamartia cannot be redeemed and the resulting human connection between the families is irrevocably marked by tragedy. Conclusion: Tragic Resonances in Contemporary Drama The reconceptualization of tragedy lies at the heart of Hudes’s dramatic conception of an experimental exploration of the sensible. The Elliot Trilogy serves as a resounding echo chamber between classical drama and a reconfiguration that recognizes the contemporary specificities of the human condition in the twenty-first century. The multiplication and overlap of voices, spaces, and their conjunction with supernatural or spiritual forces invoke haunting echoes that resonate back and forth from one play to another, between each character and the stories they share with their family, and between classical tragic material and contemporary theater. As Robert Andreach concludes in his book Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theater: “If Aristotelian form is dead, a new order of forms can restore the genre to life.”[29] In the Elliot Trilogy, the echoes of a tragic past reverberate in the present and spheres that seem incompatible at first sight reveal their permeability and expose the frailty of the human existence. Overall, Hudes’s playwriting is proof for the ongoing relevance of the tragic in the twenty-first century and for the genre’s extensive capacity to change. Nathalie Aghoro is Assistant Professor of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at the Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt. She earned her doctorate with a PhD thesis on conceptions of voice and sound in contemporary American novels by Richard Powers, Karen Tei Yamashita, Jennifer Egan, and Jonathan Safran Foer. She is the co-editor of the JCDE special issue on Theatre and Mobility (with Kerstin Schmidt) and her publications include essays on postmodern novels, contemporary literature, and Afrofuturism in music. [1] George Steiner, “‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered,” New Literary History 35, no. 1 (2004): 2–3. [2] Anne García-Romero, The Fornes Frame: Contemporary Latina Playwrights and the Legacy of Maria Irene Fornes (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016), 161. [3] Heinz-Dietrich Fischer, Outstanding Broadway Dramas and Comedies: Pulitzer Prize Winning Theater Productions (Zürich: LIT, 2013), 194. [4] Oregon Shakespeare Festival, “Playwright Notes: Leaving a Legacy,” 7:25, posted on 27 October 2014, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=YphF3Qe6M54. [5] Ibid . [6] Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2011), 12–13. [7] Steiner, “‘Tragedy’: Reconsidered,” 4. [8] Ibid. , 2–3. In this sense, apolis characterizes the hero as a subject devoid of a place in the world. [9] Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13. [10] Ibid., 12. [11] Ibid. [12] Ibid., 14. [13] Ibid., 17–18. [14] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (London: Penguin Classics, 1993), 36. (emphasis original) [15] Ibid. [16] Ibid., 37. [17] Paul Raimond Daniels, Nietzsche and “The Birth of Tragedy” (London: Routledge, 2013), 76. [18] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 37. [19] Quiara Alegría Hudes, Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2012), 12. Further references to this play will be noted parenthetically in the text. [20] García-Romero, “Fugue, Hip Hop and Soap Opera: Transcultural Connections and Theatrical Experimentation in Twenty-First Century US Latina Playwriting,” Latin American Theatre Review 43, no. 1 (2009): 88. [21] Quiara Alegría Hudes, Water by the Spoonful (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2012), 18. Further references to this play will be noted parenthetically in the text. [22] Rancière, The Birth of Tragedy, 19. [23] Quiara Alegría Hudes, The Happiest Song Plays Last (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2014), 85. Further references to this play will be noted parenthetically in the text. [24] García-Romero, The Fornes Frame, 6. [26] Christopher Perricone, “Tragedy: A Lesson in Survival,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 44, no. 1 (2010): 76. [27] Ibid. , 81. [28] Ibid. , 82. [29] Robert J Andreach, Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theatre (Lanham: University Press of America, 2014), 174. "Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy" by Nathalie Aghoro ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 2 (Winter 2019) ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: "Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre" by Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler "Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003)" by Konstantinos Blatanis "Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy" by Nathalie Aghoro "'Take Caroline Away': Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change" by Joanna Mansbridge "The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America" by Julia Rössler "Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a ‘Lesbian Suicide Musical’" by Maureen McDonnell www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Black Performance and Pedagogy Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jennifer-Scott Mobley Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Jennifer-Scott Mobley By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF Although she was honored with a Pulitzer Prize for drama and produced a diverse body of work critically esteemed in her time, Susan Glaspell’s dramaturgical innovations and contributions to US theatre have largely been overlooked by theatre history narratives for the better part of the twentieth century. With the possible exception of her feminist masterpiece, Trifles, Glaspell’s plays have not been anthologized or celebrated on par with those of her contemporaries, among them Eugene O’Neill, whose career was launched by the company she co-founded, the Provincetown Players. Building on the work of Linda Ben-Zvi, J. Ellen Gainor, and Marcia Noe, among others, Jouve’s monograph furthers the recuperative efforts of feminist scholarship to critically examine Glaspell’s dramatic oeuvre and theoretically position its significance to the development of modern drama. Following a concise biography of Glaspell’s personal life and professional achievements, Jouve positions her argument in conversation with Robert Brustein’s Theatre of Revolt (1962) in which Brustein, examining plays by celebrated male luminaries such as Ibsen, Chekhov, and Shaw, characterized modern drama as rebelling against communal values and espousing individualism in response to monolithic democratic cultural mores. Brustein singles out O’Neill in particular as the forerunner of the theatre of revolt and modern drama. Jouve, in turn, seeks to recover Glaspell’s significant contributions to the development of modern drama and Brustein’s so-called theatre of revolt, asserting that, “rebellion permeates every level of Glaspell’s dramatic endeavor, from content to form. […] Glaspell explored the potential of drama as an actual instrument of pacifist rebellion to an extent which few playwrights of her generation actually dared” (15-16). The book is divided into three parts. Part I “Susan Glaspell’s Drama of Denunciation” begins by highlighting Glaspell’s lifelong passionate compulsion to write. Extrapolating from primary documents, such as a 1917 interview in which Glaspell declared that “almost everything in politics is a story,” Jouve argues that the genesis of Glaspell’s inspiration to write lay in questioning the “duplicity of American democracy” (21). Close textual analysis of Trifles (1916), Woman’s Honor (1918), and Alison’s House (1930) reveal how Glaspell’s protagonists, sometimes powerfully absent from the stage as in the case of Trifles’ Mrs. Wright, serve to critique the hypocrisy of democratic ideals that limit or exclude women from legal and public spaces. Productively engaging the notion of “deterritorializing the self” from Una Chaudhuri’s Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (1995), Jouve explores stage directions, settings, and space, arguing that in Alison’s House and many of Glaspell’s works, the domestic space, the home, is simultaneously a place of constraint as well as a site of creative freedom. This section also treats The Inheritors (1921) and Free Laughter (1917), which was only recently unearthed in 2010. Free Laugher, a comedic play about banning laughter, showcases Glaspell’s clever deployment of form as content. Part II, “Susan Glaspell’s Drama of Resistance” draws on Brustein’s concept of revolt as well as Albert Camus’s notion of the rebel, first exploring the female protagonists of The People (1917), The Inheritors (1921), and Springs Eternal (1943). Categorizing the protagonists into two types of rebels, the idealist and the individualist, Jouve asserts that, for Glaspell, whose health was fragile, “writing was the most efficient mode of activism she was able to embrace, so she gave the stage to her fictitious combatants to lead the revolt” (94-96). Throughout the analysis, Jouve not only finds correlations between Glaspell and her characters, several of whom she portrayed onstage, but also breaks down Glaspell’s language at the rhetorical level, identifying how metaphor, repetition, verb tense, and alliteration underscore intention and theme. For example, in The Inheritors, Madeline’s dialogue depicts her as the ultimate “idealist rebel and mouthpiece of the playwright,” in the tradition of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.” In The Outside (1917) and The Verge (1921) among other works, Jouve finds “individualist rebels” who differ from the aforementioned idealist counterparts putting “their own prerogatives before the common good,” prizing freedom of choice and defying gendered conventions of family and society (126). Included in this section is the first scholarly treatment of Wings, an unpublished, fragmented play from the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Jouve’s analysis of Wings positions the male protagonist among Glaspell’s individualist rebels who “desire to overthrow the cultural order,” freeing himself from the conventional role of male breadwinner to pursue his desire to fly. Here again, Jouve finds significance in setting and correlation among the playwright’s subjectivity and form and content, noting that the experimentation of form in Wings echoes the protagonist’s actions in The Verge: “Like her heroine who experiments with form in the 1921 full-length play, Glaspell takes her experiments a step further by resorting to expressionism in order to render the invisible by the visible, to make existential confusion visually manifest through the set” (135). In Part III, “Susan Glaspell’s Drama of Hope,” Jouve contrasts Glaspell’s canon with Brustein’s “revolting” dramatists whose work critiqued existing conventions and institutions but failed to offer solutions or alternative ideas. Conversely, Glaspell’s drama “envisages collaboration as the alternative to conventional coercive patterns that split society into the oppressed and the oppressors, and as a means to achieve social harmony in the face of political and cultural abuses” (165). Jouve persuasively argues that Glaspell stages “positive revolts,” highlighting how collaboration manifests in some of the aforementioned plays through examples of sisterly, national, and international solidarity. This last section concludes by countering previous scholarship that has viewed the protagonists of Bernice (1919) and Chains of Dew (1922) as compromised in their feminist ethos for sacrificing their own self-empowerment to bolster their male counterparts. Citing Glaspell’s real-life choices in support of George Cram Cook, her professional and romantic partner, Jouve argues that these protagonists’ models of self-sacrifice “turn out to be covert strategies to undermine oppressive structures from within” (204). Jouve’s exhaustively detailed textual analysis helps to cement Glaspell’s place among the trailblazers of modern drama and is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship addressing Glaspell’s contributions. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Jennifer-Scott Mobley East Carolina University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Theatre of Isolation “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

Stacy Wolf Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 1 Visit Journal Homepage Musical Theatre Studies Stacy Wolf By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Musical Theatre Studies, whose presence as a viable academic field is not much more than a decade old, is spreading out in all directions of chronology, geography, approach, and methods. Scholars trained in theatre studies, dance studies, and musicology and ethnomusicology are becoming more comfortable with each other’s intellectual tendencies and conventions, sharing our analytical languages and epistemological assumptions. A quick, ad-hoc survey of some colleagues turned up an inspiring and formidable range of recent and current projects. Some books expand the field in valuable ways. These include, for example, Elizabeth Wollman’s Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City , which takes seriously sexually explicit shows and their conversation with the city, with feminism, with gay culture, and with mainstream musicals. Carol Oja’s Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War looks at the work of Leonard Bernstein from a new angle, focusing on his collaborations with artists of color, including actors, conductors, and dancers. Liza Gennaro’s Making Broadway Dance , a much-needed study of Broadway choreographers, is also in process. I’m working on Beyond Broadway: Four Seasons of Amateur Musical Theatre in the U.S. , which argues that nonprofessional artists at high schools, summer camps, and community theatres sustain and are the lifeblood of the form. Other scholars re-locate what’s been called the most American of entertainment genres in a global context. Both David Savran and Laura MacDonald, for example, are working on international projects: David’s explores the branding of Broadway and its significance across the globe, and Laura studies Korea and China-based productions of Broadway musicals. Some current projects put musical theatre in conversation with other fields, such as urban geography and architecture—Dominic Symonds’ performance cartography of Broadway’s music—and Jessica Sternfeld’s work in disability studies. In Raymond Knapp’s recently completed book on Haydn, German Idealism, and American popular music, he discusses the important role of musical theatre and its sensibilities to the development of American popular music. In an effort to bolster the undergraduate curriculum, which for generations consisted of knowledgeable professors—typically longtime fans of musicals and collectors of trivia who listed facts and dates and told stories (many of them fascinating and crucial to understanding how musicals are made but with no critical framework)—several textbooks have been published recently. James Leve’s American Musical Theater and Larry Stempel’s Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater offer historical context and critical tools to help students learn the repertoire and develop analytical skills. Several other anthologies geared towards undergraduates and graduate students are in process: The Disney Musical: Stage, Screen and Beyond , edited by George Rodosthenous, and Childhood and the Child in Musical Theatre , edited by James Leve and Donelle Ruwe. Elizabeth Wollman is editing The Methuen Critical Companion to the American Stage Musical , which shifts away from the typical production-based study to a culture- and industry-based overview of the American commercial theater. She and Jessica Sternfeld are editing the large Routledge Handbook , which examines musicals of the last fifty years from many angles and will be the first collection to focus on recent repertoire. In addition, Dominic Symonds notes that musical theatre studies’ methods and critical ideas, such as “musicality, collaboration and interdisciplinarity” are increasingly being taken up in other disciplines. This moment in scholarship and pedagogy is, I think, marked by two other issues, which ironically (or not?) seem to pull in opposite directions of access and popularity. The first is the ubiquitous challenge of accessing visual archives to be able to teach musical theatre. Some students are lucky enough to see a New York or regional production of a show, and others can take advantage of local community theatres or high schools, which are both fantastic and underused resources for teaching college students about musicals. But some instructors are limited to what they can find on YouTube, whether clips produced by Playbill or BroadwayWorld, or, more commonly, illegally taped and posted to the web. It’s impossible to teach students the complexity of the genre of musical theatre without a dynamic visual and aural archive. If we want students to understand not only the text-based elements of musicals (script and score) but also casting, staging, and design (to name only a few), we need access to productions for them to see, even in video’s imperfect form. Sondheim’s professionally taped and commercially distributed musicals, including John Doyle’s production of Company , Hal Prince’s Sweeney Todd , and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George , for example, are invaluable teaching tools. Legal restrictions on taping hamper our ability to teach a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of performance. Second, the fans of Broadway musicals have gone mainstream, at once resonant of the 1940s and 50s when musical theatre was a part of popular culture, and with a new, intensely social media orientation. In 1996, Rent broke open a new place for young, politically-progressive musical theatre fans. Now, Hamilton has connected with a diverse audience unlike anything we’ve seen in decades. The fanatical (and I mean that as the highest compliment) passion of “Rentheads” in the mid-to-late 1990s has been bettered by the Hamilton frenzy, which I witnessed firsthand when I attended and gave a talk at the first BroadwayCon in January. Many of the fans I met at that gathering of mostly women, mostly under 30 grew up on Disney musicals and the film versions of Sweeney Todd , Chicago , Les Miz , Phantom , and Into the Woods . Though they (and all of my students) can sing the entire cast album of Hamilton , they also know and love Broadway musicals more generally, and they express their fandom of Fun Home , Fiddler on the Roof , and The King and I on Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. Social media enables the consolidation of widespread fan communities, whose engagement with a musical might be by way of the cast album, artists’ tweets, YouTube clips, or the musical itself. But these new modes of communication and connection don’t alter the fact that the object of affection and desire is the live performance event of a Broadway musical. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Stacy Wolf is Professor of Theater and Director of the Princeton Arts Fellows at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She is the author of Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical and A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical . She is currently working on a book about amateur musical theatre in the US. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue American Tragedian Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Performing Anti-slavery The Captive Stage Musical Theatre Studies Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Murder Most Queer New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Carol Westcamp Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Late Work of Sam Shepard Carol Westcamp By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. The Late Work of Sam Shepard, by Shannon Blake Skelton, brings necessary attention to the later phase of Sam Shepard’s works, including his short prose, plays, acting performances, and screenplays. Previously published scholarship has tended to focus on Shepard’s most prolific period, roughly categorized as 1965 to 1985, as well as his family plays, such as Curse of the Starving Class (1976), Buried Child (1979), True West (1980), Fool for Love (1980), and A Lie of the Mind (1985). Skelton argues that with Shepard’s 1988 directorial debut in Far North and 1991 play States of Shock, Shepard transitioned to a “Late Style” that mixed genres and “resisted the clichéd notions that an aged artist in their autumnal period will offer gentle reflection” (3, 5). In the introduction, Skelton maps out the main points of the project from Shepard’s personality to the gender dynamics of his works. Each chapter corresponds with each key point, creating a thematically organized structure to the book. The first chapter studies the Shepard persona. Since Shepard was an actor, a writer, and even a celebrity, his image circulated widely during the height of his fame in the 1980s. Skelton argues that during his Late Style, Shepard adopted a paternal character due to his acting roles as well as his “status as an elder statesman of American theatre” (72). This new persona began to emerge when he was cast as law professor Thomas Callahan in the movie The Pelican Brief (1993) and was solidified in his role as father and husband Patrick Singer in the movie Safe Passage (1994). These father figure roles continued in subsequent films: Allie’s father Frank Calhoun in The Notebook (2004) and the elder mentor Tom in Mud (2012). This Late Style identity showed an artist who may have passed beyond his most popular period but stayed active in a variety of art forms. Skelton writes, “From acting and directing to writing, Shepard has seemingly made peace with himself, his art, his legacy, and his persona” (72). In the next chapter, Skelton examines Shepard’s self-reflexive exploration of authenticity and the artist in American culture. Much of Shepard’s earlier work probed how artists struggle with authenticity, trying to remain true to the art or the artistic self while facing a world of capitalism, which tries to change art to make it more commercially popular. Some plays such as Cowboy Mouth (1964), Angel City (1976), and True West may have represented this struggle, but they did not offer resolutions. During his Late Style, Shepard positioned the artist as older and wiser. Using close reading, Skelton focuses on two specific works and two solutions. Howard in the film Don’t Come Knocking (2005) achieves authenticity by forming relationships with others. For Hobart in the play Kicking a Dead Horse (2007), authenticity is ultimately unobtainable in life, so he finds it by embracing death. Chapter three explores the relationship between memory and trauma as demonstrated in the plays Simpatico (1993), The Late Henry Moss (2000), and When the World Was Green (1996), the latter of which was co-written with Joseph Chaikin. As with many of his earlier works, Shepard never offered easy answers but revealed characters struggling to comprehend a “past that consistently informs the present” (13). For instance, Buried Child and A Lie of the Mind address the personal dynamics of remembering and forgetting traumatic events in families’ pasts. But it was not until the Late Style works when Shepard revealed ways of “grappling with the past and its memories to transform the individual” (135). Sympatico demonstrates that one can achieve peace through confronting and then letting go of painful histories. Late Henry Moss and When the World Was Green show that one can reconcile with a past trauma by reenacting the event. Focusing on the two plays States of Shock (1991) and The God of Hell (2004), the fourth chapter addresses the politics of Shepard’s work during the Gulf War and the War on Terror. These two plays, unlike earlier ones, “unabashedly engage with political issues and offer commentary on broader concerns of the contemporary world” (137). Skelton argues that both plays show masculine, political conservatives attempting to change the minds of the other (potentially subversive) characters who question the supremacy of patriarchal narratives. Through these plays, Shepard suggests that “conservative ideology can be defeated through (1) direct action (States of Shock) (2) resistance by women (The God of Hell) and (3) the responsibility of one to be politically aware and engaged” (161). In the final chapters, Skelton analyzes how Shepard engages with the legacy of colonialism as well as gender dynamics. While the body of Shepard’s work has focused on the mystique of the American cowboy, his Late Style showcased the perspective of indigenous people, as in the plays Silent Tongue (1994) and Eyes for Consuela (1998). Shepard tried to move past romanticized notions of the Native American figure, showing instead more in-depth characters. Much of Shepard’s early work has been criticized for its lack of women and glorification of masculinity. However, during the Late Style, Shepard used the homosocial space in plays such as Ages of the Moon (2009) and Heartless (2012) to challenge patriarchal assumptions, tackle the collapse of masculine expectations, and address same-sex desire. Skelton’s book is an important contribution to the critical studies of Sam Shepard, offering discussion of Shepard’s major themes, stylistic changes, and late works. The book builds upon previous publications such as Stephen J. Bottoms’s The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis (1998) and Matthew Roudané’s The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard (2002). Roudané’s collection does offer two essays that address Shepard’s Late Style, but the essays do not provide the comprehensive insight of Skelton’s monograph. Skelton gives a personal touch to the striking impact that Shepard has had on American culture. Carol Westcamp University of Arkansas at Fort Smith The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 1 (Fall 2018) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2018 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. Footnotes ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. About The Author(s) ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting The Late Work of Sam Shepard Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Bodies and Playwrights Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Paul E. Fallon. Cambridge, Massachusetts Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Paul E. Fallon. Cambridge, Massachusetts By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Jay Eddy in Boston Playwrights' Theatre Driving in Circles. Photo: Scornavacca Photography. ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. References ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. Footnotes ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. About The Author(s) ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

Isaiah Matthew Wooden Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement Isaiah Matthew Wooden By Published on April 28, 2021 Download Article as PDF by Isaiah Matthew Wooden The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 33, Number 2 (Spring 2021) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The 1978 documentary Black Theater: The Making of a Movement opens with a striking performance by the legendary artist-activist-duo Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee that reveals the stakes of the project and the revolutionary Black artistic movements it archives.[1] Viewers first encounter Dee’s radiant face and honey-toned voice. With her eyes fixed squarely on the camera, the esteemed actress launches into a poem whose opening line offers a powerful rebuke of the notion that Black art is in any way imitative or derivative. “Black poetry is not what Shakespeare begot,” Dee recites percussively.[2] Davis quickly responds to her initiating call, adding “Nor, is it one with Tennyson.”[3] For a minute or so thereafter, the pair trade lines that remind viewers that Black art “sets up its own condition” and, indeed, “defies tradition.”[4] The performance culminates with Davis and Dee inviting viewers to join them in celebrating all that is distinct and compelling about Black art. The scene offers an evocative overture to a film that, by casting a resplendent spotlight on some of the key figures and movements that collectively revolutionized Black art in the twentieth century, distinguishes itself as a major milestone in African American theatre and performance history. Produced and directed by Woodie King, Jr., the founder of the New Federal Theatre, Black Theater: The Making of a Movement has been screened countless times since its late-70s premiere, and the academic database and video publisher Alexander Street has made it available to stream through its website.[5] For those who study and teach African American dramatic literature and theatre history, the film remains an indispensable resource for the sheer number of Black theatrical luminaries it brings together to meditate on the vital importance of Black art in the ongoing struggle for Black liberation. As the promotional description that accompanies it asserts, the film “is a veritable video encyclopedia of the leading figures, institutions, and events of a movement that transformed the American stage.”[6] In addition to Davis and Dee, the documentary features, among other theatrical innovators, Amiri Baraka, Roscoe Lee Browne, Ed Bullins, Vinnette Carroll, Robert Hooks, James Earl Jones, Lloyd Richards, Ntozake Shange, Barbara Ann Teer, Glynn Turman, and Douglas Turner Ward commenting on the rich contributions of enterprises and initiatives such as the Black Theatre Alliance, the Group Theatre Workshop, the New Lafayette Theatre, the Negro Ensemble Company, and the Urban Arts School. The film offers viewers much more than an abundance of star power or a standard accounting of the organizations and institutions that helped shape the new theatre movements that the Civil Rights activism of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s engendered. It overflows with insights about the tremendous significance and influence of the arts—theatre, especially—in Black social, cultural, and political life. Revisiting the film in the wake of the growing calls to fundamentally upend and overhaul the systems and structures reinforcing racism, antiblackness, and white supremacy in the arts reveals just how deeply relevant and resonant many of the conversations it catalogs remain. Its subjects convey with profound clarity their visions for a Black theatre that is at once revolutionary, heterogenous, and deeply attuned to the experiences of Black people. In drawing attention to a few of its more potent threads and themes in what follows, I hope to situate the current demands for change within a longer history of struggle to rework the American theatre. I also aim to explore how heeding some of the vital lessons the documentary provides might further enrich and embolden efforts to imagine, plot, and build artistic practices, strategies, principles, and conditions that are both transformative and sustainable. The documentary launches with well-known figures including Dee, Davis, playwright Owen Dodson, and director Lloyd Richards paying homage to some of the artists who they credit with making their work in the theatre possible. They give particular praise to change agents like Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson for breaking barriers and expanding possibilities for the Black theatrical imagination. Two key points emerge from these backward glances. The first is the idea that Black theatre has always been deeply connected to and rooted in community. Davis explains how Black artists in New York City responded to the bigotry and discrimination of commercial and mainstream theatres by bringing together people from their own mostly segregated neighborhoods to mount performances. In doing so, they extended a tradition that dates back to the early national period, as theatre historian Marvin McAllister outlines in his study on the “entertainments” of impresario William Brown.[7] However, as Richards observes, the little headway that Black artists did begin to make on and off Broadway in the 1940s and ’50s was quickly undermined by the racist and repressive forces of McCarthyism. Richards, reflecting on the widespread efforts to terrorize Black artists during the period, offers the second key point I want to underscore. Black theatre, he insists, is fundamentally a theatre of protest. “The theatre has been for Black people a way of protesting the circumstances within which we attempt to exist in this country,” Richards remarks.[8] An abundance of evidence in the corpus of African American dramatic literature bears out this declaration. As Daphne Brooks points out in her evocative reading of William Wells Brown’s The Escape, or a Leap for Freedom, the first play published by a Black person in the United States, African Americans have long mobilized the power of theatre and performance to forge both discursive and embodied insurgency.[9] Throughout the remainder of the documentary, King grants some of the Black arts leaders who helped heighten the fervor for a radical Black consciousness, aesthetic, and politic that intensified during the catalytic Black Power era an opportunity to elaborate on their motivations for pursuing new theatrical paradigms. The deep commitment so many of these artists had to centering experimentation in their work resounds across these conversations. Vinnette Carroll, who was both the first Black woman to stage a show on Broadway and to garner a Tony Award nomination for her direction, notes that she founded the Urban Arts Corps in 1967, in part, to create a space for Black artists to train and develop new material that might not otherwise receive nurturing or support. “It’s also a place where some writers and musicians can come and try out things and not be afraid to fail,” Carroll explains.[10] Barbara Ann Teer, who, along with actor-activist Robert Hooks co-founded the Group Theatre Workshop in 1962 and, in 1968, established the National Black Theatre in Harlem, expresses a similar sentiment. Teer recalls how she and her early collaborators at the National Black Theatre spent nearly two years collectively devising artistic processes and practices that at once “fitted the sensibilities of Black people” and demonstrated “the richness and greatness and power inherent in the form and feeling of Black life/style.”[11] To that end, they experimented with drums, rhythms, chants, and energy, all in an effort to create a theatre that was unequivocally and unapologetically Black.[12] Not every Black artist of the era committed to renouncing any and all things associated with the theatrical traditions of Europe. For example, the Group Theatre Workshop, which mounted an off-Broadway staging of Douglas Turner Ward’s Happy Ending in 1965, paved the way for the founding of the Negro Ensemble Company in 1967. While the Negro Ensemble Company would quickly fortify its reputation as a launching ground for Black artistry and talent (including a production of Errol Hill’s Man Better Man in the 1968-69 season), it did not shy away from engaging with white interlocutors and collaborators. The first work the company produced was Song of the Lusitanian Bogey by German playwright Peter Weiss, in fact. “When the decision about Song of the Lusitanian Bogey was announced I knew I would get flack,” Turner Ward recalls.[13] “But no matter. The fact, in this instance, was that authorship had no significance. The play was ‘authored’ by the real historical situation itself. Peter was merely a conduit. More significantly, the material was going to be authored by an all-Black creative team, giving it life,” he goes on to say.[14] The production proved an auspicious springboard for the company, establishing it as a formidable presence on the New York arts scene and a model that others might adopt and follow. Certainly, as James Earl Jones recollects in the documentary, many Black artists maintained profound ambivalence about what their social and artistic responsibility should be to the various movements brewing around them. Jones recalls that during the successful off-Broadway run of Jean Genet’s The Blacks, a fierce debate erupted amongst his fellow company members about what actions they should take to advance the struggle for rights, freedom, and justice. “Half of us thought it was our responsibility, our social and artistic responsibility, to go up to picket… [The] other half preferred to, as Roscoe Lee Browne would say, stick to our vocational guidance, stick to our work.”[15] While Jones notes that he sided with Browne, he also confesses that he found great value in the dissension, as it not only served to build a greater sense of ensemble amongst the company, but it also empowered each performer to clarify for themselves what form they wanted their activism to take. As the film shifts focus to the future of Black theatre in its final section, a more subtle line of conversation begins to emerge about the perils and politics of arts funding. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the drastic economic changes that occurred throughout the 1970s, the interviewees voice a palpable unease about money and resources. It surfaces in the appeal that Carroll makes for wealthy Black people to consider financially supporting the arts: “I’d like to see more Black producers doing all sorts of things in the theatre, and that Black people would invest in us because we certainly have a group of Black people now with the money to invest in the theatre,” she asserts.[16] In the wake of Nixon’s election to the U.S. presidency, many of the grant-giving institutions that had been instrumental in launching ventures like the Urban Arts Corps, the Negro Ensemble Company, and the New Lafayette Theatre (the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, among them) decided that it was too risky to continue to support Black cultural institutions and withdrew their financial backing. This left many of these organizations without the resources they needed to stay afloat. Bullins, who after a brief stint as the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party became the playwright-in-residence at the New Lafayette Theatre, explains: When Nixon came in the late 60s…he so frightened the philanthropic community that they cut back on just about all Black arts activities…So, all that money just about disappeared. And, we were working with a company of fifteen actors and all the support personnel with quite a yearly budget. And so, we couldn’t operate on the level that we had been operating on.[17] The documentary’s various discussions about funding underline just how potentially detrimental an overreliance on the goodwill and philanthropy of foundations and corporations can be to building a truly sustainable theatre. This is an important caution to take note of, especially amid calls to celebrate the commitments that institutions like the Ford and Mellon Foundations have made in recent months to granting millions of dollars to Black arts and cultural organizations.[18] These foundations have proven time and again that they are undependable. And, although they might provide some relief in the short term, the inconsistency of their funding often produces deleterious effects for Black art that are much longer-lasting. While the film’s chronological structure might suggest a progressive, teleological narrative, Black Theater: The Making of a Movement closes by exploring many of the questions and ideas that remain unaddressed or unresolved for Black theatremakers. The conclusion of the film sends an urgent call to Black artists to continue to find ways to bring the artform to Black communities and to harness its power to embolden radical change. Each of the figures featured in the documentary played a significant role in expanding possibilities for what the American theatre could be. Revisiting the film reaffirms just how solid the foundations they laid remain. It also provides an occasion for contemporary scholars and students of Black theatre to contemplate further how to capitalize on some of the “new stirrings” that have emerged in efforts to reimagine and remake the theatre—and the world—anew.[19] Isaiah Matthew Wooden is a director-dramaturg, critic, and assistant professor of Theater Arts at Brandeis University. A scholar of African American art, drama, and performance, he has contributed articles and essays to The Black Scholar, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Modern Drama, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Topics, among other scholarly and popular publications. Wooden is the co-editor of Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration (Northwestern UP 2020) and is currently at work on a monograph that explores the interplay of race and time in post-civil rights Black expressive culture. [1] Black Theater: The Making of a Movement, directed by Woodie King, Jr. (1978; San Francisco: California Newsreel), https://video.alexanderstreet.com/watch/black-theater-the-making-of-a-movement?source=suggestion. All subsequent references are to this version of the film. [2] Black Theater. [3] Black Theater. [4] Black Theater. [5] The New Federal Theatre notably celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2020. [6] See Black Theater. [7] See Marvin McAllister, White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour: William Brown’s African and American Theater (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). [8] Black Theater. [9] See Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). [10] Black Theater. [11] Black Theater. [12] La Donna L. Forsgren’s In Search of Our Warrior Mothers provides a wealth of evidence of some of the other ways this commitment to experimentation manifested for Teer and her Black Arts Movement contemporaries. See La Donna L. Forsgren, In Search of Our Warrior Mothers (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018). [13] Douglas Turner Ward, “Foreword,” in Classic Plays from the Negro Ensemble Company, ed. Paul Carter Harrison and Gus Edwards (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 1995), xiii. [14] Ward, “Foreword.” [15] Black Theater. [16] Black Theater. [17] Black Theater. [18] See, for example, the announcements about the Ford Foundation’s “American Cultural Treasures” initiative and the Mellon Foundation’s sponsorship of “The Black Seed.” [19] See W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). ISNN 2376-4236 Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble” by Elizabeth M. Cizmar “Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth” by Baron Kelly “A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson's Black Feminist Intervention” by Khalid Y. Long “An Interview with Elaine Jackson” by Nathaniel G. Nesmith "Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston" by Michelle Cowin Gibbs "1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston’s Antimusical The Mule-Bone Is Presented" by Eric M. Glover “'Ògún Yè Mo Yè!' Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities" by Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green "Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar" by Lisa B. Thompson "Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge" by Bernth Lindfors "Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation" by Olga Sanchez Saltveit "A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement" by Isaiah Matthew Wooden www.jadtjournal.org www.jadtjournal.org ">jadt@gc.cuny.eduwww.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2020 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative The Theatre of August Wilson Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Introduction to “Milestones in Black Theatre” Interviews and Afterviews on "Milestones in Black Theatre" Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Re-Imagining America and Theater: Race, Representation, and Form Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Ansley Valentine Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 Ansley Valentine By Published on April 15, 2023 Download Article as PDF References At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when all of the theaters closed, many artists moved their work to digital platforms. While many disparaged these efforts, claiming that virtual performance was not legitimate performance, Pandemic Performance : Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times documents the work experience and creativity of primarily American theatre and dance artists who not only moved to digital and other platforms, but who also developed new methods of working through these platforms, thereby sustaining and growing craft through the pandemic. Pandemic Performance includes scholarship in a variety of modes—traditional research alongside artists’ reflections—which makes this book an important record of the field, as well as of myriad artists’ experiences in this time. The range and level of detail given will serve as an important historical record from the inside of the changes in process and communities that artists undertook to maintain their artistry. Pandemic Performance is one of the first books to chronicle “resilience, liveness and protest in quarantine times” so thoroughly. Editors Kendra Claire Capece and Patrick Scorese organize the book around three headings: PART I: America God Damn; PART II: Friction and Encounter; PART III: Building a New Future. In PART I: America God Damn , Capece and Scorese begin with the general societal upheaval that happened with the convergence of Black Lives Matter, Covid-19, and the death of George Floyd, framing how those critical events caused an awakening to systemic injustice in America in general and the performing arts, in particular. PART II: Friction and Encounter examines the difficulties artists and institutions faced as they tried to pivot to make art in different ways. PART III: Building a New Future shares views on how disruption and adaptation created models for sustained artist/community/institution realignment. This book focuses more on individual artists who document their reactions to disruption and how they’ve examined their own praxis. These artists developed performance models to supplement or replace their previous work, as the profession and society experienced crisis. Contributors focus on how artists shifted their relationships with institutions and ultimately became different artistically in light of the shifts in society. In fact, this book seems to be one of the first to gather a variety of sources that address the impact of marked societal shifts on the working artist from the perspective of artists documenting their metamorphosis. There are certainly other resources that highlight data such as the economic impact on the arts in the United States, the number of arts organizations that failed to reopen after the shutdown, and so on. What makes this book unique is its centering on artists’ voices relative to their work, whether written by the artists themselves as in (Re)current Unrest: The Fire This Time (Charles O. Anderson) or gathered through conversations such as Performative Allyship and the Foxes That Drool: In Conversation with Brittany Talissa King (Brittany Talissa King with Kendra Claire Capece and Patrick Scorese). Here, disparate artists share their individual responses to the shutdown, their reaction to the disruption to their work practices and places, but also how they pivoted to make art in a different way. For example, some detail how they discovered ways of making media practice a part of their performance model while trying to maintain the immediacy they found in their previous live performance work. While the idea of mediated live performance is not completely new, the ways these artists experimented with media are new, as are the contexts—and communities engaged, at times—demonstrating resilience. This book makes a cogent argument for the importance and practicality of these performances. Rather than simply being placeholder activities, Pandemic Performance makes a very clear argument for why these works actually discovered and explored new uses of performance theory. By necessity, the means of production were decentralized. In the absence of institutional support, the artists featured found new ways of creating their work. They also explored ways of working as collaborators while remaining in isolation. They took on new ways of using their work and artistry to support the change they saw around them. The result is a book that will appeal to anyone interested in how artists invested in community engagement and social justice, as well as the performing arts, struggled with and adapted to the Covid-19 challenges they faced. On one hand, it validates the experiences of thousands of performing artists who embraced this unstable time as an opportunity to create despite obstacles. On the other hand, this book can serve to challenge those who questioned the legitimacy of virtual performance and whether it was worthy of serious artistic consideration or critique. The volume’s case study chapters give detailed accounts of the processes and experiences of those who joined the digital performance space, determined to create and persevere. The research presented documents methods, analysis, and outcomes of the disparate projects. One should also note that Pandemic Performance shares perspectives of BIPOC artists who found new life and opportunities in the pandemic that had not existed for them before, reimagining the field’s practices and hierarchies. This book is important to the field because it captures in detail the seismic shifts that happened in performance. The writing is largely accessible and often very personal. Pandemic Performance can serve students, artists and scholars in performance studies, social justice, community development, and other disciplines. Some might question its scholarship because of the mixture of analysis and first-person accounts, however the volume is fascinating, instructive and can ground others’ future scholarship. Capece and Scorese critically frame the artists’ contributions effectively, moving from hypothesis to analysis via the Introduction and book structure. To an impressive degree, they also value the unfiltered voices of socially-engaged artists who helped to reimagine performance and work practices, making this an important primary source for scholars now and moving forward. Footnotes About The Author(s) ANSLEY VALENTINE Indiana University Bloomington Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

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

Baron Kelly Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Baron Kelly By Published on April 30, 2021 Download Article as PDF by Baron Kelly The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 33, Number 2 (Spring 2021) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Histories of US theatre have often overlooked the contributions of Black trailblazers as agents of change. Instead of focusing on the knowledge, tradition, sacrifice, and artistry of these pioneers, mainstream histories have emphasized their acts of rebellion in ways that continue to frame their narratives in the context of the dominant white culture. While the “legitimate theatre”[1] in the United States proved impenetrable to African American artists for many years, the histories of those Black performers who created dynamic careers merit a narrative that transcends their successful “invasion” of that long-forbidden territory. This brief essay explores the legacies of Earle Hyman (1926-2017) and Frederick O’Neal (1905-1992) who represent two shining examples of excellence in a long, and largely unknown historical context in which their long track record of achievements were not recognized or could not be fully acknowledged. Hyman’s career began in the early 1940s and continued well into the twenty-first century, encompassing several significant chapters in American theatre history. His career exemplifies progressive efforts to make the American theatre more culturally diverse and inclusive, to eradicate racial and ethnic stereotypes, and integrate non-white traditions, playwrights, performers, and multicultural audiences. Earle Hyman’s brilliant theatrical career spanned the US and Europe, and he became the first Black actor to play the title roles in four of Shakespeare’s masterpieces: Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear, along with leading roles in Chekhov, O’Neill, Pinter, Soyinka, Albee, Fugard, Beckett, Hansberry, and Uhry. Hyman’s numerous successes established him as a leading man in the classical repertoire of the Western canon. During the 1940s and 1960s Frederick O’Neal led the way on and off the stage, working as an actor, theatre organizer, and union spokesman, advocating and working tirelessly for the inclusion of African Americans in American theatre. While Hyman was on the stage carving a career on stage in legitimate theatre, Frederick O’Neal, Hyman’s costar in Anna Lucasta, promoted the racial integration of American theatre. O’Neal insisted that the Black community and other ethnic groups had the right to act, direct, write, produce, and participate in all aspects of the American theatre. He focused on putting more “color” on Broadway. “I don’t mean in the sense of all-black shows,” he once clarified, “That will take care of itself. What I mean is a real commitment to the integration of the Broadway theatre.”[2] Both men proved that their “revolutionary acts” of penetrating fields long closed to Black actors were only the beginning of their stories. I invite contemporary theatre scholars to return to their legacies and reconsider their impact on this history of Black theatre. Earle Hyman: Two Ways of Life In the mid-1950s, the immensely talented and stately African American actor Earle Hyman pushed his way through the closed doors of classical and contemporary theatre, demonstrating artistic versatility in his roles. Almost a century after Ira Aldridge broke barriers in Europe and Russia (Ira Aldridge had crossed the Atlantic in the early 1800s, but had never been permitted to display his talent in America). Hyman became the first African American actor to demonstrate artistic versatility in a range of both Shakespearean and contemporary roles in legitimate theatre. In the late part of the twentieth century, Hyman’s popular appeal came through his work as Russell Huxtable, Bill Cosby’s television father, in The Cosby Show. However, in the professional theatre world, he was known first and foremost for performance in classic plays, especially his Shakespeare roles. Hyman’s period of prosperity in the 1950s should not be taken as evidence that the status of Black actors had generally improved to any great degree by that time. Before Hyman’s successes, two African American theatre artists of exceptional talent, Paul Robeson and Canada Lee, succeeded briefly in forcing the classical theatre doors open with their Broadway performances in Othello (1943) and The Tempest and The Duchess of Malfi (1945, and 1946), respectively. Additionally, some Black actors, including Ruby Dee, Frederick O’Neal, and Frank Silvera, had been cast in roles that were not specifically Black roles, but they were the exceptions, not the rule. Major roles written by white playwrights for Black actors were limited, and Black theatre had been ghettoized in the US.[3] Writing in the 1960s, author Roy Newquist defined the central challenge faced so many Black actors: As restrictive as the issue of whether or not the Negro is allowed to act is the problem of what he can act in. Few plays, whether classical or contemporary, include good roles for Negroes. Since audiences are still prone to judge the Negro actor as a Negro first, then as an actor, it is difficult to integrate the cast of a play by casting a Negro in a basically ‘white’ part. Plays have been written, of course, for all Negro casts, and ‘white’ plays have been played by all-Negro casts, but the former have been produced frequently enough, and the latter become Negro theater, which is another matter entirely.[4] Indeed, Hyman entered a highly segregated world of theatre. Groups like the Actors’ Equity Association (formed on 26 May 1913) engaged in constant battles with theatre managers for equal treatment, standard contracts, and basic standard civil rights for actors. Yet, throughout this struggle, they ignored the rights of Black actors. The April 1923 edition of Equity News, published by Actors’ Equity, defined the union’s position toward the Black actor: Equity’s policy has been that when colored performers act in white companies, they come under our jurisdiction and should belong to the AEA, but when they perform in all-colored companies, we don't seek their support because this group of people has many problems of which we know nothing and have at present no way of learning. As we don’t wish to take their dues without giving something in return, we have always felt it would be infinitely better if they were to form a colored branch of Equity.[5] Equity’s policies, while appalling, hardly seem surprising in the midst of the Jim Crow era. They explicitly tie professionalism to whiteness and acceptance in a white-dominated cultural system. Additionally, the language of “We” in the statement signals an entirely white leadership team in Equity, and a refusal to acknowledge Black performers as professional equals. By the time Hyman began making his mark in the 1950s, African American activists had taken to the streets. Black protests for civil rights surfaced in American theatre as early as the mid-forties. Actors Fredi Washington, Canada Lee, and Paul Robeson attended civil rights rallies fighting for soldiers of color and their rights. African Americans who had fought for their country during World War II came home with new expectations. In New York, Black theatregoers were allowed to purchase seats anywhere in the theatre in most Broadway houses that earlier had enforced segregated seating policies. Yet attitudes changed slowly among those who controlled the entertainment industry and access to opportunities for Black artists. In 1956, after becoming the first and only African American actor cast at the American Shakespeare Festival Stratford in Stratford, Connecticut, Hyman achieved another artistic milestone when he secured the lead in, Mister Johnson, a stage adaptation of Joyce Cary's novel about colonial days in West Africa. Hyman had previously appeared on Broadway in small roles in Climate of Eden (1952) and No Time for Sergeants (1955). However, Mister Johnson was his first leading role on Broadway since Anna Lucasta in 1944 and it offered a chance to exhibit his versatility. In the title role of Mister Roberts he portrayed a young Nigerian elevated to clerk's status for the British Government. Langston Hughes and Milton Meltzer summarize the plot as follows: Having adopted the appellation Mister, Johnson is no longer tribal, but neither is he civilized in the word's conventional sense. Hilariously funny yet sweet happenings occur between his would-be decent employer [Harry Rudbeck] and this Nigerian boy in a backwoods outpost of empire. The two men are friends, but the gulf between them is too great for genuine understanding. In the end, the black boy is sentenced to hang for an unintentional crime. Rather than suffer the noose's public indignity, he begs his white friend (who upholds the sentence) to shoot him. The white does. To paraphrase an old cliché of cowboy and Indian films, ‘Another Negro bites the dust.’[6] Langston Hughes observed that "on Broadway Negro characters do not shoot first. They merely get shot."[7] Despite its critical success, Hyman faced the same problem with Mister Roberts. It offers no Black hero and no character remains to carry on the Black character’s legacy. Many playwrights of the 1950s framed Black characters as martyrs because those types of figures appeared less threatening to white audiences (and thus more commercially viable). The character of Mister Johnson reverted to that old theme stretching back to Uncle Tom's Cabin: the innate capacity of Blacks to suffer, especially for white folk. Although Mister Johnson received mixed reviews, the top (white) critics proved unanimous in praise of Hyman's talent. He had accomplished the American actor's dream, "stardom" on Broadway, and a collection of glowing reviews. All the leading white New York critics heralded Hyman’s performance. Brooks Atkinson, who had followed Hyman's career from the beginning, wrote: "The leading part is wonderfully well acted by Hyman, a gifted Negro who at last has inherited a Broadway part worthy of his talents. Mr. Hyman is a tall, supple, imaginative actor. … [He] is superb.”[8] Adding to Atkinson’s praise, Robert Coleman wrote: “Hyman is magnificent as the well-meaning, essentially honest and irresponsible native trapped between two ways of life. His dreams, accomplishments and eventual destruction are realized with touches that are irresistibly amusing and enormously disturbing. Take our word for it, Hyman is going to win many a prize this season for a truly great performance.”[9] And indeed, Hyman received a 1956 Theatre World Award for his performance. Theatre Arts declared Hyman the play's "principal onstage asset"[10] and dubbed him, "one of the brightest entries in Broadway's own future outlook.”[11] Richard Watts, admitting that the play had challenges, concluded that Hyman's performance minimized these failings: "Mr. Hyman, in a part that dominates the evening and appears in virtually every scene, gives a beautiful performance, which is at the same time warmly humorous and has the quality of tragic dignity. Mister Johnson certainly has frailties, but Mr. Hyman's characterization is so moving and real that they seem comparatively unimportant."[12] John Chapman of the New York Daily News wrote: "It is, mostly, Hyman's play, for the role is a long and hard one-and Hyman doesn't falter. This is good acting."[13] Other critics were equally impressed by Hyman's presence and ability to capture the audience. John McClain stated, "The evening is almost entirely Hyman's. Hyman dominates the stage and sustains you until the final curtain falls on his flattened figure."[14] The New York Herald Tribune's Walter Kerr wrote: In actor Hyman's hands, Mister Johnson is sunny, ingratiating, and strangely touching throughout the play. Mr. Hyman has an enormous emotional range."[15] Hyman was a handsome and extremely tall light-skinned Black man. He played to exclusively white audiences in the theatre bringing an exoticized and visceral truth to the stage that had not been seen before.[16] Hyman would later describe Mister Johnson as one of the high points of his career. But even Hyman’s newly acquired "star status" did not guarantee Mister Johnson an extended run. Unfortunately, the lines did not form in front of the box-office, and the show closed after 44 performances. "Broadway was just not ready for Mister Johnson," observed Helen Martin. “It hit too close to home. The average American audience, composed of middle-class whites, was not open to the idea of seeing injustices perpetrated by them presented on the Broadway stage."[17] Echoing Helen Martin, Loften Mitchell observed, “The author had good intentions, but the mark of the handkerchief was on Mr. Johnson's head and Negroes did not like it.”[18] An interesting commentary was the fact that director Robert Lewis never understood why they didn't. He lamented that Negro groups had not booked theatre parties for the show.[19] Mister Johnson’s Broadway fate offers one example of how Hyman both exceeded expectations for Black actors of his time but still had his success stymied by racism in the commercial mainstream US theatre. Like his character of Mister Roberts, Hyman found himself “trapped between two ways of life” – one in the mainstream white theatre that relegated him to certain types of roles, and one in the emerging Black American theatre. Once Hyman launched his career in Europe, he found himself able to move into the types of roles that shifted him away from the limited opportunities available in US theatre. Frederick O’Neal: A Real Commitment While Hyman carved a career on the “legitimate” stage in the US and Europe, Frederick O’Neal, Hyman’s costar in Anna Lucasta, promoted the racial integration of American theatre. O’Neal insisted that the Black community and other ethnic groups had the right to act, direct, write, produce, and participate in all aspects of the American theatre. He focused on putting more "color" on Broadway. "I don't mean in the sense of all-black shows,” he once clarified, “That will take care of itself. What I mean is a real commitment to the integration of the Broadway theatre."[20] O’Neal’s advocacy for Black actors started with his union involvement. The January 1944 edition of Equity magazine published an editorial entitled, "No Color Line." Twenty-one years after AEA had claimed its leaders had, “no way of learning” about the “many problems” faced by “colored performers,” the organization seemed ready to reconsider some of its earlier policies. The editorial, “No Color Line,” lauded Equity for ignoring the color line when it needed Black actors in white shows: Equity adopted the policy thirty years ago when it was neither particularly expedient nor likely to obtain for it any commendation, but simply a matter of right and justice and good sense for a theatre which needed Negro actors and has benefited by their appearance. It still might be a good idea for a lot of other organizations to approach the problem of Negro members from the same angle and in the same spirit.[21] Frederick O'Neal decided to tackle the "problem" of Negro members when he joined AEA later that same year. In 1944, O'Neal chaired the Hotel Accommodations Committee. This committee addressed the difficulties facing AEA members on the road, especially minority members. No group of members was more deeply and adversely affected by not being able to secure lodging than Black performers who would have to undertake the discouraging and sometimes humiliating task of finding accommodations for themselves, however poor or inconvenient the accommodations might be. The committee and the AEA took steps to address this problem "[urging] the League of New York Theatre, the Association of Theatrical Agents and Managers, local house managers, and even the national Travelers Aid Society to make special efforts to provide adequate accommodations for minority performers on tour."[22] From O'Neal's point of view, finding accommodations for minority performers on the road was only part of the problem. There needed to be more "color" in the audiences as well. But how could this become a reality when many theatres remained segregated? For example, in Washington, D.C. blacks were permitted to perform on the stage of the National Theatre, but their relatives and friends could not come to see them. Equity had been aware of this situation but felt little motivation to do anything about it until after World War II.[23] As a member of the Negotiating Committee of 1947, O'Neal helped to formulate the agreement with the League of New York Theatres which stated that beginning on June 1, 1948, "the actor shall not be required to perform at any theatre in Washington, D.C., where discrimination is practiced against any actor or patron of the theatre by reason of his race, color or creed."[24] In the June 1952 edition of Equity News, O’Neal wrote an article entitled “Integration.” He pointed out that theatre and all other forms of American entertainment were among the most powerful and influential medium of communication and education. Therefore, it was increasingly important that the role of the “Negro” citizen be adequately and accurately portrayed to reflect his/her significant presence in American society.[25] “In confirmation of the realities of the American scene today,” he wrote, “we urge the portrayal of the Negro as a more general part of the scheme of our society, for example, as postmen, doctors and teachers, without the necessity of emphasis on race.”[26] He stressed that in the recent past: A well-intentioned but ill-directed sensitivity to this problem [of racial stereotypes] has worked inadvertent harm to the Negro artist. Apprehensive of doing injustice to the Negro citizens and offending humanity, writers and producers have tended to completely eliminate the Negro in comedy and servant roles. This policy, wellmeant though it may be, is unrealistic and has seriously curtailed the employment of the Negro artist.[27] O'Neal's faith in his fellow Equity members and his belief that integration could solve the racial problems in the theatre culminated in a practical display of "mixed casting." With O'Neal as chair, the Equity Committee on Negro Integration, presented a two-hour program of scenes entitled "Integration Showcase 1959." The impressive cast of "Integration Showcase" included Ralph Bellamy (then AEA's president); Robert Preston, star of The Music Man; Geraldine Page, star of Sweet Bird of Youth; as well as many prominent Black performers, including Louis Gossett, Ossie Davis, and Diahann Carroll. The producers of "Integration Showcase" did not "seek a forum to demand the indiscriminate casting of African Americans in roles where audience credibility would be strained," but "wanted merely to prove that more black actors could and should be cast in roles which are at present denied them arbitrarily." The producer of the "Integration Showcase," Windsor Lewis, stated, "the aim is to stimulate the imagination of writers, directors, and producers in every field of the entertainment world down to the level of community and amateur theaters."[28] O'Neal added, "The point of the show is to show how the Negro actor can be used in 'other than Negro roles'-without disturbing the artistic intent of the play. In the so-called non-designated role we see no reason why we can't have a Negro."[29] The star-studded event was presented to an invited audience of 1,500 actors, directors, agents, producers, and other theatre personnel connected with casting. It had taken two years for Actors' Equity to assemble all the players in New York City at the same time. The theme expressed in the 1959 Integration Showcase, “We see no reason why we can’t have a Negro,” has echoed in the outcries of the ‘80s and ‘90s and among those who have thrust "non-traditional casting" into the limelight. In a 1992 collection of interviews with actors to determine the effect of non-traditional casting on their lives, one young actor, Mary Lee, translated O’Neal’s goals into the jargon of the ‘90s saying: "We can cut through much p.c. rhetoric in casting if we simply ask of any role: Is race (age, gender, physical ability) germane: if yes, simply cast it so. If no, give all actors an equal opportunity.”[30] While O’Neal maintained that caricatures and stereotypes should always be censured, his denied that there was anything denigrating about comic or servant roles if they were included as a part of American life. On the other hand, when Blacks were presented exclusively in such roles, it distorted their representation and impeded any attempts at integration. Again, Mary Lee's argument echoes O'Neal's, but brings his argument into more contemporary conversations: Sometimes the roles are stereotyped as written, sometimes not. Sometimes roles that have depth and dimension are directed as stereotypes. This is especially true for culturally specific roles. When there are more ethnically-specific lead roles out there that command our attention and respect, there will be much more respect for non-white actors in all roles, traditional or not.[31] O’Neal was a man of even temperament, who had experienced the pain of the racial divide, but believed, ideally, in an integrated society and fairness. He fought tirelessly for Black actors to be engaged for roles not racially designated. Conclusion The cultural politics of casting, access, and representation continues in the twenty-first century (most recently in the 2019 volume, Casting a Movement). In her 2010 study, Passing Strange, Ayanna Thompson pondered the slowness of contemporary theatre to become truly multicultural. Thompson argues that even though directors as early as Orson Welles or Joseph Papp employed color-conscious casting, the mission of countering whiteness through intentional casting against color is still seen as a challenge, and as a new idea.[32] She probes the inconsistencies in contemporary casting practices. Although most regional Shakespeare festivals profess to be multicultural, their actual practices can be divided into four categories: (1) colorblind casting, assigning actors of color according to ability without regard to race; (2) societal casting, assigning actors of color to roles that were originally written for white actors; (3) conceptual casting, assigning actors of color to roles that will enhance the play’s social resonance; (4) cross cultural casting, moving the play’s milieu to a different location or culture.[33] Black theatre artists in twenty-first century America have evolved from a sense of pride, struggle, history, and achievement from those like Hyman and O’Neal who found numerous ways to surmount obstacles set before them. Their resistance to racism and their unrelenting demands for equity in access and representation wrought significant changes in US theatre. Hyman and O’Neal stand as examples of those who led the way with their artistry, integrity, talent, and intelligence bringing honor to the profession. They stories defy the familiar, mainstream narratives of Black artists to illustrate that Black performers could offer layered and complex characters in any setting. Interestingly, Hyman never described the characters he played as “white” characters. He described them as aggressive, frustrated, loving, victimized, etc. He brought his experiences to his characters and wove those experiences into the given circumstances. Similarly, O’Neal remained adamant that performers should not be confined to certain roles based on color. For O’Neal, acting meant revealing the inner worlds of the characters rather than commenting on the circumstances of the performers. Reclaiming O’Neal’s and Hyman’s unique perspectives on the role of the Black performer illuminates an era in US theatre history when Black actors struggled to establish both equity and equality in casting practices. Both men serve as vital links connecting African American trailblazing ancestors of past years when only a select few were able to walk in the corridors of legitimate theatres, to the stars of the present day as they usher in a new era in the American theatre. Baron Kelly is a four-time Fulbright Scholar and a Professor in Theatre and Drama at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Currently, he serves on the boards of the Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare and Social Justice Series Editorial Advisory Board, the Harold Pinter Review, Comparative Drama Conference, Stanislavsky Institute, and the American Society for Research’s Executive Committee. In addition, he serves on the Fulbright Review Panel and is a member of the National Theatre Conference. Acting assignments Include Broadway; Royal National Theatre of Great Britain; Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada; Edinburgh Theatre Festival. Performances for over 30 of America’s resident theatres including the Oregon Utah, and California Shakespeare Festivals; The Guthrie; Yale Rep; Mark Taper Forum; Old Globe San Diego; Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington, D.C.; Actors Theatre of Louisville; among others. His teaching of acting has led him to more than a dozen counties on five continents and in 20 American states. [1] The term “legitimate theatre” refers to serious drama sand classical theatre work including classical comedy. It simply indicates a divide, supposedly implying that art and mere entertainment are somehow in separate camps. [2] Loften Mitchell, Voices of the Black Theatre (New Jersey: James T. White, 1975), 181. [3] Sluts . . . slaves . . . servants . . . salt-of-the-earth southern were the stultifying stereotypical s’s. These were the roles available to black actors at the time. Most were written in some white writer’s ersatz pidgin-English version of dialect. When the theatre world would be graced by the illuminating hands of August Wilson, the spoken rhythms of the Black rural poor would be perceived as folk music and take their place beside the lilting Irish brogue of Sean O’Casey and the Welsh inflected rhythms of Dylan Thomas. [4] Roy Newquist, A Special Kind of Magic (New York: Rand MacNally Co., 1967), 113-114. [5] Equity News (April, 1923), 16. [6] Langston Hughes and Milton Meltzer, Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967), 125. [7] Langston Hughes, “The Negro and American Entertainment,” in The American Negro Reference Book, ed. John P. Davis (New York: Educational Heritage, Inc., 1966), 820. [8] Brooks Atkinson, “Mister Johnson,” New York Times Theatre Reviews, 31 March 1956. [9] Robert Coleman. “Mister Johnson is Superbly Acted,” New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, 1 April 1956. [10] Theatre Arts 15 (June 1956): 16. [11] Theatre, 16. [12] Richard Watts Jr, “Portrait of a Man of Good Will,” New York Theatre Critics' Reviews, 31 March 1956. [13] John Chapman, “Mister Johnson is a Touching Play,” New York Theatre Critics' Reviews, 31 March 1956. [14] John McClain, “A Real Hit? May Well Be,” New York Theatre Critics' Reviews, 30 March 1956. [15] Walter Kerr, “Mister Johnson,” New York Theatre Critics' Reviews, 30 March 1956. [16] Gifted Black actresses such as Hilda Simms, Jane White, and Janice Kingslow had suffered brutally stunted careers in which, as light-skinned Black females, they had been considered uncastable in white roles because they looked too much like white. [17] Helen Martin, personal interview in her home 12 June 1996. [18] Loften Mitchell, Voices of the Black Theatre (New Jersey: James T. White, 1975), 181. [19] Mitchell, 181. [20] Mitchell, 181. [21] Equity News (January 1944), 58-60. [22] Equity News (January 1944), 58-60. [23] Equity News (April 1960), 14. [24] Equity News (April 1960), 14. [25] Equity News (June, 1952), 19. [26] Equity News (April 1960), 14. [27] Equity News (April 1960), 14. [28] Windsor Lewis, quoted in “Integration Showcase,” Ebony 14, no.10 (August 1959), 73. [29] Frederick O’Neal, quoted in “Integration Showcase,” 73. [30] Mary Lee, New Traditions (New York: New Traditions,1992), 3. [31] Lee, 3. [32] Ayanna Thompson, Passing Strange (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 99. [33] Thompson, 76. ISNN 2376-4236 Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble” by Elizabeth M. Cizmar “Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth” by Baron Kelly “A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson's Black Feminist Intervention” by Khalid Y. Long “An Interview with Elaine Jackson” by Nathaniel G. Nesmith "Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston" by Michelle Cowin Gibbs "1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston’s Antimusical The Mule-Bone Is Presented" by Eric M. Glover “'Ògún Yè Mo Yè!' Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities" by Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green "Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar" by Lisa B. Thompson "Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge" by Bernth Lindfors "Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation" by Olga Sanchez Saltveit "A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement" by Isaiah Matthew Wooden www.jadtjournal.org www.jadtjournal.org ">jadt@gc.cuny.eduwww.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2020 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative The Theatre of August Wilson Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Introduction to “Milestones in Black Theatre” Interviews and Afterviews on "Milestones in Black Theatre" Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Re-Imagining America and Theater: Race, Representation, and Form Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Winners Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Winners By Published on May 12, 2021 Download Article as PDF The Errol Hill Award is given by the American Society for Theatre Research in recognition of outstanding scholarship in African American theater, drama, and/or performance studies, as demonstrated in the form of a published book-length project (monograph or essay collection) or scholarly article. The book or article must deal with African American theater history, dramatic literature, or performance studies (research on dance, acting and directing, public performances, i.e., parades, pageants, etc.). 2020: Kemi Adeyemi, University of Washington, Seattle, "Beyond 90°: The Angularities of Black/Queer/Woman/Lean," Women and Performance 29:1 (February 2019). 2019: Joshua Chambers-Letson, Northwestern University, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer Color of Life, New York University Press Honorable Mentions Joanna Dee Das, Washington University in St. Louis, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora, Oxford University Press Christian DuComb, Colgate University, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia, Michigan University Press Shane Vogel, Indiana University, Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze, University of Chicago Press 2018: Kellen Hoxworth, Dartmouth College, "The Many Racial Effigies of Sara Baartman," Theatre Survey 58:3 (September 2017). 2017: Renee Alexander Craft, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in Twentieth-Century Panama (Ohio State University Press, 2016). Honorable Mentions Christen Smith, University of Texas at Austin, Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil (University of Illinois Press, 2016). T. Carlis Roberts, UC Berkeley, Resounding Afro Asia: Interracial Music and the Politics of Collaboration(Oxford University Press, 2016). 2016: Uri McMillan, UCLA Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York University Press, 2015). Honorable Mention Adrienne Macki Braconi, Harlem’s Theatres: A Staging Ground for Community, Class, and Contradiction, 1923-1939 (Northwestern University Press, 2015). 2015: Paige McGinley, Washington University in St. Louis, Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism (Duke University Press, 2014) Honorable Mention Faedra Chatard Carpenter, Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2014). 2014: Kathleen Gough, Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic (Routledge, 2013). Honorable Mentions E. Patrick Johnson Ramon Rivera-Servera, Solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews and essays (Northwestern University Press, 2014). Macelle Mahala, Penumbra: The Premier State for African American Drama (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 2013: Diana Rebekkah Paulin, Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in US Drama and Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 2012: Bernth Lindfors, Ira Aldridge: The Early Years 1807-1833 (University of Rochester Press, 2011). Honorable Mention Brandi Catanese, The Problem of the Color[blind] (Univesrity of Michigan Press, 2011). 2011: Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (University of Michigan Press, 2010). 2010: Tavia Nyong'o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 2009: Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Duke University Press, 2008). 2008: Cedric Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theatre and Film before World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 2007: Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Performing Race, Gender, and Nation in the Trans-Atlantic Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2006). 2006: Jill Lane, Blackface Cuba, 1840 - 1895 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 2005: Harry Elam, The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (University of Michigan Press, 2004). 2004: E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Duke University Press, 2003). 2003: Thomas DeFrantz, Dancing Many Drums (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). 2002: David Krasner and Harry Elam, Jr., eds., African-American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader (Oxford University Press, 2001). 2001: Kimberly W. Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (Routledge, 2001). 2000: George A. Thompson, Jr., A Documentary History of African Theatre (Northwestern Univeristy Press, 1998). 1999: Jill Lane, "Blackface Nationalism, Cuba 1840-1868." Theatre Journal 50, no. 1 (1998). 1998: David Krasner, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895-1910 (Macmillan Publishers, 1997). 1997: Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara, eds., Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth Century Blackface Minstrelsy (Wesleyan University Press, 1996). The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 33, Number 2 (Spring 2021) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative The Theatre of August Wilson Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Introduction to “Milestones in Black Theatre” Interviews and Afterviews on "Milestones in Black Theatre" Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Re-Imagining America and Theater: Race, Representation, and Form Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

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

Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, (former) Editor, New England Theatre in Review Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage New England Theatre in Review Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, (former) Editor, New England Theatre in Review By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF The mission of New England Theatre in Review ( NETIR ) is to document the history of producing theatres in the New England states by assessing their artistic merits, how they reflect and respond to their audiences and immediate communities, and how they fulfill their position as regional leaders supporting the growth and maturation of American theatre. Our reviewers write one-thousand-word essays that address the theatre’s full season of productions; administrative and business practices as sustainable institutions; and gender, ethnic, race, and LGBTQ+ equity, both in hiring practices and season programming. At the top of each essay is a full list of the shows, with production dates, from the 2023-24 season. Readers of this edition of NETIR who are interested in the previous history of these theatres are encouraged to consult the back issues of New England Theatre Journal. In the aggregate, these astute chronicles of the work of major American producing theatres, including American Repertory Theater, Barrington Stage, Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre, Hartford Stage, Huntington Theatre, Long Wharf Theatre, Portland Stage, Shakespeare & Company, Trinity Repertory Theatre, Vermont Stage, and Yale Repertory Theatre, provide an on-going critical history that is unique in American theatre scholarship. NETIR has been particularly assiduous in documenting theatre during and after the coronavirus pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter and its manifestations via “We See You White American Theatre” and other activist movements. The exigencies of the pandemic, coupled with the equally urgent need to reform theatre structure and practice along anti-racist lines, promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) both on and off stage, became the twin foci for theatres across America from 2020-21 forward. Since we are still in the post-pandemic, post-reckoning era, with many theatres continuing to struggle to regain the audiences, funding, and community support of the pre-COVID years, our reviewers continue to assess the health and well-being of their theatres right now. Have theatres changed the number, type, and/or style of plays produced; revamped artistic and administrative personnel that impact programming and operations; published new guidelines and/or DEI measures? Are virtual productions still happening? Are COVID regulations (masking, vaccinations, etc.) still in place in whole or in part? Is there any sense of “back to normalcy” or, perhaps, a new normal, whatever that may mean? This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) MARTHA S. LOMONACO is a theatre director, historian, and writer. She is Professor Emerita of Theatre and American Studies at Fairfield University, where she was resident director and ran the theatre program for thirty-four years. She is the author of two monographs Every Week, A Broadway Revue: The Tamiment Playhouse, 1921-1960 and Summer Stock: An American Theatrical Phenomenon ( Choice 2004 Outstanding Academic Title) and an edited collection, Theatre Exhibitions , volume thirty-three of Performing Arts Resources . She has been editor of New England Theatre in Review since 2010. Marti holds a doctorate in Performance Studies from New York University. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.