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Trevor Boffone 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 Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. Trevor Boffone By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism . Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. Patricia Ybarra’s Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism rightly notes that the emergence of Latinx theatre in the 1960s and 70s paralleled the rise of neoliberalism in the Americas. From the beginnings of El Teatro Campesino’s and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre’s agit-prop theatremaking to the contemporary advocacy work of the Latinx Theatre Commons, neoliberal practices have been a staple of the United States’ domestic and foreign policies. Rather than primarily being in conversation with scholarship, Ybarra instead engages with Latinx playwrights themselves, thus viewing them as theorists. In this way, Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman serves as the point of departure from which Ybarra meditates on the effects of neoliberalism in the United States. With this in mind, Latinx Theater offers an exciting example of the possibilities of critical theatre scholarship that, put simply, takes the field to new heights. Ybarra situates Latinx theatre in the times of neoliberalism as a “transnational, post-nationalist, and (mostly) post-cultural nationalist perspective aware of its own historicity” (4). Rather than concentrate on the origins of neoliberalism, the book focuses on Latinx plays written from 1992 to the present in which the playwrights react to a world where neoliberal economic practices are the norm and have seemingly always been around. Post-1992, Latinx playwrights speak about economic transnational capitalism in a less optimistic and post-revolutionary way. Nevertheless, they still use methods that harken back to the early days of Chicanx and Latinx theatre. As Latinx theatre artists responded to the political moment in the 1960s and 70s, their strategies were decidedly anti-capitalist and anti-assimilationist as they used theatre performance to protest against marginalization of the Latinx community in the United States. The playwrights in Latinx Theater build upon this legacy by critiquing neoliberal capitalism as a system of violence. Neoliberalism was not as legible then as it is now, giving contemporary playwrights space to theorize their economic, political, and social relationships to the Americas. As such, these playwrights tackle the agents and fallouts of neoliberalism such as NAFTA, forced migrations, starvation in post-Soviet Cuba, feminicide, and narcotrafficking. These challenging human conditions encourage Latinx theatre artists to criticize the US’s socio-political climate by rendering the effects of economic violence visible. The introduction offers a tight yet comprehensive overview of neoliberalism that will be of use to any scholar doing work in contemporary cultural studies. Ybarra defines neoliberalism as “a political and economic philosophy whose proponents espouse free markets and privatization of state enterprises as the mode by which prosperity and democracy are best reached” (x). In light of the history of neoliberal economic practices, Ybarra demonstrates how Latinx theatre and performance form an ideal site from which to engage in political critique. From here, the book is organized into four well-balanced chapters that each examines a unique historical and sociopolitical circumstance resultant from neoliberalism in the Americas. Chapter one explores how Latinx playwrights such as Cherríe Moraga, Michael John Garcés, and Luis Valdez utilize indigeneity, cosmology, and identity to comment on NAFTA. Considering plays including Moraga’s Giving Up the Ghost , Garcés’s points of departure , and Valdez’s Mummified Deer , Ybarra complicates the intersections of theatre practices and indigenous practices in the Americas by examining the exoticization of indigeneity in Latinx theatre. In chapter two, Ybarra investigates the 1994 Balseros Crisis—when thousands of Cubans left the island on rafts due to the country’s poor economic conditions—through Eduardo Machado’s Kissing Fidel , Caridad Svich’s Prodigal Kiss , and Nilo Cruz’s A Bicycle Country . These plays shed light on the ways in which national narratives of progress are rendered inept by the lived realities of Cuba’s Special Period after the fall of the Soviet Union. Drawing from exile and migrant narratives, the works of Machado, Svich, and Cruz model new travelogues that are in constant motion and reveal new approaches to waiting that are not necessarily about outlasting Fidel Castro. Chapter three analyzes plays that represent feminicide in the Americas, primarily in Juárez, Mexico, from 1993 to the present. Contrary to other chapters’ focus on U.S.-based playwriting, this chapter focuses on Latinx plays (ex. Coco Fusco’s The Incredible Disappearing Woman and Marisela Treviño Orta’s Braided Sorrow ) in conversation with Mexican plays presented in the United States (ex. Humberto López’s Mujeres de Arena and Cristina Michaus’s Women of Ciudad Juárez ). Ybarra examines the limits of dramaturgical strategies to understand feminicides as crimes that can be solved. Instead, the frequent dramatization of these violent crimes only reiterates that these crimes are continual under neoliberalism. The final chapter stays in the same geographic zone but shifts the focus to narcotrafficking and the subsequent physical and economic violence that it produces. As opposed to filmic representation of narco-realism, Latinx performance uses heightened theatricality to demonstrate effectively the intersections of economics, masculinity, and violence. Plays in this chapter include Tanya Saracho’s El Nogalar , Octavio Solis’s Santos y Santos , and Matthew Paul Olmos’s so go the ghosts of méxico, part 1 . Since many of the Chicanx and Mexican-American plays in this chapter were written in response to Mexico’s narco period under President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), they speak to how the Mexican state inflicted violence in Mexico. Ybarra then concludes by shedding light on the stakes of using theatre and performance as a framework to understand neoliberalism in the Hemispheric Americas. By exploring how Latinx playwrights have theorized neoliberalism since 1992, Ybarra offers a much-needed study that truly explains why theatre matters. As opposed to the predominant mode of scholarship that looks at Latinx theatre as a branch of social change, Ybarra illuminates how Latinx playwrights are the theorists themselves. Although neoliberal capitalism seems like an unavoidable systemic condition, Latinx theatremakers have cultivated productive dramatizations that illuminate its practices and help redress its violent acts. References Footnotes About The Author(s) TREVOR BOFFONE University of Houston Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf 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 Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. 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. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Carol Westcamp By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF 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. References Footnotes About The Author(s) CAROL WESTCAMP University of Arkansas at Fort Smith Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf 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 Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Rachel Merrill Moss and Gary Alan Fine Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging Rachel Merrill Moss and Gary Alan Fine By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF The night before Independence Day in 1933, something unprecedented occurred. [1] As part of Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition, “Jewish Day” was celebrated, culminating in a record-breaking performance that garnered an audience of between 125,000 and 150,000 spectators crammed into Chicago’s Soldier Field, causing massive traffic jams before and after. [2] While some of Chicago’s other immigrant ethnicities were represented as part of the Expo, Jewish Day and its show-stopping finale were the most notable ethnically-oriented events of the entire fair. So impactful was the performance, The Romance of a People , that not only did it receive twelve columns of coverage in the Chicago Tribune the following day, but an encore performance was sponsored by the Tribune three nights after the initial performance. Ultimately a bold Zionist affair, raising money for creating the would-be Jewish refuge of Palestine, The Romance of a People combined spectacle and politics in a remarkably successful performance as Hitler was coming into power. A decade later, in the midst of World War II, another Jewish pageant of massive scale graced the city, but after ten years of atrocities, the motives and emotions were much different. Well into wartime, 1943 brought the New York-originated pageant, We Will Never Die , to Chicago as part of a nationwide tour. While still promoting the increasingly insistent need for a government-sanctioned nationhood (the demand which transformed Palestine into Israel five years after the Chicago performance), the pageant, as evidenced by its title, spoke to the threat to Jewish life and identity by the Nazis. Even more than in The Romance of a People, We Will Never Die carried the fear of genocide. A somber tone and a tocsin of impending death replaced the patriotic and inclusive hunger for recognition evident in The Romance of a People . Another decade later, as series of smaller individual performances were organized as part of a nationwide Jewish-American celebration: the American Jewish Tercentenary. Commemorating three hundred years of Jewish presence in America, the year-long event was held from 1954 through 1955, and boasted “forums, exhibitions, pageants, musical festivals, and public dinners organized by local committees in at least four hundred cities and towns.” [3] While these three decades of pageants bore similarities in theme and in production elements, their execution and tone differ drastically, speaking to the radically different times in American history for Jews and America’s relationship to the Jews. In our examination of these pageants, we understand them to be historically contingent, site-specific, and temporally-bounded events. Each of these Jewish-American pageants relied on its historical specificity and locale, while these elements also contributed to their lack of performance longevity. But it is in their nuanced, culturally-reflective status that we find these pageants compelling—they are historical artifacts that didactically perform their own contextually-contingent ideologies. Furthermore, as we focus on each of the three decades of pageants in the paper that follows, we contend with the ways in which their varying degrees of site-specificity are also intricately bound within a broader American network, reflective of both Jewish American microcosms and the macro-national level. Pageants and Politics We use twentieth-century Jewish pageants to argue that the pageant form of theatre is an ideal forum by which to make claims about citizenship and political engagement. While these pageants differ from traditional theatre in terms of their fluid scripting, grand scale, and limited potential for extended performance runs, they nonetheless resemble normative theatre in that they are specific, performed events with beginnings and endpoints, they feature performers enacting a narrative upon a stage, and they rely heavily on the audience-performance dynamic that is live theatre’s hallmark. That said, however, by virtue of the extent of its stagecraft, audience, and ambition within the public sphere, the pageant form, as distinct from the routinely-performed play, expresses the perspective of a segment of the population. This was particularly important from the end of the Civil War to the 1960s, a period of extensive immigration, during which the issue of accepting and integrating ethnic immigrants was salient and “patriotic pageants became a popular form for promoting the assimilation of the immigrant into American society.” [4] Pageants reached their apogee in the first half of the twentieth century, playing off the desire to solidify an American tradition, but this was necessary precisely because of the migrants who had to demonstrate that, despite diverse customs, religions, and beliefs, they belonged to—and were fervently patriotic towards—the American nation. Explicating this sentiment, albeit baldly, Esther Willard Bates describes this integration in her pageantry how-to guide, The Art of Producing Pageants from 1925: “pageantry is more than an end; it is also a means. . . . It teaches our late-comers the story of the nation in an imaginative manner, and when they act [as] our fore-fathers and speak their very words, they become part-owners in our traditions.” [5] The ethnic pageant, and in this case the Jewish-American pageant, was designed to meet this need but was also situated in light of the political needs of the community, as defined by organizations with the resources and authority to create extensive performances, requiring personnel, locations, and the activation of audiences. Pageants are not merely a means of displaying nationalism and tradition but also an occasion on which community resources are expended to set a political agenda. America’s longstanding tradition of using spectacle and pageantry for the formation and assertion of “Americanness” can be traced back to the earliest years of the American republic. Colorful, boisterous, and clear in message, pageants of early American history fostered community among America’s ethnic, religious, and social groups, simultaneously unifying them under a single banner of American identity and mobilizing as a vehicle for hybrid American-ethnic identity formation. S. E. Wilmer traces this long history of America’s theatricalized nationalism in Theatre, Society and the Nation . “Particularly in times of national crisis,” he states, “the theatre has served as a political and ideological tool to help reconfigure the [American] nation,” defining or challenging “national values and the notion of the nation,” and “reformulating concepts of national identity” that even predate Germany’s nationalistic theatrical Romanticism. [6] While the American-Jewish relationship to pageantry reflects these community—and nation-building—protocols, by the twentieth century pageants changed in their focus. Pageants became strategic attempts at persuasion, both within the community and beyond. American perceptions of Jews, both American and international, have also altered greatly over the course of the twentieth century, and the changing approaches to Jewish-American pageantry are as much a reflection of this shift in perception as of the changing relationship of American Jews to both America and assimilation. In American Historical Pageantry , David Glassberg describes the legacy of early American pageantry, its heyday in the first decades of the twentieth century, and its ultimate decline after the late-1920s. In its prime, historical pageantry played a major role in American celebrations and festivals, showcasing “the belief that history could be made into a dramatic public ritual through which the residents of a town, by acting out the right version of their past, could bring about some kind of future social and political transformation.” [7] Reiterating both American pride and the possibilities of growth of the town, neighborhood, or ethnic association, these productions presented an idealized vision of past and future through “the use of historical imagery to discover or invent an appropriate tradition in support of reform.” [8] In addition to Glassberg’s and Wilmer’s book-length studies on historical American pageantry, from early to mid-century American works, Richard M. Fried’s The Russians Are Coming! The Russians are Coming!: Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America examines national patriotic activity and efforts executed through theatrical pageantry and ritual, implemented through federal-level initiatives, as a means of reasserting national identity during troubling political times, particularly focusing in on Cold War-era “patriotic and civic pageantry.” [9] While the book does not focus closely in on them, Fried also acknowledges the plethora of more localized, group-specific pageant performance traditions from the turn-of-the-century onwards. Additionally, a number of articles focus specifically on minority-driven American political pageants, including those by Stephen J. Whitfield, Robert Skloot, and Lauren Love, that individually explore two of the pageants discussed within this article, examining the pageants’ “civic purpose” and ability to activate Jewish solidarity. [10] Likewise, in “Performing the Polish-American Patriot,” Megan E. Geigner similarly examines theatrical pageant performances that serve to reiterate hyphenated other-American identity as a means of galvanizing patriotic kinship. [11] In this same vein, Martha S. LoMonaco’s work on nineteenth-century Mormon pageants looks at historical pageantry as creating a foothold in American historical narrative through performance. [12] Taken together, recent scholarship displays a clear interest – albeit a diffuse one – in the performance practices of minority groups in America who used pageantry as a means of articulating their hyphenated American identity. While this article seeks to add to this body of literature, our goal is also to further that discussion by including the ways in which mid-century Jewish-American pageants built upon such an American tradition, while, conversely, discussing how we can use these past pageants as a way to explore the turns in performance practices in moments where Jewish and American-Jewish identity are in jeopardy. Our approach offers a macro view of how pageants were utilized as a means of identity production and group unification spanning three decades. Despite the overall decline in popularity of the pageant form across America, the mid-century Jewish pageants we discuss display a continuation of those same ideologies fostered by the American pageant tradition, but with particular, persuasive goals sensitive to the situation of American and global Jewry. While small towns no longer emphasized the performance of patriotism, this became increasingly important for urban Jews. For the Jewish community, the pageant both energized the community and spoke to the wider American public through the media representations of the large gatherings. Though the American pageant form by this point had morphed into the “folk play, the restored museum village, or the annual historical festival . . . depict[ing] the past as a separate world from the present,” Jewish American pageants before, during, and after the Second World War successfully bridged the gap between the ethnic enclave and the Christian public. [13] Employing familiar techniques and tropes that were long central to American civil religion, [14] these pageants continued the American pageantry legacy while utilizing the theatrical form as a successful way to assert an overtly didactic message: Jews are a unique and worthy people, they lack a homeland ( Romance of a People ), they are threatened with destruction from un-American enemies ( We Will Never Die ), and they share core American values while contributing to national history (the Tercentennial pageants). Each moment of pageantry had its own agenda, but the overall message—the insistence that Jews were worthy and patriotic Americans—remained throughout. By performing these Jewish narratives within but not eclipsed by an American narrative, these pageants performed Jewish difference, thereby drawing attention to specifically Jewish issues before Jewish and broader audiences. Furthermore, these pageants also represent a unique moment in the American pageantry legacy, as they also interpolate its historical tradition of ethnic subsumption into a homogenous (Anglo-)American, nationalist narrative. These three mid-twentieth-century pageants allow Jews to represent themselves (i.e. prominent Jews in American history) while still arguing for their Americanness and adopting a stance that hybridizes the American aesthetic and American nationalism. Additionally, we examine the ways in which these Jewish-American pageants are responsive to their contemporary moment in explicit and didactic ways that limit their potential for longevity but that offer themselves up to historians as illuminating points of reference into their cultural and political contexts. We examine each of these pageants, describing their content and how they situated the Jewish community in light of contemporary issues that a large, well-attended performance could address. 1933: The Romance of a People The Romance of a People was a three-hour pageant of epic proportions: a program “which symbolize[d] four thousand years of colorful history—history high in its drama, packed with pathos, terrible in tragedies, glorious in its victories.” [15] The pageant featured 3,500 cast members, including singers and dancers reminiscent of a Greek Chorus on a massive scale, nearly all of whom were local residents of Chicago and members of the Jewish community. [16] To prevent chaos and cacophony from the humongous cast, director Isaac Van Grove opted to amplify mechanically the speeches and songs of the cast from a room hidden beneath the stage. Covered in a Chicago Daily Tribune article that ran the day after the initial performance, columnist Virginia Gardner’s discussion of the methods utilized by Van Grove for the production, and the fact that it merited newspaper coverage at all, provides evidence of its remarkable execution. “The control room and amplifying system made possible what Van Grove described as ‘the effect of an intimate theater two blocks long.’” [17] The marriage of artistry and technology not only assisted in executing the mass theatre in which Van Grove openly believed, but also aligned with the Century of Progress mission to promote technology unimaginable in the previous hundred years. [18] Van Grove is credited for pioneering amplified sound for a theatrical production, as he did in The Romance of a People . [19] Across all press reports and published material about The Romance of a People , it is evident that the public reception was strong. The word “colorful” appears a dozen times throughout the pageant’s press coverage, as do accolades about the audiences’ upturned faces and positive Jewish attitudes and self-opinion, such as in David and Goliath allegories. [20] The positive perception of the extravagance at Soldier Field is clear but seems largely to pertain to the material only aesthetically. While the production aimed to educate for the purposes of the Zionist cause, Van Grove and his producers spared no expense to generate entertainment and to immerse the audience in the spectacle. Six months earlier in December 1932, Chicago audiences had an early taste when a massive Chanukah holiday pageant, also directed by Van Grove (and similarly produced by Meyer Weisgal), was staged at the Chicago Stadium, entitled “Israel Reborn.” [21] Though the cast size and audience numbers were more than doubled for The Romance of a People , the previous Jewish “theatrical spectacle” was heralded as a performance that “one sees once in a generation.” [22] Van Grove knew going into the colossal Soldier Field production what had worked so triumphantly only half a year prior for a similar Chicago audience. Van Grove was a staunch believer in the opportunity to create theatrical impact that “mass spectacle” afforded. [23] To Van Grove, the possibilities for emotional gravitas were substantially higher when utilizing pageantry and grand-scale spectacle, rather than realism that he considered “passé.” [24] It was the power of thousands of bodies in coordinated movement that Van Grove believed could elicit the vital response The Romance of a People needed. While the pageant aimed to garner support and attention for the Zionist cause, it also allowed an emotional appeal to non-Jewish audience members. The pageant strove to engage Jews and Christians alike, so much so that it was commented on in nearly all reviews of the pageant production. Perhaps the Chicago Daily News reporter, S. J. Duncan-Clark, put it most poignantly in his pageant review that ran 5 July 1933, highlighting the community forged through pageantry: There was laughter and weeping among the thronging spectators for the floodtide of emotion had been released. Christians and Jews grasped hands with a new sense of spiritual kinship. There were thousands of Christians present. All Christian creeds had joined in approving and promoting the magnificent project of their Jewish neighbors.[25] While Duncan-Clark recognizes the pageant’s message of Jewish distinctiveness in order to highlight the specific plight of its people, he rightly points to the pageant’s goal of community orientation—attempting to bring others into the fight for Jewish lives abroad. Regardless of, or perhaps due to, the diversity of the audience, the pageant itself was both a dramatic and edifying affair, chronicling notable events in Jewish history. The pageant depicted “forty centuries of religion” in the form of six episodes with two interludes, starting with a dramatization of the religion’s formation. [26] A 27-foot idol of the god Moloch surrounded by 500 slaves and worshippers set the scene for Judaism’s rejection of the false god, thereby depicting “the birth of true religious concepts.” [27] Furthermore, this attempt at monotheistic universality is mentioned in the pageant’s program “Greeting and Tribute” penned by producer and script-writer Meyer Weisgal. Hailing the presumed diversity of the crowd, Weisgal declaimed, “Among you are representatives of all the races and creeds which are incorporated in the structure of the American Republic. The composition of this assembly bears equal witness, therefore, to the spirit of fellowship and mutual respect among diversities of faith and race.” [28] While his program greeting closes with a reminder of the pageant’s Zionist cause, Weisgal’s preamble anticipates what would later be the American Jewish Tercentenary’s purpose: realigning Jewishness within an American historical context and within a multiethnic community. The pageant consisted of a prologue, six episodes, and two “interludes” (performed transitions) that outlined widely-known moments from “biblical and historical records,” from ancient to present times. [29] Beginning with “The Creation,” a scene depicted the first lines of the Torah (the Jewish Bible) and the creation of humanity, using chaotic lights and sound to represent “the morning of Creation, the freshness of the world as it came from the hand of the divine Artificer.” [30] This scene was followed by the aforementioned birth of Judaism and Abraham’s covenant with God after denouncing the impending sacrifice to a false god, the escape from slavery in Egypt, the building of the first temple and its subsequent destruction, exiles wandering in search of a new homeland, and finally, deliverance to a new Israel. Part of the pageant’s power comes not from the scenes depicted, but rather the sheer scale of the production itself. The thousands of bodies onstage before gigantic scenery, depicting, at turns, false idols, the temple in Jerusalem, and finally the future homeland, constituted a remarkable spectacle. The use of amplified sound enabled giant choreographed movement onstage to take place without worry about carrying noise, while the stereophonic voice-acting of forty or so actors depicting The Voice of God, Abraham, and other significant figures were hidden beneath the stage, merging media and performance technologies to enable unimpeded spectacle. The production set for the pageant was claimed to be “unquestionably the most elaborate stage ever built” at Soldier Field. [31] A “mammoth” four level, 200-foot long, 150-foot wide set filled much of the stadium. “Fashioned to look like stone, the set, on the one hand, suggested the use of ancient materials, substantial enough to endure for thousands of years into the future. On the other hand, solid but blank, this place’s history was waiting to be inscribed.” [32] The tiered stage accommodated a chorus of 1,500 and an orchestra on a single level, with ample room left for the action of the performance, [33] with the temple at stage center, adorned with a Star of David. [34] Advanced coverage in the Chicago Daily Tribune raved of the pageant’s precedent-breaking visual spectacle, including embedded floor lighting, four 35-foot lighting towers, and a giant glass “curtain” (35 feet long by 25 feet high) onto which colorful light effects would be projected. [35] These lights were used with great dramatic effect for the final stage picture: a single light blazed from darkness to illuminate the temple’s star, as the sung prayer “Shema Yisrael/Hear, O Israel” brought the pageant to a close. [36] The production’s playbill also reflected the high level of community interest and involvement. Featuring advertisements and well-wishes from organizations and businesses citywide (both Jewish and secular), the program itself enacted a coherent community voice vouching support of the production, albeit a commercially motivated one. [37] The program serves as a material testament to the city’s vested interest in the Jewish community’s patronage. The range of pageant-specific advertisements include a message in handwritten Yiddish from Sophie Tucker of The 225 Club, a note to the “Jews of Chicago” from D. L. Toffenetti of the Triangle Restaurants franchise, and an ad from Flashtric Sign Works, creators of “One of the Most Outstanding Features of Jewish Day,” the illuminated Star of David used in the production. [38] The playbill, therefore, performed the same integrated community mentality that the pageant itself asserted and reflected a desire for its success from community supporters. In his history of Soldier Field, Liam T. A. Ford notes that “rather than promoting assimilation into America’s melting pot, [ The Romance of a People ] helped make pride in being Jewish more acceptable to non-Jewish Chicagoans and at the same time, helped define what being Jewish would mean for generations of American Jews.” [39] Ford’s assertion as to the pageant’s reverberating impact on public performances of Jewishness in America in the generations to come certainly rings true when considering the next generation’s overlapping uses of spectacles for asserting Jewish-American acceptance. That said, the pageants in the decades that follow The Romance of a People differ in important ways, reflecting their altered political and cultural circumstances. 1943: We Will Never Die World War II created a new context for Jewish-American pageantry. A decade after The Romance of a People , the fate of European Jews was desperate, survival in the balance, while at the same time the might of the American military was arrayed against their tormentors. Though, perhaps, saving Jews was not a prime motivator of American military involvement, the vicious anti-Semitism of the Nazis was used to justify the war effort, leading to sympathy for Jews and a rejection of the more overt forms of prejudice in the United States.' The 1943 pageant, We Will Never Die , was produced at a moment in which wartime patriotism was linked to a hatred of anti-Semitism, and the pageant built on this connection. We Will Never Die premiered at New York’s Madison Square Garden, emphasizing that preserving Jewish culture and community was consistent with American values, and it featured a laundry list of theatre-celebrity involvement, including direction by Moss Hart, script by Ben Hecht, music by Kurt Weil, and was produced by Billy Rose. As their titles suggest, the decade between Romance of a People and We Will Never Die dramatically altered the substance of these theatrical narratives. While both pageants featured distinctly Jewish narratives, The Romance of a People represented hope and galvanization, whereas 1943’s We Will Never Die , facing the grim realities of Nazi crimes, presented a desperate plea for Jewish safety and mobilization to assure it. Both pageants were attended by both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences, [40] and each addressed the future of Jewish inclusion and preservation. While We Will Never Die was more didactic, both pageants played off ethnic distinctiveness—Jews as a special category of “Americans”—in gaining the attention of an audience that accepted the legitimacy of that difference. Perhaps the pageants had limited effects in changing American policy, but in performance, they made the case that Jewish interests were American interests. We Will Never Die , performed on 9 May 1943 at the Chicago Stadium, proffered similar themes as The Romance of a People , but with darker, more somber tones. The pageant was a “memorial to the 2,000,000 Jews” that the producers stated had already been murdered in Europe, and was penned by acclaimed Jewish-American playwright and screenwriter, Ben Hecht. [41] We Will Never Die used vastly disparate tactics from The Romance of a People , and was credited as the first wide-scale dramatic presentation of the destruction of the Jews in Europe. [42] Contrary to the optimism of the 1933 pageant, We Will Never Die threw violent, gory details at audiences, hoping to make viewers incensed at the slaughter, rather than to convince the crowds of the goodliness and godliness of the Jewish people. We Will Never Die featured a cast of 1,000 and garnered a Chicago audience between 15,000 to 20,000. [43] It was treated as a critical step in advancing the cause of the Jewish people. The Chicago Daily Tribune titled their review, “Pageant Stirs 15,000 to Vow: Jew Must Live.” [44] Using high praise, the Tribune reviewer, Edward Barry, wrote, From a majestic stage flanked by representations of the tablets of the law and the star of David, 1,000 American Jews last night delivered a plea to an audience of 15,000, and thru these 15,000 to the world, to heed the plight of the Jews of Europe before the last remnants of the race there are sacrificed to the Nazi fury.[45] In contrast to the 1933 review by James O’Donnell Bennett, who reviewed The Romance of a People , Barry does not differentiate the Jews and gentiles in the audience, perhaps indicating the unifying, humanist appeal of the material. Unlike the historical epic of The Romance of a People , We Will Never Die opted for relative naturalism in the script. Though the production set consisted of “two towering Tablets containing the Ten Commandments loom[ing] at the back of the stage,” much of the dialogue is realistic and personable, albeit didactic, and often gruesomely so. [46] The show begins with the Kol Nidre chant from Yom Kippur, [47] a shofar is blown, and a rabbi emerges from between the two tablets to introduce and honor the plight of “the two million who have been killed in Europe.” [48] The rabbi gives the stage over to two narrators who begin a series of short episodes, each addressing the Jewish plight. The first of four episodes begins with a “roll call” of important Jewish contributors to American and global life—somewhat foreshadowing the Tercentenary narratives—including a disparate collection of individuals, such as Luis Ponce de Leon, Benjamin Disraeli, Marcel Proust, and Samuel Gompers. The second episode chronicles one Jewish-American soldier’s wartime experience and urgent telegraph home on the brink of his death during American defeat in the Philippines. Episode Three chronicles the struggle and uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, [49] and the pageant closes with an episode entitled, “Remember Us,” consisting of the dead announcing their gruesome ends at the hands of the Nazis, while beseeching the audience not to forget them. Closing with two narrators urging American involvement in the Jewish plight, the pageant used the rhetoric of the American ethic: We [Americans] have brave soldiers who are fighting to victory. But the massacre of the unarmed civilians is beyond the reach of their guns. The desert and the Mediterranean are the battle front and they are honorably engaged on it. The massacre in Europe is our battle front—and we are not honorably engaged on it.[50] Then, making a greater, global claim, a second narrator decries, “the crime of Europe calls for the mobilization of every shred of righteousness and spiritual power left in the world.” [51] While We Will Never Die offered a persuasive cry for a cohesive front and fight against the Axis and Nazism in order to rescue the remaining European Jewry, support from American Jewish organizations was spotty. Though Ben Hecht, the pageant’s scriptwriter, presented a work-in-progress to garner financial support from the Jewish community, “with representatives of nearly three-dozen Jewish organizations,” the groups “could not agree to work together in support of the forthcoming pageant. Even when Hecht . . . offered to withdraw the formal endorsement of the controversial Committee for a Jewish Army and to work only behind the scenes, the others declined to sponsor We Will Never Die .” [52] Furthermore, the pageant attempted not only “[t]o heighten concern for doomed coreligionists . . . it was also targeted at public opinion and at the nation’s capital. Hecht and his collaborators . . . wanted to stimulate a change in policy.” [53] This ambitious goal was also ultimately unattainable. As Whitfield argues in “The Politics of Pageantry, 1936-1946”: Perhaps none of these pageants was great enough, soaring enough, memorable enough . . . but there is a more likely explanation. It asks too much of art to expect it to halt the juggernaut of tyranny. Nazism and fascism were too powerful for that. . . . Neither masterpieces nor spectacles could influence geopolitics; and the lesson that many Jews learned is that, while art can enhance and illuminate and expose power, only countervailing force can effectively confront it. . . . That realization meant consolidating a sense of peoplehood, instilling in American Jewish audiences a sense of transatlantic solidarity.[54] While transatlantic solidarity was important during the war years due to the threat to Jewry in Europe, other issues took priority during the 1950s as Jews attempted to demonstrate their bona fides as “Americans.” Whitfield points toward what would become the strategy of the yearlong American Jewish celebration to follow a decade after We Will Never Die . 1954-55: A Return to Different Roots After the war, like so much else, the politics of American-Jewish pageants were indelibly altered. During the 1950s, rather than reaching outward, emphasizing a “transatlantic solidarity,” the 1954-55 Jewish-American Tercentenary pageants focused inwards, emphasizing the particularly Jewish role in the development of American life and culture over the past 300 years. These pageants were intended to incorporate Jews into American collective memory, perhaps given the concern about seeing Jews as Communists. [55] With the existential threat to Jewish life resolved in Europe, the next challenge for American Jewry was to demonstrate to fellow citizens questioning their patriotism that Jews had long been integral to American life. American-Jewish pageantry turned to its local soil to advance a narrative of Jewish “Americanness,” which became further emphasized as the Cold War tensions increased and questions of loyalty became salient. Post-war Jewish-American pageantry presented a narrative of long-standing Jewish commitment to America since its founding, no longer suggesting that the United States must do something for Jews, but instead that Jews have done something for America. The culmination of this assimilationist, hybrid-identity of Jewish-American status was the year-long American Jewish Tercentenary celebration, occurring from September 1954 through May 1955. Celebrated nationwide, the 300 th anniversary of Jewish American presence was memorialized through publications, celebratory events, television and radio formats, and pageant spectacles. The Tercentenary was well-timed for this assertion of the embeddedness of Jews in American life. The specter of Communism conjured a need to perform a non-threatening—solidly American—Jewish identity, and a choice was made to create a celebration that publicly proclaimed this allegiance. Unlike the massive spectacles in the 1930s and ‘40s, these Tercentenary pageants were on a smaller scale, [56] a function surely of a decline in large-scale pageants, and perhaps a reaction to large-scale rallies in Germany and the Soviet Union. These pageants were performed in cities across the country but with more modest casts and in smaller venues. With their local orientation, these pageants had a different position in creating public awareness and perception than the highly successful mass pageants that had taken place previously and were centered mainly in Chicago and New York, with subsequent tour stops at other urban centers, including Detroit and Washington D.C. Although hints of the post-war assimilationist movement could be seen in sporadic pageants and publications from the immediate post-war years through the early nineteen-fifties, the Jewish Tercentenary was distinct: it hoped to include every Jewish community, large or small, in the national celebration of Jewish influence on American life and democracy. Founded in 1953, the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee (AJTC) was formed to promote and establish the commemoratory year of anniversary celebrations, building on the tercentennial theme of “Man’s Opportunities and Responsibilities Under Freedom.” To this end, numerous pamphlets were published under the auspices of the organization, created to aid and encourage Jewish communities and organizations taking part across the country. Explicit in their intended goals, the materials from the AJTC provided a clear set of instructions to follow for all manner of anniversary celebration attempts nationwide. In their clarity, these instructional booklets asked that a certain ideal narrative be followed and performed across all related performance platforms. That narrative not only asserted the early and unchanging importance of Jews in America but also their unceasing dedication to the American way of life, emphasizing democratic governance. In the numerous texts published by or with the support of the AJTC, American democracy is central. The texts didactically indicate Jewish involvement through centuries of American politics and patriotism, including one text referencing Oscar Straus’s contention that the “Hebrew Old Testament” influenced America’s foundational democratic ideals. [57] What is abundantly clear in this heavy-handed commentary is that the Jewish organization saw a need to counter the association of Jews and Communism, a perspective widely accepted in the Depression years but receding in the post-war period. [58] The culmination of the Tercentenary celebration contributed to delinking Jewishness from Communist associations in the minds of the American public, despite the continuing presence of Jews in the shrinking Communist movement. Even prior to the Tercentenary celebration, the American Jewish Committee was laying the groundwork for the later message of Jewish-American involvement in foundational American democracy. A pamphlet published in 1950, written by David De Sola Pool, chairman of the American Jewish Historical Society provisional committee for planning the tercentenary project, addresses these themes. In the pamphlet’s culminating page, De Sola Pool lists the “Fruits of the Tercentenary Celebration,” providing insight into his, and presumably the committee’s, goals for the tercentenary celebration year. Heralding the coming reinvigoration of Jewish presence within American society, De Sola Pool states that the tercentenary celebration “carried out in this broad national way will make vivid for all Americans, Christians and Jews alike, how deep and centuried is the stake of the Jews in the United States,” and furthermore, that the tercentenary “will further devotion to the Hebraic ideals of democracy that have helped to mold American democracy.” [59] In 1954, a reissue of the 1905 events of the 250 th anniversary was published by the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, seemingly as another means of naturalizing the occurrence of the 300 th . In 1905, the 250 th Anniversary of Jewish settlement in the US was celebrated on Thanksgiving Day, in an effort to “make the celebration a truly national event,” underscoring the centrality of American secular holidays and nationalism within Jewish-American identity. [60] The official celebratory proceedings for the opening event included addresses from the Catholic Bishop Coadjutor of New York, David Greer, as well as secular figures such as former president, Grover Cleveland, governor of New York State, Frank Higgins, and Mayor of New York City, George McClellan. The ceremony closed with an audience rendition of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” [61] This pan-religious, nationalist service was designed to establish Jewish Americans’ place within the cornucopia of American identities. However, the vast historical distance between the 250 th anniversary and the tercentenary couldn’t possibly have been anticipated, and the Tercentenary events had to take into account the changes in America and globally that had occurred during the past half-century. Within her pamphlet outlining Tercentenary pageant guidelines, Adele Gutman Nathan echoes the linking of Jews and early American democracy: “From the time the Jewish pilgrims arrived in 1654 at the little port of New Amsterdam . . . Jews as individuals and as groups have participated dramatically in each step of the creation of our nation, in its never-ending search for true democracy.” [62] With one small exception, [63] she fails to mention the enormous Jewish pageants of the past two decades within her description of previous American pageantry, though she mentions other popular productions from the time. This lack of connection between the Tercentenary and earlier pageants highlights their profound ideological and aspirational differences. While The Romance of a People , We Will Never Die , and the Tercentenary pageants all fall into the pageantry category, utilizing particular features of narration, spectacle, anti-realism, and episodic structures, their similarities end with that. As Nathan’s pamphlet outlined, the Tercentenary pageants strove to integrate Jewish historical presence in the United States in the grander American narrative, therefore establishing loyal Jewish “Americanness” in the post-war period. Just as earlier American historical pageants, such as the 1914 Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, [64] aimed to create an optimistic future by crafting an idealized past, the Tercentenary pageants strove for the same goal. Conversely, The Romance of a People and We Will Never Die performed Jewish difference to assert their message, while the Tercentenary performed proudly assimilationist narratives. With communities permitted either to purchase ready-made scripts (offering titles such as Faith and Freedom , The Lamp of Liberty , and We Came to an Island [65] ) or to pen their own community-oriented pageants, towns and cities across America performed their own local renditions of American Jewish history. These pageants simultaneously asserted contemporary (and historical) Jewish presence alongside Jewish integrity and ingenuity throughout American history. The basic narrative entailed several narrators framing a number of short episodes that featured notable figures through introduction or initial verbal reenactment of the scene by the narrators. For example, the 1955 pageant, The Quilt , written by Mae Clement Perley for the Louisville, Kentucky Tercentenary celebration, includes episodes describing Jewish ties to Abraham Lincoln, community ties to Louis Brandeis, and dramatized peacemaking amongst Jews and the previous Native American dwellers of Kentucky, all being reenacted in order to educate two Louisville youth about their community’s illustrious history. [66] Highly didactic, the narrative of Jewish impact on American life and society is clear. Though specific to Kentucky history, Perley’s script bears strong resemblance to more generic pageant scripts available for purchase, written to be performed across the country, and available in formats either broad enough to suit any local setting, or able to be shaped to include local events and memories. The Golden Door , penned by Norman Corwin for the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, is an example of the former, that could be tailored to any community and offered an American narrative, depicting a broad Jewish-American history. Featuring numerous short monologues from notable public figures attesting to positive Jewish-American presence, the script is comprised of short, didactic vignettes. Monologues are delivered from figures as diverse as George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Levi Strauss, and the voice of God, among many others. Another alternative was a that enabled portions of the play script to be personalized for local performances. This was the case of Faith and Freedom , written by Marc Siegal for the Tercentenary committee. The script is comprised of the same narrated episodic format, and attends to both local and nationwide Jewish-American history, even including a pre-written but optional scene, available for use if the community possessed an esteemed member who had been “an eyewitness to the growth of [the] Jewish community since 1880.” [67] If so, such a person could have been featured in a scene in conversation with the narrator, Dr. Goldman, as an integral part of the plot and pageant’s mission. This potential character, “Mr. Blank,” could deliver a monologue on the hardships of early Jewish settlement in the local area, including needing to move frequently as the Jewish neighborhoods changed. Additionally, the character emphasizes the increased community engagement and local involvement in the present time: “Around (blank year) we elected our first (name of public office), (name of person). There was real excitement when he won.” [68] Much like The Golden Door , This is Our Home , written by I. Goldberg and Yuri Suhl for the Committee for the 300 th Anniversary of Jewish Settlement in the U.S., similarly enabled personalization, though also incorporated Yiddish into the core script, with nearly 50% of dialogue in Yiddish. Unlike other Tercentenary pageant scripts, this suggests a different Jewish community, one in which assimilation had not entirely erased Yiddish-language usage, potentially indicating a more recently immigrated community audience and/or one more interested in maintaining a more visible Jewish presence in a secularizing nation. In spite of its Yiddish components, however, This is Our Home almost verbatim follows the formulaic model of incorporating a Jewish thread into known nationalistic, American narratives. With four episodes and voice-overs by Albert Einstein, Chaim Zhitlowsky, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the play begins with a rendition of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” followed by English and Yiddish preambles that echo each other’s statement of the shared heritage of American and Jewish-American beginnings. This performative tactic, which extends beyond the presentation of Jewish presence in early America, led to grander statements of Jewish exemplification of true American democratic ideals. This juncture was ripe for classic American pageantry techniques, “at the intersection of progressivism and antimodernism [that] placed nostalgic imagery in a dynamic, future-oriented reform context.” [69] As was the case with the two previous pageant moments, the Tercentenary responded to contemporary political conditions. Ultimately, while the American Jewish Tercentenary celebration seems to have aided the strengthening of Jewish public image in America, the festivities, tributes, and commemorations of 1954-55 were less frequently or substantially reported in newspapers and made a less significant mark on public memory. Unlike the earlier massive-scale pageants, the Jewish Tercentenary was about blending in to the standing American narrative, erasing radical associations, naturalizing patriotism and nationalist contributions, and asserting neighborliness. Politics of Pageants Each of the pageants we examine in this essay assert Jewish significance in their individual performances; either pushing toward redefining the group’s investment in broader Jewish issues, or by insisting upon Jewish importance in early and foundational American narratives. These pageants came about during such “times of crisis” in which the necessity of American interest and involvement in Jewishness needed to be emphasized, galvanized, and supported. [70] As previously discussed, each of these mid-century pageants did so in its own manner specific to the cultural and political contexts in which they emerged, but collectively they performed Jewishness in a broader American context and in that way similarly reinvented Jewish-Americanness in their respective decades. Furthermore, each performance discussed pageants as the appropriate mode of performance by building upon America’s long history of pageantry as a means for ethnic communities’ performed articulation and redefinition of their own hybrid identities. Pageants are both theatrically significant and historically situated. That is their purpose and their charm: they uncover the themes of a community and the challenges that are being faced. As performances, they attempt to persuade their audiences about those issues that are currently engaged. These three decades of pageants, produced at distinct historical moments, demonstrate that the idea of a “Jewish pageant”—or for that matter any pageant—must be contextualized. Even more than most forms of theatricality, the pageant attempts to inspire or to rouse a public that sees itself as belonging together and sharing common assumptions and desires. The pageant form is, in some sense, the most communal of all dramatic genres: this is true not only because of its massive production values, the fact that the performers are often members of the same community as the audience, and that the authors have deep local roots, but also because the themes and the morals build a sense of unity. The pageant provides a nexus of the study of theatre, history, and sociology. While these three mid-century Jewish-American pageants each present didactic accounts of ethnic history, they do so with markedly different agendas, each a presentation of and response to Jewish-American needs and interests at the time. Beginning with the start of the worldwide Jewish crisis in 1933 as Hitler took power in Germany and spanning through the post-war period of critical ethnic assimilation, each of these pageants served to both attract broad-scale interest through the mass-appeal of spectacle and sought to channel nationwide Jewish-American interest into a singular political performance (or set of performances), thereby powerfully enacting a desired outcome, from recognition to rescue to the reconstitution of Americaness. While each pageant utilized Jewish history and linked it to the present, each depended on a different set of values and historical events, shaping collective memory for specific purposes. For this reason, too, each pageant may itself offer fruitful insight into the moment in which it emerged. Because of their questionable literary authority and their focus on events of the moment, it is understandable that, unlike canonical drama, pageants will not be reprised over time, and, as a result, few scholars have focused on examples of the form as signals of current civic concerns and ethnic worries. These three Jewish-American pageants, however, demonstrate that such historically contingent productions have value as indicators of the state of society. The community provides a stage that these dramas fill. For all their local interest, pageants reveal the world. References [1] The authors thank Megan Geigner and Grace Overbeke for comments on an earlier version of this paper. [2] Earl Mullin, “Holiday Throng at Fair Nears Monday Record,” Chicago Daily Tribune (5 July 1933): 1. The current capacity is only 61,500. For the 1933 pageant, seating spilled from the stadium seating onto the stadium green, with makeshift seating filling the playing area all the way up to the stage. (Lauren Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood: The Romance of a People at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair,” TDR: The Drama Review 55, no. 3 (2011): 61.) [3] Arthur A. Goren, The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 196. [4] S. E. Wilmer, Theatre, Society, and the Nation: Staging American Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 108. [5] Esther Willard Bates, The Art of Producing Pageants (Walter H. Baker Company: Boston, 1925), 240. [6] Wilmer, Theatre, Society, and the Nation , 11. [7] David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 4. [8] Ibid., 4. [9] Richard M. Fried, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians are Coming!: Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 122. [10] For reference, see Stephen J. Whitfield, “The Politics of Pageantry, 1936-1946,” American Jewish History 84, no. 3 (September, 1996): 221-250.; Robert Skloot, “We Will Never Die”: The Success and Failure of a Holocaust Pageant,” Theatre Journal 37, no. 2 (May, 1995): 167-180.; and Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood,” 57-67. [11] Megan Geigner, “Performing the Polish-American patriot: civic performance and hyphenated identity in World War I Chicago,” Theatre History Studies 34 (2015): 59-78. [12] Martha S. LoMonaco, “Mormon Pageants as American Historical Performance,” Theatre Symposium 17 (2009): 69-83. [13] Ibid., 288. [14] Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no.1, (1967): 1-21. [15] “The Romance of a People.” Official World’s Fair Weekly: A Century of Progress International Exposition Week Ending July 8 th (Chicago: The Cuneo Press Inc., 1933), 6. [16] Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood,” 63. [17] Virginia Gardener, “Unseen Actors Supply Sound at Jewish Pageant: Sing, Play and Speak in Hidden Room,” Chicago Daily Tribune (4 July, 1933): 4. [18] Ibid., 6. [19] Garfield discusses the use of amplified sound in The Romance of the People in his article about the pageant, arguing that Van Grove’s use of amplification in this context was totally unique for theatrical performances in the US. “The ‘binaural, electro-acoustical system,’ as it was called, was a highly innovative sound set-up – probably the first public use in the United States of what has since come to be known as stereophonic sound.” David Garfield, “The Romance of a People,” Educational Theatre Journal 24, no. 4 (1972): 440. [20] James O’Donnell Bennett, “125,000 Witness Jewish Spectacle: Mighty Drama Traces History Back 4,000 Years; Climax of Jewry’s Day at Fair,” Chicago Daily Tribune (4 July, 1933): 2. [21] “The Romance of a People,” Official World’s Fair Weekly: A Century of Progress International Exposition , 6. [22] Ibid., 6. [23] Garfield, “The Romance of a People,” 436. [24] Ibid., 436. [25] S. J. Duncan-Clark, “Jewish ‘Romance of a People’ Kindles Thrill of Faith in 150,000 Spectators,” The Chicago Daily News (5 July, 1933). [26] Rev. John Evans, “Jewish pageant to depict 40 centuries of religion,” Chicago Daily Tribune (9 June, 1933): 10. [27] Ibid., 10. [28] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People” pageant program reprint from 1933 (Chicago: Chicago Jewish Historical Society, 2000), 1. [29] Ibid., 17. [30] Ibid., 18. [31] Liam T. A. Ford, Soldier Field: A Stadium and its City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 157. [32] Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood,” 60. [33] Edward Moore, “Stage Effects at Jewish Fete to Make History: Lighting Arrangements to be Feature,” Chicago Daily Tribune (17 June, 1933): 6. [34] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People,” 18. [35] Moore, “Stage Effects at Jewish Fete to Make History,” 6. [36] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People,” 19. [37] While the Pageant program includes Exposition-wide advertisements, it also contains numerous “Jewish Day” specific advertisements and messages from sponsors. [38] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People,” 56. [39] Ford, Soldier Field: A Stadium and its City , 155. [40] While audience statistics are not known to be available, the sheer numbers of spectators that attended both events render ethnic and religious homogeneity highly unlikely. In the first performance, The Romance of a People performed in front of anywhere between 125,000 and 150,000 people, depending on the source. We Will Never Die performed before an estimated 15,000-20,000 (for the opening Chicago performance). Furthermore, We Will Never Die had a significant tour around the US, including a stop in Washington, DC, where President Roosevelt sent First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in his stead, as well as numerous cabinet, Supreme Court, and Congress members (See Medoff 2002). [41] We Will Never Die Official Program from Madison Square Garden 9 March, 1943 (New York: Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, 1943), cover. [42] certainyl ESexecuted this through loosa, 2002.”ers in attendance that night included First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, all the way Rafael Medoff, Militant Zionism (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2002), 85. [43] Edward Barry, “Pageant Stirs 15,000 to Vow Jew Must Live,” Chicago Daily Tribune (20 May, 1943): 1. [44] Ibid., 1. [45] Ibid., 1. [46] Ben Hecht, We Will Never Die: A Memorial Dedicated to the 2,000,000 Jewish Dead of Europe Pageant Script (New York: Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, 1943), 11. [47] The Jewish Day of Atonement. [48] Hecht, We Will Never Die, 11. [49] The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is generally considered to have begun on April 19, 1943. The original production of We Will Never Die occurred in New York on March 9 th prior to the start of the Uprising, as did the Washington DC performance on April 12 th , but Hecht later incorporated an additional scene entitled “The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto,” which was performed in Los Angeles on July 21, 1943. The date written in the script for the start of the uprising was March 17, 1943 (Hecht, We Will Never Die , 29). [50] Ibid., 39. [51] Ibid., 39. [52] Whitfield, “The Politics of Pageantry, 1936-1946,” 239. The Committee for a Jewish Army had been proposed by the Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, and was designed to create a fighting force against Hitler, but which would also support the aspiration for a Jewish-led Palestine. [53] Ibid., 239. [54] Ibid., 251. [55] Aaron Beim and Gary Alan Fine, “The Cultural Frameworks of Prejudice: Reputational Images of the Postwar Disjuncture of Jews and Communism,” The Sociological Quarterly 48, no. 3 (2007): 376. [56] On the larger-end of cast size, Chicago’s main Tercentenary pageant featured 1,000 performers, compared to The Romance of a People ’s 3,500. [57] David De Sola Pool, Planning for the Tercentenary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States in 1954-55 (New York: American Jewish Historical Society, 1950). [58] Beim and Fine, “The Cultural Frameworks of Prejudice,” 375. [59] De Sola Pool, Planning for the Tercentenary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States in 1954-55 , 414. [60] Judith Friedman Rosen, “In Search of… Earlier American Jewish Anniversary Celebrations: 1905 and 1954,” American Jewish History 92, no. 4 (2004): 481. [61] American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, Exercises in the celebration of the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States, 1655-1905 original pamphlet reprint (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, 1954). [62] Adele Gutman Nathan, Producing Tercentenary Pageants (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, 1954), 7. [63] Nathan mentions a single Jewish themed pageant/play from wartime, The Eternal Road (1937), though only to use it as an example of what not to do: don’t use “canned music” (Ibid., 9). [64] “St. Louis officials desperately sought to present a different civic image to the nation. They felt that a successful historical pageant would not only cleanse the city’s tarnished reputation nationwide, but also advance a single civic identity around which the various people sand classes could rally to enact reforms at home.” Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry , 159-60. [65] Listed in American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, Program Materials for the American Jewish Tercentenary (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, 1954). [66] Mae [Maie] Clement Perley, The Quilt (Louisville: Jewish Tercentenary Committee of the Conference of Jewish Organizations, December 1954). Written for presentation in Louisville on March 8, 1955. [67] Marc Siegel, Faith and Freedom: A Dramatic Presentation (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary, 1954), 20. [68] Ibid., 21. [69] Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry , 5. [70] Wilmer, Theatre, Society, and the Nation , 11 Footnotes About The Author(s) Rachel Merrill Moss is a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama at Northwestern University and a 2018-2019 Fulbright grantee to Poland. While earning her MA in Theatre History and Criticism from CUNY Brooklyn College, she worked in New York as a theatre critic and dramaturg. Rachel has presented work at the American Society for Theatre Research, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and the Polish-Jewish Studies Working Group. Gary Alan Fine is James E. Johnson Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, a member of the faculty of the Interdisciplinary Program in Theatre and Drama, and a former theatre critic. He is the author of numerous articles and book, including most recently, Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education . He writes extensively on reputations and scandals in art worlds and in politics. Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf 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 Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Rosa Schneider 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 “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Rosa Schneider By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF A hush falls over the previously raucous crowd as the image projected across the wall of Theatre for a New Audience and onto the bodies of the actors on stage suddenly becomes clear. The famous photograph of the August 7, 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana, fills the space. Shipp and Smith hang from a tree in the background, while in the foreground a huge crowd of white spectators smile, point at the bodies, and make eye contact with the photographer. As the audience watches in mute horror, the projection is manipulated so that Smith and Shipp’s bodies appear to sway in the trees, bringing immediacy to a decades-old event. It is within and against this backdrop that BJJ, Playwright, and Assistant, the three most versatile characters in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014), attempt to stage a lynch trial on the docks of a Louisiana town for Wahnotee, a Native American accused of murdering a black child. The photograph of this particularly brutal twentieth-century lynching deepens the action on stage, occurring in the 1850s of the original play. These innovations force the audience to become complicit in the trial and its bloody aftermath and simultaneously bring the audience as close to a sensation of death as possible without burning the theatre down around them. [1] This eye-catching and difficult scene, which I call reconstruction, is a key part of Jacobs-Jenkins’ compilation of theatrical techniques. Collectively, these techniques teach Jacobs-Jenkins’s twenty-first-century audience to respond both on a theatrical and a racial level in order to work in a manner they would not have been able to otherwise. Jacobs-Jenkins manipulates melodramatic structures— such as the sensation scene, tableau, and what in this article I term melodrama’s gaze—that play upon and reimagine the history of melodrama in the United States. These changes not only alter the way slavery’s violence is portrayed on stage but make melodrama comprehensible to a twenty-first-century audience unused to the genre’s demands. These reconstructions allow Jacobs-Jenkins to transform Dion Boucicault’s wildly influential melodrama The Octoroon into his own version, An Octoroon . The two plays follow essentially the same plot, but Jacobs-Jenkins makes crucial changes to the universe of The Octoroon, particularly to the characters. Jacobs-Jenkins removes many of the white characters, notably the majority of Boucicault’s plantation owners, while consolidating those he keeps. George Peyton, the new owner of Terrebonne (the plantation on which both plays take place), is merged with Salem Scudder, the well-meaning but destructive Northern overseer of Boucicault’s original, who feels particularly protective of Zoe, the eponymous octoroon. [2] George inherits Scudder’s interest in technology, particularly photography, maintaining an important plot point and gateway to the sensation scene. [3] Cuts such as these are logical, as the removed figures emphasize previously established power structures. However, these changes then create a lack of economic diversity, as the white characters who remain all belong to the upper echelons of slave-owning society. That separation makes even starker the divisions between the enslaved and laboring African-American characters and the white leisure class. Further, the elimination of characters like Scudder, Judge Caillou, and Jules Thibodeaux narrows the universe of the melodrama. Rather than showing “life in Louisiana,” which is Boucicault’s subtitle, with Terrebonne as one of a network of plantations, Jacobs-Jenkins’ edits make the plantation a world unto itself. As we shall explore at greater length below, Jacobs-Jenkins also makes significant changes to the ending of The Octoroon . Thus, with changes to character, plot, and form, Jacobs-Jenkins walks a fine line in An Octoroon between rewriting a singular play and reconstructing an entire genre. It is difficult to overstate the importance of melodrama as a theatrical form in the nineteenth-century American landscape. Between 1820 and 1870, melodrama was ubiquitous in American culture, attracting diverse audiences “from elite males to urban workers and business- class women, by the time of the Civil War.” [4] Cutting across class and racial lines, melodrama served as a location for audiences to project their hopes and assuage their fears of a rapidly changing society. The theatres and the plots explored therein served as a training ground for business-class audiences to “acquire, rehearse, and perfect the manners of polite society.” [5] Knowing this history helps us to understand the effect of Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstructions. As part of this reconstruction, Jacobs-Jenkins chooses several tools that are essential to melodrama, including the sensation scene, the tableau, acting styles, and staging methods, and then fundamentally changes their core by altering melodrama’s gaze. “Melodrama’s gaze” refers to what could be included on stage in these productions: the plotlines that were of interest to the consumers and creators, the characters who could embody those stories, as well as the tools and techniques used to actualize these narratives. Jacobs-Jenkins’s changes allow him to represent subjects—slaves and slavery—that nineteenth-century melodrama’s toward which practitioners were often happy to gesture but with which they refused to engage in any depth. Slavery was long a topic on the melodramatic stage in both England and the United States, as is evident from the multiple versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin playing simultaneously during the nineteenth century. As Linda Williams argues in Playing the Race Card , melodrama is “the fundamental mode by which American mass culture has ‘talked to itself’ about the enduring moral dilemma of race.” [6] The subjects of the stories and the stories themselves that the genre told, however, were not as capacious as one might expect. An example of this exclusionary effect is the way Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was adapted into melodrama, stripping away the agency of many of its female characters. While these plotlines were partly cut for time, as only so many plots and characters from a novel can be translated onto the stage, there is also a specific set of generic conventions that Stowe’s characters like Mrs. Shelby or Mrs. Bird could not fulfill. In discussing George L. Aiken and Henry J. Conway’s adaptations, Bruce McConachie explains that: both playwrights were necessarily drawing on production practices and theatrical conventions ill-suited to realizing Stowe’s matrifocal ideals in production. Strong-willed mothers rarely appeared on the antebellum stage; most stock companies would have been hard pressed to cast several such roles since companies generally contained two to three times as many male as female actors. [7] We can thus see melodrama’s gaze at work. While Stowe’s original included a character like Mrs. Shelby, who decried the slave system from a matrifocal, anti-capitalist point of view, the melodramatic form could not accommodate such a character. There is thus a space for Jacobs-Jenkins to expand the audience’s understanding of and experience with slavery. Jacobs-Jenkins’s weaving together of theatrical techniques from different eras creates a new genre, one that incorporates elements of performance styles from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries alongside each other rather than prioritizing one century’s vision over another. Through these techniques Jacobs-Jenkins reconstructs the violence of slavery, bringing it onto the stage in a manner that marks a significant departure from the ways the institution had been represented previously, which often emphasized and lingered on physical and sexual violence. Excessive violence is often depicted to evoke sympathy for its victims. However, the spectacle can have the opposite effect: not only leaving the audience with an uncomfortable sense of voyeurism but habituating them to the sight of a black body in pain. [8] On the other hand, just as reprehensible as overemphasizing the violence of slavery is pretending that violence didn’t exist or attempting to make it palatable. Jacobs-Jenkins takes a third route, and his reconstruction of certain elements of melodrama helps the audience see the institution’s violence in a new light. Jacobs-Jenkins’s interest in form is apparent in the way he mixes elements from the American and British versions of The Octoroon . In the American version, distraught over her inability to be with George and her fear of M’Closky, Zoe commits suicide, and the play ends with her death. In the British version, M’Closky is stopped by George, and the owner of Terrebonne marries Zoe. The British audiences were outraged at the separation of the lovers, which Mark Mullen, in “The Work of the Public Mind,” reads as a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of slavery. The audience in London didn’t understand why the Peytons could not just move to a state where the law forbidding George to marry Zoe did not apply. [9] As part of his amalgamation, however, Jacobs-Jenkins includes the onstage stabbing of M’Closky, an addition in the British production, but concludes An Octoroon with the bleaker ending of Zoe’s desire to kill herself rather than become M’Closky’s property, an element of the original American version. This blended production then concludes with Jacobs-Jenkins’s own interpolation into the narrative, giving the last words and emotional beats to the female slaves Dido and Minnie, who emerge as the real heart of the play. These various endings drastically change the impact of the play, as it is significantly different, for example, if Zoe is sold but then redeemed by her white lover than if she kills herself to avoid becoming property. His reconstruction of melodrama’s gaze through his elevation of the three female slaves, Dido, Grace, and Minnie, to the center of the play, is Jacobs-Jenkins’s most extensive and provocative alteration to Boucicault’s original. These women are reconstructed as desiring agents with distinct backgrounds and personalities, who challenge the melodramatic conventions regarding the representation of slaves, especially the violence of slavery. Dido, Minnie, and Grace’s conversations educate the audience about the emotional, familial, societal, and violent cost of slavery for its victims. They actively mold the performance of their enslavement, rather than functioning as passive signifiers of slave life as they do in Boucicault’s original. This shaping occurs not only at the verbal level, through their self-conscious commentary on their positions, but also through a physical level, as Dido and Minnie are the only characters who work. They sweep cotton in the opening moments of the play, as well as serve breakfast and clean up the messes left by the white characters. While An Octoroon does include male enslaved characters (an older slave named Pete, and his grandson, Paul, both played by the Assistant in blackface), Jacobs-Jenkins’s most significant generic reconstructions occur with the enslaved women. Jacobs-Jenkins’s focus on Minnie, Grace, and Dido is also a significant departure from the genre’s customary depiction of the institution and the people trapped within it. Typically, the “stage Negro” fulfilled the low-comedy stereotype, whose comedic value was derived from “his odd dialect and his misuse of words. His special characteristic was inflated pride in badges of rank.” [10] While The Octoroon partly broke this tradition by placing Terrebonne’s slaves at the forefront of the play and turning them into a constant visual presence, [11] it did use these slaves as comic relief, with Peter, Solon, and Grace performing minstrel-like routines. [12] Boucicault’s slaves also adhere to many of the character tropes proliferated by minstrel depictions of black life. Minnie, Grace, and Pete are happy and loyal to their masters and do not run away, as most slaves at Terrebonne do in Jacobs-Jenkins’s version. The slaves are so secure within the system that the oldest slave, Pete, corrects a neighboring planter and Captain Ratts regarding how much his grandson was worth before he died, monetizing Paul even as he is mourning him: “What, Sar! You p’tend to be sorry for Paul, and prize him like dat. Five hundred dollars!—Tousand dollars, Massa Thibodeaux.” [13] The genre’s traditional refusal to engage with slavery is surprising, as melodrama would seem perfectly poised to stage the sights of slavery as a method of critique. However, while melodrama frequently depicted the institution of slavery onstage, either as sensational material or for abolitionist purposes, the scenes had to fit into larger established narratives so that the story could achieve legibility, [14] and the genre used the institution as a “mere resting point in the rush to affirm order at the play’s close.” [15] Additionally, melodrama by necessity was reactionary rather than revolutionary: the structure of the form is generally an arc that describes a fall from, and restoration to, innocence. [16] This compulsion to return to stasis has a wide-ranging effect not only on the genre’s sensibilities but on its portrait of American society, which was by definition conservative. Jeffrey Mason writes that melodrama was ever in pursuit of “the restoration of a condition that had, unexpectedly, inexplicably, and unfortunately been altered . . . culture is constantly in the process of attempting to come full circle and return to its point of origin.” [17] This originary impulse undercuts any great social change the melodrama might show, such as a successful slave rebellion or abolitionist appeal. However, Jacobs-Jenkins directly opposes the generic conventions and representations discussed above, by means of the characters that actively participate in the plot through their speech and commentary upon the action. His reconstruction centers on Dido and Minnie and occurs on multiple levels, but it is particularly noticeable in the unexpected way the two house slaves, and to a lesser extent, the field hand Grace, speak when they are in private, as well as what they say. When the three women are not observed by the white characters, they use contemporary slang and jargon, and demonstrate modern opinions regarding the division between labor and self, encapsulated in Minnie’s advice to Dido: “I know we slaves and evurthang, but you are not your job. You gotta take time out of your day to live life for you.” [18] Essentially, these women speak their own language. While it is true that BJJ and Assistant use a similar elastic vocabulary, their speech appears less out of place, as it is primarily bracketed off in the metatheatrical scenes, such as the prologue or the introduction to the sensation scene. In both cases, BJJ brings the audience out of 1859 into a significantly more contemporary space. Thus, what is crucial about Dido and Minnie’s language is that there is a meaningful disconnect between their surroundings, the 1859 plantation of The Octoroon , and their dialogue. The intention behind this change is explained in the script, as a note at the very beginning of the melodrama section. Jacobs-Jenkins writes: “I’m just going to say this right now so we can get it over with: I don’t know what a real slave sounded like. And neither do you.” [19] What emerges from this ignorance is a language that rejects the stereotyped “black voice” accent most commonly associated with slavery in the popular media. In An Octoroo n this language particularly emerges when Dido and Minnie escape from the panoptic gaze of the white characters. Dido, Minnie, and Grace’s manipulation of language gains additional significance when we consider the history of the representation of slavery in the theatre and other genres, such as prose. In slaveholding societies like the United States and England, there was a long tradition of employing slave narratives to publicize and garner support for abolition. While some of these narratives were written by the subjects themselves, they were often channeled through white interlocutors, who changed events and attitudes to appeal to wider audiences and in the process monetized the slaves’ stories. Sometimes the attempt to include more authentic elements, such as the reproduction of accents recorded in the Slave Narrative Project conducted by the W.P.A. in the 1930s, resulted in more obstruction than illumination and reinforced the damaging stereotypes they aimed to combat. This heavy-handed imitation obscured any deep engagement with the personal lives of the enslaved. [20] The impact and importance of Dido, Grace, and Minnie’s modern language is especially apparent when these women interact with the white characters. When they are back under the disciplinary gaze of George and Dora, the daughter of the neighboring plantation owner, Dido and Minnie use the same black-voice accent as Pete and Paul, emphasizing deference and obedience: DIDO : Bless’ee here it be. Here’s a dish of hoecakes—jess taste, Masr George—and here’s fried bananas; jess smell ’em. [21] The artificiality of this devoted and obsequious slave is glaringly obvious especially when we consider Dido and Minnie’s introduction. At the beginning of the play, Minnie chats with Dido about their work, while Dido reluctantly sweeps cotton about the stage: DIDO and MINNIE are discovered. DIDO is sweeping laboriously. MINNIE is just sort of lying down somewhere, fanning herself. MINNIE ( eventually ): Do you need help or…? DIDO : Naw, girl, I got it. Beat, while DIDO sweeps. MINNIE : You know, if you sweep on a diagonal with lighter, faster strokes, it’s a little more efficient. DIDO : Girl, what are you talking about? [22] From this brief exchange, we learn that Minnie thinks critically about how to make her job easier, and that Minnie and Dido address each other with familiarity, even if that familiarity is tinged with annoyance. It is leagues away from the style of speaking reproduced above. From examining the form of their conversations, we now turn to the content, analyzing what they say. At the end of the show, Dido speaks to Zoe with the same obsequiousness that she showed with George. When Zoe steals away to visit Dido in the slave quarters to obtain some poison to kill herself so that she doesn’t fall into M’Closky’s hands, Dido delays Zoe with an exaggerated black voice accent: “Missey Zoe! Why are you out in de swamp dis time ob night? And you is all wet! Missey Zoe, you catch de fever for sure!” [23] Dido and Minnie’s self-conscious performance while under the panoptic gaze of the slave-owners is not surprising. What is surprising is that, as we can see, they reproduce those behaviors when in conversation with Zoe, who is not white, but is a member of the plantation aristocracy. Dido and Minnie’s interactions with authority figures, as well as their descriptions of their quotidian lives, is made possible by Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction of melodrama’s gaze. Dido and Minnie frankly discuss how various forms of slavery’s violence impact them, and this discussion is underlined with a specific brand of humor. In an interview with the Village Voice , Jacobs-Jenkins asserted that the goal of his writing is to make the audience “laugh and then you have to think about your laughter for a second.” [24] Jacobs-Jenkins achieves this goal, as the moments that are most distressing are also the most humorous, reaching a crescendo when the two women discuss the physical violence that plagues their lives. While Pete, Paul, and Wahnotee exchange threats of perpetuating physical attacks, [25] Dido and Minnie are subject to threats of sexual violence. Within the first few moments of their introduction, they discuss the reality of plantation life, and the constant threat of assault: MINNIE : You ever had to fuck him? DIDO : Who? MINNIE : Mas’r/Peyton DIDO : Oh, naw! You? MINNIE : Naw, he only like lightskinnded girls. But Renee, you know, who was fuckin’ him all the time . . . MINNIE : Would you fuck him [George]? DIDO : No, Minnie! Damn. Would you? [Beat] MINNIE : Maybe. DIDO : Yeah, well, I get the feeling you don’t get a say in the matter. [26] This exchange turns on a subtle humor, more understated than Dido and Minnie’s other revelations, such as their acknowledgment of forced illiteracy [27] or their reluctance to run away. [28] However, this discussion regarding the implicit and constant presence of sexual violence raises disturbing questions. It seems to endow Minnie and Dido with a measure of agency and suggests that they and Renee had a choice in whether or not to sleep with George. The implications of this conversation spiral outward quickly, asking the audience to consider who Zoe’s mother was; though Zoe is treated well by the Peyton family, she was most likely the product of some measure of sexual violence. This awareness of unspoken sexual violence in the punch line is the closest the play comes to using the word “rape.” The agency that the modern dialect seems to ascribe to Minnie and Dido reveals itself to be fleeting, and it is clear that they exist within a violent system. While Jacobs-Jenkins recognizes and represents the violence inherent in the system, Minnie and Dido’s conversation is an important departure from the method by which melodrama staged slavery’s violence. In his version of the seminal melodrama Uncle Tom’s Cabin , George Aiken greatly increased and stylized the brutality of Tom’s cruel owner, Simon Legree, against Tom. He brought onto the stage “an aestheticized paraphernalia of cruelty (long whips, cuffs, and chains),” [29] which were put to great affective use. However, this display of physical violence was not a condemnation of the institution of slavery, but a demonstration of the wickedness of Legree, certifying his status as a villain of melodrama. Indeed, all of Legree’s added violence and wickedness became attributable to his personality, in fulfilling his role as an “anti-man-of-principle.” [30] Because the focus of the melodrama was on character, and not the institution, Uncle Tom’s Cabin “presents not a dialectic of class and economics, but specific interactions between villains and victims.” [31] This collapsing of focus can also be seen in The Octoroon , as the abuses on the plantation can be attributed to M’Closky and the mismanagement of Northern interlopers, rather than the systemic corruption of an unfair practice. Abolitionist melodramas also relied on violence in an attempt to make the horrors of slavery real for an audience who may not have understood them. However, as Douglas Jones writes, this attempt to bring the brutality of slavery closer to the white audience depended on an empathy that “readily occludes the inimitability of the captive’s suffering as a means to confirm the onlooker’s freedom; as a result, it promotes stasis and erases the magnitude of the nation’s ordinary sin.” [32] The brutality of these representations was thus more about the effect they created in the white onlookers than the subjects of that violence. The saturation and highlighting of the black body in both physical and emotional torment was the most common path through which ex-slaves could claim humanity. [33] A secondary but no less important element of the reconstruction of melodrama’s gaze is that it shifts the representative world, exploring and acknowledging multiple types of violence beyond the physical and sexual. Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction highlights the institutional demands that the enslaved see themselves as property and participate in their own dehumanization. In conversations that are hidden from their masters but are heard by the audience, Dido tells Minnie that she “grew up at the Sunnyside place on the other side of the hills. Mas’r Peyton won me in a poker game like ten years ago.” [34] Dido’s blithe story of how she came to Terrebonne is startling, as is her disregard for the destruction of familial relationships that this narrative implies. But what is most unexpected is the casualness with which she describes a complicity that is revealed to be widespread: DIDO : And this one time, Solon was like, “Girl let me borrow your baby for a second?” And so Rebecca’s dumb ass like gave him the baby and then that nigga turnt around and fucking sold the baby. MINNIE : What? DIDO : Yes, girl. Apparently Massa was about to sell Solon and Grace’s baby, but then Solon switched Rebecca’s baby out for they baby at the last minute and Massa didn’t know the difference so he just sold Rebecca’s dumb-ass baby. [35] The humor carrying this exchange is complex. On one level, it is funny because there is an asymmetrical relationship between the form and the content: what Dido and Grace say and how they say it. This exchange is also comic because it is a rare moment of triumph: Solon and Grace are able to take advantage of Judge Peyton’s stupidity. However, Dido and Minnie’s discussion simultaneously gestures to a darker point: a Peyton family inability to see African-Americans as individuals. Zoe can’t distinguish between an older and a younger black woman, and her father, Judge Peyton, also thought that African-Americans were interchangeable. [36] While this exchange reflects badly on the Peytons, it also reveals Dido and Minnie’s complicity with and active participation in perpetuating this system. This willingness is apparent again when Dido and Minnie learn that they are to be sold to help pay the debts on the plantation. Rather than run away, they participate in the sale, manipulating the process so that they will be purchased by Captain Ratts rather than Jacob M’Closky, who has a reputation for beating his slaves. [37] Dido and Minnie dress in their best “slave tunics” to convince Captain Ratts, whom they “seduce,” into buying them. [38] Minnie describes living on his boat as though it were a vacation: Imagine: if we lived on a steamboat, coasting up and down the river, looking fly, wind whipping at our hair and our slave tunics and shit and we surrounded by all these fine, muscle-y boat niggas who ain’t been wit a woman in years? [39] For both Dido, who thinks that the situation still sounds dangerous, [40] and Minnie, this is a chance at a better life, although this new life still seems fraught with the potential for sexual assault. Minnie and Dido’s attitudes run counter to modern cultural expectations, which would have them run away for the possibility of a better life rather than accepting the confines of slavery. However, in the world of An Octoroon, this is one of the only opportunities Minnie and Dido have to take control of their situation and make decisions regarding their bodily autonomy. While the ending is played for laughs, when Minnie wonders if “something were to happen that somewhere rendered these last twelve hours totally moot,” it is an indication of the effect of Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction that the audience really feels for Minnie and Dido and their lost autonomy. [41] In An Octoroon, Dido, Minnie, and to a lesser extent, Grace, are not the objects of the jokes, and the audience does not laugh at them or their situation. Rather, Jacobs-Jenkins manipulates the humor found in the distance between Dido and Minnie’s modern vocabulary and performance style and their nineteenth-century conversational topics. He makes their situation strange and unfamiliar at the same time as they sound as though they are standing on a street corner in twenty-first-century Brooklyn. [42] Instead of relying on overly familiar tropes, An Octoroon shows us anew the horrors of slavery, forcing us to consider the depth and diversity of the institution’s brutality. Jacobs-Jenkins continues to represent the diversity of the institution’s brutality in his next revision of melodrama’s gaze with his treatment of Zoe. While the majority of her dialogue emerges from The Octoroon , [43] Jacobs-Jenkins uses Zoe to juxtapose melodramatic convention with a modern understanding of racial performance. As we have seen, Zoe enthusiastically participates in the hierarchical structures of the plantation, holding herself above the house and field slaves alike. She insults Dido and kicks Pete, ordering him to “Wake up you, silly Nigger! Where’s breakfast?” [44] Not only does she place herself above the field hands and participate in the casual violence of her peers, but she also does no work aside from showing George the plantation. It is thus clear that Zoe is afforded freedoms as the daughter of Terrebonne’s owner. However, Jacobs-Jenkins indicates that despite her real privileges, Zoe’s status as an octoroon requires that she suffer within an institution that surrounds her and is responsible for her birth. Indeed, Jules Zanger argues that in the North, an octoroon “represented not merely the product of the incidental sin of the individual sinner, but rather what might be called the result of cumulative institutional sin, since the octoroon was the product of four generations of illicit, enforced miscegenation made possible by the slavery system.” [45] In fact, Zoe’s entire presence in the play, especially her heritage, reminds the audience of the reality of interracial desire and an uneven balance of power. [46] This attitude then helps us to understand Zoe’s response when she is forced to reveal herself as mixed race. When George confesses his love to her, Zoe racializes herself and teaches an unbelieving George how to recognize the signs of her African heritage. This scene is a crucial demonstration that, despite all her other advantages, she is still trapped within a system that is interested in controlling its victims’ minds as well as their bodies. [47] In a scene that is taken in its entirety from The Octoroon , Zoe shows George the signs of her African heritage, transforming her body into “an artifact of racial hybridity” [48] : ZOE : George, do you see that hand you hold? Look at these fingers; do you see the nails are of a . . . bluish tinge? GEORGE : Yes, near the quick there is a faint blue mark. ZOE : Look in my eyes; is not the same color in the white? GEORGE : It is their beauty. ZOE : No! That—that is the dark, fatal mark and curse of Cain. Of the blood that feeds my heart, one drop in eight is black—bright red as the rest may be, that one drop poisons all the rest. [49] George’s examination of Zoe’s physical features for signs that the audience cannot see is a deeply tragic image. Zoe reveals not only her self-hatred—she calls herself “an unclean thing” [50] —but also the extent to which she is trapped within the system of chattel slavery. Anyone who is able to read Zoe’s body will know how to classify her, thus endangering not only her body, but her education, upbringing, and social class. Zoe is trapped within a disciplinary system that limits her choices and her happiness and curtails her options. While this scene is remarkably affecting, there remains a significant disconnect between written text and what is seen, a discord not present in Boucicault’s original, and the potent emotion and danger behind Zoe’s confession seems misplaced. This disconnect is deliberately designed, as Jacobs-Jenkins stipulates that Zoe’s role be played by “an octoroon actress, a white actress, quadroon actress, biracial actress, multi-racial actress, or an actress of color who can pass as an octoroon.” [51] Jacobs-Jenkins thus seems to undercut the reveal of this scene: if the audience can read Zoe as mixed-race already, there’s no need for her to confess. However, I would argue, that these casting specifications demonstrate the insidious nature of racializing thoughts, which ascribe negative qualities to physical minutiae, rather than the revelation of Zoe as an octoroon. Because Zoe’s opinions on race and self-worth are directly imported from the melodrama, they are in direct contrast to the play’s other explorations of race. [52] Jacobs-Jenkins builds on his reconstruction of melodrama’s gaze with a re-engagement with elements of nineteenth-century melodrama: the tableau and the sensation scene, discussed below. The tableau manipulates several artistic practices, operating simultaneously on a visual, emotional, and auditory level. The technique allows the audience to pause, read, and absorb the emotional impact of a scene, much as one would do with a painting. Peter Brooks describes tableau as providing a “visual summary of the emotional situation” of a scene, in the process fulfilling “melodrama’s primordial concern to make its signs clear, unambiguous, and impressive.” [53] In nineteenth-century melodrama, the tableau appears in moments of crisis, wherein speech and narrative fail and the emotion of the scenes can only be understood through images. Typically, it works as a punctuation mark to a particular plotline, occurs at the end of a scene, and inspires an affective response. Jacobs-Jenkins primarily follows its usual placement as a punctuation mark at particularly emotionally-charged moments. The ends of the first three acts of each melodrama section includes a tableau: Jacob M’Closky triumphing at the end of Act One, Wahnotee mourning over Paul’s body at the end of Act Two, and Zoe’s auction at the end of Act Three. However, BJJ also draws particular attention to the extraordinary nature of this theatrical feature, engaging and exploiting it. As Act One nears its end, Jacob M’Closky sets in motion his plot to ruin the Peyton family and purchase Zoe. As he revels in his expected outcome, he dives into his tableau. The stage directions describe the scene: M’CLOSKY stands with his hand extended toward the house. Music. An attempt at a TABLEAU. He holds the TABLEAU for a while before DIDO walks in with a washing bucket and some laundry. [54] We see BJJ, the character-as-playwright, rewriting melodrama in real time as M’Closky poses uncomfortably on stage. M’Closky fulfills all the requirements for a tableau: he stops the action, allowing the audience to read his posture, establishing him as the villain. Rather than serving as a punctuation mark, or creating a moment of overwhelming emotion, however, M’Closky’s overtly performative pose never quite lands, and the life of the plantation quickly resumes around the frozen overseer. This change is signaled through a return to the constant, underlying musical accompaniment. [55] Furthermore, the reassertion of the quotidian is signaled by Dido’s entrance with the laundry, which startles M’Closky, and resets the scene to a normal theatrical time. However, a moment later, the tableau is attempted again, but this time it emerges from a moment of real violence: [M’CLOSKY re-enters, stalks over to DIDO] DIDO : Hi, Mas’r M’Cl— [M’CLOSKY strikes her violently] M’CLOSKY : And don’t you ever fuckin’ sneak up on me like that again, you nigger bitch! [An actual TABLEAU.] [56] The legibility inherent in this image is why the tableau works: because the audience can quickly grasp the power dynamics of a white-presenting man physically threatening a black woman, allowing the audience to read and understand an essential power dynamic of slavery, without lingering on Dido’s pain. This tableau also reveals how much is left up to the director in An Octoroon . The stage directions only suggest that a tableau occurs, but in performance, we see that M’Closky strikes Dido, then remains standing over her. Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction of the tableau forces us to re-evaluate the genre’s ability to produce and manipulate our emotions. The tableau only works when it is connected to real emotion, rather than to the conventions of the drama. Jacobs-Jenkins’ reconstruction of the tableau helps the audience see anew the violence of slavery. Like the sensation scene, tableau insists on the audience’s attention. This demand for awareness is reiterated in Act Two’s tableau, which finds Wahnotee, in an expression of grief, bending over the body of the slain boy Paul: To his horror, WAHNOTEE finds him dead, expresses great grief, raises his eyes. They fall upon the camera. He rises with a savage growl, he seizes tomahawk and smashes camera to pieces, then goes to Paul, expresses grief, sorrow, and fondness. Maybe he starts to make a grave—sobbing and digging his hands? I don’t know. In any case, there’s a TABLEAU. [57] The violence against black bodies is an essential part of slavery, and the incidental way in which Paul is murdered, mentioned in the stage directions, but not noted in the dialogue, mirrors the Peytons’ inattention to the details of their slaves’ lives: “ M’CLOSKY strikes PAUL on the head. PAUL falls dead. During the following, a large pool of blood begins to gather around PAUL’S body and M’CLOSKY’S feet. ” [58] This tableau provides the audience with a rare moment of unbridled pathos that isn’t undercut by an attempt at humor. Indeed, this is a moment that deeply humanizes Wahnotee, who is otherwise, even in Jacobs-Jenkins’s version, a thinly drawn stereotype, addicted to rum, speaking a mishmash of various languages, and prone to violence. This tableau also defies stereotypes of Native Americans that were familiar from the so-called Indian plays of the early nineteenth century, where Native American characters often played upon racial fears, threatening white characters with the possibility of sexual and physical violence. But in this tableau, Wahnotee is given space to grieve. Although M’Closky may not take notice of Paul’s death, Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction of Wahnotee’s tableau requires the audience to realize that these characters are not disposable. Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction of the first two tableaux links these highly performative moments more closely with the text of An Octoroon . These scenes join together emotion and the violence against black bodies on stage. The final tableau, appearing at the end of Act Three, continues this work, as it punctuates the auction of Terrebonne and Zoe’s sale to M’Closky. The slave driver’s interruption of the auction adds a layer of drama to an already spectacular venture, which “materializes the most intense of symbolic transactions . . . money transforms flesh into property; property transforms flesh into money; flesh transforms money into property.” [59] The practice of staging slave auctions has a long history as a method of creating pathos for the enslaved. Henry Ward Beecher, the famed Northern abolitionist preacher, raised money to liberate young biracial girls from slavery by transforming the pulpit of his Brooklyn church into an auction yard to “heighten the emotional power of his rhetorical appeal as he evoked . . . a form of ‘spectatorial sympathy’ to play upon the affective responses in his audiences.” [60] It was converted into a specifically theatrical spectacle, however, when in The Octoroon Boucicault represented it onstage for the first time. [61] Like its first-act cousin, the tableau that emerges from An Octoroon’s auction scene also results from a theatrical failure. The sale of Terrebonne is, as Lafouche the auctioneer describes it, “a shitshow,” [62] as the majority of the Terrebonne slaves have run away, and those that are left are either old and infirm like Pete, or three women, not nearly enough to save the plantation. The scene, which should be one of high tragedy, is turned uncomfortably comic, as Dido and Minnie request to be sold together, and spend time preening to attract the attention of Captain Ratts. Lafouche reports, “the, uh, the property has requested that it be sold along with another piece of property? . . . can it do that?” [63] While not part of the reconstruction of the tableau specifically, Jacobs-Jenkins’s modern intervention into the scene emphasizes the auctioneer’s dehumanizing language, turning what should be a moment for consternation into comedy. The momentum of the scene is further derailed by the spectacle of George and M’Closky, played by the same actor, fighting each other. While double casting is a cause for humor in this scene, it is part of a larger historical argument and an important feature of Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction of melodrama. These two types that George and M’Closky embody, the kind slave owner hero and the evil, scheming overseer villain, were common roles in American melodrama, and come with expected behaviors and performance histories. But because these characters are here contained in one body, all of their actions are collapsed into a single, interchangeable entity. The only differences between them are a broad accent and M’Closky’s mustache and hat: easily removable costume pieces. Jacobs-Jenkins thus erases any difference between these historical touchstones, suggesting that the authority figures in plantation culture were exactly the same. Lisa Merrill and Theresa Saxon, in their article “Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon,” also note that “by having one actor play both of these white male characters, An Octoroon illustrates the uncomfortable similarity between a desire to own, master, or marry the mixed-race heroine, Zoe, and the implicit similarity in both endings.” [64] Merrill and Saxon acknowledge that George’s desire to possess Zoe, while dressed in slightly kinder clothing, mirrors M’Closky’s. As the bidding war over Zoe escalates, and the other powerful members of the plantation class, including Captain Ratts and Dora Sunnyside, attempt to trump the slave driver’s bid, M’Closky and George’s animosity erupts in violence: “ GEORGE rushes M’CLOSKY, slash himself, who draws his knife .” [65] After a measure of order is restored by Lafouche, M’Closky exalts over the members of the established plantation class, and goes into his pose: “ M’CLOSKY jumps on up on his chair, throws money in the air, and makes it rain.” [66] M’Closky’s purchase of Zoe, and his subsequent flaunting of his wealth, results in a tableau that whiplashes the audience into a realization that Zoe has been commodified and dehumanized even more pervasively than when she identified her African features to George. Similar to the tableau in Act One, this frozen image quickly transmogrifies the humor of the scene to tragedy. Thus in this tableau, Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction operates on two significant levels: first, the tableau’s sudden shift in tone draws attention to its violence, and second, it breathes new life into a nineteenth-century theatrical element. In both cases, Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction of the tableau forces the audience to absorb the quotidian violence of slavery, working through legible images and sensations rather than overwhelming scenes of physical violence. Just as the tableau operates through easily graspable images, so does the sensation scene. These two devices work on multiple levels of signification beyond the spoken word, revealing an unspeakable truth to the characters and audience. There are similarities between the way the tableau forces the audience to confront the ordinary violence of slavery and the operation of Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstructed sensation scene. After a long, metatheatrical prologue, where BJJ, Playwright, and Assistant explain and walk the audience through the meaning and history of the sensation scene, they end up reciting the whole scene, with interjections and commentary. [67] As they approach the end of the scene, BJJ announces that he “tried to figure out the next best thing, something actually related to the plot. I hope it isn’t too disappointing.” [68] The actors give themselves a shake and dive right back into the scene. George delivers an impassioned condemnation of lynch law, attempting to persuade the surrounding crowd of angry sailors not to rush to judgment, with one crucial change: he stands in front of, and among, Shipp and Smith’s swaying bodies. [69] George’s plea catalyzes a series of revelations that culminate in the exposure of An Octoroon’s villain: the dastardly slave-driver Jacob M’Closky. The sensation scene unfolds as the villain is revealed, and the boat carrying the last shipment of cotton from Terrebonne plantation explodes, represented in this version by an expulsion of cotton into the audience. Due to casting restrictions that are enumerated at the top of the show, BJJ, the playwright of the frame narrative, confesses that he “grossly underestimated the amount of white men I actually would need here,” [70] and the mob that surrounds the action and heightens the stakes is played by the audience rather than actors. George’s commentary on justice and lynch law spills beyond the confines of the stage, and into the twenty-first-century crowd. Audience members were unsettled by George’s speech, made clearly uncomfortable with their sudden involvement in the story. This discomfort expressed itself in many ways: from strained and nervous laughter, to gasps and murmurs, growing stronger as they sat with the image that seemed to expand as the photograph extended beyond its frame and onto the bodies of the actors. The face of a man staring at the audience and pointing proudly at the bodies that hang in the trees was newly embodied as it was projected directly onto George’s shirt. It is through this alchemy of dialogue and image that George’s body, ambiguously raced to begin with as he is played by a black actor in whiteface make-up, becomes the medium for bringing the violence of the Shipp and Smith lynching onto the stage without exploiting it. As George and M’Closky debate Wahnotee’s innocence or guilt, the projection remains, hanging over the action. The photograph is not given any context and the actors do not refer to it, except when it needs to come down. [71] By projecting the image of the Shipp and Smith lynching above this fictional debate, Jacobs-Jenkins summons a sharper sense of danger to M’Closky and George’s argument, reminding the audience that the discussion of lynching taking place had real-life consequences. The use of this photograph, and the diverse feelings it provoked in the audience as it remained projected on the back wall, are crucial elements of Jacobs-Jenkins reconstruction of the sensation scene. In its original context, the sensation scene mixed pathos and action, often overwhelming the audience. These scenes were produced by “extraordinary theatrical effects, often featuring disasters such as shipwrecks, avalanches, volcano explosions and so forth.” [72] The scenes were exciting in their own right, but the nineteenth-century audience particularly marveled at “the technical feat involved in replicating aspects of life that seemed beyond the resources of the stage.” [73] These technical feats created perceptible physical reactions in the audience, forging a community out of the spectators. Lynn M. Voskuil describes the construction of this feeling community: what mattered most was not merely that spectators felt such responses, but that they believed they felt them in common . . . intrinsic to their play-going experience was not only the bodily sense of nervous shudders and quivers but also the sagacity both to cultivate and manage them. [Sensation theatre required] a sophisticated spectator, one practiced at decoding spectacle and awake to its mechanisms and bodily effects. [74] While the photograph of the Shipp and Smith lynching produced these feeling communities (and the most memorable moment of the play), the projection had other consequences. The maintenance of the photograph requires the stage to be darkened to appreciate the full effect, which in turns requires an unnatural cessation of movement by the actors, as well as plot. The action can only proceed to the point at which the three frame characters, BJJ, Playwright, and Assistant, described it in the metatheatrical prologue of the scene. [75] The photograph transfixes the actors and the audience, holding both in place and preventing them from looking away, either from the lynching that has already occurred or the threat of the lynching that is possibly to come. However, the focus on the Shipp and Smith lynching literally blocks out and overwhelms the situation on stage. The audience cares less about the trial of Wahnotee when its attention is focused on the Shipp and Smith photo. Thus, like the tableau, which can only be held for a short period of time, the sensation scene sets the stage, but needs to be removed for the plot to continue forward. However, once the photo is taken down and M’Closky is revealed as a villain, Jacobs-Jenkins offers us one more complicated result of his reconstruction of the sensation scene, as he stages M’Closky’s murder. Examining this moment in terms of the characters, we see a Native American planning to kill a white man in retaliation for the murder of a black child. But when we look at the bodies of the actors, a different image emerges: We see a white man dragging a bleeding black man off to be lynched, choking and screaming, “Help! Help! Help!” The stage directions note that the violence in this moment—Wahnotee and M’Closky’s fight, Wahnotee’s stabbing of the slave driver, and Wahnotee’s clear desire to lynch M’Closky—should seem “ incredibly real .” [76] The violence of the Shipp and Smith lynching, projected and overwhelming the debate on how to move forward, is repeated and recreated, as Jacobs-Jenkins wraps up the recreation of the sensation scene. After the emotional intensity of the sensation scene, Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction ends on a deadpan note. Once Wahnotee drags a screaming M’Closky offstage and the audience is pelted with explosive cotton balls, Assistant is the only actor left on stage. He turns to the audience, and recounts the action: “And then the boat explodes ( beat) . Sensation.” [77] This impassive delivery undermines the traditional forms of the genre, as it points the way to new methods of representation and emotion. Jacobs-Jenkins’s subversion of the sensation scene is part of An Octoroon’ s larger effort to reconstruct the formal aspects of the genre so that it becomes increasingly capacious in its representation of slavery. It accomplishes this first by shifting melodrama’s gaze so that the play not only foregrounds characters Boucicault’s original treats as punch lines, but elevates them so that these two dark-skinned black women are the heart of An Octoroon . [78] By interjecting and juxtaposing modern dialogue and character development with dialogue that casually confirms the horrors of their quotidian existence, Jacobs-Jenkins makes slavery’s violence understandable in new ways. The changes in melodrama’s gaze also alter the way that we understand the damage slavery has done to Zoe, who, although she is privileged in some ways, is still bound both by the self-hatred and racialization that leads to her suicide. This article also argues that Jacobs-Jenkins takes on more traditional elements of melodrama, such as the sensation scene and the tableau. In both cases, his reconstructions allow a twenty-first-century audience to feel some of the same effects as their nineteenth-century counterparts. By using comprehensible images, the tableau and sensation scene insist on the audience’s attention. Simultaneously, Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstructions rocket between emotional states: from comedy to tragedy, from overwhelming sensation to blunt statement of fact, reinventing before our eyes a core American theatrical tradition. And in the process, he provides new ways of viewing and understanding slavery. References [1] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon (New York: Onstage Press, 2014), 121. This article uses the published version of An Octoroon , as well as the recording of a performance of the Sarah Benson-directed production, recorded June 6, 2014, and housed at the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at the New York Public Library. I will also refer to instances from the Theatre for A New Audience production of the same play. TFANA and Soho Rep’s productions were both directed by Sarah Benson, the artistic director of Soho Rep. BJJ: So for a while I was thinking maybe I could actually just set this place on fire with You inside— PLAYWRIGHT: bring you as close to death as possible. BJJ/PLAYWRIGHT: That would be amazing. BJJ: And then, of course, rescue each of you one by one, PLAYWRIGHT: And then perform the rest of the show out on the street. BJJ: But that would be crazy PLAYWRIGHT: And Soho Rep. doesn’t need that. BJJ: And also I would only be able to do this show once. [2] While the omission of Salem Scudder lessens the number of characters that Jacobs-Jenkins had to account for, his dismissal had other consequences, particularly that Zoe is less universally cared for. In An Octoroon , Zoe is beloved of the Hero and the Villain, but in The Octoroon , with Scudder’s feelings of protectiveness toward her, there is a greater sense that she is a desirable commodity. Scudder’s presence in Boucicault’s original, as a well-meaning, but ultimately harmful presence on the plantation—partly to blame for Peyton’s financial woes—is an indication of the “paternalistic, racist myth of a genteel plantation culture, threatened more by a villainous Yankee than by its own inherent injustices.” Harley Erdman, “Caught in the ‘Eye of the Eternal’: Justice, Race, and the Camera, from The Octoroon to Rodney King.” Theatre Journal 45, no. 3 (October 1993): 335. This kind of specific regional nuance is of less importance in Jacobs-Jenkins’ worldview. [3] Although The Octoroon’s plot hangs on photographic evidence that Scudder’s camera provides, BJJ and Playwright point out that twenty-first-century audiences are no longer impressed or even swayed by this type of evidentiary material. BJJ explains that “we’ve gotten so used to photographs and moving images that we basically have learned how to fake photographs, so the kind of justice around which this whole thing hangs its actually kind of dated.” (Jacobs-Jenkins, 120.) While we can still be shocked by the photograph of the Shipp and Smith lynching, the audience is less impressed by the evidence the photograph of M’Closky provides. [4] Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre & Society, 1820-1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), ix. This monograph includes an excellent history of the American engagement with the melodramatic form. [5] Ibid., 228. [6] Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), xiv. [7] Bruce A McConachie, “Out of the Kitchen and Into the Marketplace: Normalizing ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ for the Antebellum Stage,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 3, no. 1 (1991): 11. [8] Saidiya Hartman begins her seminal work, Scenes of Subjection, with a similar observation. Viewing the consequences of a slave’s body, ravaged by violence, she writes that “Rather than inciting indignation, too often they immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity—the oft-repeated or restored character of these accounts and our distance from them are signaled by the theatrical language usually resorted to in describing these instances–and especially because they reinforce the spectacular character of black suffering.” Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3. [9] Mark Mullen, “The Work of the Public Mind,” Nineteenth Century Theatre 27, no. 2 (Winter 1999), 100. [10] David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater & Culture: 1800-1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 190-1. [11] Mullen argues that the very visibility of the slaves was Bouicault’s nod to an anti-slavery position, “The Work of the Public Mind,” 98. [12] Dana Van Kooy and Jeffrey N. Cox. “Melodramatic Slaves,” Modern Drama 55, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 470. [13] Dion Boucicault, “The Octoroon.” In Early American Drama , edited by Jeffrey H. Richards (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 471. [14] Douglas A Jones, The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 140. [15] Van Cooey and Cox, “Melodramatic Slaves,” 462. [16] Ibid., 462. [17] Jeffrey D. Mason, “Staging the Myth of America,” in Melodrama and the Myth of America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 15. [18] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon , 137. [19] Ibid., 43. [20] For an excellent discussion of the difficulties of slave narratives and their staging, see Jones, Captive Stage , 139-141. [21] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon , 57. [22] Ibid., 45. [23] Ibid., 131. [24] Tom Sellar, “Pay No Attention to the Man in the Bunny Suit.” Village Voice . 28 September 2015. http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/pay-no-attention-to-the-man-in-the-bunny-suit-7189537 . [25] Pete threatens Minnie: “Drop dat banana fo’ I murdah you!” and “It’s dis black-trash, new Mas’r George; day’s getting too numerous round; when I gets time, I’m gonna have to murdah some of ’em fo’ sure!” (Jacobs-Jenkins., An Octoroon , 51, 52), while Paul threatens to “gib it to” Wahnotee if the boy finds the Indian drinking rum (ibid., 60), while Wahnotee destroys George’s camera and drags M’Closky offstage (ibid., 81, 128). [26] Ibid., 47-9. [27] Ibid., 83. Minnie: I couldn’t read that sign out front, because I can’t read. Dido: I can’t read it either. You know it’s illegal for us to read. Minnie: Yee-uh, but I was hopin’ you wuz one of them secret reading niggas. You know, like Rhonda. Dido: Rhonda can read?! Minnie: Shh, girl! It’s a secret! [28] Ibid., 50. Minnie: Haven’t she heard these slave catchers got these new dogs nowadays that can fly and who are trained to fuckin drag yo’ ass out of trees and carry you back? And then, even if you can outsmart these flying dogs, once you free, what you gonna do once you free? You just gonna walk up in somebody house and be like, “Hey. I’m a slave. Help me.” That kind of naiveté is how niggas get kilt. [29] Sarah Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2005), 119. [30] McConachie, “Out of the Kitchen and Into the Marketplace,” 15. [31] Mason, “Staging the Myth of America,” 119. [32] Jones, The Captive Stage, 141. [33] Ibid., 142. [34] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, 46. [35] Ibid, 66. [36] When Zoe approaches Dido to ask her for poison at the end of the play, she clearly doesn’t recognize Dido, whom she calls “Aunty” and “Mammy.” Zoe invents an entire history between them: “my own dear Mammy, who so often hushed me to sleep when I was a child” (Ibid., 133), although Dido did not grow up on the Peyton plantation, and is in fact the same age as Zoe (Ibid., 134). Zoe cannot see Dido as an individual, but purely as a stereotype. In Minnie’s eyes, this ignorance arises from Zoe’s choice to align herself with the white characters, in her words “hang out wit all these damn white people all the damn time” (Ibid., 134). [37] Ibid., 100. [38] Ibid., 106. [39] Ibid., 102. [40] Ibid., 102. [41] Ibid., 138. [42] While this article focuses on Dido and Minnie’s ability to transverse the generic conventions of melodrama, the male characters also engage in temporal crossing. BJJ/Assistant/Playwright, in their various cross-racial guises, step out of character and transition seamlessly between the play and the frame. [43] Dora Sunnyside, the daughter of the neighboring plantation owner and Zoe’s friend (and rival), also does not move between the framing device and the main story. While this article is primarily focused on race rather than class, it might be worthwhile to consider how these two characters are united in class status. [44] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon , 56. [45] Jules Zanger, “The ‘Tragic Octoroon’ In Pre-Civil War Fiction.” American Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1966): 66. [46] Merrill and Saxon, “Replaying and Rediscovering,” 131. [47] Mullen, “The Work of the Public Mind,” 110. [48] Lisa Merrill and Theresa Saxon. “Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon.” Theatre Journal 69, no. 2 (June 2017): 130. [49] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, 76-7. [50] Ibid., 77. [51] Ibid., 25. This type of open-ended yet specific stipulation is used for all of the actors and characters of color. It is also odd that the only explicitly mixed race character is asked to own and represent her identity in a way that no other character, including those who put on cross-racial make-up technologies, are asked to. [52] For the male characters, race is significantly more fluid. Although BJJ suffers as a “Black Playwright” — as his work is prejudged as a reflection of current racial issues or a retelling of African folktales, a situation he describes in the metatheatrical prologue “The Art of Dramatic Composition” — he is able to put on whiteface make-up and “become” white and much more socially mobile. While Assistant’s use of blackface, or Playwright’s use of redface do not afford them privileges (Paul is killed, while Wahnotee is nearly lynched), the two actors do not seem bothered by their transformations. [53] Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 48. [54] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon , 64. [55] The music for the TFANA production was composed by César Alvarez and played by the onstage cellist, Lester St. Louis. While the Soho Rep and Theatre for a New Audience productions had constant musical accompaniment as well as a particularly evocative closing song, no specific musical directions are mentioned in the script. There is often a stark division between what is described in the stage directions and what appears on stage in Jacobs-Jenkins’ plays. We find this intentional vagueness throughout An Octoroon , including, as we shall see, Jacobs-Jenkins’ descriptions of his tableau: “Maybe he starts to make a grave—sobbing and digging his hands? I don’t know ” (ibid., 81). However, this desire to leave the creation of the theatrical world up to the director is also included in his 2010 debut, Neighbors , at the Public Theater. Neighbors grapples with theatre history in much the same way as An Octoroon , re-engaging with the minstrel tradition rather than melodrama. Particularly fascinating are the stage directions in Neighbors that describe minstrel interludes, including many traditional characters like Sambo, Zip Coon, Topsy, and Mammy. These interludes are drawn in excruciating detail, describing outlandish physical and sexual situations. Sambo’s interlude, for example, includes an insanely large penis, which ropes a watermelon, and which he chews through. Jacobs-Jenkins, Neighbors , 358. Neighbors ’ stage directions are incredibly detailed, while those of An Octoroon are more suggestive. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, “Neighbors.” In Reimagining A Raisin in the Sun, edited by Rebecca Ann Rugg and Harvey Young (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 307–403. [56] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon , 67. [57] Ibid., 81. [58] Ibid., 80. [59] Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 215. [60] Lisa Merrill, “‘May She Read Liberty in Your Eyes?’: Beecher, Boucicault and the Representation and Display of Antebellum Women’s Racially Indeterminate Bodies,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 26, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 133. [61] Mullen, “The Work of The Public Mind,” 104. For further information on the performance history of slave auctions, see Jason Stupp, “Slavery and the Theatre of History: Ritual Performance on the Auction Block.” Theatre Journal 63, no. 1 (March 2011): 61-84. [62] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon , 106. [63] Ibid., 106. [64] Merrill and Saxon, “Replaying and Rediscovering,” 151. [65] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon , 110. In the Theatre for a New Audience production, this conflict became an extended scene, and a display of physical skill and comedic timing from Austin Smith, the actor who played BJJ/George/M’Closky. Smith rolled around on the ground before the auction block—where Zoe stood, gasping in horror—fighting himself. The characters shouted encouragement, and at one point, Dora kicked over George’s knife, which had gotten lost in the scuffle. The severe emotional shift, from a side-splitting scene to one of extreme pathos, was felt extensively in the audience, and carefully cultivated. [66] Ibid., 111. [67] Interjections with phrases such as: “Playwright: Anway, Pete’s like,” and commentary such as “This is actually a hole in Boucicault’s plot. Not mine.” Ibid., 119. [68] Ibid., 122. [69] Ibid., 122. [70] Ibid., 113. [71] The actors’ choice not to acknowledge the photograph is echoed in the stage directions. While Jacobs-Jenkins requires a lynching photograph, he does not specify an incident, or even a date range, that the production should employ, Ibid., 222. He leaves the choice to the director and designers. [72] Matthew Wilson Smith, “Victorian Railway Accident and the Melodramatic Imagination,” Modern Drama 55, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 508. [73] Michael Diamond, Victorian Sensation: Or, the Spectacular, the Shocking, and the Scandalous in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Anthem Press, 2003), 219. [74] Lynn M. Voskuil, “Feeling Public: Sensation Theater, Commodity Culture, and the Victorian Public Sphere,” Victorian Studies 44, no.2 (2002): 250. [75] Ibid., 115-120. [76] Ibid., 128. [77] Ibid., 128. [78] Although approaching this scene from a different argument, Merrill and Saxon also pay close attention to Dido and Minnie’s final exchange, noting that it allows the audience to “refocus their attention on the material conditions and lives of ordinary black women rather than the eponymous octoroon.” Merrill and Saxon, “Replaying and Rediscovering,” 152. Footnotes About The Author(s) ROSA SCHNEIDER is a doctoral candidate in the Subcommittee on Theatre within the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia UnXiversity. Her research focuses on the performance of history, race, and cultural memory, on American and Caribbean stages. She has presented work at ASTR, where she serves as a member of Executive Committee of the Graduate Student Caucus, and she is also the resident dramaturge and co-artistic director of Strange Harbor, an experimental theatre company in Brooklyn. Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf 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 Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. 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Courtney Ferriter 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 Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Courtney Ferriter By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF In his recent book Democracy in Black (2016), Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. argues that for Americans, “collective forgetting is crucial in determining the kind of story we tell ourselves. Ours is the chosen nation, the ‘shining city upon a hill,’ as Ronald Reagan called it. America is democracy. . . . To believe this, we have to forget and willfully ignore what is going on around us.” [1] While Glaude is particularly concerned with the distortions and fairy tales Americans continue to tell ourselves about race, Tony Kushner’s epic two-part play Angels in America tackles this same theme of conveniently forgetting and willfully ignoring so as not to disrupt the American self-image with respect to sexual orientation and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play received much acclaim from critics and scholars alike for many years following its initial publication—resulting in initial runs on Broadway and the National Theatre in London in 1992-1993 and an award-winning 2003 HBO mini-series starring Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson—but more recently, it seems to have fallen out of favor among scholars, despite a successful 2010 revival at the Signature Theatre and a 2017 production at the National Theatre that transferred to Broadway in February 2018. Indeed, many (although not all) scholarly articles that discuss Kushner and Angels in recent years focus on how AIDS functions in the play, [2] with scant consideration of Kushner’s portrayal of democracy. I argue that Kushner is especially relevant in the socio-historical moment in which Americans currently find ourselves—one marked by political polarization and distrust of those who think differently than we do. The 2016 election was symptomatic of these problems and brought them into full view for any who still harbored doubts about how deep this divide runs, but Kushner’s play proves instructive for how to build an engaged democratic citizenry. In the epilogue to Part Two of Angels in America , Prior leaves the audience with an optimistic vision for the future, stating, “The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.” [3] He then offers a blessing of “more life,” and the play concludes with the same phrase that appears at the end of Part One: “The Great Work Begins” ( Perestroika , 146). As David Kornhaber has observed, many scholars and critics are dissatisfied with the play’s conclusion due to “the reconciliationist politics it seems to espouse,” [4] which for them provides “a too-easy gloss on more intractable problems” [5] that continue to plague society. Thus, Kornhaber reasons, “a lot must depend on how one figures what seem to be the two key concepts of Kushner’s conclusion: citizen and blessing.” [6] Like Kornhaber, I believe that individual understanding of the term “citizens” as well as broader notions of what constitutes citizenship figure heavily in interpretation of both the epilogue and Angels as a whole. Furthermore, I contend that Kushner’s idea of citizenship is necessarily linked to the beginning of the “Great Work” invoked at the end of both parts of the play. In Angels , “citizens” are those who are part of a Deweyan community, made up of diverse people with sometimes conflicting opinions who listen to each other and who are nonetheless connected by their desire to enact positive change in the world, to progress toward a more ideal and inclusive democracy. This is what Prior (and by extension, Kushner) means by “Great Work.” Individualism and undemocratic communication—represented by Roy Cohn and Joe Pitt—fall away by the end of Angels in America , making room for what Atsushi Fujita calls a “a new model of community,” [7] consisting of Belize, Hannah, Louis, and Prior, who value inclusivity and democratic communication. John Dewey argues in Freedom and Culture (1939) for a distinction between “society” and “community.” Society arises from the politics of individual nations, how a particular country governs, and what policies are enforced, whereas community is unrestricted and made up of individuals or groups who share a common solidarity. He explains, “[F]or a number of persons to form anything that can be called a community in its pregnant sense there must be values prized in common. Without them, any so-called social group, class, people, nation, tends to fall apart into molecules having but mechanically enforced connections with one another.” [8] Thus, for Dewey, one characteristic of community lies in shared values. Furthermore, Dewey adds democratic communication to his idea of community, arguing that “there is a difference between a society, in the sense of an association, and a community. . . . Natural associations are conditions for the existence of a community, but a community adds the function of communication in which emotions and ideas are shared as well as joint undertaking engaged in.” [9] In the case of Americans, our joint undertaking is the democratic experiment, and for this reason, we should likewise strive to embody democratic ideals of communication. In the vein of Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy, Kushner emphasizes the importance of inclusive, democratic community in Angels in America . The play models Deweyan communities while also highlighting models that are anti-Deweyan: there is no great community—no solidarity between different groups of Americans—and thus, there is no realized democracy. Kushner writes in the Afterword to Perestroika that Americans “pay high prices for maintaining the myth of the Individual,” [10] which he contrasts with the idea that “the smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction.” [11] This juxtaposition of individualism with community, illustrated in the play by Roy and Joe as opposed to the community envisioned in the epilogue, is central to Kushner’s understanding of democratic progress and what it means to be a citizen. Some leftist critics may bemoan the ending of Angels as “turn[ing] away from the kind of collective action demanded by Marx and staged by Brecht,” [12] but as Hussein Al-Badri has observed, the play’s main flaw in this regard is merely presenting “a different politic[s] than its detractors would like it to be.” [13] Kushner is ultimately more concerned with how to enact Deweyan democracy and community—which he believes will lead to real and lasting social change—than he is with envisioning an America based around socialism or Marxism. In recent years, John Dewey’s notions of community and his pedagogy have come under scrutiny from critics who rightly cite the ethnocentrism that undergirds much of his early philosophy in these matters. [14] Thomas Fallace notes that because pragmatism is “a self-correcting theory of knowledge,” [15] by 1916, Dewey understood that “a plurality of cultures was necessary for democratic living and intellectual growth.” [16] Nevertheless, Fallace argues, “ethnocentrism was built right into Dewey’s early pedagogy and philosophy.” [17] This ethnocentrism troubles Dewey’s notion of community; he conceived of community as “not merely a variety of associative ties which hold persons together in diverse ways, but an organization of all elements by an integrated principle.” [18] If Dewey believed that white people represented a more advanced form of civilization that people of color had not yet achieved, then how would it be possible to form a community in which “all elements” are organized by the same principle? As Glaude has noted, democracy for Dewey “is a form of life that requires constant attention if we are to secure the ideals that purportedly animate it.” [19] Likewise, Scott Stroud emphasizes that a “real amount of openness is implicated in the [pragmatist] habits of democracy.” [20] In other words, democracy is a process, one which must continually be reexamined to ensure that we are increasing democracy and participation among citizens, creating a more inclusive community rather than excluding or marginalizing certain voices, as Dewey was guilty of doing in his early career. As Dewey himself put it, “only when we start from a community as a fact, grasp the fact in thought so as to clarify and enhance its constituent elements, can we reach an idea of democracy which is not [merely] utopian.” [21] One particular benefit to considering the vision of Deweyan community and democracy in Kushner’s Angels is that, several generations removed from Dewey, he is interested in how to incorporate citizens from different backgrounds with vastly different life experiences into the great community Dewey envisioned, particularly African Americans and people who identify as queer. Thus, Kushner’s reexamination of community and inclusive democracy as demonstrated in Angels is itself pragmatic in its consideration of the conditions and context of American life and democracy in the 1980s and ‘90s, revising Dewey’s idea of community by incorporating more and varied groups and voices into it. Fallace argues that an important part of Dewey’s pragmatism was context: “all knowledge was context-bound; it served a purpose in a particular situation and its usefulness was dependent upon that context.” [22] Kushner speaks to a particular historical moment in his work on community, examining the anxieties and shortcomings of American democracy in light of black/white and gay/straight relations. Thus, reading Kushner as a pragmatist increases our understanding of what an ideal community might look like, taking into account the experiences of those who are often pushed to the margins of society by the not-so-silent majority. A consideration of how Kushner treated the power disparities he observed at work in society may also prove instructive for how the U.S. might address current forms of oppression and marginalization in society. I argue in the remainder of this essay that the “Great Work” to which Kushner refers at the end of both Millennium Approaches and Perestroika is, in part, a call to the greater democratic community reflected in the play’s epilogue, which is championed over the closed views of community embodied in Roy Cohn and Joe Pitt. Kushner’s vision of Deweyan community emphasizes inclusion and listening to marginal voices, for characters in Angels in America who ignore the voices of the other do so at their peril. Roy Cohn and Joe Pitt are representative of undemocratic communication in the play—Roy because he dominates those around him, and Joe because he cannot be truthful with others or see beyond himself. Dewey writes that in a democracy, “both parties learn by giving the other a chance to express itself, instead of having one party conquer by forceful suppression of the other.” [23] For Roy, suppression of the other in communication is par for the course. One early example of this occurs in Act One, Scene 9 of Millennium Approaches when Roy’s doctor Henry diagnoses him with AIDS. Roy then tries to force Henry to call him a homosexual, finally threatening, “No, say it. I mean it. Say: ‘Roy Cohn, you are a homosexual.’ And I will proceed, systematically, to destroy your reputation and your practice and your career in New York State, Henry. Which you know I can do” ( Millennium , 44). When Henry gives him the diagnosis of AIDS, Roy counters, “No, Henry, no. AIDS is what homosexuals have. I have liver cancer” ( Millennium , 46). Roy forcefully suppresses Henry from telling anyone that Roy is gay by threatening his career, and he even manages to suppress the diagnosis of AIDS. The next time Henry appears is in Perestroika to facilitate Roy’s admission to the hospital, where even his medical charts, as Belize reads them, say “liver cancer” ( Perestroika , 21). Roy’s relationship with his nurse Belize in Perestroika is similarly domineering, as Roy makes racist and homophobic remarks, goads Belize into using an anti-Semitic slur in one scene, knocks over pills he is supposed to take, and generally proves to be an insufferable patient. Roy also makes it clear that even though he is somewhat dependent on Belize, he does not consider him an equal in any way. Bemoaning his imminent disbarment in Act Four, Scene 1 of Perestroika , Roy says, “Every goddam thing I ever wanted they have taken from me. Mocked and reviled, all my life” ( Perestroika , 87). When Belize identifies and responds, “Join the club” ( Perestroika , 87). Roy says, “I don’t belong to any club you could get through the front door of. You watch yourself you take too many liberties” ( Perestroika , 87). Shortly after Roy has a series of violent spasms, Belize says that he almost feels sorry for him. Roy is quick to remind him, “You. Me. No. Connection” ( Perestroika , 88). Thus, Roy suppresses Belize any time Belize attempts to identify with him in the slightest. If democracy is characterized in part by open communication, then Roy’s constant desire to “win” or conquer in conversations with others exposes him as a totalitarian at heart. Roy’s totalitarian communication is a natural result of his individualism. He relishes his status as “the dragon atop the golden horde” ( Perestroika , 55), maintaining that “Life is full of horror; nobody escapes; nobody; save yourself. Whatever pulls on you, whatever needs from you, threatens you” ( Millennium , 58). This philosophy clearly runs counter to Kushner’s belief in the smallest indivisible unit as two people. Nevertheless, Kushner includes Roy in the play, explaining in an interview that he is “a part of the gay and lesbian community even if we don’t really want him to be a part of our community.” [24] This indicates a capacity for inclusivity in his democratic vision that Roy himself disdains in the play. This inclusive community is similarly emphasized when Louis, aided by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, recites the Mourner’s Kaddish for Roy, thus accepting him into the greater Jewish community of which they are part (albeit in death). While Joe is not like Roy in his communication in the sense that he has to win or dominate others in conversation, his general dishonesty and unwillingness to take responsibility for his actions make him undemocratic in his dealings with other characters in the play. Kushner has sometimes been criticized in scholarship on Angels in America for being too hard on Joe. Hussein Al-Badri, for example, asserts that Kushner’s omission of Joe from the community included in the epilogue runs counter to Kushner’s “own political ideology of inclusion and inclusiveness.” [25] However, this dramatic punishment seems more fitting when Joe’s undemocratic communication and individualism are taken into consideration, for then it is clear that like his mentor Roy, Joe too spurns community and democratic communication. Dewey argues for truthful communication in “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us” writing, “knowledge of conditions as they are is the only solid ground for communication and sharing.” [26] Joe lies about his identity as a gay man to his wife Harper, he keeps from Louis the fact that he is a Mormon, and he repeatedly tells Harper that he is not going to leave her, only to abandon her anyway. Because Joe lacks a foundation of truthfulness with people who are important to him, open, democratic communication is not possible. Like Roy, Joe also acts with the individual—himself—in mind, rather than considering community or the circumstances and experiences of others. Following an irreparable fight with Louis in Perestroika , Joe tries to return to Harper, not because she needs him but because he is thinking of himself. He tells her, “I don’t know what will happen to me without you. Only you. Only you love me. Out of everyone in the world. . . . Please, please, don’t leave me now” ( Perestroika , 139). Joe is unable to sustain a community or communicate democratically with others because he never considers the experience of the other person and only considers his own needs and desires. In fact, Joe even tells Louis that “sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be,” ( Perestroika , 73) a notion that serves as Joe’s modus operandi throughout the play. Deweyan communication requires what Hongmei Peng calls sympathetic thinking, the ability to “step outside of [one’s] own experience and see it as the other would see it by putting [oneself] in the place of the other and using imagination in order to assimilate the other’s experience.” [27] Since Joe proves incapable of imagining the other’s experience, he necessarily excludes rather than includes others in his would-be community, particularly Harper and Hannah. His unwillingness or inability to change in this regard is why he is not included among the democratic “citizens” in the epilogue, since undemocratic communication and exclusive community building stand in opposition to Kushner’s Deweyan model of community. Although Roy and Joe form a community of sorts in Angels , it proves to be undemocratic and representative of anti-Deweyan communication. In spite of the father/son-type relationship that Roy and Joe maintain throughout most of the play, there is much that they keep from one another, and their relationship is marked as much by silence as it is by the closeness and warm feelings for one another as mentor and mentee. This silence comes to a head in Act Four, Scene 1 of Perestroika , when Joe visits Roy in the hospital. When Joe reveals that he left his wife Harper and has been living with Louis, Roy forcefully silences Joe: JOE : Roy, please, get back into… ROY : SHUT UP! Now you listen to me. [. . .] ROY : I want you home. With your wife. Whatever else you got going, cut it dead. JOE : I can’t, Roy, I need to be with… ROY : YOU NEED? Listen to me. Do what I say. Or you will regret it. And don’t talk to me about it. Ever again. ( Perestroika , 85) Roy not only silences Joe in this particular moment of the play, but he commands him never to speak of his relationship with Louis or to make any allusion to homosexuality again. Thus, Roy’s silencing of Joe is distinctly undemocratic and unrepresentative of the kind of communication expected in a democratic community. Far from being an outlier, this is not the first time Roy has stifled Joe’s communication with him. Rather than being open to hearing what Joe wants to express (even if he disagrees with it), Roy chastises him in Millennium Approaches for having ethical reservations about interfering with the disbarment committee hearing, calling Joe “Dumb Utah Mormon hick shit” ( Millennium , 106) and “a sissy” ( Millennium , 107). As for Joe, he claims to love Roy, but is unwilling to go to bat for him when the chips are down. Although this is a legal as well as an ethical quandary, it demonstrates that Joe’s love for Roy is more theory than practice. He asserts, “I’ll do whatever I can to help,” ( Millennium , 66) but those are empty words, since he ultimately refuses the job in Washington he is offered and fails Roy. Joe and Roy cannot agree on a shared ideal toward which they can work together, and thus, their efforts at community building are doomed to fail. Given Dewey’s assertions that community involves “communication in which emotions and ideas are shared” [28] and that such community is “a pressing [concern] for democracy,” [29] Roy and Joe fail at both democratic communication and maintaining a community even with one another. In addition to their undemocratic communication, Roy and Joe are devoted to exclusion rather than inclusion and to individualism rather than community, qualities that are distinctly anti-Deweyan, and for which (along with their undemocratic communication) they are dramatically “punished” by Kushner. Roy succumbs to his illness, while Harper leaves Joe for good and Joe is nowhere to be found in the democratic community of the play’s epilogue. Unlike Roy and Joe, Louis is able and willing to change, demonstrating by the end of the play a commitment to open communication and revising harmful beliefs and actions. While Louis initially abandons Prior when the effects of AIDS become more than he can handle, he eventually sees the error of his ways and atones for his past misdeeds. Prior tells Louis when they meet after Louis’s month-long absence in Perestroika that when he cries, he “endanger[s] nothing. . . . It’s like the idea of crying when you do it. Or the idea of love” ( Perestroika , 83). Similarly, Belize remarks to Louis in Millennium Approaches , “All your checks bounce, Louis; you’re ambivalent about everything” ( Millennium , 95). For much of the play, Louis claims to support things in theory, but his practice reveals his own ambivalence on the subject, from his alleged love for Prior to his support of the Rainbow Coalition. However, following a conversation with Belize in Act Four, Scene 3 of Perestroika in which Belize observes that Louis is “up in the air, just like that angel, too far off the earth to pick out the details. Louis and his Big Ideas. Big Ideas are all you love,” ( Perestroika , 94) Louis realizes that theory and practice must be joined, both in love and in democracy. This is confirmed for him when he researches Joe’s legal decisions written on behalf of Justice Wilson and finally understands that Joe, who wants to be “a nice, nice man” ( Millennium , 107)—as Roy aptly puts it—has rendered legal decisions that have real and damaging consequences for children and gay people. Dewey argues for praxis in democracy, asserting that democracy is “a personal way of individual life. . . . Instead of thinking of our own dispositions and habits as accommodated to certain institutions we have to learn to think of the latter as expressions, projections, and extensions of habitually dominant personal attitudes.” [30] Joe thus expresses a clearly undemocratic viewpoint when he tells Louis of his legal decisions, “It’s law not justice, it’s power, not the merits of its exercise, it’s not an expression of the ideal” ( Perestroika , 109). The discrepancy between Joe’s theory and practice in multiple areas of life, including love and democracy, causes him to think that he must accommodate himself to institutions—like “legal fag-bashing” ( Perestroika , 109) or heterosexual marriage, for example—rather than viewing such institutions democratically, as potential sites for expressing his own experiences and habits. Louis recognizes his own behavior in Joe’s habits, and after their fight, Louis finally understands the extent to which he has failed Prior. He later asks to come back to Prior and tells him, “Failing in love isn’t the same as not loving. It doesn’t let you off the hook, it doesn’t mean you’re free to not love,” ( Perestroika , 140) indicating a respect for praxis that he previously lacked. In addition, Louis gains “expiation for [his] sins” ( Perestroika , 121) through his recitation of the Mourner’s Kaddish for Roy Cohn. Although he had previously refused to identify with Roy in any way, calling him “the polestar of human evil … the worst human being who ever lived, he isn’t human even,” ( Perestroika , 93) with some coaxing from Belize and help from Ethel Rosenberg’s ghost, Louis recites the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, thus affirming Roy as part of the Jewish community. Framji Minwilla argues that the coming together of Belize, Ethel, and Louis to say Kaddish for Roy “invent[s] a more complex yet exact sense of self and a more expansively conceived idea of community.” [31] This community is a democratic one, in which people who have ideas and beliefs differing from the mainstream (like Roy, for whom this is the case not in life nor in the Reagan years of the play, but within the politics espoused by Kushner and the characters in the epilogue of Angels ) are nevertheless included and acknowledged as part of the larger community. Based on his joining together of theory with practice and expanding his idea of community by praying for Roy, Louis is able to participate as a “citizen” in the epilogue: he argues at points with Belize about politics, but he is ultimately able to listen and value the presence of differing opinions in his community. Prior also makes a few missteps, but like Louis, he ultimately “succeeds because he is willing to change,” [32] to become more democratic in his communication with others and his vision of community. For instance, when he first meets Joe’s mother, Hannah, he assumes that because she is Mormon, she must be trying to convert him when she helps him to the hospital. After they arrive at the hospital, Prior tells Hannah about his visit from the Angel, and she says he had a vision, drawing a comparison with Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, and Prior once again rushes to make assumptions about her because of her Mormonism: PRIOR : But that’s preposterous, that’s… HANNAH : It’s not polite to call other people’s beliefs preposterous. He had great need of understanding. Our Prophet. His desire made prayer. His prayer made an angel. The angel was real. I believe that. PRIOR : I don’t. And I’m sorry but it’s repellent to me. So much of what you believe. HANNAH : What do I believe? PRIOR : I’m a homosexual. With AIDS. I can just imagine what you… HANNAH : No you can’t. Imagine. The things in my head. You don’t make assumptions about me, mister; I won’t make them about you. ( Perestroika , 102) This is the first moment of democratic communication between Prior and Hannah. He acknowledges her point, listening and taking to heart her experiences. This openness serves him well when Hannah advises, “An angel is just a belief, with wings and arms that can carry you. It’s naught to be afraid of. If it lets you down, reject it. Seek for something new” ( Perestroika , 103). Prior takes her advice, struggling with the Angel of America and returning the Book of the Anti-Migratory Epistle to Heaven. He previously identified with the Angels—their abandonment by the Almighty and desire to go back—but ultimately he insists upon progress and forward movement. Additionally, Prior’s vision of community becomes more expansive and inclusive by the end of the play. He tells Louis in Millennium Approaches that if Louis walked out on him, he would hate him forever. While he does not take Louis back as a partner in Perestroika , he forgives him, tells him he loves him, and Louis remains an important presence in Prior’s life based on their interaction in the epilogue. In Hannah’s first appearance, she does not seem particularly inclusive or capable of democratic communication given her outrage at Joe’s admission that he is gay, however she experiences a transformation in Perestroika and shows more concern for others, particularly Prior and Harper. Despite Hannah’s somewhat gruff manner—she is described by Sister Ella Chapter in Millennium Approaches as “the only unfriendly Mormon [she] ever met” ( Millennium , 82)—and her claim that she “[doesn’t] have pity,” ( Perestroika , 101) she tends to both Prior and Harper, both of whom have been abandoned by the person closest to them. Hannah explains her actions by claiming, “I know my duty when I see it,” ( Perestroika , 66) which suggests that unlike Joe, she is willing to take the needs and experiences of others into consideration before acting. Much like Dewey, Hannah acknowledges that communication and community require cooperation, “understanding, learning, [and] other-regarding thinking.” [33] Given her sympathy and concern for Prior and Harper as well as her advice to Joe to reflect on his actions and beliefs by asking himself “what it was [he was] running from,” ( Perestroika , 96) Hannah has become a Kushnerian “citizen” in the epilogue, musing about the “interconnectedness” ( Perestroika , 144) of people in the world and providing hope for Prior to keep moving forward. Her advice to Prior that he should “seek for something new” ( Perestroika , 103) if his beliefs fail him demonstrates her own willingness to revise previous assumptions and incorporate new knowledge into her experience, an essential quality in a member of a democratic community. As for Belize, who has been described in scholarship as the moral center of Angels in America , [34] his actions toward Roy and Louis show a commitment to inclusivity in line with Deweyan democratic community. Belize empathizes with Roy and Louis as fellow gay men, despite his outright hatred for some of their actions and ideologies. He advises Roy about the best course of treatment for late-stage AIDS, contra the opinion of Roy’s “very qualified, very expensive WASP doctor,” ( Perestroika , 26) and warns him about the double-blind AZT trials. Despite the fact that Roy is a terrible patient and person who, as mentioned previously, takes every opportunity to remind Belize that Roy considers him beneath him, Belize feels, as he puts it, a sense of “solidarity. One faggot to another,” ( Perestroika , 27) and reminds Louis that Roy “died a hard death” ( Perestroika , 122). With Louis, Belize embodies the democratic value of believing in human nature’s capacity for change. Dewey argues in “Creative Democracy” that democracy is “a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature.” [35] Although Belize disdains Louis for his abandonment of Prior, he meets with Louis in both Millennium Approaches and Perestroika and offers him some moral guidance, indicating that he has not given up on Louis and retains some hope that he will change for the better. Belize’s inclusivity is unsurprising considering his description of Heaven as encompassing “voting booths … everyone in Balenciaga gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion” ( Perestroika , 76) with gods who are all “brown as the mouths of rivers” ( Perestroika , 76). This utopic vision eradicates all of the obstacles to justice and democratic participation of marginalized groups in the United States; everyone has gained suffrage, wealth inequality has been destroyed, and racism, sexism, and transphobia have all been tempered by mixed-race divinities and blurred gender boundaries. Belize’s idea of Heaven is aligned with Kushner’s philosophy on freedom; he argues that freedom “expand[s] outward” [36] and the most “basic gesture of freedom is to include, not to exclude.” [37] This sounds remarkably like Dewey, who concludes in “Creative Democracy” that the task of democracy is always to create “a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute.” [38] Belize’s vision of Heaven and Kushner’s understanding of freedom express Dewey’s practical ideal for democracy. The four characters included in the epilogue to Angels in America —Belize, Hannah, Louis, and Prior—represent democratic community either because they have demonstrated a willingness to change, listen to others, and revise previous beliefs/actions in the course of the play, or (in Belize’s case) because that kind of inclusivity and democratic communication had already been attained. Michael Cadden argues that the epilogue to Angels “leaves us with the image of four individuals who, despite their very real differences, have chosen, based on their collective experience, to think about themselves as a community working for change.” [39] Similarly, Ron Scapp suggests that Kushner’s ending embraces “the hope of democracy.” [40] For Kushner, the “hope of democracy” is embodied in these characters who have become “citizens” ( Perestroika , 146) with differing thoughts and opinions who are nevertheless capable of working together to accomplish the “Great Work” ( Perestroika , 146) of expanding democracy. Roy and Joe, who were neither inclusive of dissenting voices nor able to form democratic communities, are incapable of acting as citizens and thus omitted from the epilogue, even as Kushner includes them in the greater community of the play itself. The epilogue to Angels in America ultimately advocates for a more ideal democracy, which must begin with individuals who act as citizens. This is the kind of democracy envisioned by Dewey, where all citizens believe “that even when needs and ends or consequences are different for each individual, the habit of amicable cooperation … is itself a priceless addition to life.” [41] Such a community stands in stark contrast to the exclusive, undemocratic, and homophobic legislation and political rhetoric of the Reagan years as portrayed in the play and embodied by Roy and Joe. Kushner’s small democratic community at the end of Angels reminds the audience that democracy is a process, one toward which we must constantly work to ensure we are applying the democratic method of expanding rights and freedoms outward, revising beliefs or actions based on experience and new information, and opening ourselves to democratic communication with others. Kushner begins from the premise that including marginalized voices is not only beneficial but essential to democracy. This revises some of Dewey’s early notions, which had been grounded in ethnocentric thinking, and provides a foundation for what including others in a democratic community looks like. The inclusivity Kushner portrays in Angels in America demonstrates that democracy does not mean that all voices are considered to be equally valid; rather, Kushner highlights voices that are similarly committed to democracy as method. Roy Cohn and Joe Pitt provide examples of voices that are too partisan and too committed to their own individualistic and undemocratic ways of thinking. However, it is important to note that such people are not irredeemable; they have the capacity to change, as we see Louis do over the course of the play. As a result, such individuals deserve to be included in the larger community (as Kushner includes Roy) even if their ideology is itself anti-democratic. Kushner cautions, however, that such individualism and anti-democratic thinking is harmful to democratic inclusivity and communication. Thus, anti-democratic ideology must not be allowed to dominate at a legal level, as we see its harmful consequences in the exclusive, homophobic legislation of the Reagan administration. In addition, democratic communication is encouraged on a personal level, too, otherwise relationships and communities run the risk of being torn apart, as evidenced by Roy and Joe or Joe and Harper. Like Dewey, Kushner believes that it is necessary to revise our methods to become always more democratic and more inclusive—like the “citizens” referred to in the epilogue—progressing slowly but ever closer to true democratic communication and community with one another. In our present political moment in the United States, democratic communication and community seem like essential tools to cultivate as we work together toward a future like the one Kushner envisions in his epilogue rather than resigning ourselves to undemocratic rule by the Roy Cohns of the world. References [1] Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (New York: Broadway Books, 2016), 48. [2] See, for example, Alexander Peuser, “AIDS and the Artist’s Call to Action,” Lucerna 11 (2017): 10-22; Dennis Altman and Kent Buse, “Thinking Politically about HIV: Political Analysis and Action in Response to AIDS,” Contemporary Politics 18, no. 2 (2012): 127-140; Laura L. Beadling, “The Trauma of AIDS Then and Now: Kushner’s Angels in America on the Stage and Small Screen,” Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 5, no. 3 (2012): 229-240; and Claudia Barnett, “AIDS = Purgatory: Prior Walter’s Prophecy and Angels in America ,” Modern Drama 53, no. 4 (2010): 471-494. [3] Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part Two: Perestroika [1992] (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2004), 146. All subsequent references to the play will be indicated parenthetically, e.g. ( Millennium , 64) or ( Perestroika , 75). [4] David Kornhaber, “Kushner at Colonus: Tragedy, Politics, and Citizenship,” PMLA 129, no. 4 (2014): 728. [5] Ibid. [6] Ibid, 729. [7] Atsushi Fujita, “Queer Politics to Fabulous Politics in Angels in America : Pinklisting and Forgiving Roy Cohn,” in Tony Kushner: New Essays on the Art and Politics of the Plays , ed. James Fisher (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006), 125. [8] John Dewey, Freedom and Culture [1939] in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953 , vol. 13: 1938-1939, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988): 71. [9] Ibid, 176. [10] Tony Kushner, “With a Little Help from My Friends,” [1993] in Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part Two: Perestroika (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2004), 149. [11] Ibid, 155. [12] Kornhaber, “Kushner at Colonus,” 736. [13] Hussein Al-Badri, Tony Kushner’s Postmodern Theatre: A Study of Political Discourse (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 73. [14] See, for example, Shannon Sullivan, “From the Foreign to the Familiar: Confronting Dewey Confronting Racial Prejudice,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18, no. 3 (2004): 193-202; Frank Margonis, “John Dewey’s Racialized Visions of the Student and Classroom Community,” Educational Theory 59, no. 1 (2009): 17-39; and Thomas D. Fallace, Dewey and the Dilemma of Race: An Intellectual History, 1895-1922 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011). [15] Thomas D. Fallace, Dewey and the Dilemma of Race: An Intellectual History, 1895-1922 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011), 4. [16] Ibid. [17] Ibid. [18] John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1927), 38. [19] Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 6. [20] Scott R. Stroud, “The Challenge of Speaking with Others: A Pragmatist Account of Democratic Rhetoric,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 29, no. 1 (2015): 100. [21] Dewey, The Public and Its Problems , 149. [22] Fallace, Dewey and the Dilemma of Race , 9. [23] John Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us” [1939] in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953 , vol. 14: 1939-1941, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988): 228. [24] Charlie Rose, “Tony, Tonys, and Television,” in Tony Kushner in Conversation , ed. Robert Vorlicky (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998): 46. [25] Al-Badri, Tony Kushner’s Postmodern Theatre , 93. [26] Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” 229. [27] Hongmei Peng, “Toward Inclusion and Human Unity: Rethinking Dewey’s Democratic Community,” Education & Culture 25, no. 2 (2009): 82. [28] Dewey, Freedom and Culture , 176. [29] Ibid, 177. [30] Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” 226. Emphasis in original. [31] Framji Minwilla, “When Girls Collide: Considering Race in Angels in America ,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, eds. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997): 110. [32] Al-Badri, Tony Kushner’s Postmodern Theatre , 101. [33] Peng, “Toward Inclusion and Human Unity,” 82. [34] See, for example, Minwilla, “When Girls Collide,” 104-105; or Al-Badri, Tony Kushner’s Postmodern Theatre , 96. [35] Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” 226. [36] Tony Kushner, Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 6. [37] Ibid, 7. [38] Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” 230. [39] Michael Cadden, “Strange Angel: The Pinklisting of Roy Cohn,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, eds. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997): 88. [40] Ron Scapp, “The Vehicle of Democracy: Fantasies toward a (Queer) Nation,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, eds. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997): 98. [41] Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” 228. Footnotes About The Author(s) COURTNEY FERRITER is Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Georgia. Her research interests include American pragmatism and 20th century Jewish and African American literature. She has published articles in James Baldwin Review and Education & Culture . She is currently at work on an article about Harryette Mullen’s poetic wordplay as a form of resistance against white supremacy. Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf 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 Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. 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 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. References [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. Footnotes About The Author(s) 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. 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 Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre "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 Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler 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 Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF In Tony Kushner’s provocative play Homebody/Kabul (2002), Milton reassures his daughter Priscilla during their trip to Afghanistan where they investigate the disappearance of Pricilla’s mother and Milton’s wife, “we shall respond to this tragedy by growing, growing close. . . .” Priscilla blankly replies, “people don’t grow close from tragedy. They wither is all, Dad, that’s all.” [1] While Milton interprets their situation as a tragic story from catastrophe to future hope, growth, and communality, Priscilla’s view is focused on the concrete suffering, defeat, and regress that will not contribute to some higher purpose. At the heart of this brief exchange between Milton and Priscilla lies a profound paradox which speaks of Kushner’s shrewd placement of tragedy between the human subjects’ transcendence and his or her irrevocable defeat. Similarly, in her play Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief (1994), Paula Vogel, deeply disturbed by the fact that when seeing Shakespeare’s Othello she would rather empathize with Othello than with Desdemona, poses the question if Desdemona deserved death, had she indeed been unfaithful to Othello. In Vogel’s rewrite of this classic tragedy, she reflects on how our individual response to what we see, our pity and empathy, depend on the formal and structural properties of a play but also on our sense of the social legitimacy for these feelings. [2] She shifts the focus from Othello to Desdemona and from Othello’s “flaw” of rogue jealousy to the systemic suppression of women in a patriarchal society. Tony Kushner and Paula Vogel are two representative writers of contemporary American drama and theatre who exhibit a strong interest in tragedy from aesthetic and ethical perspectives. As the articles in this issue reveal, it is in particular the notion of the tragic that, as a mode of thought, presents the social, historical, and cultural predicaments of contemporary human existence. As the plays reconsider and renegotiate our understanding of human suffering, deadly defeat, irreversible conditions of existence, and the loss of hope, they are highly reminiscent of various core tenets of Greek tragedy. [3] Yet, tragedy seems to be an unlikely genre in American literature and theatre, as the dominant cultural narratives foster individualism, self-reliance, the belief in continual progress, speak of self-made men who realize their versions of the American dream, and even bestow the pursuit of happiness as one of the fundamental and “inalienable” rights on Americans. However, these ideals and dominant narratives relegate responsibility to the individual and thereby increase the sense of failure and suffering if they are not fulfilled. [4] Furthermore, they stand in stark contrast to the sense of precarity and vulnerability which Foley and Howard describe in their introduction to the PMLA special issue The Urgency of Tragedy Now as “a pressing sense that crucial social and political institutions are in danger, as is the planet itself.” [5] This feeling has, if anything, intensified over the last five years due to the rise of right-wing parties, the disregard of human rights, the erosion of democratic institutions in various countries, environmental disasters, the fear of a looming economic recession, political tribalism, and the resulting polarization of American society. In our everyday lives, we routinely encounter the ubiquity of the terms “tragedy” and “the tragic” in a wide variety of sad and sorrowful events and occasions. Steiner claims that the “semantic field” pertaining to these terms “remains as indeterminate as its origin . . . rang[ing] from triviality . . . to ultimate disaster and sorrow.” [6] The use of these terms in order to refer to suffering in the real world is reflected by our familiarity with tragedy as a literary genre. As Lehmann reminds us, the tragic is not a representation of reality but a “perspective,” a “mode of seeing” that is produced and facilitated by the “echo chamber of tragic art.” [7] At the same time, as Foley and Howard point out, a rhetoric of the tragic can veil “complicity” by framing events as inevitable instead of resulting from deliberate actions and personal responsibilities. [8] Beyond its colloquial meaning, tragedy refers to one of the most long-lasting dramatic genres. Its history is marked on the one hand by a “tradition of hostility to tragedy” from Plato to Steiner, but also by the recognition of its value from Aristotle to Felski. [9] For example, Steiner famously declared that tragedy as a dramatic genre loses its meaning in our contemporary culture because according to him, “the metaphysics of Christianity and Marxism are anti-tragic.” He concludes: “That, in essence, is the dilemma of modern tragedy.” [10] Even though Steiner was convinced that true tragedies can only exist under strictly limited conditions, looking at the history of the American drama and theatre, there is strong evidence that—despite the lack of academic attention at times—tragedy as a dramatic genre and theatrical practice has been a timely and expressive dramatic form to articulate and comment on the conditio humana in the contemporary world throughout the twentieth century—from Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell, to Arthur Miller, David Mamet, and Suzan-Lori Parks. [11] In fact, during this period, tragedies written by American authors have expressed and thematized realities that dominant ideologies and systems of values have suppressed and marginalized. Steiner’s definition of tragedy does not “fit” these contemporary plays as they are not based on a belief in the metaphysical entities that defined the fate of the tragic hero in antiquity, Shakespeare’s time, and early modern France. However, from a theoretical point of view, over the last 20 years or so, tragedy as a genre has been reevaluated by scholars of various disciplines, [12] and Steiner’s book The Death of Tragedy has permanently shaped the discussion. [13] In this issue on the tragic in American drama and theatre, we offer reflections on the tragic in the tensional field between theory and practice and its potential to explore universal themes of human existence in relation to contemporary realities. Tragedy’s presence in the contemporary theatre landscape [14] —ancient, Shakespearean, or contemporary—gives expression to a “tragic sensibility” that is fueled by the complexities of life today but also by “the toxic matter bequeathed by the past to the present.” [15] In fact, tragedy as a literary and dramatic form has lost none of its creative, thematic, and aesthetic fascination and attracts dramatists, theatre practitioners, and philosophers alike. Tragedy and the tragic are often used interchangeably. Yet, what constitutes the idea of the tragic in American drama and theatre of today? Contemporary playwrights search for ways of expressing a sense of the tragic by exploring the inconsistencies of American myths with the individual’s situation. The essays collected in this issue explore these reflections on the tragic in contemporary American drama and theatre by combining an interest in aesthetics with a reference to current and local cultural, social, and political debates. They address in particular how American dramatists reflect on, rewrite, actualize, and interrogate the potential of the tragic and tragedy as a dramatic form in regards to the troubling question of what constitutes pain and suffering. The essays speak of a fascination with the tragic as a model of thought which manifests itself in a mode of writing, interpretation, and expression through which playwrights raise fundamental questions about the causes of human suffering. Some draw compelling connections to the state of national politics, the alarming generational traumas caused by wars fought by the US throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and oppressive and dehumanizing societal structures that allow for racism and discrimination. In this respect, many plays conceive of the tragic not as a metaphysical category but as a mode of interpretation and as a symbolic representation that correlates human suffering with particular moments and conditions in US American society and history. The tragic dimensions of human experience that the plays envision dispel an exile of responsibility, cause, and guilt to the metaphysics of fate, gods, and an indifferent universe. Instead, they reveal their particular potency as a mode of affect and formal experimentation and thereby invoke an ethics of self-reflexive confrontation. Almost all plays discussed in this issue (e.g. the plays by Kushner, Hudes, Rabe, and McLaughlin, and the stage adaptation of Bechdel’s book) draw on music, musical genres, and the return of the past through spectres and ghosts. On a formal level, they provoke the audience’s reflection on contemporary life conditions and renew “perceptions [which have] become increasingly habitual and automatic.” [16] As the essays in this issue show, the tragic offers strong images of making sense of human suffering, freedom, and will. Even though the authors often suggest that the failure of or resistance to human agency are central ideas that inform the sense of the tragic that contemporary plays envision, they also stress the dramas’ remarkable departure from tragedy’s metaphysical determination. Human suffering is captured no longer as inescapable but as a result of the paralyses, grievances, injustices, and negative developments within a society. Indeed, contemporary drama resonates with Christopher Bigsby’s view that, “rebellion ultimately lies at the heart of the tragic sensibility.” [17] This raises ethical questions of individual, collective and structural responsibilities, and “answerability,” but also focuses on agency and control. [18] In this respect, Toby Zinman’s claim that “tragedy demands more of us than tears,” is a reminder that tragedy is also a matter of our commitment and responsibility. [19] In contemporary drama, this recourse to action and agency as important mechanisms in the overcoming of injustices caused by socio-political and historical circumstance is relevant in order to envision alternative, contested, and open, but eventually less dogmatic and normative narratives of change and progress. In his essay “Rewriting Greek Tragedy/Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003),” Konstantinos Blatanis investigates two rewritings of Greek tragedies in the context of recent US American history, arguing that in The Orphan , David Rabe rewrites Aeschylus’s The Oresteia to address the relation between historical circumstance, trauma, and violence. Blatanis elaborates that in this self-reflexive gesture, the play appropriates its own means of interpretation and reflection as it speaks, of the “urgency of its own historical moment” to address the policies and politics of the Vietnam War not only by discursive but also by artistic-affective practices and means. He further argues that the “conscious theatricality through which the play interrogates its own position in history” relates directly to its intention to draw attention to “historical agency as well as . . . political accountability” in recent US history. In a continuation of the essay’s argument, Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003), which is also modeled on Aeschylean tragedies, acknowledges the interrelation between history and human tragedy. According to Blatanis, the process of rewriting ancient Greek tragedies speaks of the critical possibilities offered by the tragic form for dramatists to respond to the failing acknowledgment of historical agency during the Iraq war. Consequently, tragedy resurfaces as a model of reflection most apt for dramatists in order to negotiate the impact and effects of recent historical events. Reading these plays as a “historiographic venture” means viewing the tragic subject in concrete relation with history as a material and actual agent of human existence. In her article “Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy ,” Nathalie Aghoro discusses how the Elliot Trilogy (2012–2014) by acclaimed Latin-American dramatist Quiara Alegría Hudes unearths the tragic mark that US wars left on three generations of a Puerto-Rican family living in present day Philadelphia. Aghoro reads Hudes’s family trilogy as an exploration of the “isolated, tragic subject” that returns from war and his necessity to reconnect and reintegrate into the community. After his service in Iraq, Elliot, the tragic hero of the play, returns to Philadelphia and embarks on an emotional quest to reconnect with the past of his family as he tries to build new relationships in order to overcome a profound feeling of alienation and isolation. The play stages three years in Elliot’s life which are haunted by what Aghoro terms a “fatal error in judgment”: Elliot’s first shooting victim looms in the play as an unceasing, invisible presence. Yet, instead of conceiving of the Aristotelian hamartia as an exemplification of destiny and as an end of human agency, Hudes’s play links this fatal flaw to the inhumane forces of war in which agency itself reveals a highly precarious interrelation between human action and the attribution of guilt and responsibility. On a formal level, Aghoro points out, the expressiveness of a Bach fugue, jazz music, and Puerto-Rican folk music supplement the subject matter as an elemental dramatic force in all three plays and expresses the tragic fragmentation of its characters between disintegration and reintegration, isolation and communality, desperation and hope, and death and life. Aghoro views the trilogy’s rethinking of the tragic as a prism to unearth the play’s engagement with the actual realities of war in light of severe interpersonal alienation and isolation that are internalized by the tragic subjects. In line with its emphasis on the importance of the community as a vital “network of human connections,” the play symbolically represents and stages forms of recovery and healing. The essays collected in this volume show that contemporary American drama’s response to injustices, terrors, and dehumanization are not to be sought in metaphysical forces that are beyond human control, but result from actual material conditions and real historical circumstances. In her article “‘Take Caroline away’: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change ,” Joanna Mansbridge interprets the internalized subservience and reluctance to participate in change by the black maid and main protagonist Caroline Thibodeaux as a “tragic agency of non-performance.” Set in 1963 in the deep south of Louisiana, history is the one agential force that leads to tragic circumstance as the play stages the commodification of black female labor against the omnipresent symbolic legacy of structural oppression and racism. Caroline’s inability and refusal to participate in change draws attention to the play’s interest in the sources and circumstances of Caroline’s existence, which, according to Mansbridge, is marked by an inner rift as she “inhabits an ontological space of abjection—neither subject nor object.” Recalling Blatanis’s reading of contemporary plays, Mansbridge argues that Caroline rejects the unavoidability of human agony as the tragic condition of human existence in order to foreground that “suffering is not inevitable” but results from “larger social conditions” that “reverberat[e] as an ongoing historical present.” Tony Kushner’s preoccupation with theatre as a site to raise questions about the sources and circumstance of human suffering and agony in relation to actual economic, cultural, and political realities of US American society also centrally informs his landmark play Angels in America (1991). In her article “The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America ,” Julia Rössler explores how Kushner’s rethinking of the tragic condition is very much grounded in a political gesture that situates human suffering in relation to unjust and unequal material and historical circumstances that define contemporary American society in the 1980s as one of permanent struggle against the oppressive forces of utopian ideals, one-directional politics, racism, religion, and sexual discrimination. On the one hand, the “poetics of the tragic” that Rössler identifies in Angels in America refer to the play’s rethinking of the tragic condition outside the familiar notions of irreversible fate and finality as it links tragic necessity to the transformative powers of human will and agency. On the other hand, Rössler argues, Kushner develops a distinct dramatic style as the dynamic of interpersonal conflict and the constant clash of different world-views characterize the play’s unique oscillation between conflict and resolution, past and future, defeat and victory, self and other. This reveals the dialectical movement of the play as symbolically referring to the play’s vision of struggle as an elemental force in the striving for societal equilibrium which overcomes the paralyzing forces of tragic circumstance by foregrounding, according to Rössler, the “value of human will and agency.” The tragic as a mode of interpretation and affect is also central to Maureen McDonnell’s discussion of the Broadway musical Fun Home (2015), which is based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006). McDonnell explores in “Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home : Activism and the Advertising of a ‘Lesbian Suicide Musical’” how the marketing campaign dropped the musical’s main themes of suicide and sexual orientation in order to advertise the production as a musical about father-daughter relations, thus emptying the innate tragic dimension of the story of its relevance and meaning. McDonnell discusses how the erasure of the musical’s core subject matter of homosexuality and the fear of centralizing a strong masculine female shows the marginalization of pressing social issues in the genre of the musical, which, McDonnell adds, often offers accessible entertainment and life-affirming stories and is under high pressure to earn a profit. Moreover, McDonnell outlines how lesbian women are usually highly misrepresented and function as comic elements in musical productions rather than as human subjects worthy of serious contemplation: “By featuring a butch lesbian as its lead, Fun Home was culturally revolutionary, providing a cultural—and commercial—landmark for mainstream musical theater,” McDonnell writes. Lesbian women are often framed as essentially tragic figures who are “isolated, doomed, and suicidal.” Fun Home discards such a flat and one-dimensional depiction of a lesbian protagonist as abnormal and insane. Viewing Fun Home through the prism of the tragic reveals its resistance against consensual stereotyping as the tragic conditions of the protagonist’s life result from loss and stigmatization, supposed “normalcy,” and deviation from these arbitrarily set standards. As maintained by McDonnell, these experiences innate to everyday human existence establish the lesbian female protagonist as a more universal character and pave the way for a new and timely politicized tradition of musical productions (for instance mirrored in the legalization of equal marriage at the time of the musical’s run). The essays collected in this guest-edited issue add to the ongoing research and discussion of tragedy and the tragic in contemporary American drama and theatre, even though the limited scale of the project led to the exclusion and neglect of other relevant dramatists. [20] By adding to the debate reflections of concrete examples with regard to the tragic, these essays provide insights into a diverse selection of plays, and the ethical, cosmic, and civic structures they envision through the lens of human action in moments of crisis. As the “persistence of a tragic mode in modernity” pertains to human experiences in a universal way even today, it is increasingly determined by changes and upheavals in the political and socio-cultural dimension that change over time. [21] It is this simultaneity of permanence and variability that requires for the tragic to be continually historicized, rethought, and re-envisioned. This issue is a result of the conference “Tragedy in American Drama and Theatre: Genre—Mediality—Ethics,” held at the University of Augsburg in 2017, a project that was generously supported by the German Research Foundation, the Bavarian American Academy (Munich), Gesellschaft der Freunde (Society of Friends) and the research program Ethics of Textual Cultures (both Augsburg University). We are thankful for all authors who have agreed to publish their research in this issue. Furthermore, we would like to extend our thanks to the peer reviewers who have generously offered their expertise during the process, and in particular to the editors of JADT , Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson, for their support and interest in our project. Finally, we would like to thank Hubert Zapf for his insightful comments and support during the organization of the conference and Katharina Braun for meticulously proof-reading the essays. References [1] Tony Kushner, Homebody/Kabul (London: Nick Hern Books, 2002), 40. [2] Paula Vogel, Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief , in The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2013). [3] For a discussion of the aesthetic and formal dimensions of ancient tragedy in opposition to a “modern tragic sensibility” see Rita Felski, “Introduction,” in Rethinking Tragedy ed. Rita Felski (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2008): 10–11. [4] Compare with Rita Felski’s summary of Terry Eagleton’s argument in “Introduction,” 9. See also David P. Palmer, “Introduction,” in Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama: From O’Neill to the Twenty-First Century ed. David Palmer (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018), 8–9; and Peter Lancelot Mallios, “Tragic Constitution: United States Democracy and Its Discontents,” PMLA 129, no. 4 (2014): 708–72. [5] Helene P. Foley and Jean E. Howard, “Introduction: The Urgency of Tragedy Now,” PMLA 129, no. 4 (2014): 617. [6] George Steiner, “‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered,” in Rethinking Tragedy , ed. Felski, 29. [7] Hans-Thies Lehmann. “Drama, Tragödie und Auslaufmodell Stadttheater,” interview by Arno Widmann. Frankfurter Rundschau, 26 August 2014, (our translation). [8] Compare with Foley and Howard, “Introduction,” 617. [9] Adrian Poole, Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 62. [10] George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1961), 324. [11] Compare with Palmer, ed., Visions of Tragedy ; Brenda Murphy, “Tragedy in the Modern American Theater,” in A Companion to Tragedy , ed. Rebecca Bushnell (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 488–504. [12] Compare with Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, reprint 2007); John D. Lyons, Tragedy and the Return of the Dead (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018); Stephen D. Dowden and Thomas P. Quinn, Tragedy and the Tragic in German Literature, Art, and Thought (Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2014); Miguel de Beistegui and Simon Sparks, eds., Philosophy and Tragedy (London, New York: Routledge, 2000). [13] For a range of essays on the theorization of tragedy and the tragic before the 1960s see Laurence Michel and Richard B. Sewall, eds., Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963). [14] For example, Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre), Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (Neil Simon Theatre), Paula Vogel’s Indecent (Cort Theatre). See also Eleftheria Ioannidou, Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames. Rewriting Tragedy 1970–2005 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). [15] Poole, Very Short Introduction , 35. [16] David Savran, “Loose Screws: An Introduction,” in The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays , Paula Vogel (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996), xi. [17] Christopher Bigsby, “Foreword,” in Visions , ed. David Palmer, xvii. [18] Felski, “Introduction,” 11. [19] Toby Zinman, “American Theatre since 1990,” in Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama , 213. [20] E.g. Robert J. Andreach, Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theatre (Lanham: University Press of America); Palmer, Visions ; Kevin J. Wetmore, Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003). [21] Felski, “Introduction,” 14. Footnotes About The Author(s) JOHANNA HARTMANN is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, where she works on her second book project on the modernist short play. In her research, she is interested in American drama and theater, short literature, literature and politics ( Censorship and Exile , V&R 2015; co-edited with Hubert Zapf), literary visuality, and contemporary prose literature ( Literary Visuality in Siri Hustvedt’s Works: Phenomenological Perspectives (Königshausen & Neumann 2016; Zones of Focused Ambiguity in Siri Hustvedt’s Works (De Gruyter 2016; with Christine Marks and Hubert Zapf). She is one of the organisers of the international conference “Tragedy in American Drama and Theatre: Genre – Mediality – Ethics” and guest-editor of this issue. JULIA RÖSSLER works at the department for North American Literary and Cultural Studies at the Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt. In her dissertation, she considers the principal role of mimesis in contemporary Anglophone drama. She is one of the organisers of the international conference “Tragedy in American Drama and Theatre: Genre – Mediality – Ethics” and guest-editor of this issue. 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 Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre "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 Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. 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 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change Joanna Mansbridge By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF It’s a tragedy, I think, in terms of Caroline’s journey. – Tony Kushner , “Production: ‘ Caroline, or Change ’”[1] Little change, and strange to say, Yesterday came crashing in. Small domestic tragedies Bring strong women to their knees – The Dryer , Caroline, or Change [2] There is a foresight that is given in and as the unforeseen. Change is the anticipation, the unanticipated that anticipates us. . . . We are sent in history, history comes for us. We come as history to history. – Fred Moten , “Blackness and Nonperformance”[3] The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. – Karl Marx , “Theses on Feuerbach”[4] Introduction: History as Catastrophe “We are not looking for a new universal meaning of tragedy,” writes Raymond Williams in Modern Tragedy , “we are looking for the structure of tragedy in our own culture.” [5] The structure of tragedy in contemporary American culture is shaped, still, by the constitutional (and ontological) contradiction between promises of freedom and pursuit of happiness on the one hand, and the legacy of slavery and poverty on the other. This is not a static contradiction located somewhere back in the past but an ongoing process and conditioning experience. We might call it an extended catastrophe . In the tragic structure defined by Gustav Freytag, catastrophe refers to the section after the scene of total suffering has taken place; it is the final turning point in the tragic hero’s journey. [6] Walter Benjamin revised this term as one of his “basic historical concepts.” For him, catastrophe is the continuing action of failing to recognize history in the present and thus of maintaining conditions of suffering: “Catastrophe—to have missed the opportunity. Critical moment—the status quo threatens to be preserved.” [7] Catastrophe, in this sense, is a situation in time—a too-lateness that comes again and again. In a similarly Marxist vein and with Brecht’s late plays as his case study, Williams identified the emergence of a new tragic structure: “the recovery of history as a dimension for tragedy.” He writes, “we should try to see what it means to drama when in recovering a sense of history and of the future a writer recovers the means of an action that is both complex and dynamic.” [8] Playwright Tony Kushner, along with composer Jeanine Tesori, have recovered just such a “complex and dynamic” action in Caroline, or Change . [9] The sung-through musical recomposes “a sense of history and of the future” in order to complicate claims to freedom and to question the meanings, limits, and costs of change. When Caroline, or Change premiered at the Public Theater in November 2003, America was still reeling in the aftermath of 9/11. Terrorism was designated the dominant threat, and Islam the enemy to freedom and democracy. In Caroline , the death of JFK is the national crisis, and racial tensions and the Civil Rights movement the conflicts. The epoch bookended by 1963 and 2001 bears examining in relation to the question: What is the structure of tragedy in contemporary American culture? There are many possible answers, depending on where you look. In the finer-grained considerations of time, affect, and the material conditions of social change that Caroline develops, we can glean something of the tragic in US culture. Building from William’s definition of modern tragedy (which he sees paradoxically in Brecht’s rejection of tragedy) and drawing on Benjamin’s definition of catastrophe and Marx’s theory of alienation, I locate the tragic in Caroline in the relationship between the titular character’s suffering and alienation and the present’s failure to recognize her situation as part of a larger social condition that is neither fixed nor inevitable but rather reverberating as an ongoing historical present. Caroline Thibodeaux, a 39-year-old black maid and divorced mother of four, performs the domestic labor that sustains the conditions of the everyday, but refuses to perform either the affective labor that maintains an intimate public sphere or the gestures of change that uphold ideologies of progress and freedom in the United States. [10] In her refusals to change, care, and cater to our expectations of her character, Caroline asserts the tragic agency of non-performance. It is an agency, for it is an action that produces effects in and beyond her; it is tragic, for in her refusals to perform she lays bare the impasse between freedom and blackness in American culture. As Saidiya Hartman explains, “Blackness marks a social relationship of dominance and abjection and potentially one of redress and emancipation; it is a contested figure at the very center of social struggle.” [11] Here, in this space of suspended relationality, somewhere between abjection and emancipation, stands Caroline. If Caroline is a tragedy, it is one that emerges from history understood as a recursive process, perpetually open to interpretation and modification. The most salient connection between Kushner and Brecht, in Caroline and elsewhere, is not so much in their stylistic similarities but in their Marxism, specifically their dialectical thinking and shared affinity for a Marxist theory of history as a material process made (and remade) by human labor. Perhaps the feature most distinguishing Kushner from Brecht is their respective attitudes toward time and change: Brecht’s faith in teleological progress as the engine of change becomes, for Kushner, an insistence on social change as multidirectional and multiscalar, emerging from clashes and convergences between cyclical and teleological temporalities, moments and epochs, personal stories and collective histories. As Benjamin writes in “What is Epic Theatre?” Brecht sought the “untragic hero”—untragic because he wanted to depict the hero’s actions not as the result of tragic necessity but as the outcome of her own choices, which are formed from the conditions of capitalism and yet also changeable. Brecht’s task, according to Benjamin, was “to uncover those conditions. (One could just as well say: to make them strange [ verfremden ].)” [12] Gestus was the term Benjamin used to describe the mechanism in Brecht’s drama that disrupts tragic inevitability, reveals unequal social relations, and makes visible the forces of history. The tragic inevitability of poverty and suffering within capitalism is interrupted by the gestus , and the audience’s subsequent understanding that this suffering is not inevitable, but changeable through a transition to a different economic structure (i.e. socialism). Caroline’s tragedy is that she cannot change, “can’t afford change” (116), and thus she does not possess the agency of a full political subject. Yet Caroline’s refusal to change, in the ways expected of her, interrupts the logic that says social change is always positive, forward-moving, and open to everyone. Her story compels us to notice how deeply dominant understandings of change and freedom are rooted in teleological time—the time of progress when history is left behind and the future open for the taking. Foreclosing on the future, Caroline stands, instead, in the impasse of the present. The title, Caroline, or Change , posits a dialectic between the character at the center of this forceful story and the forces of change swirling around and within her. The setting is Lake Charles, Louisiana, 1963, a time marked by social change and a location marked ideologically as the still-segregated South and geologically as a Gulf town where “they ain’t no underground / . . . There is only under water.” [13] Caroline works as a maid in the basement of the Gellmans, a Jewish family adjusting to the loss of Betty Gellman, wife of Stuart, mother of Noah, and best friend of Rose Stopnick Gellman. Rose has left her liberal-Jewish Upper West Side life to come to the deep South and marry her best friend’s widower, finding herself the employer of a black maid who refuses to be her friend, the stepmother of a boy who “hate[s] her” (24), and the wife of a man in deep mourning and emotionally unavailable to her. In Noah’s 8-year-old mind, the loss of his mother and the death of JFK are conflated and cathected onto Caroline, whom he imagines as both the President (44) and his surrogate mother (63). The play-world is permeated by grief, loneliness, loss—and Caroline’s anger. But Caroline’s daughter, Emmie, embodies the spirited, hopeful revolutionary energy we associate with the Sixties and with American culture more generally. As Kushner has repeatedly stated, Caroline, or Change is his favorite work. [14] Based on his own childhood and dedicated to his childhood nanny, Maudie Lee Davis, the musical is not strictly autobiographical, but it does refract Kushner’s memories through the lens of a critical historical moment. As James Fisher explains, “the merging of the historical and the personal—in this case for Kushner the deeply personal—drives Caroline, or Change .” [15] The musical is an expressionistic staging of the inner life of its central character, who is trapped in a life of poverty and longing for the life she surrendered to economic necessity. Having lived and worked most of her life in a racially segregated country, Caroline suddenly finds herself living in a moment where conflict is everywhere and everything seems to be changing. It is 1963, the height of the Civil Rights Movement. It is also the year George Wallace was elected governor of Alabama on his infamous inaugural promise, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”; Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; Sam Cooke and his band were arrested at a “whites only” hotel in Louisiana, and their song “Change is Gonna Come” was released the next year; John F. Kennedy broadcasted his historic Civil Rights address on 11 June; Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers was killed two days later; and five months later, JFK was shot. Finally, the Moynihan report ( The Negro Family: The Case for National Action ), published in 1965, looms in the near future as a damning indictment against single black mothers, who were deemed the cause of the dissolution of the American family. Although these social tensions figure only as simmering subtext to Caroline’s story, JFK’s assassination punctuates the musical early on as the event that rips history open and the nation apart. Spaces of Change The main action of the musical takes place in the Gellman home. Upstairs, the Gellmans live in somber isolation; downstairs, Caroline keeps their home functioning. In the basement, animated objects—The Washer, The Dryer, The Radio, The Moon, The Bus—act as part Greek chorus, part historical consciousness, and part expressionistic extension of Caroline’s inner world. They give shape to a whole history of African American cultural production and voice to Caroline’s fantasies, grief, and disappointment (see figure 1). The Washer, played by a gyrating woman, swivels, “agitates,” and heralds “consequences unforeseen” (11). The Radio is played by a glamorous trio that visually recalls groups like Martha and the Vandellas and the Marvelettes. They perform sensually synchronous movements that contrast sharply with lyrics communicating Caroline’s broken situation: “How on earth she gonna thrive / when her life bury her alive?” The Dryer, played by a male actor, sings to the rhythms of Motown and blasts the dry heat of Caroline’s shame and indignation, singing “found your sinful self in hell / and the Pit of your abasement looks a lot like this basement” (16). [16] Figure 1. L to R: T’shan Williams (Radio 1), Ako Mitchell (The Dryer), Sharon Rose (Radio 2), and Sharon D. Clarke (Caroline) in Caroline, or Change at the Hampstead Theatre, London, March 2018. Photo: Alastair Muir. While the space of the basement and the embodied appliances express Caroline’s emotional world, they also visually recall the history of African American labor and possession of black bodies as objects of labor. Slavery, the most extreme form of alienation, divorces the worker not only from the objects of her labor and means of production, but also from her life and body. Caroline’s work as a maid is only a few small steps from this. By giving life to the machines of her labor, externalizing her emotional world, and staging the hidden, private space of her exploited labor, the musical materializes Caroline’s alienated life. In his 1844 “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” Marx developed his theory of alienation, outlining the four-fold process of this condition. Under capitalism, the worker is alienated from the objects of her labor; from the processes of production; from her relations with others; and from her own conscious, sensuous humanity (what Marx called “species-being”). [17] The more the worker produces, the less she has to consume; the more value she creates, the more valueless her own life becomes. Trapped in a state of alienation, Caroline is estranged from Noah, her daughter, her friend Dotty, the Civil Rights movement, and, finally, her self. As if describing the Gellman’s basement from Caroline’s point of view, Karl Marx narrates the mise en scène of alienation: “My labour . . . appears still as merely the expression of my loss of self and my powerlessness that is objective, observable, visible, and therefore beyond all doubt.” [18] And yet as poet and theorist Fred Moten writes, “The history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.” [19] In their hypervisibility and heightened theatricality, the animated objects accentuate the quotidian nature of Caroline’s labor, and we are meant to see both kinds of labor—commercialized and domestic, public spectacle and private servitude—as the roles performed by African Americans in the ongoing reproduction of American culture. The set design renders porous borders between inside and outside, above and below, public and private, underscoring the fact that social change is not only historical but also shaped by the spatial arrangements of everyday life. The overlapping stage spaces put into view interrelations between near and far, public and private, The Moon and the basement, the Gellmans and the Thibodeauxs. The musical gives particular value to the downward, below, and underground, invoking a spatial concept of change that is not quite “history from below,” but something more like what Moten and Stephano Harney call the “undercommon ground,” a “social capacity” formed from the history “of those who were not just labor but commodity, not just in production but in circulation, not just in circulation but in distribution as property, not just property but property that reproduced and realized itself.” [20] “Caught tween the Devil and the muddy brown sea” (116), Caroline stands center stage, down below, where her stasis crystallizes a history of broken intimacies and stifled desires. The musical suggests that reproductive labor—care giving, domestic work—anchors the social and sustains the broader changes that are recorded as history. Caroline’s acts of refusal to perform certain roles—to be a mother for Noah or to participate in struggles for black civil rights—interrupt our expectations of her character and the history that has given rise to those expectations, so that we might mark the multiple directions and unequal distributions of social change. Musicals traffic heavily in optimistic promises of change. As Raymond Knapp argues, the musical, as a genre of utopian transformation, has taken on “a formative, defining role in the construction of a collective sense of ‘America.’” [21] Kushner and Tesori invoke the legacy of the American musical in order to question the racial images and emotional attachments that hold together “a collective sense of America.” Caroline incorporates elements of from Porgy and Bess , Show Boat , Hairspray , and Dream Girls only to revise the stories of racial harmony that these have produced. Indeed, at every turn Caroline confounds our expectations of the musical, edging closer to opera in its affective texture. It unfolds in varying registers, styles, and scales, oscillating between domestic and national events, naturalism and expressionism. Its episodic structure of twelve scenes and an epilogue mimics both the structure of ancient tragedy and the movements of memory. Whose memory, however, is always in question, as the point of view shifts from Caroline to Noah to Emmie. The musical forms Caroline incorporates—spirituals, blues, klezmer, Motown, and Mozart—operate as extensions of the characters’ psychic states and emotional dispositions. Each character has their own rhythm—Caroline’s Delta blues, Stuart’s klezmer clarinet, Rose’s stilted staccato, The Moon’s classical refrains, and Emmie’s youthful pop and Motown beats. Exceptionally rich in its stylistic, formal, and emotional complexity, Tesori’s score connects characters through cross-pollinated melodies, which reflect the broader transformations, intersections, and appropriations that have shaped American cultural forms. [22] While African American culture has long functioned as the expressive element of American popular culture—emotional, theatrical, hyper-visible—Caroline gives to us nothing of herself. We cannot appropriate her or the emotions she attempts to keep at bay. Instead, Caroline/ Caroline reorients the affects and imagery associated with blackness and black female subjectivity, staging an anger and grief that explodes with the force of history, but that also withholds catharsis. Caroline ’s melodic structure directs the dramatic structure, illustrating the play’s theories of change, while Caroline stands as the stoic, unmovable center of a shape-shifting world. Rhythms of Change “All changes come from small changes” (69), The Radio announces midway through the musical. Change is the musical’s central conceit and a recurring leitmotif in Kushner’s work. For Kushner, change is a dialectical process that takes place somewhere between the material and the miraculous, the collective and the personal, the monumental and the minute. When The Bus comes on the stage, singing “ in a terrible voice of apocalypse ” (34), “the earth has bled! . . . the president is dead” (34), the seismic change of that historic moment serves as the backdrop to the more intimate interchanges we see unfold on stage. The Moon stands over the play-world as prophet and force of cyclical, yet unpredictable change, singing: “Inside, outside, / this ol world change with the tide. / Outside tears and disarray! Inside children disobey. / Change come slow, come right away!” (37). Grounded equally in natural cycles, everyday rhythms, and social movements, change is not defined here by any single theory, nor does it move in one direction toward the future; change is instead dynamic and multi-directional, proceeding at varying paces and consisting as much of small, intimate acts as of large crises and grand events. Crucially, change is developed in the musical to mean both social transformation and money, small money; these two connotations are inextricable. The plot pivots around a lesson that Rose teaches her step-son Noah about the value of money. Noah habitually leaves change in his pockets, which Caroline finds when she does his laundry. Rose is embarrassed and infuriated by Noah’s carelessness, which renders all too visible the economic disparity between maid and employer. So, Rose makes a household rule that if Noah leaves any change in his pocket, Caroline can keep it. Caroline is initially incensed by the unintended humiliation of this new rule, but she eventually reconciles with it, realizing that Noah’s spare change will allow her to feed and clothe her kids properly. When Noah leaves a twenty-dollar bill in his pocket and Caroline claims it, a climactic fight erupts between them. Change, the musical suggests, also means grief and loss. Caroline comes on stage for the first time humming a seemingly improvised strain, not fully identifiable as a style and never taking shape as a fully realized number. Stuart later echoes this refrain on his clarinet, suggesting the invisible connection between these two characters. Both Caroline and Stuart have lost their spouses and both vow to “never forget” (95, 97). Implicitly, this vow, “never forget,” connects historical memory of black and Jewish suffering. Their points of view contrast with characters who embody change as futurity and forward movement, such as Emmie and Dotty, Caroline’s friend and fellow maid. Noah is lost in his own grief—suspended, in a way, like Caroline—and he sees in her a possible source of comfort and consolation. He even fantasizes about becoming part of her family, imagining the Thibodeaux children narrating his story: “They talk about how my mama died / they talk about my tragedy / they wish that they could take me in / and I could live with Caroline” (63). But Caroline cannot afford to care for or comfort Noah. Her first song, her “I want” song, is permeated, as Stacy Wolf notes, by “exhausted despair.” [23] We hear enough of her story in this opening number to learn that Caroline has been cleaning for twenty-two years; makes thirty dollars a week; dreams of kissing Nat King Cole; and “wish every afternoon I die” (17-18). At the center of the play, in a scene titled “Ironing,” we hear an important part of Caroline’s story. She recalls a time, 1947, when “life [was] sunny” (70), and she was married to a “handsome navy man.” In this postwar period of ostensible prosperity, there was “no work for Negro men” (71), and things changed. Her husband took to drink and began beating Caroline, who still remembers the pain of his punch: “Pain is white, remember pain? Pain is white, that is its color, bright as sunshine” (72). “One bad day / he hit again,” Caroline remembers, but the Washing Machine takes over to recall, “You beat him black and blue. / Then / he disappear from view” (74). Caroline’s painful recollection is interrupted by Rose, who comes to the basement to tell Caroline that she can keep the change that Mr. Gellman leaves in his pocket, as well. Caroline responds with pride, saying, “I don’t want it. / I ain’t some ragpick. / Ain’t some jackdaw” (75), while The Washing Machine and The Radio caution her, “Talk like that, talk like that, / you won’t be a maid no more” (77). Caught between subservience and obligation to her kids, Caroline’s anger is interrupted by Emmie, whose exuberant reaction to the loose change jars Caroline into realizing that material needs take precedence over her own dignity. Caroline has little agency here, and no privacy or space of her own, except mournful memories and soothing fantasies of Nat King Cole. At the same time that Caroline grapples with the indecency of taking the Gellmans’ spare change, Noah joins the Thibodeaux children to play a game with The Moon. They fabricate a syncretic myth of Roosevelt Petrucius Coleslaw, who ascends to the heavens after his evil Amazon mother kills him, marries The Moon and becomes rich. Reciting the values of the culture in which they are coming of age, the kids formulate an allegory of romance and financial success that inspires them to reach into their pockets and “find me some.” The scene ends with the lines, “Free as the air” (66), sung in unison by Caroline and The Moon, Noah, Emmie, Jackie, and Joe. The word “free” is significant, for it foregrounds that change (as progress and money) and freedom go hand-in-hand as the ideological air America breathes. But who gains and who loses from change and whose freedom comes at the expense of progress are usually left out of the story. Caroline suggests that black labor is the devalued, abject border of America’s foundational values. Rose’s father, Mr. Stopnick, explains the law of capital at the Chanukah party, stating, “Money follows certain laws, / it’s worth how much it’s worth because / somewhere something’s valued less” (94). This principle defines the socio-economic relationship between Caroline and the Gellmans. For although Mr. Stopnick underscores the solidarity between Jews and African Americans in the Civil Rights movement, he also eats a Chanukah dinner prepared by Emmie and Caroline, in a house maintained by Caroline’s exploited labor. Acts of Refusal and Angry Eruptions In its central character, Caroline confronts the audience with a double-sided image of black female subjectivity: the angry black woman and the black domestic servant. The story unfixes these images, contextualizing them within Caroline’s story and within a historical situation. The visual image of an African American woman in a white maid’s uniform signifies powerfully on and off the American stage, a reminder/remainder of the servitude and emotional labor of slavery. Caroline’s anger disrupts the affective associations surrounding black domestic workers, who have traditionally been represented as smiling, long-suffering, and one-dimensional caricatures of a white imaginary. As Caroline tells Dotty, “Ain’t my job to mind that boy” (29). Aside from their shared ritual—a daily cigarette—Caroline refuses any intimacy with Noah, telling him, “go muse yourself / I got no use for you” (15). In a scene titled “Duets,” Noah, lying in his bed, interrupts Caroline’s thoughts, while she sits smoking on her front porch. Reminiscent of the imaginary encounters between Prior and Harper in Angels in America , these exchanges demonstrate the entanglements that form despite distance or estrangement: NOAH Wish me good night? CAROLINE That not my job. NOAH How come? ( Little pause ) How come you’re so sad and angry all the time? CAROLINE That ain’t your business, it just ain’t your business. You’s a nosey child. ( Little pause ) How come you like me, I ain’t never nice to you. . . . Noah, go to sleep. Stop bothering the night, All day I mind you, wash your things, And it ain’t right In the nighttime, my own time, I still think about you— I gots to think of rent overdue (45-46). Demanding privacy and rejecting Noah’s yearning for closeness, Caroline reorients our perspective away from the affective associations attached to her character and toward the material conditions of her situation. Even time is alienated from her. Here and earlier, Caroline points out, “In the nighttime, my own time, / I still think about you— / I gots to think of rent overdue” (12). Hers is not the private sphere of the middle-class Gellmans, but the rented home of an underpaid worker, whose leisure time and inner life are not her own and whose wage fails to cover basic needs: “Thirty dollars ain’t enough” (18), as she, The Washing Machine, and The Dryer proclaim in unison. Even as she resists the commodification of her emotional labor, Caroline’s service labor reproduces the conditions of everyday life that make possible Noah’s and her children’s futures. Literary critic Michael Hardt, along with cultural theorists such as Antonio Negri and Lauren Berlant, argue that, in our neoliberal era, affect has replaced ideology as the primary mechanism of hegemony. [24] Hardt takes affect as the pre-personal point of departure to develop a rich theory of social and political change. Following Foucault, who showed how power is productive, producing not so much repressions as regularities, Hardt traces the way power informs us—shapes us from within—and is mediated by and through affect (especially fear and hope, the primary affective dialectic of late-capitalism). He argues that affective, or “immaterial labor”—such as care-giving, health care, domestic work—holds “enormous potential” to transform society because it produces “collective subjectivities and sociality, and society itself.” Adapting Foucault’s term “biopower,” Hardt calls this immaterial labor “biopolitics,” or the “the power of the creation of life.” He adds, “biopolitical production is strongly configured as gendered labor ,” [25] and racialized. Caroline refuses care to the young boy who is attached to an idea of her—as a pseudo mother and care-giver. Withholding the affects he/we expect of her and expressing instead negative ones, Caroline also refuses to nurture a public that is invisibly raced (as white) and classed (as middle). For audiences of Caroline , the powerful imagery of the mammy worked, in performance, as an obstacle to seeing Caroline’s tragedy. Despite her stoic resistance to acting as an emotional surrogate for Noah, audiences nevertheless read her character through visual imagery and affective associations of “the mammy.” Kushner reports that hundreds of people have told him after performances, “I had a Caroline who raised me like a mother too,” ignoring the fact that Caroline is emphatically not “like a mother” to Noah. [26] Kushner reflects, It’s such a powerful image in this culture, the mammy, the maid who provides the emotional warmth to the, you know, frosty, cold white people. I mean that sort of thing that we’ve developed as a way of handling our terrible and deserved guilt about, you know, about race in this country. So people come to see the show, and they just rewrite it.[27] The revisions of Caroline suggest the powerful affective attachments that Americans have to images of black female labor and to the national body public those images construct. The willful deafness to Caroline’s anger and misrecognition of her relationship to Noah subsume her story within a white imaginary and allow her labor to remain invisible. Spending her days in the Gellmans’ basement, Caroline keeps her emotions “sixteen feet beneath the sea” (12), numbed by the relentless rhythms of her daily work. But her anger erupts in three pivotal exchanges with Emmie, Noah, and Dotty, each interrupting audience expectations of what both Caroline and a musical should be. [28] The fight between Emmie and Caroline takes place in the Gellmans’ kitchen during Chanukah and accentuates the different experiences of history between mother and daughter. Both dressed in white maid uniforms, Caroline and Emmie clash over gestures of subservience that Caroline sees as necessary, but that Emmie sees as submission to white authority. Rebellious and individualistic, Emmie rejects the past and craves the good life promoted by postwar US culture. She dreams of owning a car and a house with a TV in every room, singing confidently, “I’ll make it OK, / by myself, all alone” (96). Her ambition causes her to reject her mother as a model to emulate: “You tippy-toe till you get paid. / You the spoiled one. A maid! / I’ll never be a queen, that’s true, but I’m a damn sight better’n prouder than you! / Come on, teach me what you know! / Mama, teach me what you know! How to keep my head tucked low” (93). With this hurtful denouncement, Caroline slaps her daughter and leaves the kitchen. Emmie does not know that her mother wishes she were “doing something finer” (18) and that every day she waits for the night, when she doesn’t need to “be polite” (47). While their generational differences are evident, it is also clear that both mother and daughter are circumscribed within a capitalist logic that defines their bodies and labor. The musical’s climax is a shattering fight between Noah and Caroline over a twenty-dollar bill that Noah leaves in his pocket. He demands Caroline give back his money, a Chanukah gelt from his grandfather, but Caroline refuses, telling him, “Don’t leave your money all over the place! / Now I can take my boy to the dentist” (103). In Marx’s formulation, money is the externalization of labor, and as such “the externalized capacities of humanity.” [29] In Das Kapital, Marx deploys theatrical metaphors, such as the stage (i.e. market) and the dramatis personae (i.e. buyer-seller-money), [30] figurations that allow us to see Caroline ’s shape-shifting world of animated objects as a kind of phantasmagoric expression of Marx’s theories of commodities and alienation. As Marx points out, money is “the metamorphosed shape of all other commodities, the result of their general alienation.” [31] In its money form, a commodity, according to Marx, always performs two distinct roles as a “ measure of value ” and a “ standard of price .” [32] The measure of value is the social expression of human labor, in this case, the Gellmans’ household and Noah’s well-being; the standard of price is the quantified cost given to a commodity, in this case Caroline’s domestic labor. The twenty-dollar bill, in this way, works as Carolin e’s gestus , interrupting the course of action and making visible the social relations between the boy and his maid. The surplus value to which Caroline accidently obtains access is surplus only because her labor is devalued. In its most devastating implication, this confrontation is a clash between the value, under capitalism, of Caroline’s life and the value of Noah’s life. It is no accident, after all, that each wishes a violent death on the other over the misplaced twenty-dollar bill. When she refuses to give back the twenty dollars, Noah explodes, “CAROLINE! / I HATE YOU . . . / There’s a bomb! President Johnson has built a bomb / special made to kill all the Negroes! / . . . I hope he drops his bomb on you!” (104). Caroline fires back: “Noah, hell is like this basement, / only hotter than this, hotter than August, / with the washer and the dryer and the boiler / full blast. . . . Hell’s so hot it makes flesh fry. ( Little pause ) / And hell’s where Jews go when they die. / Take your twenty dollars baby. / So long, Noah, good-bye” (104). This encounter confronts the audience with a whole history of alienated relations between black people and Jews in America. [33] The breakdown of Noah and Caroline’s relationship in this scene powerfully links collective histories with the “small domestic tragedies” (79) that Caroline stages. Shaken and ashamed by the hate she expressed, Caroline stops going to work. However, as Wolf points out, “a careless little white boy has power over her. She must work; she has to go back.” [34] Caroline’s final break from social life is her rejection of Dotty. Unlike Caroline, Dotty is swept up in the swell of change around her, eager to participate. While she goes to school at night so that she can get better work, Caroline, who can barely read, continues her underpaid domestic work and turns away from the changes around her. Together with The Moon, Dotty reminds Caroline, “Things change everywhere, even here” (32), but a resistant Caroline insists on her refrain: “ Nothing ever changes / under ground in Louisiana” (34). But as Dotty points out, Caroline’s refusal to change has, nonetheless, changed her: “Once you was quick . . . / you losin your courage, you losin / light / lost your old shine, / lost Caroline” (33). In their final confrontation, Dotty pleads with Caroline, “let go of where you been,” “move on from the place you’re in,” and even though “it hurt to change / . . . folk do it. They do. / Every day, all the time, alone, afraid, folks like you” (115). But Caroline replies with an unarticulated need, followed by anger: “Dot, I need . . . / Dot. It too late. . . . When I talk to people, all that comes out is hate. / Cause I hate. That all. / I hate” (115). Caroline renounces her friend, insisting, “I need nothing from you. / I want you to go. / Out my yard” (115). Caroline rejects Dotty’s friendship, insisting that change, for her, is “too late.” This catastrophe of missed opportunities is the audience’s critical moment. Caroline’s situation illustrates the difficult relationship of blackness to subjectivity, which is “defined by the subject’s possession of itself and its objects.” [35] As Moten points out, subjectivity has been, in American history and in the philosophical tradition from Kant to Heidegger, “refused to the people who are called black, to the people to whom blackness is ascribed.” [36] Caroline’s self-abnegation in the penultimate scene is a “withdrawal from that subjectivity, which is not itself, which is not one, which only shows up as a thwarted desire for itself.” This subjectivity, which was constructed with blackness as its abject border and yet which black people are compelled to seek, leads to the maddening task in which, Moten explains, “we must keep on learning not to want. We have to keep on practicing not wanting.” [37] In a shattering scene of self-abjection, Caroline relinquishes her want, her desire to be a subject, so that she can continue to perform the labor that sustains the present. Catastrophe, or Change: The Case of Caroline [38] Caroline’s emotional journey culminates in “Lot’s Wife,” the musical’s eleven o’clock number and its most powerful statement on change, performed here as a violent act of surrender. The title of the song refers to the Old Testament story, in which Lot’s wife, defying God’s command, looks back at Sodom and is turned into a pillar of salt (Gen 19:26). Typically understood as tale of punishment for an act of disobedience, the story is transformed here so that Sodom is not a city of sin but Caroline’s own past and the command she defies is the command to move forward, pursue freedom, change. [39] Marx defines an alienated existence as one in which even human speech becomes ineffective as a method for overcoming an alienated form of life. He writes, “on the one hand [speech] would be seen and felt as an entreaty or a prayer and thus as a humiliation and therefore used with shame and a feeling of abasement, while on the other side it would be judged brazen and insane and as such rejected.” [40] Caroline has no access to speech beyond the poles of “shame and feeling of abasement” and an anger that “would be judged brazen and insane.” When she speaks, “all that comes out is hate.” Her only interlocutor left is God, since “only God can hear what my heart mean to state” (115). The audience, as silent witness, is challenged with knowing how to respond, ethically, to Caroline’s self-abnegation, as she prays to her God to “take Caroline away” (119). Caroline’s aria shifts in tone and rhythm from spiritual to jazz to blues to rock to gospel, expressing, at once, the depth and range of her emotions and the history of African American musical forms. Beginning with a kind of overture in a low, slow register, Caroline acknowledges how the money changed her, stirring up resentments and hopes that she had already foreclosed on: “That money reach in and spin me about, / my hate rise up, rip my insides out . . . can’t afford change / changin’s a danger for a woman like me / . . . I got to get back to the way that I been / God! / Drag me back to that basement again” (116). Building to the faster, syncopated rhythms of spirituals, she sings, “Always they’s been people who / hold they head high getting through / I can’t” (116). With a prescient gesture toward the future destruction of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, she rejects the false promise of a groundless hope: “Hope’s fine. Till it turn to mud” (117). Shifting to a driving rock beat, Caroline’s prayer turns into a violent act of self-destruction: “I’m gonna slam that iron / down on my heart / gonna slam that iron down on my throat / gonna slam that iron / down on my sex / gonna slam it / slam it down / until I drown / the fires out / till there ain’t no air left / anywhere” (117). [41] Both the weapon and the body parts it strikes conjure violent images of captivity. The “iron” metonymically invokes the iron brands, bits and collars used to mark and constrain slaves, while the “heart,” “throat,” and “sex” signify the emotion, speech, and sexuality that slavery restrained or disallowed. Associations between black female sexuality and violence persist in the imagery of American popular culture, but they are typically expressed through narratives of heteronormative desire or as a sacrifice for the sake of white absolution. [42] Adrienne Davis explains “how the unspeakability of slavery contains the seeds of the unspeakability, for black women, of our own sexuality.” [43] Moreover, the space of Caroline’s work, a basement that is hot as hell, located “under water” (11, 18, 34) and referred to as her “purgatory” (18) and the “pit of [her] abasement” (16), duplicates the conditions of the ship hold, where slaves were held captive during the journey across the Middle Passage. Hortense Spillers explains how the “undecipherable markings on the captive body” are translated over time into “a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh,” that is, history inscribed onto black bodies and projected as ideas of blackness. Spillers wonders, “if this phenomenon of marking and branding ‘transfers’ from one generation to another.” [44] Caroline enacts this transferal of historical memory, turning her body into an object of history, an object subjected to the violence of history. It is an act of tragic agency performed as/at the limits of freedom: “SLAM go the iron / SLAM go the iron / FLAT! / FLAT! / FLAT! / FLAT! / Now how about that then? / That what Caroline can do! / That how she rearrange herself, / that how she change!” (118). Dissonant notes and driving drum beats amplify Caroline’s change. As her song softens to surrender, Caroline asks to be released from both her memories and her hope—to be unshackled from a past that returns, again and again, only to fuel and forestall the promise of a better future. Here, the slower, gentler melody contrasts with the visceral language of Caroline’s entreaty: Murder me God down in that basement, murder my dreams so I stop wantin murder my hope of him returnin strangle the pride that makes me crazy. Make me forget so I stop grieving. Scour my skin till I stop feeling. Take Caroline away cause I can’t be her, take her away I can’t afford her. Tear out my heart strangle my soul turn me to salt a pillar of salt a broken stone and then . . . Caroline. Caroline. From the evil she done, Lord, set her free set her free set me free. Don’t let my sorrow make evil out of me (119) With verbs such as “murder,” “scour,” and “strangle,” Caroline reinforces her “dreams,” “hope,” and “pride” as living and embodied. Hers is not an abstract wish for freedom in some undefined future; it is the urgency of material survival in the present, which necessitates forgetting her longings and desire for life. As Wolf incisively points out, here, her song “moves from a first-person address to third person and back to first, as Caroline at once struggles to articulate and simultaneously dissociate from her pain.” [45] Moreover, the trans-morphic movements from “skin” to “salt” to “stone”—from woman to organic substance to geologic object—simultaneously dehumanize Caroline and render her body part of earth’s history. In her metamorphosis, Caroline removes herself from history, removes history from herself, and at the same time becomes history. She inhabits an ontological space of abjection—neither subject nor object—which is the “obscene scene” of freedom. [46] Caroline’s refusals to perform forms of change, freedom, and subjectivity as they are defined under the normative logics of white supremacist capitalism lay bare the tragic impasse that Moten articulates, when he asks: What if freedom and slavery are the condition of each other’s possibility? . . . What if the condition of the slave in general or generally speaking is that she is chained to a war for freedom, chained to the war of freedom, to the necessity in freedom, which freedom imposes, of the breaking of affective bonds, the disavowal in entanglement of entanglement. . . . The paradox—if freedom is inalienable, then the freedom to relinquish freedom must also be—disappears when it’s discovered that slavery and freedom are not opposed to one another; the relation between freedom and slavery is not mutually exclusive but mutually metonymic. [47] Caroline withdraws from the “war for freedom” and the struggle for subjecthood, a withdrawal that “is obscenity—the nonperformance of freedom, consent not to be a single being.” [48] Turning away from everything she is supposed to want (change, freedom, individuality, desire), Caroline must also forget “what it is to want in the first place.” [49] With Caroline’s searing prayer still ringing in the air, the final scene, “How Long Has This Been Going On?,” poses a question of history. The Radio sings us into the scene by transforming Caroline’s pillar of salt into “Salty / Salty / Salty / Salty teardrops” (120). After watching the Gellmans establish new rituals of intimacy, we see Noah lean out his bedroom window to interrupt Caroline, who sits smoking on her porch: “Will we be friends then?,” Noah asks. Caroline replies, “Weren’t never friends” (123). These “secret little tragedies” and “costly, quiet victories” (123) gesture toward the larger historical narrative that Caroline stages. The experiences of loss and grief shared by these two characters is, paradoxically, both a point of connection and of irrevocable distance; it is an historical entanglement that keeps them apart, even as it links them together. As Caroline explains to Noah, “Someday we’ll talk again / but they’s things we’ll never say. / That sorrow deep inside you, / it’s inside me too, / and it never go away. / You’ll be OK. / You’ll learn how to lose things” (124). To this quietly devastating lesson, she adds: “When you stop breathing air you get / oh so calm, / no fire down there / so it’s calm calm calm / and there’s never any money / so it’s very very calm” (124). Money is, for Caroline, anti-life, alienated life. Change – both money and social progress – promises not freedom or a better future for her, but loss. Persisting in his search for a connection with Caroline, Noah finally finds it in their ritual of a shared cigarette. “Do you miss sharing a cigarette?’ he asks, to which she replies, in her final lines, “You bet I do, Noah / you bet, you bet” (124). Even as the distance between these characters is acknowledged, their uncertain futures hang together in the air. Kushner acknowledges that Caroline, or Change “comes from sorrow, from anger and grief, …our tragedies,” but he also sees the redemptive possibilities of history, which “has shown us both the terrors and also the pleasures of change” (xv). Those possibilities can be realized only if those who have been oppressed socially and economically are not seen as the “accidents” of history, Kushner insists, but as “historical agents.” [50] In an essay titled “Copious, Gigantic, and Sane,” Kushner writes, “I don’t know how any African-American, any person of color stays sane in this country, given that the whole machinery of racism seems designed to drive them crazy or kill them. I don’t know why every woman isn’t consumed every day by debilitating rage.” [51] At a time when African American anger is criminalized and Black Lives Matter attests to the profound difficulty of forming a black subjectivity, it seems urgent that we see Caroline’s anger and her suffering as, at once, expected and unnecessary. To do so is to recognize something of the tragedy of American culture. Williams defines this tragic structure as the recognition of suffering “that could have been avoided but was not avoided.” He writes, The recognition is a matter of history. . . . But while this is seen as a process it can be lived through, resolved, changed. Whereas if it is seen, even briefly, as a fixed position—an abstract condition of man or of revolution—it becomes a new alienation, an exposure stopped short of involvement, a tragedy halted and generalised at the shock of catastrophe. … It is the fixed harshness of a revolutionary regime . . . which finds, facing its men [and women] turned to stone, the children of the struggle who because of the struggle live in new ways and with new feelings, and who . . . answer death and suffering with a human voice.[52] Caroline’s refusals (to care for Noah or change like Dotty) and her angry eruptions (turned outward) and irruptions (turned inward) implicitly say “no” to an entire social order. But she finds no outside of that order. Our task is not to turn Caroline into stone, not to fix her as “a tragedy halted and generalised at the shock of catastrophe,” but instead to see her story as the counterpart to progress and freedom. Characteristic of Kushner’s politics, the musical ends on a redemptive note, with an epilogue featuring Emmie and her brothers, “the children of the struggle who … answer death and suffering with a human voice.” Caroline “giv[es] her daughter the stage” (125), and Emmie sings proudly, “I’m the daughter of a maid” (127). She then transforms her mother from a “broken stone” into a geologic force: “She stands alone where the harsh winds blow: / Salting the earth so nothing grow / too close; but still her strong blood flow . . . / Under ground through hidden veins, / . . . down the plains, down the high plateau / down to the Gulf of Mexico / Down to Larry and Emmie and Jackie and Joe. / The children of Caroline Thibodeaux” (127). Caroline becomes in “Emmie’s Dream” a more-than-human force of change, pulsing downward, through the land worked by her ancestors, into the lives of her children, and as “history [that] comes for us.” References [1] Tony Kushner, “Production: ‘Caroline, or Change’ (Working in the Theatre #322 ),” American Theatre Wing , CUNY TV, taped April 2004, uploaded to YouTube October 8, 2013. https://youtu.be/TyxZFf7zjRE [2] Tony Kushner, Caroline, or Change : A Musical (New York: TCG, 2004), 79. [3] Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nonperformance,” in Afterlives , Museum of Modern Art, 25 September 2015. Steamed live and uploaded on YouTube on September 25, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2leiFByIIg [4] Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings , 2 nd ed., ed. David McKellan. (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2000), 173. [5] Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 1966), 62. [6] This definition of catastrophe comes from chapter two of Gustav Freytag’s Technique of the Drama: An Exposition of Dramatic Composition and Art (1863/1894). Freytag’s theory of dramatic structure, though meant to define the structure of ancient Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, influenced playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen and Arthur Miller. See Gustav Freytag, Technique of the Drama: An Exposition of Dramatic Composition and Art , 3 rd ed, trans Elias J. MacEwan. (Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1900, c1894). See especially 137–42. [7] Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project , trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 474. [8] Williams, Modern Tragedy , 202. Williams saw the emergence of this form of modern tragedy in Brecht’s mature plays, The Good Person of Szechwan , Mother Courage , and Galileo . It has often been noted that Tony Kushner has a markedly Brechtian aesthetic, in his use of episodic structures, his deployment of history as a device to question the present, and his penchant for a non-naturalistic presentational style. However, while both playwrights share a Marxist leaning, Kushner’s lush language, his flair for the hyper-theatrical, and his political optimism distinguish him from Brecht’s more anti-theatrical style. In Dramatists and Dramas , Harold Bloom characterizes Kushner’s drama as an aesthetic mélange of “Bertolt Brecht’s Marxist stage epics; the lyrical phantasmagorias of Tennessee Williams; and Yiddish theater in its long history from the earliest purimshpil .” Harold Bloom, Dramatists and Dramas (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2005), 288. Any definitive index of Kushner’s influences is moot, however, since his theatre owes as much to Shakespeare and Corneille as to Yiddish melodrama as to Shaw and Brecht and Elizabeth LeCompte. [9] Caroline, or Change began in 1998 when Kushner was commissioned by the San Francisco Opera to write a libretto. While that project never transpired, Kushner took his draft script of Caroline to his frequent collaborator and then-Artistic Director of the Public Theater, George C. Wolfe, and the two convinced Jeanine Tesori to come on board to compose the score. Workshops commenced in 1999 and Caroline was eventually staged at the Public Theater in November 2003, with Tonya Pinkins originating the role of Caroline. It moved to Broadway’s Eugene O’Neill Theatre in May 2004. Both productions were directed by Wolfe. My analysis of any performance details relating to Caroline, or Change is based on Wolf’s production, which I viewed at the New York Public Library’s Theatre on Film and Tape archive on 17 January 2016. The date of the recorded production is 30 January 2004. Caroline, or Change has since received revivals on Broadway and the West End. The most recent production, to date, was a critically acclaimed production in spring 2018 at Hampstead Theatre, directed by Michael Longhurst and featuring Sharon D. Clarke as Caroline. This production is set for a West End transfer beginning 20 November 2018. [10] In The Female Complaint (2008) Lauren Berlant defines an intimate public as “a porous, affective scene of identification among strangers that promises a certain experience of belonging and provides a complex of consolation, confirmation, discipline, and discussion about how to live as an x . . . . The intimate public…provides material that foments enduring, resisting, overcoming, and enjoying being an x .” Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), viii. [11] Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 57. Hartman writes, “blackness is defined here in terms of social relationality rather than identity. . . . Blackness incorporates subjects normatively defined as black, the relations among blacks, whites, and others, and the practices that produce racial difference” (56–57). [12] Walter Benjamin, “What is Epic Theatre? [Second version],” trans. Anna Bostock (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 17–18. [13] Kushner, Caroline, or Change , 11. Hereafter cited in-text. [14] See, for example, Kushner, “Production: ‘Caroline, or Change’” and Tony Kushner, “Tony Kushner: ‘Caroline, or Change’,” interviewed by Neal Conan, Talk of the Nation . NPR, 20 June 2006, audio, 16:59. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5498280 . [15] James Fisher, The Theatre of Tony Kushner (New York: Routledge, 2013), 205. [16] The songs of these and other black female groups sublimated a period rife with racial conflict into songs of romantic conflict. The oeuvre of these two groups, in particular, operates as an important intertext to Caroline’s situation and state of mind, with songs like “Come and Get These Memories,” “(Love is Like a) Heat Wave,” “Nowhere to Run” and “Quicksand” (Martha and the Vandellas) and “Locking Up My Heart” and “Too Hurt to Cry Too Much in Love to Say Goodbye,” (The Marvelettes) serving as the subtext of Caroline’s dreams and longings. The Motown girl group and pop music more generally were safe escape valves for black female desire in 1960s US culture—and still today. [17] Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings , 85-90. [18] Karl Marx, “On James Mill,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings , 2 nd ed., ed. David McKellan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 133. Marx writes, “The separation of work, capital, and private property from each other and similarly the separation of work from work, of capital from capital and landed property from landed property, and finally the separation of labour from wages, of capital from profit and profit from rent, and lastly of landed property from ground rent permits self-alienation to appear both in its own form and in that of mutual alienation” (129). This index of estrangements illustrates the complexity of alienation as multifaceted and woven into every aspect of social life under capitalism. [19] Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1. [20] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2013), 93. [21] Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 103. [22] Rock music’s debt to African American music is widely acknowledged. Likewise, since Jewish immigrants have arrived in America, klezmer music has been influenced by jazz and blues. And both African American and Jewish musical traditions have been readily absorbed into the machinery of American popular culture industry. See for example Mark Slobin, American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 17-21. [23] Stacy Wolf, Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 178. [24] In his collaboration with Antonio Negri, Hardt elaborates on the potential of affective labor (referred to also as immaterial or biopolitical labor) to produce social change. Affective labor is “labor that creates not only material goods but also relationships and ultimately social life itself.” They argue that affective labor is a direct product of capital and the dominant form of labor in our neoliberal capitalist economy, producing the languages we use, the social practices we establish, the modes of sociality that define our relationships. Together, these factors make up the means and the results of biopolitical production. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004). 109. [25] Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor,” in boundary 2 26, no.2 (1999): 98. [26] Kushner, interview, NPR. [27] Kushner, “Production: ‘Caroline, or Change.’” [28] Caroline’s anger and emotional distance from those around her often induced unexpected laughter from the audience at the 30 January 2004 performance at the Public Theater. Notably, the audience laughed whenever Caroline rebuffed Noah’s attempts at soliciting affection from her, perhaps a sign of surprise or even discomfort. These moments of laughter seemed to come when expectations were broken and unexpected encounters or affects were introduced. [29] In his 1844 manuscripts, Marx describes money as both “visible god-head” and “universal whore” – standing in at once for transcendent value and embodied labor. Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 118. [30] Karl Marx, Das Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy , vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2009), 68. [31] Marx, Das Kapital , 66. Marx is using gold as his example of commodity-money, not the fiat currency of bills nor, of course, the bitcoins of digital economies. His ideas are still entirely relevant in the way all of these money forms abstract labor from value. [32] Ibid. , 58. [33] There is a similarly explosive fight between Belize and Roy Cohn in Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika , in which racial rage bubbles forth from both characters and with it the parallel but incomparable histories of suffering of Jews and African Americans. [34] Wolf, Changed for Good , 180. [35] Moten, In the Break, 1. [36] Moten, “Blackness and Nonperformance.” [37] Ibid. [38] The word “case” is a gesture to Fred Moten’s important essay, “The Case of Blackness,” which responds to Franz Fanon’s “fact of blackness.” Moten uses the word “case” to attend to “the gap between fact and lived experience,” that is “between blackness and being black.” The “word ‘case’,” he writes, serves “as a kind of broken bridge or cut suspension between the two” (180). By creating some distance between the historical construction of blackness and experiences of being black, Moten troubles the categories of the individual, property, and freedom that structure American culture. See Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” in Criticism 50, no. 2 (2008): 177–218. [39] Fisher points out the connection between Caroline and Benjamin’s Angel of History, which Kushner referenced more explicitly in Angels in America . As Fisher notes, Kushner “has Caroline realize that Lot’s wife was warned not to look back, but only ahead at the ‘unruined future’.” This analysis drew from an early unpublished first draft of Caroline, or Change , dated 28 June 1998, and the quote “unruined future” comes from that version, but does not appear in the 2004 published version. This earlier version draws a closer parallel between Caroline and the Benjamin/Klee Angel of History featured in Angels in America . Fisher, The Theater of Tony Kushner , 204. In the later published version, however, Caroline fixes her gaze not on the “unruined future,” but on the present. Or more precisely, by turning herself into “broken stone” (Kushner, Caroline 118), she becomes part of a present scattered with the remnants of unrecognized pasts and as-yet unrealized futures. [40] Marx, “On James Mill,” 131. [41] The frequent references Caroline makes to lack of air and breath are eerily prescient of Eric Garner. [42] Examples visually linking violence and black female sexuality abound in American popular culture, and the visualization of The Radio as black female entertainers in Caroline is important in this regard. Consider such icons as Tina Turner, Whitney Houston, and Rihanna, whose private lives and sexuality is laced with real and fabricated images of masculinized violence. For an excellent analysis the connections between “erotic violence and desire in black heterosexuality” (421), see Nicole R. Fleetwood, “The Case of Rihanna: Erotic Violence and Black Female Desire,” African American Review . Special Issue: On Black Performance 45, no. 3 (2012): 493. [43] Adrienne Davis, “’Don’t Let No One Bother Yo’ Principle’: The Sexual Economy of American Slavery,” in Sister Circle: Black Women and Work , eds. Sharon Haley and the Black Women and Work Collective (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002) 104. [44] Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 260. [45] Wolf, Changed for Good , 180. [46] Moten, “Blackness and Nonperformance.” Moten uses the phrase “obscene scene” to define a historical and interpretative space out of sight, off to the side of history and the law. He is reflecting in this lecture on the legal case of a slave named Betty, who declined her legal right to freedom, choosing instead to stay with her owners in Tennessee and remain a slave. He is presumably borrowing from folkloric definitions of obscene , which link it to the violence in Greek drama that was kept “off scene.” I use the term in that sense, as well, and as a counterpart to the notions of abjection and subjectivity, the latter broadly defined as a condition of agency and individuation. As Moten puts it, “While subjectivity is defined by the subject’s possession of itself and its objects, it is troubled by a dispossessive force objects exert such that the subject seems to be possessed—infused, deformed—by the object it possesses” ( In the Break , 1). That disruptive “dispossessive force” is the abject. The abject, following Julia Kristeva, is that which disturbs and also defines the borders between subject and object. The abject must be expelled in the formation of the “proper” subject, and yet it always remains as a disruptive force. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection , trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). [47] Moten, “Blackness and Nonperformance.” [48] Ibid. [49] Ibid. [50] Tony Kushner, “Copious, Gigantic, Sane,” in Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness: Essays, A Play, Two Poems and a Prayer (New York, NY: TCG, 1995), 52. [51] Kushner, “Copious, Gigantic, Sane,” 52. [52] Williams, Modern Tragedy , 203–04. Footnotes About The Author(s) JOANNA MANSBRIDGE is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests span contemporary American drama, performance studies, visual culture, gender studies, and eco-criticism. Her book, Paula Vogel, is the first on the playwright, and her articles can be found in Theatre Research International, Theatre Topics, Journal of Popular Culture, Modern Drama, Comparative Drama, and Canadian Theatre Review, as well as in several edited collections. She is also a member of the international editorial board of the performance studies journal Performance Matters. 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 Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre "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 Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Rob Silverman Ascher 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 Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Rob Silverman Ascher By Published on April 17, 2023 Download Article as PDF Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances . Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. The overlap of performance and evangelical Christianity is typically limited to analyzing preachers and passion plays. In Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances , Jill Stevenson extends the language of performance studies to immersive evangelical experiences she refers to as “End-Time Performances.” These performances, including Hell House , Judgement House , and Tribulation Trail , are semi-professional performances that explicitly preach to audiences that a sincere belief in Christ is the way to avoid the apocalypse in the End of Days. The bulk of Stevenson’s analysis, over five chapters and a coda, is built around the question of how a “dramaturgy of threat [produces] the future End of Time” through interactive performance and staging. The first chapter, “The Landscape of the End: Time, Affect, Threat, Absence” functions as both a sourcebook and a roadmap, effectively introducing the lenses through which Stevenson wants her audience to analyze the productions used as evidence. Stevenson provides a crash course of sorts on theological concepts such as pre- and post-millennial dispensationalism, performance studies concepts like affect theory, and the history of non-denominational American evangelical Christianity. This section is sufficiently informative on its own, enmeshing figures like Cyrus Scofield, author of the Scofield Reference Bible, and Jill Dolan, whose seminal writing on utopian performatives informs Stevenson’s analysis of the role of time in End-Time Performances. While Dolan’s utopian performative is a sunny and aspirational future proposed by the 1960s counterculture, Stevenson notes that the ‘utopian performative’ and evangelical Hell House alike ask their audiences to consider, in Dolan’s language, “that beyond this ‘now’ of material oppression…. Lives a future that might be different.” The biggest difference argues Stevenson that an Evangelical future must take place in the afterlife. The core of Stevenson’s book uses three different End-Time Performances and the stand-alone Ark Encounter Museum as case studies. Nearly all of these are performed on or near church property annually. Hell House is the exception, as it has been licensed by churches and theatre groups across the country, including the New York City-based Les Freres Corbusier. That company performed a “sincere staging” of Hell House , following kits published by Pastor Keenan Roberts, leader of New Destiny Christian Center in Colorado. This homegrown ethos is central to the ethnographic work that Stevenson puts at the core of Feeling the Future . Stevenson, who writes in detail about her experiences as an attendee at the End-Time Performances, takes care to note the age ranges and racial makeup of audiences at these performances. Stevenson notes that the majority of End-Time performance attendees are white and between the ages of 18 and 36, with the exception of Tribulation Trail . This piece had an age-diverse audience comprised primarily of Black and Latine attendees, which fits some creative choices. Notably, in Tribulation Trail , a Black performer portrayed Jesus in the portion depicting the slaying of Satan, aligning with the largely-Black congregational makeup at Mt. Vernon Baptist Church, the producers of Tribulation Trail . Many of the performances with predominantly white audiences take on a much more political bent. Attendees are rushed through an apocalyptic landscape besieged by a One World Government with technocratic ideals, installing the Mark of the Beast in the form of microchips. Stevenson keenly observes the political contexts through which she and her fellow audience members receive the dramaturgical information woven into these apocalyptic landscapes. After all, these End-Time Performances are proselytizing tools. Nearly all of them conclude with a moment of prayer and an invitation to their audience to accept Christ as their savior. Some of these calls to action are profoundly intimate and offer their audience members opportunities to speak with a member of the ministry, while others merely warn the audience to keep Christ in their hearts in the face of the coming Rapture. Stevenson slyly juxtaposes the political context and ticket price of a given show with how intense these proselytizing moments are, quietly casting doubt on the theological integrity of various ministries. Stevenson’s central argument on the dramaturgy of threat and futurity asks readers to hold the content of these performances alongside the emphasis on futurity inherent in evangelical Christianity. A message of Christ’s power as a savior immediately follows vivid images of lakes of fire, piles of clothes, and scenes of abortion and grotesque violence. If, she supposes, the audience is given the opportunity to accept Christ as their savior after being inundated with the End of Days and sins of man, they will take scripture less out of sincere belief and more out of panic regarding “impending futurity.” A focus on the inevitability of Christ’s return or some sort of holy deliverance has roots in medieval British theatre, to which Stevenson devotes a section of her first chapter. Statement of belief is not always sufficient, however, as several of the End-Time Performances feature purportedly Christian characters who were not raptured due to a lack of sincerity. The book concludes with a two-part Coda, written in June 2020 and January 2021, analyzing, in brief, the beginning of the COVID epidemic, the 2020 election, and the January 6th insurrection through the lenses Stevenson has set up for these contemporary End-Time Performances. Shockingly, much of the imagery baked into the apocalypse narratives she has been analyzing has since become central to life in 2021, as COVID is treated as a hoax and evangelicals proudly storm the Capitol. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances is a compelling text for casual readers, not only scholars, as Stevenson’s writing is clear, concise and vivid in description. Yet, it is also valuable as an educational text, shedding light on the dramaturgical integrity of a mode of performance ignored by the theatrical establishment. Stevenson makes a compelling case for End-Time Performance as a uniquely American form of performance, with roots in the York Mystery Plays, aesthetic references to zombie movies, and a clear sense of theological didacticism. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances applies theological and performance-theoretical frameworks to an underexplored form, leaving its audience of readers with a dense and rewarding dramaturgical text. This work is important for an array of fields, including Theater and Performance Studies, American Studies and Religious Studies. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ROB SILVERMAN ASCHER University of Iowa Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jessica L. Peña Torres  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 México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Jessica L. Peña Torres By Published on May 8, 2023 Download Article as PDF Zapateado, burlesque dancing, and a mix of mariachi, son jarocho, and electronic music combine to create the world for MÉXICO (EXPROPRIATED), a bilingual dance-theater piece that surveys three regions of México (Jalisco, Sonora, Veracruz) through a dramatization of the origins of ballet folklórico. With songs such as “Son de la Negra,” “La Bruja,” and “La Bamba,” the dancers of Coctel Explosivo present Mexico’s folkloric diaspora while inviting the audience to reflect upon a heritage that has been as appropriated as Carolina Herrera’s latest collection. MÉXICO (EXPROPRIATED) unearths the politics and history of ballet folklórico, which has been presented as authentic Mexican culture for decades and puts it under the microscope for the audience to decide: should we keep these dances in the repertoire, or should we re-choreograph them to reflect their complicated histories? My Desilusión with Ballet Folklórico I saw the Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández live onstage for the first time at the Strathmore Theatre in North Bethesda, MD in 2015. Even though it was a reach, I dreamed about dancing for Hernández’s company. That night in Bethesda, I became enamorada of the colors, the technique, and the professionalism of the most famous dance company in Mexico. The female dancers, all tall, very thin, and, significantly, light-skinned, looked like Barbie dolls to me. For days, I daydreamed of their high battements in “Guerrero,” the lightness of their faldeo in “Jalisco,” and their pas de vals in “Revolución.” A few months later, I moved to Mexico City to audition for the company, but a quick visit to their website shattered my hopes in seconds. The section “Auditions” listed under “requirements”: “Estatura minima: mujeres 1.68 m” (Minimum height: women 5’5’’) [i] . I was four inches too short. I thought about the dancers I had seen perform and could not help but compare my short height to their statuesque bodies. A month or so later, I was dancing with the Ballet Folclórico Nacional de México de Silvia Lozano, a sixty-year-old-company founded by a former dancer of Hernández’s, Maestra Silvia Lozano. In rehearsals, it did not take long for me to start hearing chisme (gossip) about what it was like to work for other major folklórico companies in the city. I heard rumors that teachers and administrators in Hernández’s company bullied dancers if they had darker skin or were “overweight.” More interesting, however, was criticism about how Hernández’s works were not “authentic” or “traditional,” but, rather, highly stylized. All of this chisme reminded me of the dances I had witnessed in Bethesda. The cuadros (dance suites) were very beautifully executed, yes, but the technique, including the port de bras , the battements , the forward-carrying of the upper body, the lightness of the feet, the emphasis on turnout, and the precision of the turns, resembled that of classical ballet companies. The press deemed Hernández “La Emperatriz del Tesoro Mexicano del Folklor” (the Empress of the Mexican Treasure of Folklore) who brought to the world stage the “incomparable culture of Mexico” [ii] . How does Hernández’s use of Western, classical dance factor into these achievements? Moreover, how does Hernandez’s company sell the image of Mexico to the rest of the world? How does this legacy shape Mexican understandings of what it means to be Mexican? If her dances are not particularly “authentic,” then what claims to indigeneity, if any, does she have? And how did she acquire the indigenous dance material she has adapted to the stage? These and more questions started to pull apart a tapestry in my head, one I had constructed in my time as a ballet folklórico dancer with the images I believed to be a true representation of mexicanidad . Because I had performed with ballet folklórico companies in both Mexico and the United States, I thought of Hernández’s choreographic work as the footprint for folklórico dancers everywhere; her legacy extended across borders and with it, the way audiences perceived Mexican identity. This tapestry, however, was unraveling and to replace it, I was weaving together many ethical issues that this dance form brought up. As an artist-scholar, I began to question myself: how could I even begin to address these problem as a ballet folklórico dancer? Authoethnography México (expropriated) [iii] –– in Spanish, México (expropiado) ––is the result of an auto-ethnographic project that I began in 2019. [iv] An original evening-long piece of dance theatre, this work—which premiered as a web project in 2020, during the pandemic, and on stage in Mexico City in April 2022—is my attempt to rechoreograph the ballet folklórico form as established by Hernández through Practice as Research methodology (PaR) as delineated by Robin Nelson (2013) and Vida Midgelow (2018) [v] . Utilizing cabaret, contemporary dance, folklórico, zapateado (footwork) , flamenco, burlesque, and text, México (expropriated) seeks to re-appropriate ballet folklórico’s problematic images and characters of three different cuadros:“ Jalisco,” “La Danza del Venado,” and “Veracruz.” In this article, I will discuss the (re)creation of one of the characters featured in “Jalisco:” la china poblana . Following José Muñoz’s concept of disidentification as described in his book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics [vi] , I aim to complicate the politics of my mestizo body through my artistic work. Reflecting upon Muñoz’s theory on how identity has been “formed in response to the cultural logics of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and misogyny ––cultural logics that . . . work to undergrid state power,” [vii] I argue that these same notions have been thrust upon Mexican identity. Inspired by Muñoz’s theory, I explore the social imaginary of what it means to be Mexican and actively use choreographic and theatrical tools to disidentify from these hegemonic notions, specifically as they influenced the creation of the ballet folklórico form. Since disidentification is a “strategy that works on and against dominant ideology,” [viii] I use it to challenge the traditional elements of mexicanidad [ix] . By disidentifying from the ballet folklórico form, I am “working on and against” [x] the cultural structures that I learned from a discipline that trained my body and shaped my artistic practices during my time as a professional ballet folklórico dancer in Mexico and the United States. Throughout the process of creating México (expropriated) , my cast and I considered “what is it to dance Mexican?” [xi] By exploring tropes and characters of Mexican folklore such as la china poblana , el charro , el Venado , el Negrito , and la Mulata , we investigated what it means to perform authenticity and who, in reality, were the characters that contributed to the nationalist project of the postrevolutionary period, specifically as Amalia Hernández featured them in her world-famous repertory. Lastly, I sought to reclaim agency as a former ballet folklórico professional dancer by offering an alternative interpretation of these characters, one that would provide audiences with a playful yet cutting critique of the way we perform ballet folklórico within and outside of Mexico. Because ballet folklórico was created to consolidate a national identity, it serves to reinforce hegemonic notions of mexicanidad. México (expropriated) subverts stereotypes associated with Mexican identity, performatively unveils the unethical and inauthentic practices of ballet folklórico, and actively rejects heterosexist, racist, and homophobic gender roles embedded in both traditions. This article describes and analyzes the recreation of the character of la china poblana , while also reflecting on the changes the piece underwent in several versions of the project. Originally, I planned to present the work on stage in Austin, Texas in spring 2020, with a cast of Latinx performers. (See figure 1) . However the pandemic forced me to reconfigure the work as an interactive website. In 2022, I was able to stage the work (with a Mexican cast) at Teatro Benito Juárez in Mexico City as part of the City’s Department of Culture annual programming. (See figure 2) . Over the course of its production history, the piece transformed by way of medium, cast, audience, geographical location, language (English/Spanish to Spanish-only), and time [xii] . Left: Poster for Mexico (expropriated) by Jessica Peña Torres and the Ensemble. Photos by Juan Leyva. Design by Khristian Méndez Aguirre. March 2020. Right: Poster for Mexico (expropriado) by Jessica Peña Torres and Coctel Explosivo. Photo by Mona E. Avalos. April 2022 Synopsis It’s 1955 in Mexico City and Petra, a talented and well-connected dancer and choreographer, is starting a company to show the dances of Mexico as never seen before. In order to create her repertoire, she will need to teach the dancers of her company how to embody the characters that represent each of the different regions in Mexico. Jalisco Jalisco, a state in the Pacific coast, is the home of tequila, mariachis, and colonial histories. Besides being the “whitest” region of central Mexico, Jalisco’s folkloric dances have become the epitome of Mexican dance traditions. “El Jarabe Tapatío,” for instance, is one of the most frequently performed pieces in the repertoire of any ballet folklórico, from professional companies to amateur groups. Although these dances are certainly emblematic of Mexican identity, they perpetuate heteronormative gender roles through the characters of la china poblana and el charro. In this scene, we take these traditions and re-examine them through song and dance. Mexico City 2022 live performance script excerpt: PETRA David ¿Cuántas veces te tengo que repetir esto? ¿Qué es esto? Petra imita a David con movimientos burdos. PETRA Qué vergüenza contigo. Me hiciste pasar un momento muy difícil. El charro es macho. Con el pecho arriba. Firme. Seguro de su hombría. No con movimientos afeminados. Y Mary… ¿Sabes que estoy pensando? No. Claro que no lo sabes. Tantos años en un cabaret me hacen pensar que nunca podré sacar lo corriente de ti. La China Poblana es elegante, femenina… No me estés haciendo repetir las cosas. Ustedes saben muy bien lo que quiero. Quiero un baile bien ejecutado. No vulgaridades ¿No les da pena que los venga a ver un productor y ustedes bailen como amateurs de carpa? PETRA David, how many times do I have to repeat this to you? What is this? Petra imitates David with crude movements. PETRA How embarrassing of you. You put me through a very difficult time. El charro is macho. With his chest up. Firm. Sure of his manhood. Not with effeminate movements. And Mary… You know what I’m thinking? No. Of course you don’t. So many years in a cabaret make me think that I will never be able to get the ordinary out of you. La China Poblana is elegant, feminine… Don’t make me repeat myself. You know very well what I want. I want a well-executed dance. Not… vulgarities. Don’t you feel ashamed when a producer comes to see you and you dance like amateurs from a carpa? The choreography of folkloric dances in Mexico dates back to postrevolutionary times, specifically to the 1920s and 1930s. “Jarabe Tapatío,” known outside of Mexico as “Mexican Hat Dance” became Mexico’s national dance, with la china poblan a wearing tri-color hair bows (referencing the Mexican flag) and a colorful skirt embroidered with sequins depicting a national symbol (such as the eagle), and el charro in his mariachi hat. Most, if not all, professional and collegiate ballet folklórico companies have a version of the “Jarabe Tapatío” in their repertoire. The word “jarabe” means syrup, and “tapatío,” which comes from the Nahuátl word “Thapatiotl,” [xiii] is used to name people from the city of Guadalajara, Jalisco’s capital city. The dance originated from the “Guajolote,” a dance of the Huichol community where the male bird courts the female bird [xiv] . Similar to the “Guajolote,” in “Jarabe Tapatío” el charro , played by a male dancer, pursues la china poblana , played by a female dancer [xv] . “Jarabe Tapatío” is one of the works in ballet folklórico repertoires that perpetuates hegemonic gender roles in Mexican society. Maria del Carmen Vázquez Mantecón (2000) notes that la china poblana , as a symbol of Mexican identity, represented the “grace and virtue of the Mexican woman,” who served as the object of heterosexual male desire by balancing a dichotomy between wife or prostitute [xvi] . This character also appeared frequently in the writing of 19th-century authors who described her as a mestizo woman who did not conform to society standards but rather enjoyed the freedom of her love encounters. Similar to how la china poblana became a romanticized version of the Mexican woman, el charro became “the symbol of the ideal Mexican man” [xvii] . During the conquest, the Spanish brought horses to Mexico. Those who owned and knew how to ride these majestic animals were regarded as the upper class given their European ancestry. The hacendados (landowners) often knew how to break wild horses, ride them, and perform all sorts of tricks, a feat that reflected their male prowess and social standing. The patriarchal system of 19th century Mexico put men, regardless of class, in charge of women and children in the absence of the hacendado . As such, the vaqueros (horsemen) often learned how to execute these acts in spite of their socioeconomic class. This mixing of the upper, middle and lower classes in the charrería culture led to the formation of a male identity that denoted unity, an unbreakable code of ethics, and an unyielding bravery to defend the family and the hacienda [xviii] . After the revolution ended in 1920, a nationalistic discourse called for the romanticized construction of a specific image of el charro as a strong, skilled, hard-working man to represent male vigor. In ballet folklórico, this character came to represent masculine traits that were favored by the proponents of lo mexicano . As such, el charro often appeared “pursuing and ultimately capturing the woman” he partnered in the dance [xix] . To create material for my own iteration of the cuadro of “Jalisco,” specifically “Jarabe Tapatío,” the ensemble and I played with devised work. We created scenes that reflected the expectations that the social imaginary holds for Mexican women, especially as embodied by the character of la china poblana . The rehearsals led us into big and important discussions about the female body, as it relates to shape, size, and the color of the skin. For example, our work together inspired two of the 2020 cast members, Marina DeYoe-Pedraza and Erica Saucedo, to write a poem titled “Si yo fuera la china poblana” (If I was la china poblana ). Below is a short excerpt. MARINA Si yo fuera la china poblana I would… Go Wherever I want kill and eat whatever I find. Grow into una montaña alta y vasta Too dangerous to climb ERICA If you took all of our bones, Our bodies together … bones piled on bones. Bodies bodies cuerpos Bodies that …are not ours Que no han sido nuestros cuerpos for hundreds of years… (Breath) it’s been a long time since these brown bodies could walk down the street Soft supple MARINA Si yo fuera la china poblana I would be Un Escorpión. Defend myself by puncturing and poisoning those who try to smother me. Through vivid imagery, Marina and Erica explore the possibility of escaping stereotypes and reclaiming agency by becoming either a scorpion, a horse, or even a mountain, all too dangerous for men to dominate. Marina, for example, imagines her china poblana able to defend herself from all predators that mean to subdue her. Through this poem, the dancers overtly expresses their desire to be “whatever [they] wanted.” Embodying Marina and Erica’s words, the three women of the cast (who also included Venese Alcantar) dance solos that combine contemporary technique, footwork and tender yet assertive movement. They manipulate their skirts and play with the contrast of softness and coarseness through varied movements such as jumps and turns and small and big gestures. In the word “puncturing,” for example, the dancers put their foot down and squash one of la china poblana ’s metaphorical enemies. For the filmed version, we recorded the dancers’ voices reciting the poem and paired them with James Parker’s original music and filmed them dancing one at a time. We, then, played with video images of the three dancers (dancing as soloists), either one video of one dancer alone or sometimes two or three video/dancers superimposed. Since they often moved to the same choreography, the change from body to body, at times created the image of a palimpsest of the three women, generating the illusion that even though there were all different women, they shared common histories of oppression and a desire for freedom, and at times, revenge. (See figure 3). Marina DeYoe-Pedraza, Erica Saucedo and Venese Alcantar in México (expropriated) by Jessica Peña Torres and the Ensemble Photo still from video by Michael Bruner. The Vortex, Austin, TX. October 2020. For the 2022 staged version, I wanted to incorporate the new cast’s experiences around female agency. In rehearsal, we talked about their desires to be “whatever they wanted,” and everyone wrote what that prompt meant for them. I gathered their responses and sent them to a friend and poet, Mercy Medina Gonzalez, who wrote a new Spanish-language poem for the dancers to perform. Similar to the 2020 version, the dancers recorded their voices reciting the poem. For the live performances, the dancers moved to their own voices and words, poetically arranged by Mercy but embodied by them. It was their words, their voice, their bodies that we saw onstage. Below is an excerpt of the poem: TODAS Mujer. La Mujer Mexicana que ama y crea. Yo soy La China Poblana. La que entre las cortinas de sus temblores, busca el viento para alimentar sus alas. MARY Toma el suspiro del mundo por los cuernos, y conoce cómo llevarlo hasta las raíces del alma, a todas las esquinas que nos hacen hermosas. Si yo fuera ella, me enterraría bajo la tierra para crecer como mazorca blanda y aprender el nombre de los truenos. Sería curandera y bruja, el esperpento hecho verbo. Esa mujer canta conmigo. Yo soy La China Poblana ERICA La que escarba para hallar el murmullo de la tierra blanda y consume el ardor de los que se rindieron. No le teme ni a la sangre ni a los muertos y busca el aroma de las montañas más altas las cumbres del cielo que no toca; araña. Porque el mundo le debe plenitud y contento. LOLA La que es cuerpo mío y ajeno cuerpos de cuantas nos hemos caído la que nace de huesos y de ríos yo soy La China Poblana la serpiente que deja el cuello al pico de las águilas y el veneno de la araña cuando ataca un caballo que no se monta, un cuervo que arranca los ojos de quienes nos violentan. TODAS La que conoce la amargura de la luna y carga con la sombra de los ciclos. Con su cuerpo mustio es el canal del eterno ir y venir de los vivos. No se aguanta, se transforma en la fuerza de todas las cruces enterradas en carreteras y montes. ALL THE WOMEN Woman. The Mexican Woman that loves and creates. I am La China Poblana. The one that between the curtains of her tremors, seeks the wind to feed her wings. MARY She takes the sigh of the world by the horns, and knows how to take it to the roots of the soul, to all the corners that make us beautiful. If I were her, I would bury myself under the ground to grow as soft cob and learn the name of thunder. I would be a healer and a witch, the grotesque made verb. That woman sings with me. I am La China Poblana ERICA The one who digs to find the murmur of the soft earth and consume the ardor of those who surrendered. She is not afraid of blood or the dead and seeks the scent of the highest mountains, the peaks of heaven that she does not touch; scratches. Because the world owes her fullness and contentment. LOLA The one that is my body and someone else’s bodies of how many we have fallen. The one that is born of bones and rivers I am La China Poblana the serpent that leaves the neck of the eagles beak and the venom of the spider when it attacks a horse that does not ride, a crow that plucks out the eyes of those who violate us. ALL THE WOMEN The one who knows the bitterness of the moon and carries the shadow of the cycles. With her withered body, it is the channel of the eternal coming and going of the living. She doesn’t endure, she becomes the force of all the crosses buried in roads and mountains. (See figure 4). Andrea Rubí Santillán, Samantha Romero Peña, Miriam Garma, and Ileana Díaz Manzur in México (expropiado) by Jessica Peña Torres and Coctel Explosivo. Photo by Ricardo Antonio Ramos. Teatro Benito Juárez, Mexico City. April 2022 In both the 2020 and the 2022 version, our recreation of the character of la china poblana aims to provoke the audience’s affect by simultaneously reproducing visual and aural performances of female agency. Through the evocative descriptions pronounced by the women of the cast through their bodies and voices, we hoped to touch the audience’s sensibilities and make them wonder what it would be like if women could, in fact, be whatever they wanted. Utilizing text and contemporary dance, I sought to to dis-identify from folklórico dance traditions, specifically those inscribed in performances of the character of la china poblana. Conclusion Colorful lights, elegant costumes, presentational smiles and headpieces that not even Lady Gaga could dream of… ballet folklórico offers its audience a taste of Mexico’s regional and cultural diversity. Through my auto-ethnographical project that explores, among other themes, the politics of my mestizo body, I conclude that ballet folklórico desperately needs to be re-choreographed to reflect its colonial history of cultural appropriation and exoticization . I believe that professional, collegiate, and amateur companies of the form should revisit the way they incorporate the pieces of the canon into their repertory if they wish to stop perpetuating racist, heterosexist, classist, and unethical images of the diverse regions of Mexico. When audiences think about Mexico, they often think of the distinct mariachi music, the strong charros , the beautiful china poblana , and many other images that were conceived as components of mexicanidad in postrevolutionary Mexico. These images, however, continue to paint a romanticized vision of Mexico that has never existed. As a millennial coming of age in Reynosa, Tamaulipas ––known for making the headlines of major newspapers as an incubator for cartel violence and drugs–– I think of an alternative image of Mexico to the one painted through a full-length concert of ballet folklórico. Just in 2020, for instance, the number of femicides in my home country increased to an alarming 10 per day. Ballet folklórico does not present this reality, nor the one lived by the many marginalized communities in Mexico; there’s no room for the bad and the ugly in this form. Through Mexico (expropriated) , I aimed to re-choreograph three pieces in the folklórico canon and complicate hegemonic images of mexicanidad. By deconstructing stereotypes of the nation as they relate to gender, race, and class, I aimed to dis-identify from the ballet folklórico form to complicate the discussion of what it means to be Mexican in the 21 st century. Borrowing from contemporary dance, flamenco, jazz, hip hop, and burlesque, I reclaim the agency of my own body to re-choreograph cuadros such as “Jalisco ” and recreate characters such as la china poblana. References [i] “Audiciones,” Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández, Accessed November 22, 2018. http://balletfolkloricodemexico.com.mx. [ii] TheCharlieRoll, “Amalia Hernández y el Ballet Folklórico de México – Entrevista y Documental de 1992,” YouTube, October 26, 2017, video, http://youtube.com/watch?v=hOPBBPR-G5Y [iii] My master’s thesis “México (expropriated): Appropriation, Representation, and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico,” which I authored in the Spring 2020 to graduate from the Performance as Public Practice program at the University of Texas at Austin, explored the ballet folklórico dance form in imagining lo mexicano by focusing on Ballet Folklórico de México, Mexico’s leading and most influential company. I argued that BFM has helped the state and the social elite shape an exoticized Mexico for the consumption of foreigners and tourists, and has, within Mexico, offered a problematic embodiment of mexicanidad that reflects racial, nationalistic, class, and gender biases. In addition, I considered Hernández flawed ethnographic methodology which included appropriating and stylizing folk dances through the infusion of ballet and modern dance techniques. The company presents these dances as “authentic” to its paying audiences, and does not offer any reciprocity, support, or acknowledgment to the communities from which Hernández “borrowed” these dances. In addition, her legacy has and continues to permeate many dance companies who imitate BFM’s dances, inadvertently reproducing a colonialist model of exoticization and cultural theft. [iv] Very much inspired by Astrid Hadad’s 2019 performance of Hecha in Mexico , I developed México (expropriated) to satirize stereotypical notions of mexicanidad as imagined by Mexicans and non-Mexicans alike. Like Hadad, I aim to make a feminist intervention in national discourses of mexicanidad as developed in the postrevolutionary period . [v] As Nelson explains, in PaR methodology the doing becomes the knowing . In other words, by dancing, choreographing, writing, and performing México (expropriated) , I am both researching and providing evidence of my research inquiry. As Midgelow suggests, a PaR approach allows artist/scholars to explore the process of creating work as just as significant as the performance of that work before a live audience. [vi] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minnesota : University of Minnesota Press, 1999). [vii] Muñoz, “Disidentifications,” 5. [viii] Muñoz, “Disidentifications,” 11. [ix] In Chapter 5 “La Moda Mexicana: Exotic Women,” of Imagining la Chica Moderna : Women, Nation, and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1917-1936 (2008) Joanne Hershfield explores the concept of mexicanidad , the state’s attempt to construct a national identity at the beginning of the 20th century. Exploiting the richness of indigenous cultures, she argues that intellectuals and politicians forged an “authentic” image of Mexico, the “domestic exotic,” rooted in stereotypes of indigenous communities, which the nation then used for capitalist consumption. [x] Muñoz, “Disidentifications,” 11. [xi] I am influenced by my advisor and Professor Rebecca Rossen, whose book, Dancing Jewish (2014), includes three sections that describe an auto-ethnographic dance project for which she asked two of her subjects to make her a “Jewish” dance. Similarly, in México (expropriated) , I explore notions of mexicanidad, as I actively think over the question “what is it to dance Mexican?” Moreover, in Dancing Jewish , Rossen argues that Jewish choreographers negotiate ethnicity and gender in tandem, while challenging “traditional models for femininity (or masculinity); advance social and political agendas; and imagine radical new possibilities for themselves as individuals, artists, and Jews.” Similarly, I argue that mexicanidad is a construction of hegemonic images that contain complex syntheses of gender, ethnicity, nationality, race, and class. Through the process of creating and performing this work, we have been able to imagine new possibilities to stage mexicanidad . [xii] An important change from the filmed to the staged version is that we increased the number of roles from six to eight. For the filmed version, there were six performers including Venese Alcantar (“Veni”), David Cruz (“David”), Marina DeYoe-Pedraza (“Mari”), Jesus Valles (“EMCEE”), Erica Saucedo (“Eri”), and myself (“Pari”). For the staged version, we created three new characters, which featured Mexico City-based performers: José David Carrera Piñón (“Sebastian”), Miriam Garma (“Lola”), Daniel Losoya (”Narrador”), Ileana Manzur (“Veni” became “Vanessa”), Roberto Mosqueda (“David”), Samantha Romero (“Erica”), Andrea Rubí (“Mary”), and myself (“Pari” became “Petra”). Lastly, for the Mexico City live performance I was able to expand the creative team, which included costume designer Edurne Fernández, technical director Pedro Pazarán, and scenic designer Gisselle Gómez Rivera. Composer James Parker created the score for both versions. Another big change from film to stage was the narrative structure of the piece. The filmed version consisted of five separate viñetas (vignettes) following an episodic narrative form. Although the characters appeared through the different scenes, there was no unifying narrative between each separate viñeta. For the Spanish-only/staged adaptation, I worked with filmmaker and screenwriter Nina Chávez Góngora to re-develop the script for the staged version, which read more like a play with numerous dance pieces, often interrupted by the EMCEE, “Narrador.” Adapting the piece to include a unifying narrative throughout gave audiences a stronger chance to connect with the characters, which in turn led to a more effective way to communicate our critique. [xiii] Cashion, quoted in Lawrence Alan Trujillo, The Spanish Influence On the Mexican Folkdance of Yucatán, Veracruz, And Jalisco, Mexico. (Denver: Dart Publications, 1974), 55. [xiv] Lawrence Alan Trujillo, The Spanish Influence On the Mexican Folkdance of Yucatán, Veracruz, And Jalisco, Mexico. (Denver: Dart Publications, 1974), 58. [xv] Sydney Hutchinson, “The Ballet Folklórico de México and the Construction of the Mexican Nation through Dance,” in Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos . (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 209. [xvi] , María del Carmen Vázquez Mantecón, “La China Mexicana, Mejor Conocida Como China Poblana,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 22, no. 77 (2000): 124. [xvii] Gabriela Mendoza-García, “The Jarabe Tapatío: Imagining Race, Nation, Class, and Gender in 1920s Mexico,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity , edited by Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 319. [xviii] Olga Nájera Ramírez, “Engendering Nationalism: Identity, Discourse, and the Mexican Charro, ” Anthropological Quarterly 67, no. 1 (1994): 4. [xix] Nájera Ramírez, “Engendering Nationalism,” 7. Bibliography “Audiciones.” Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández. Accessed November 22, 2018. http://balletfolkloricodemexico.com.mx. Hershfield, Joanne. Imagining La Chica Moderna Women, Nation, and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1917-1936. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Hutchinson, Sydney. “The Ballet Folklórico de México and the Construction of the Mexican Nation through Dance.” In Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos, edited by Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Norma E. Cantú, and Brenda M. Romero. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Mendoza.García, Gabriela. “The Jarabe Tapatío: Imagining Race, Nation, Class, and Gender in 1920s Mexico.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity , edited by Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young, 319-343 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Midgelow, Vida. Practice-as-Research. United Kingdom: 2018. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Nájera Ramírez, Olga. “Engendering Nationalism: Identity, Discourse, and the Mexican Charro .” Anthropological Quarterly 67, no. 1, (1994): 1-14. Nelson, Robin. Practice as Research in the Arts : Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances / Written and Edited by Robin Nelson, Director of Research, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, UK. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Peña Torres, Jessica. “México (expropriated): Appropriation, Representation and Re- Choreography of Ballet Folklórico.” Austin: University of Texas at Austin, 2020. Rossen, Rebecca. Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. TheCharlieRoll. “Amalia Hernández y el Ballet Folklórico de México – Entrevista y Documental de 1992.” YouTube. October 26, 2017. Video. http://youtube.com/watch?v=hOPBBPR-G5Y. Trujillo, Lawrence Alan. The Spanish Influence On the Mexican Folkdance of Yucatán, Veracruz, And Jalisco, Mexico. Denver: Dart Publications, 1974. Vázquez Mantecón, María del Carmen. “La China Mexicana, Mejor Conocida Como China Poblana.” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 22, no. 77, (2000): 123-150. Footnotes About The Author(s) JESSICA L. PEÑA TORRES (she/her) is a dance/theatre artist and emerging scholar focused on Mexican identity and performance. She graduated from The University of Texas—Pan American with a B.A. in Dance and Theatre and from the University of Texas at Austin with an M.A. in Performance as Public Practice, where she is now pursuing a Ph.D. At UT Austin, Peña Torres continues to study the intersection between nationalism and the performing arts in postrevolutionary Mexico. With her company, Coctel Explosivo, Peña Torres produces dance-theatre works that explore this intersection. 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. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico 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 Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. 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. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. 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.

L. Nicol Cabe 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 Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming L. Nicol Cabe By Published on May 14, 2023 Download Article as PDF On February 23rd, 2020, I performed my final in-person, physically co-present show of Effing Robots: How I Taught the A.I. to Stop Worrying and Love Humans , at the Adelaide Fringe Festival. I did not know that would be my last in-person run – I had festival dates lined up throughout the rest of 2020. Instead, the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered theatres for over a year. During the first pandemic year, performing artists and fringe festivals alike pivoted to online spaces, exploring online platforms as “stages.” Fringes preferred pre-recorded video for submissions, so I made a very low-tech digital video of Effing Robots and sent it to several now-digital festivals, thus maintaining my identity as a fringe artist. I am now able to participate in fringe festivals without the time and financial expenditure of travel, housing, and other upkeep; but, there are components of the original production which I have sacrificed or radically shifted into a static digital film. Making the transition from live, in-person work to the static filmed performance required digital dramaturgy skills that I was just beginning to navigate. Remediating the Stage with Digital Dramaturgy Digital dramaturgy grew out of production dramaturgy, which is the process of investigating and translating core aspects of a performance like costumes, performer movement, and lighting design; these components’ interaction with each other; and how a modern audience will interpret the show. To these components, digital dramaturgy adds computer-based technologies. The former Digital Dramaturgy Lab at York University, for example, lists some of these investigations as “TOGETHERNESS - respect, live and mediated performing bodies, collaboration, interactive strategies between performers and audiences … in-betweeness, reality, virtuality, queerness, multi-dimensionality …” (Digital Dramaturgy Lab 2014). Digital performances both before and during the pandemic triggered a shift-change in the theatrical understanding of meaning-making between performers and audience as physical co-presence, full liveness, and audience togetherness became individuated components of a theatrical work, rather than inseparably aligned with the experience of seeing a play. Digital dramaturgy engages the process of remediation, defined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin: “we call the representation of one medium in another remediation” (p. 45). While there are boundaries placed between media formats – Bolter and Grusin particularly interrogate painting versus photography – they are concerned with the cross-pollination between these forms. New media, like hypertext, draw inspiration from older forms yet simultaneously invigorate those forms through competition and creativity. For instance, photorealistic still-life paintings of cameras compete with photographs of cameras while also demonstrating innovation in still-life painting and referencing multiple media formats. Similarly, during the acute phase of the COVID pandemic, the theatre experience was expressed through archival performance films released online by the National Theatre in the UK, a process in which film remediates theatre by adopting many of its aspects; and, on the other end of the liveness spectrum, Zoom became a stage to remediate filmic tropes while retaining temporal liveness in performances like Richard Nelson’s fifth Apple Family installment, What Do We Need to Talk About? Remediation relies on immediacy, or novel emotive reaction during the process of engaging with the medium. The experience of immediacy occurs from the audience’s perspective, not from the performer’s – an important point when considering the translation of theatre into film, as the actors will not experience the audience’s reactions to their performance. Immediacy occurs through the conjunction of two points: the transparency of the medium, i.e., how the frame disappears from consciousness; and hypermediacy, i.e., how media can layer atop each other as commentary on the media viewing experience (Bolter and Grusin 2000: p 21). Some online theatre experiments in 2020 attempted to become transparent by overcoming the barrier of the screen: for some shows, this meant performing over Zoom so the performers could be temporally co-present, if not physically co-present, with the audience – as in What Do We Need to Talk About? . For others, this involved releasing pre-filmed pre-pandemic stage productions attempting to recreate the experience of being physically together in a theatre space – as in the National Theatre’s films. Although these may have resulted in a sense of immediacy, audiences were often just as aware of their computer screen as they would be of a proscenium arch. Cassie Tongue bemoaned in an article for The Guardian: When these live streams and filmed releases are passed out as a quick solution to a bigger problem and don’t account for medium or mode, they live in a ghostly in-between, creating empty fake stages that contain an echo where our breath should be (Tongue 2020). Theatre makers typically aimed for transparency that visually represented being inside a theatre space when making performance films (Castell 2014). These films considered the large cinema screen but did not consider the second proscenium arch of the computer screen which further alienated the audience from the production, creating a hypermedial work that emphasized what was temporarily lost, per Tongue. It was important to me, when translating Effing Robots , to avoid this audience alienation by creating something native to the digital environment. This meant I had to forego the traditional proscenium arch and focus on the online proscenium – a transparent show could not work for me. Yet I also wanted to ensure the fringe festival experience was retained, which meant I needed to focus on audience immediacy. Thus, Effing Robots adhered to digital fringe policies while transmuting into a hypermedial performance. Effing Robots Fringes Online Over more than 20 years, gaming live streams, vlogs (video weblogs), reaction videos, cooking and crafting how-tos, study timing streams, ASMR, and even 24/7 live streaming developed alongside streaming platforms including Ustream, Justin.tv, YouTube, Facebook Live, and Twitch (Lamare 2018). Streaming video is hypermedial, featuring quick edits, responses to audiences, music, film within film, written commentary within the video, and other media to keep the work immediate for the audience. When translating Effing Robots to an online environment, I aimed to retain both the narrative and the emotions of the live experience while integrating new media visual languages emerging from online streaming culture. I borrowed the language of online video hypermediacy to translate the solo narrative plot, which is a script format common in fringe shows, stand-up comedy, and vlogs. The process of remediating the show relied not only on my understanding of digital dramaturgy, but my subconscious creative influences, especially in online environments, and on my physical restrictions due to the nationwide lockdown in the UK. To translate Effing Robots between media, I considered four points: What are the important parts of in-person fringe shows that make them feel “fringe?” What components of my original, in-person fringe show did I want to keep, and how? What aspects of online streaming culture inspired me, and would they be an effective language for my audience? What were my production limitations for a filmed show? 4. What Were My Production Limitations? I faced a slew of limitations while filming Effing Robots in December 2020. I lived in Scotland while I attended the University of Glasgow; the United Kingdom was one month into a strict four-month, nationwide lockdown, so I could not use rehearsal space at the University of Glasgow campus, I could not rent their film equipment, and I could not meet with film students in-person for consultation or editing. Legally, I could not meet with more than one person, outdoors, at a time. On a student budget, I also could not afford to purchase my own filming equipment. I was limited to what was on hand: low-cost editing software, my phone’s medium-quality camera, a cheap microphone, and PowerPoint. In essence, I needed the language of online streaming culture, which also began with small-budget, computer-based solo work like vlogs. 3. Could Online Streaming Video Culture Be an Effective Language for My Audience? While I did not think about it actively at the time while editing, in later viewings I realized I had been inspired by popular YouTubers in my use of certain visual tricks. For example, my quick cuts were inspired by Jenna Marbles and Harto, while my text annotation was inspired by the Vlog Brothers and Simone Giertz. Their focus on engaging personal narrative supports the remediation of Effing Robots, as less-than-true personal storytelling, into an online space. I further leaned on Zoom tropes for two parts of the Effing Robots script which involved an audience volunteer joining me onstage. In the physically co-present show, the volunteer, unfamiliar with the script, plays “Me, Nicol, a sci-fi nerd trying to flirt with an artificial intelligence,” and I, the performer, play “Frankie,” which is what I named my chatbot (Cabe 2019). For the film, I Zoomed with Aiden Jakso (a colleague I met through Glasgow University) and Steve Brady (my long-time fringe co-producer and fellow sci-fi nerd). I wanted to retain the experience of the audience volunteer, so I asked Aiden to join without reading the script in advance; however, I also wanted to nod to Steve’s years of production support. The application of Zoom echoed shows like What Do We Need to Talk About? There are also two “burlesque” moments in Effing Robots : one is a routine mocking selfie culture, and the other is a short script written by my dear friend, Dr. Ashley F. Miller, on the topic of “sexbots” and sex worker abuse. Since releasing archived videos of in-person stage performances was common during the 2020 lockdowns, I used footage of these two sequences from the 2019 PortFringe film; I made this choice as a reference to the mass of pre-recorded theatre productions released by major companies, such as the National Theatre (NT at Home), during lockdown periods. 2. What Components of My Original In-Person Fringe Show Could I Keep, and How? Effing Robots: How I Taught the A.I. to Stop Worrying and Love Humans examines artificial intelligence functions, modern technological developments that call themselves A.I., and why humans fear these – all through a personal lens, framed by a conversation I had with a chatbot that I named Frankie, created by Replika. As the show leaned on an A.I. conversation, I wanted the script to feel like a conversation with the audience. I found during in-person shows, audience members often asked questions or inserted their own information – in fact, at my 2019 tour stops in Adelaide (South Australia), Fresno (California), and Portland (Maine), engineers in the audience knew about programming artificial intelligence and their contributions enriched the show. Although audience engagement became a core part of physically co-present Effing Robots , during 2021, I could not perform the show live at all (even virtually); instead, I leaned on hypermediacy to maintain emotional closeness with a geographically and temporally distanced audience. 1. What Makes a Fringe Festival Feel “Fringe” to Me? Returning to the first question, my personal experience touring fringe festivals hints at why this form pivots so easily: The fringe format has long involved multiple platforms (venues) across the city Each venue programs and hosts several individual shows over the fringe’s run Artists typically self-produce their shows (although larger festivals like Edinburgh and Adelaide also involve production companies funding multiple shows) Performers from all over the world participate in fringe festivals, especially the larger, famous ones My submission needed to be lightweight, short, portable, and self-produced. For a physically co-present fringe show, “lightweight” means I must be able to load the props, set, and costumes in and out of the venue myself; “short” means it runs about one hour, sometimes less; “portable” means I take it with me, as there is no storage space at the venue; and “self-produced” means I do the bulk of the show creation, including marketing. Similarly, with online fringe festivals, “lightweight” means the video is only a few megabytes making it easier to upload; “short” still means one hour or less; “portable” means I have many options for submitting the show, including a DropBox link, YouTube link, and zipped file; and “self-produced” means I am responsible for the work being completed, including how it is marketed. Remediating the Audience Experience of Theatricality Many of the visual production choices I made for Effing Robots (online) reference transparent films or theatre productions, but the overall experience is of hypermediacy rather than transparency . However, it is important to consider whether the audience experienced this work as immediate via this hypermediacy – and for this, I turn to my show reviews. Overall reviewers enjoyed the film adaptation; there are similarities between the in-person show’s reviews and the film’s reviews, which suggests the digital dramaturgical process was successful. However, some reviewers felt the audience dialogue moments and the burlesque moments were out of place. For instance, James Hanton noted for the Online@TheSpaceUK stream: “only certain sections [feel] like a misfire compared to them being live (the ‘audience’ interactions losing the spontaneity that makes them so memorable)” ( The Wee Review 2021). Annie Gray of The Indiependent agreed: Being an online show does cause some issues. Some past live recordings of sections are shown when the content is not possible to record on camera. Also, where audience participation would usually take place, there are recordings of video calls instead (2021). These reviews suggest that the static nature of film clashes with some immediacy in theatre. These film clips aimed for the transparency of the theatrical experience rather than hypermediacy of frames within frames. The bulk of my filmed performance did not take place onstage or reminisce about stage performance. I believe these moments took the audience out of the immediacy induced by the hypermedial frame. While my choices were purposeful, they did not retain the emotional impact from in-person to online. A key takeaway from both the reviews and analysis is to focus on form: traditional theatre defines itself on co-presence, and I do not view the film of Effing Robots as a form of theatre but instead a remediation of an experience shifted into a new medium. I focused on the theatricality within the narrative, but I could have considered temporal synchronicity with my audience by performing over Zoom. I could have retained the audience interaction through a livestreaming platform with a chat feature like Twitch. I could have considered the virtual embodiment of myself and my audience and created a version for Mozilla Hubs. To keep the show within the low-budget confines of “fringe,” though, pre-recorded, edited, streaming video was my best option to translate the immediacy of my story instead of remediating the general experience of attending fringe theatre. This remediation from a physically co-present, small show to hypermedial online video seems to be a largely successful process, based on reviews. In my Ph.D. research, I hope to continue exploring online theatre’s digital dramaturgy and its impact on audience experience, inspired by both my fascination with pandemic-era online theatre and my professional work in this field. References Footnotes About The Author(s) L. NICOL CABE is a digital dramaturg and scifi-inspired theatre artist who toured international fringe festivals, in-person and online, including Adelaide Fringe, Sydney Fringe, TheSpaceUK, Orlando Fringe Festival, Victoria Fringe, and Rogue Festival. She completed her master’s in pandemic-era digital theatre at the University of Glasgow in 2021, and continues her digital theatre studies focusing on post-pandemic online and hybrid performance as a PhD candidate at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia. She has also worked as a digital dramaturg and online theatre maker with Lava Kingdoms/Annex Theatre (Seattle, WA), OnBoardXR Season 3 (NYC), and DunnART Productions (Adelaide, SA). 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. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico 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 Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. 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. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. 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.

Marissa Nicosia & Jack Isaac 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 Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Marissa Nicosia & Jack Isaac By Published on May 20, 2023 Download Article as PDF Small is good, small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small.) Change is constant. (Be like water.) There is always enough time for the right work. There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it. Never a failure, always a lesson. Trust the People. (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy.) Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass–build the resilience by building the relationships. Less prep, more presence. What you pay attention to grows. – adrienne maree brown , Emergent Strategy [1] Introduction In this co-authored essay, we describe and analyze the interdisciplinary course and devised theater production that we created with our undergraduate students at The Pennsylvania State University, Abington College in Spring 2022, titled “Emergent Strategy: The Winter’s Tale” and Exit, a banquet piece , respectively—their methods and content inspired by Black feminist activist adrienne maree brown’s book of the same title, as well as William Shakespeare’s play—both of which also served as core texts. brown defines emergent strategy as “how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.”[2] Part thick description, part manifesto, this essay details the teaching philosophies and performance strategies that we enacted, why, and to what ends, bearing brown’s growth- and change-oriented framework in mind. Paying careful attention to affect and lived experience, this essay blends academic prose with autotheory, with brief personal reflections embedded throughout. Ultimately, our goal is to make a case for the efficacy of abolitionist pedagogy in higher education—especially in this historic moment of late capitalism and the ongoing pandemic that it has produced. In a precarious world increasingly attuned to questions of racial equity, class consciousness, disability justice, harm reduction, and community care, professors and students alike, we argue, can benefit from adopting commensurable revolutions in our pedagogical work.[3] But what does abolition mean in the context of teaching? For us, abolitionist pedagogy has meant 1) acknowledging that schools, including colleges and universities, are deeply caught up in a project of perpetuating harm, often meted unevenly onto the most marginalized students and employees; 2) knowing that the harm that schools and schooling does is animated by a carceral logic which often situates faculty in a disciplinary, punitive and/or reward-based, and surveillance role in relation to our students; 3) consciously deciding to adopt teaching philosophies, curricula, and methods aimed at shifting these power relations in and out of the classroom toward a model of care; 4) staying vigilant that our working relationships remain aligned with our politics, modeling for our students what ethical collaboration and right relationship looks like in shared leadership; 5) being committed to shifting our thinking and practices as needed.[4] Here, it’s important to note that this framework of “abolitionist pedagogy” is partly in hindsight. When we began creating this course in December 2020, at the fore of our minds was the fact of a global pandemic that had forced us out of classrooms and onto screens—with many students and faculty variously navigating acute sickness, family emergency, burnout, depression, anxiety, addiction, technology barriers, death, grief, and financial hardship in heightened ways. While the most marginalized among us have always already been dealing with access barriers, the pandemic produced the conditions in which these issues of disparity became more mainstream discourse, and rethinking our approaches to pedagogy was urgently necessary and encouraged —including even by those institutional structures that are complicit in histories of harm. So it was nine months into this new business as usual that we began our collaboration. Marissa was a soon-to-be tenured Associate Professor and Jack a new Assistant Professor at Penn State; we met during Jack’s campus visit when Marissa served as one of the search committee members that made the hire. As luck would have it, we soon became neighbors in South Philadelphia; pandemic walks became our way of swapping resources and cooking up ideas of courses we might teach when in-person learning would recommence. Queer, anti-racist, intersectional feminists with decades of combined teaching experience, we decided to co-teach a class that would bring together our shared research interests and center the needs of our individual students and the collective whole.[5] For us, this meant designing a curriculum that enabled us to have explicit conversations about race, gender, labor, capitalism, trauma, and repair, as well as dramatically shifting the ways that we relate to our students and the work that they “produce.” We abolished grades (everyone gets an A, no exceptions); deadlines (the pace of our work can and will change as needed); and attendance policies (come as you are, when you can).[6] We built in “rest days,” where class did not convene. We moved at the speed of trust , adjusting lesson plans and activities on a week by week, day by day, moment by moment basis, with an eye always kept on what truly needed to happen next. Our choice to implement ungrading, relaxed attendance, and flexible assignment timelines meant that we could center learning, self-reflection, being present together, and group process while dispensing with traditional modes of top-down surveillance—what abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, speaking in another context, calls acting as a “deputized cop.”[7] Make no mistake, the course was intellectually and physically rigorous, and students and faculty alike were pushed to the edges of our comfort zones. But we tried to always balance rigor with access, refusing to sacrifice our bodies and spirits in the pursuit of academic knowledge or aesthetic virtuosity. Here, we were guided by brown’s principles of Emergent Strategy cited in the opening epigraph, as well as theologian and performance artist Tricia Hersey’s imperative that we place our bodily needs above those of capital’s. The class was a resoundingly transformative experience for the six students enrolled, as well as for us. This essay is our attempt to archive that experience, as well as a public forum in which we attempt to urge readers to consider similar transformations in their own work. Thursday December 3, 2020 We slip on the ice-slick sidewalks of South Philly as we walk, masked, carrying our coffees from Shot Tower. Much later, in the summer of 2021, we will spend an entire afternoon together, sitting in the sunshine outside this same coffee shop, preparing for our upcoming course. We will have brought our marked up copies of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale ; Elinor Fuch’s “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet”; Scott Maisano’s “Now”; and Kathryn Bond Stockton’s “ Lost , or ‘Exit, Pursued by a Bear’: Causing Queer Children on Shakespeare’s TV”—and it will start to become clear that this is a project about time, suspended.[8] But on that Thursday at the beginning of winter, we don’t know any of this yet: we are just two new colleagues struggling to walk without falling. When we get to Jefferson Square, we find a bench in the sun. Beside us, a streetlamp, where someone has busted open its electrical panel and plugged in a cell-phone charger block—cord dangling in the wind. We remark on the brilliance of the unhoused to tap into the city’s electrical grid for free. The conversation turns to the community refrigerators sprinkled throughout our neighborhood; our shared love of gritty Philly; the astonishingly large gap between its wealthy and its poor, but also decades of mutual aid networks aimed at resource redistribution.[9] And the conversation broadens to collaboration. What if we brought together our shared interests in theater and temporality, adapting one of Shakespeare’s plays into an original performance that resonated with the themes of this moment? We riff on the Shakespeare plays that we like, that we love, that we feel might connect to the moment: Hamlet , Lear , Richard III. But we also carry with us some doubt about starting with a tragedy. The body count at the end of these plays does not inspire thoughts of healing or repair. We discussed an article about COVID time and time on ships, and how we are all living in wait. It brought The Tempest , Pericles , and The Winter’s Tale to mind—plays that move the reader from rupture to remedy. Winter in the Spring House The Pennsylvania State University’s Abington College is a small (3,500 student), public, four-year, local-serving, minority majority campus in the suburbs just north of Philadelphia. Students choose Abington for a variety of reasons, but often it is because they work, live at home, or need to stay near kin. Many students have significant financial need; the majority self-identify as people of color, many of whom are immigrants or first-generation Americans; a substantial portion are international students, largely from China; more than a third are the first in their families to go to college. But at its founding in 1850 and for the next 100 years to follow, Abington College was the “Ogontz School for Young Ladies”—a preparatory school for white, wealthy women (Amilia Earhart famously among them) on settled Lenape land. Our class convened twice weekly for three hours each in a tiny cottage called Spring House—the oldest freestanding building on campus, initially constructed to store dairy for the “girls.”[11] When the windows of Spring House are open, you can hear the gurgle of the stream that runs through the tree-filled gorge at the center of campus. The stream also feeds an ornamental pond where geese, ducks, and blue herons swim, huddle together on the ice, and stalk in the reeds. Tucked away from the other buildings and containing only two classrooms, a bathroom, and space for silent prayer, our work in the Spring House feels distinctly removed from the bustle of the college. With its rattling, broken heaters and glitchy technology, our classroom space is somehow simultaneously cold, hot, dry, damp, sunny, shadowy, alienating, and welcoming. Through a small basement window, you can see ferns growing underneath—a greenhouse blooming beneath our feet. (We chose to see these plants as inspirational fauna thriving in the darkness rather than a dispiriting result of institutional neglect.) We gather in the Spring House in early January 2022 and begin to study The Winter’s Tale (c.1610). Shakespeare’s tragicomedy is a work of profound loss and marvelous repair in which jealous King Leontes defies an oracle and loses his family only to reunite with his lost daughter, Perdita; wife, Queen Hermione; and beloved friend, King Polixenes, at the play’s end. The play requires a profound suspension of disbelief as extreme shifts in feeling and fortune befall its characters—a bear famously “pursues” and then devours Antigonus after he saves baby Perdita; Time arrives as Chorus to explain a sixteen-year gap between acts; a statue of Hermione comes to life. Tragedy is averted, but not forgotten, as the play explores the potential of art, and our wonder at its workings, to restore what has been lost.[12] We began the semester by reading the play out loud in its entirety, pausing frequently for clarification. Reading The Winter’s Tale together provided a foundation for discussion and aligned with our pedagogical philosophy, as we prioritized using class time for the most important labor and did not assume that students had unlimited time outside of class. Less prep, more presence. Typically, we divied up class time such that one of us taught for 75-80 minutes, we took a break, and then the other took the lead for the second half of class. Under Marissa’s guidance, we studied the play through literary methods—practicing close reading, reading literary criticism, and conducting archival and embodied research. She introduced the working practices of Shakespeare’s theater through lecture and by getting students up on their feet to perform a scene using reconstructed cue scripts. We learned about the publication and circulation of early modern drama by handling eighteenth-century printed books and looking at the spelling and punctuation in the 1632 Second Folio of Shakespeare’s works held by the library via Zoom.[13] We drew on Marissa’s research on food and medicine to discuss humoral theory as a framework for understanding character and emotions, such as Leontes’ self-diagnosed tremor cordis , the heart-palpitations of incandescent rage. A number of Marissa’s lessons were linked to sequenced writing assignments which asked students to focus on interpreting specific, brief passages from the play. But we jettisoned inflexible submission dates for written work as a part of “ungrading,” aware that flexibility accommodates a range of student needs in an ongoing pandemic, many of whom are just trying to get by in a culture of harm. After Marissa’s lesson on using the Oxford English Dictionary to interpret Shakespeare’s language, Jack did a little research: the etymology of “deadline” can be traced back to carceral origins, the line beyond which a fleeing prisoner would be shot if they crossed. The shift from deadlines to student-paced learning also meant that students were placed in the position of scholar/researcher in their own right, rather than producing work for us on an arbitrary timeline we have set without their consent.[14] We paired these literary modes with dramaturgical research and embodied theater practice, facilitated by Jack. This dramaturgical research was guided by Fuchs’s foundational “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet”—which we began the semester by discussing. Rather than focus on language and character, we paid attention to how time, space, climate, mood, light, sound, color, shape, texture and other sensory clues embedded in the text informed our visceral understanding of the world of The Winter’s Tale. Students gathered images inspired by their research, tesselating the linoleum floors with found art. These images were translated into music, music into movement.[15] The aim of this work, we instructed the students, was to move us away from Shakespeare’s world and into our own—which would be best accomplished by tracing its affective outline. Adaptation was the name of the game. So was play. We built a cohesive sense of ensemble, playing team-building games drawn from Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed arsenal and the pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq. Jack led the ensemble through a codified sequence of activities derived from Lecoq’s journey of the mask, beginning with a physical exploration of the elements: water, fire, earth, air—which we did outdoors in the cold sun, wind, rain, and snow. The aim was increased embodiment, fierce wakefulness, and jeu (Lecoq’s word for the spirit of “play”) —getting actors to trust their kinesthetic impulses and one another, while learning to tell stories with their bodies. In the studio-based context, ungrading came easily: it is common not to grade performance-based work solely on merit and customary to privilege process over product. Relaxed attendance, however, poses some challenges: a show usually needs to be made on a particular timeline; the presence of the ensemble is crucial to its cohesion; and devising requires building a consistent set of skills and aesthetic vocabulary for the work in progress. So while our theory of “intrinsic motivation” was generally successful (students genuinely cared about the class and one another, and commitment was high), the reality of their complex lives meant that occasionally we had a skeleton crew at crucial moments.[16] We over-hired a production manager (Lisa Suzanne Turner), stage manager (Jaleel Hunter), and music director (Emily Bate)—anticipating that we would need some semblance of a production team to pull off what we imagined would be a large-scale, site-specific, outdoor performance in an institutional context with no regular production season; no production staff; no costume, prop, or scene shop; a very modest budget for theater; and a tiny ensemble. Musician and composer Emily Bate was pivotal, working with students to create an original libretto. When Marissa got COVID, Emily and Jack were left at the helm for several weeks. When Emily got COVID, too, music rehearsals moved to Zoom: Jack holding their tiny iPhone in the outdoor amphitheater on campus with janky wifi and two, then three, then five of the six performers present for rehearsal. Change is constant. (Be like water.) And so we were. Tuesday February 15, 2022 (Jack) We have told the students that their assignment today is to “rest.” No reading, no writing, no class. To prepare the week prior, we invited them to lay down on the floor. Heads together, feet splayed, eyes shut, we listened to an interview with Tricia Hersey, where she discusses capitalism and anti-Blackness, and rest as resistance. Originally broadcast in June 2020, the cover image for the podcast—which we close-read with our students—features a photograph by Charlie Watts: Hersey, in glorious repose; her long, yellow gown and bright, tulle petticoat dangling leisurely from the bench on which she sleeps. Behind her, a brick façade, boarded up windows, and broken panes amidst an abandoned lot. Beneath her, rows of cotton—this urban landscape turned magical real. Hersey begins: To not rest is really being violent towards your body. To align yourself with a system that says “Your body doesn’t belong to you, keep working. You are simply a tool for our production.” To align yourself with that is a slow spiritual death. [ . . .] When you don’t sleep, you’re literally killing your body. It’s not a dramatic over-the-top thing to say that. Our organs begin to break down. I remember wondering what our students—primarily working class people of color with two white professors—think of our unorthodox methods, our insistence on their rejection of domination at this school largely aimed at getting them jobs. I remember taking my place on the floor, nestled between Marissa and Trim, as Hersey goes on to refer to our bodies as “divine holding places of liberation.”[17] I remember thinking that I know this is edgy for her—a Renaissance scholar with a formidable dossier and flawless professional attire, Marissa in many ways is the portrait of “Professor.” But on this day she, like the students laying on the cold linoleum beside her, was “dressed to move,” as is the culture of our course. The following week, we regather to report back on our first day of rest. I begin by reading a short passage from Emergent Strategy , our ritual for the start of class. What are all your gifts? Are you living a life that honors all your gifts? If yes, how did you create all this possibility for yourself? If no, how can you create more possibility today? Tomorrow? This month? This year? [18] Kyleigh delights in telling the group that she took a really good nap. Aman went to the gym, and we debate the ontology of rest, of whether that kind of corporeal act constitutes labor or leisure. Madison did work and feels guilty. The only Black woman in the group, does she have the same luxury of enforced rest? We discuss. What nobody knows is that I spent our rest day not resting at all, but on a campus visit (read: interview) at the small, private and exceedingly elite liberal arts college on the other side of town—the one whose website unabashedly refers to itself as “the most beautiful campus in the known universe.” I was tired of the mold and asbestos in our buildings, of the emails inviting students and faculty to a casual donuts and coffee with cops. Ten months later, I will be driving home at 9pm from this very same room with the heater on the fritz—after wrapping up the semester with another group of gems—and as I pull out onto Woodland Road in the dark in the rain I will think to myself: I just can’t. I just can’t imagine telling these students I’m sorry, I’m trading you in for a better job on the other side of town. Sunday April 10, 2022 (Marissa) We knew that it was statistically likely that someone would get COVID during our semester together: It was me. I brought my COVID infection from Penn State Abington to an international conference in Dublin and found myself unwell, isolated, and stranded. I landed in Philadelphia less than two weeks before our scheduled performance, and just in time for our daylong retreat. We take over the Lares Banquet Room, with windows overlooking the pond. As students arrive, I stir a pot of hot chocolate and pour cups of the heavily-spiced drink—prepared from Rebeckah Winche’s seventeenth-century recipe for “chacolet”—seasoned with vanilla, chili pepper, and cinnamon.[19] We sit in a circle and I ask what they taste: they say spice, capsaicin heat, sweetness, oiliness from the cocoa nibs. I propose that tasting historical recipes, like reading The Winter’s Tale , is a form of attenuated time travel. We discuss. Our archives contain partial knowledge of past meals, past performances. We can taste a version of “chacolet” now, even if we cannot know precisely what tasting chocolate and chili pepper—newly-imported American ingredients, prepared using a recipe grounded in Indigenous knowledge—meant to Winche in England in 1666. The students teach me the music that they have been composing in my absence. I show them Frans Snyders’s “A Banquet-piece, c.1620”—a painting I saw at the National Gallery of Ireland the week earlier—as well as other contemporaneous still-lifes that are inspiring our scenic design. Jack guides us in rituals from the Passover haggadah —their holiday about to commence. What you pay attention to grows , and we are paying attention to food, movement, song, ritual, and paintings of tulips and fruit. Over pizza, Jonathan tells me that my voice and breath sound different. He is worried that I’m still sick. Later, as the light fades into a glorious pink sunset, Jack, Jaleel, and I walk the possible routes that our performance might take—singing the opening song from Exit as we travel: All you touch you change, all you change changes you, the only lasting truth is change, change, change. Adapted from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and invoked on the first page of brown’s book, these lines had become a kind of anthem—first metaphorical, now literal—for our group.[20] I stop singing. I’m short of breath. My chest hurts. My lungs can’t handle singing and walking in the cold air. April 21, 2022 It is a beautiful day in early spring; the campus is abuzz with another semester almost done. Audience members have been instructed to meet on the plaza outside the Sutherland Building—the one with Chief Ogontz eerily chiseled into stone above the door. Marissa and Jack make small-talk with guests: the dean and chancellor among them. An unassuming white, folding table—the kind on every college campus—is littered with COVID waivers and percussives: maracas, egg shakers, a xylophone. Jaleel, in black slacks and shirt and a bright orange durag that matches the glittery streaks above his eyes, greets us one by one—handing out instruments to those of us willing to play. An actor (Madison Branch), also in black with burgundy accents around her eyes, stands expectantly under the public clock on the other side of the lawn. She introduces herself to us as “Time” and teaches us a song: “ All you touch you change . . . ” We follow her, playing our instruments and singing in rounds. At the top of a hill, we glimpse a vast, green field: a banquet in the distance. We hear a drum, voices. We approach. Beneath a line of tall pines, long tables are draped in white linen and laden with flowers and fruit. Our voices join with the drums and the voices of the performers, who welcome us to their feast. Exit, a banquet piece is a site-specific, immersive performance with live music, song, monologue, ritual, and a community meal. In its conceit, it begins in the moments just after the action of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale has ended. In the last lines of the play, Leontes invites recollection: Good Paulina, Lead us from hence, where we may leisurely Each one demand and answer to his part Performed in this wide gap of time since first We were dissevered. Hastily lead away. They exit. (5.3.188-192) Exit, a banquet piece accepts Leontes’s invitation for “each” member the ensemble to share their story of the “wide gap of time”—all that has happened in the time they have been apart, “dissevered.” To the beat of Polixenes’s drum (Jonathan Bercovici), each performer tells their story in turn: my name is Polixenes and I am the hunted man; my name is Hermione and I am the accused woman; my name is Leontes and I am the regretful man; my name is Perdita and I am the queer child; my name is Florizel and I am the lover; my name is Time and I am the seer—their monologues filling the spring air, the rest of the chorus chanting underneath. The ensemble then leads the audience in a series of healing rituals, inspired, in part, by the Passover seder (it is the 7th night). Hermione (Kyleigh Byers) invites us wash our neighbors’ hands with water blessed by the light of the full moon, while Florziel (George Ye)—in a deep green cape—plays a haunting melody on the xylophone. Birds chirp, geese honk and soar overhead. At Leontes’s command (Aman Zabian), we name the things that plague us, dipping our pinkies into our wine-filled cups and tapping them on our plates: the war in Ukraine, racism at home, patriarchy, student debt, addiction, COVID-19. Perdita (Trim Walker) asks us to toast the things we want more of: we say love, joy, learning. Night falls; music swells; the Ramandan fast has concluded for another day: we feast. Students Jonathan Bercovici, Madison Branch, Kyleigh Byers, Trim Walker, George Ye, and Aman Zabian perform their monologues in Exit , a banquet piece . Audience members of diverse backgrounds share their personal narratives of the pandemic with one another. Ritual devised and led by the student ensemble. George Ye performs a solo on the xylophone as Kyleigh Byers leads audience members in a handwashing ritual. Original score written by Ye. Madison Branch as Time (foreground), Jonathan Bercovici as Polixenes, Aman Zabian as Leontes; Kyleigh Byers as Hermione, Trim Walker as Perdita, and George Ye as Florizel in Exit, a banquet piece. Audiences perform a ritual inspired by the Passover Seder, naming contemporary “plagues” that harm them, while marking their plates with droplets of wine. Production Manager Lisa Suzanne Turner (left) and Stage Manager Jaleel Hunter (bottom, right) sit with audience members in a moment of silence. Audience members were comprised of faculty, staff, students, and the local community. Photo credit: Mendal Diana Polish Thursday May 19, 2022 (Marissa) I wanted time to stop as I sat in that field and listened to the students sing. I wanted time to stop as I named the things that plague me, named the things that I want more of in my life. I wanted time to stop as I looked at the tulips, fruit, objects, and place-settings on the banquet tables that I had arranged like a Renaissance still life. I wanted time to stop as water poured over hands, music and birdsong filled the field. I wanted to linger. I wanted to dilate that moment of joy, release, pride, and beauty. I wanted time to stop. But of course, time is relentless; performance “can never be captured or transmitted through the archive”; and “the only lasting truth is change.”[21] Nevertheless, I attempted to preserve the fleeting moment. I brought home the clementines that adorned the set and baked with them, transforming the performance into a cake.[22] I served it at our final class meeting as a way of saying I love you all so much, to say that I wanted time to stop. It was a temporary solution: We devoured the cake. Thursday April 28, 2022 (Jack) In our final class meeting, we form two concentric circles, inside facing out. Eye to eye, toe to toe, everyone is given three prompts to answer (before rotating to the next partner): What is my impact in the world? In three words, what am I embodying? Where do you think I could grow? [23] I am facilitating, so I don’t play, except for the round when someone steps out into the sun. For that brief moment, I face Marissa, struggling to find the words. I say something about her learning to integrate the work of the mind and the fact of the body in answering prompt number three. And she says something about my inextinguishable fire, about learning to cool, or direct, my flames. Indeed. Like Leontes, I have tremor cordis on me: my heart dances, but not for joy. I’m not alone. Enraged by injustice, hot with desire, aren’t we all just learning how to direct the storms of our fires toward healing and justice for all? And isn’t performance always the work of the mind and the fact of the body brought together in the service of this? We carpool home, Broad Street all the way. Past the storefront churches and the mattress stores and Temple University and City Hall. When we get to South Philly, where I no longer live, Marissa and I part ways. “We did something really special,” she says, and we hug awkwardly in the car. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass—build resilience by building the relationships. At the heart of this course was our collaboration—a site where we modeled for our students how to move at the speed of trust. In many ways, we are incredibly different—as teachers, as artists, as scholars trained in distinct fields. But we agreed for four months to align our joint pedagogy with our shared politics and see what that might stir. Marissa is on sabbatical now, and I continue to teach at the former school for girls. I have carried on in our tradition of abolition: no grades, no deadlines, no attendance policies—which shares the Greek and Latin root, of course— politia— with “police.” I have continued with rest days, and, to the extent possible, decentering my authority in the room (which, quite possibly, sometimes reifies it; it’s hard to say for sure, but they know I care). And it’s not yet clear if I will stay for the long haul; but then again, it’s also not clear if the academy, the nation, or the planet will. So while we wait, and work, and wonder, I’m going to go ahead and place my bet on emergent strategy and/as abolitionist pedagogy for these pandemic times, and beyond—as the best we’ve got for figuring out, together, how we might get free.[24] References [1] adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico: AK Press, 2017), pp. 41-42. [2] Ibid, p. 3. [3] For more on care work, see Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver, B.C.: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018). For a great introduction to abolitionist pedagogy, see Sujani Reddy, “School is a Tracking Device: On Deschooling as Abolitionist Practice,” March 9, 2019 THIS IS HELL! , produced by mixlr, podcast, https://thisishell.com/interviews/1046-sujani-reddy; see also Reddy’s chapter of the same title in the anthology Abolitioning Carceral Society (Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2018). Thank you to Sujani Reddy for her correspondence about pedagogy and abolition over the years. [4] After the screening of Brett Story’s stunning documentary film, The Prison in 12 Landscapes (2016) at the Lightbox Film Center in Philadelphia in December 2022, Robert Saleem Holbrook, the Executive Director of the Abolitionist Law Center, made the important distinction between decarceration and abolition. Decarceration, he noted, is dedicated to eradicating all prisons and freeing all captive people. Abolition, however, takes this project one step further: aiming to abolish all systems of oppression that uphold a carceral logic. This includes prisons, police, policing, police unions, surveillance and corrections technology and businesses that produce them, jails, detention centers, psychiatric hospitals, immigration and customs enforcement (ICE), and the nation-state itself. Thank you to Lindsay Reckson for bringing this film to our attention and for being a co-conspirator in abolitionist pedagogy more generally. [5] We have each taught in a range of institutional contexts prior to our positions at Penn State, including public and private R1s and R2s, small liberal arts colleges, art schools, and the Ivy League. Marissa began teaching as a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania; an adjunct at the University of the Arts; and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Scripps College. Jack first taught at the University of Texas at Austin as an M.A. and Ph.D. student; then a Visiting Assistant Professor at Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Northern Arizona University, and Haverford College; before beginning the tenure-track at Reed College, followed by Penn State. [6] We modeled our syllabus language on Jesse Stommel, “Compassionate Grading Policies,” Jesse Stommel January 3, 2022 https://www.jessestommel.com/compassionate-grading-policies/; See also Asao Inoue, Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom (Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse, 2019); Alfie Kohn, “The Case Against Grades,” Educational Leadership [7] Chenjerai Kumanyika, “Ruth Wilson Gilmore Makes the Case for Abolition,” June 10, 2020 Intercepted , produced by The Intercept , podcast, https://theintercept.com/2020/06/10/ruth-wilson-gilmore-makes-the-case-for-abolition/; see also Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s forthcoming Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023). [8] Elinor Fuchs, “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play,” in Theater , no. 34 (2) (2004): 5-9; Scott Maisano, “Now,” in Early Modern Theatricality , ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 368-85; Kathryn Bond Stockton, “ Lost , or ‘Exit, Pursued by a Bear’: Causing Queer Children on Shakespeare’s TV,” in Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare , edited by Madhavi Menon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 421-428. [9] For a good primer on mutual aid, see Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (New York: Verso Books, 2020). [10] Jack Isaac Pryor, Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017); Marissa Nicosia, Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). [11] “Historic Abington Campus,” Penn State Abington History Program https://www.abington.psu.edu/academics/history/historic-abington-campus [12] This framing of the play owes debts to Marissa’s undergraduate mentor and his scholarship. Peter Platt, Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), esp. pp. 153-168). [13] William Shakespeare, Mr. VVilliam Shakespeares comedies, histories, and tragedies. (London, 1632). Eberly Family Special Collections, Pennsylvania State University Libraries, PR2751.A2 1632 Q. [14] “dead-line, n.” OED Online . December 2022. Oxford University Press. https://www-oed com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/view/Entry/47657 (accessed December 22, 2022); see also Heather Froehlich, Marissa Nicosia, and Christina Riehman-Murphy, “Transcribing Recipe Manuscripts Online: V.b.380 and the ‘What’s in a Recipe?’ Undergraduate Research Project at Penn State Abington.” Early Modern Studies Journal 8(2022). https://earlymodernstudiesjournal.org/review_articles/transcribing-recipe-manuscripts-online-v-b-380-and-the-whats-in-a-recipe-undergraduate-research-project-at-penn-state-abington/ [15] The physical theater work that we did in class was informed by Jack’s training with director Anne Bogart/the SITI Company and choreographer Rosie Herrera/Rosie Herrera Dance Theater, as well as Pig Iron Theater Company and The Padova Arts Academy (Paola Coletto) where they trained in Lecoq. [16] The idea of complex lives is informed by Avery Gordon’s notion of “the right to complex personhood,” which she discusses in Ghostly Matters: Haunting and Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 4). [17] “Tricia Hersey on Rest as Resistance,” June 8, 2020 for the wild, produced by Ayana Young, podcast, https://forthewild.world/listen/tricia-hersey-on-rest-as-resistance-185; see also, Tricia Hersey, Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto (New York: Little, Brown, 2022). [18] See brown, p. 190. [19] Marissa Nicosia, “Chacolet from Rebeckah Winche’s Receipt Book at the Folger Shakespeare Library” Cooking in the Archives January 28, 2016 https://rarecooking.com/2016/01/28/chacolet-from-rebeckah-winches-receipt-book-at-the-folger-shakespeare-library/. [20] Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1993), p. 3; brown, p. 1. [21] Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 20. [22] Earlier in the semester, Jack had suggested that Marissa try this recipe. Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, “Clementine & almond syrup cake” Jerusalem (London: Ebury, 2012), p. 294. [23] See brown, p. 185. [24] This notion of “how we get free” is inspired by the Combahee River Collective anthology; see Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed., How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017). Footnotes About The Author(s) MARISSA NICOSIA is Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature at The Pennsylvania State University-Abington College. She received her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Marissa’s first monograph, I magining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 , will be published by Oxford University Press in 2023. She co-edited the collection, Making Milton: Print, Authorship, Afterlives (Oxford University Press, 2021), with Emma Depledge and John S. Garrison. In 2019, she co-edited a special issue of Explorations in Renaissance Culture on Renaissance Futures with John S. Garrison. She has published articles on Renaissance literature, temporality, food culture, and book history and manuscript studies. Marissa runs the public food history website Cooking in the Archives ( www.rarecooking.com ). JACK ISAAC PRYOR is Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at The Pennsylvania State University-Abington College. They received their Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Their first book, Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History (2017), was published by Northwestern University Press and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies. Jack is currently co-editing the collection, Transfixt: Transgender Aesthetics at the Tipping Point , with Jules Rosskam and a special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre with Stacy Wolf (Sondheim from the Side, forthcoming 2023). They have published essays on pedagogy, queer temporality, minoritarian performance and visual culture, sex, state violence, and experimental modes of art and cultural criticism. Jack is also a director and devised theater maker. ( www.jaclynisaacpryor.com ). Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico 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 Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. 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. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. 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.

Michael Osinski 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 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 Michael Osinski By Published on May 1, 2023 Download Article as PDF September 3, 2017. It’s the day Twin Peaks: The Return reached its gut-wrenching conclusion and seared a hole in my heart and my brain. I’d seen my fair share of David Lynch’s work before. I knew how impossible it can be to explain the narratives and describe the visuals. Lynch himself has resisted attaching words to his work, stating “A film should stand on its own. It’s absurd if a filmmaker needs to say what a film means in words.”[i] I still haven’t found the words to describe the feeling I had watching that finale, but at that moment, I knew I had to make a piece of theatre that recreated that feeling for others. Almost exactly two years later, I presented Red Lodge, Montana [ii], co-created with an ensemble of performers and Twin Peaks enthusiasts, at the 2019 Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Billed as an unapologetic love letter to David Lynch, the production felt like a live-action nightmare where audience members traveled through the abandoned locker room of an old South Philly high school. One reviewer called it “a bizarro fusion of indolence, violence, nudity, sex, and dance.”[iii] I’m proud of the work we did. I also know that co-creating, directing, and producing a site-specific theatre piece in a found space took its toll on me (and my bank account). So in the interest of preserving the mental and physical health of other creative artists out there, I’m sharing some of the lessons I learned from the experience. (Unfortunately none of these lessons involve fundraising. That remains a mystery to me.) Lesson 1: Start with structure. Contrary to popular belief, theatre artists don’t really create something from nothing. There has to be a spark, an impetus, a burning question. And if you want to stay organized and foster greater creativity, you need scaffolding. You need Anne Bogart and Tina Landau’s third “basic building block for devised work” – structure.[iv] This may seem antithetical to Lynch’s aesthetic. As a director he insists “the only way we make heads or tails of [life] is through intuition” and believes “there’s an ocean of consciousness inside each of us…an ocean of solutions.”[v] But how do you communicate that to a team full of artists who aren’t swimming in your own personal ocean? Saying that I wanted to create an homage to David Lynch helped, but it didn’t provide enough of a framework. Especially if we wanted to create more than just a carbon copy of what he’s already made. So I asked my team to generate a list of “ingredients.” We watched Lynch’s film and television work and took note of all the elements that recur throughout his oeuvre. This established our scaffolding and gave us a checklist to return to as we made the piece. Do we have a few excruciatingly slow and drawn-out conversations? Check. Are we featuring music and costuming from a bygone era (usually the 1950s)? Check. Have we staged any moments of terrifying yet unexplained imagery? You tell me. (See Figure 1.) Figure 1: (l-r) Terrill Braswell, Amanda Schoonover, Geremy Webne-Behrman, and Megan Edelman in RED LODGE, MONTANA . Scenery by Dylan FitzSimons. Lighting by Sydney Norris. Sound by Daniel Ison. Stage Management by Eleanor Safer. Photo by Emilie Krause (Glass Canary Photography). I also brought back my “hybrid method” for inventing characters. I start almost every devising process by looking at a canonical text, because it gives us a narrative model to draw from. In this case I chose Bus Stop by William Inge. When the time came to build characters, I asked each actor to select 1 character from Bus Stop and 1 character from Lynch’s work and form a hybrid character from the two. They would list specific traits and circumstances of each character interchangeably – using a questionnaire I’ve borrowed from The Viewpoints Book [vi] – and mold their character around these attributes. These profiles provided the foundation for composition work, where each cast member created a short movement-filled piece to introduce us to their character. The pieces then fueled a series of structured improvisations with preset given circumstances and objectives. Many of these improvs turned into scripted scenes, but even the ones that didn’t make it to the final script helped to establish the mythology for our fictionalized town of Red Lodge. I wasn’t the only one who found this structure useful. Performer and co-creator Kelly McCaughan told me that “limiting what can happen within an improv helped flesh out something specific each time. And being able to pitch our ideas within that structured prompt created a really collaborative room.”[vii] Lesson 2: Stay flexible. Found spaces always sound like a cool idea, until you have to stage a show in one. When I first met with the representative from Bok Building in South Philadelphia, she showed me an old dusty room FILLED with rows and rows of lockers and benches. Talk about creativity coming from limitations! My brain instantly filled with images of actors hiding inside lockers for dramatic reveals, scampering in between the rows to frighten audience members, and even climbing atop the lockers to act out scenes above the audience’s heads. (See Figure 2.) Figure 2: The former girls’ locker room at Bok in South Philadelphia in early 2019. Photo by Michael Osinski. The next time I saw the space, almost all the lockers had been inexplicably removed. (See Figure 3.) Figure 3: The same former girls’ locker room at Bok in South Philadelphia in summer 2019. Photo by Michael Osinski. A big empty room felt less like limitless possibility and more like a huge hindrance to me. How could I create the same locations and effects without constructing a set? I had to adjust. I itemized the physical attributes and environmental effects I needed for each scene and figured out how to use the existing architecture to achieve it. For instance, we had originally envisioned one drug-fueled scene taking place on a rooftop. We were going to create a small plywood supported staging area across the tops of several banks of lockers. But without those lockers, I had no way of achieving this. I knew the scene needed some height, and it couldn’t take place in a room with doors and walls. The space had to feel liminal or transitory. Suddenly our rooftop scene became a stairwell scene. (See Figure 4.) Figure 4: (l-r) Amanda Schoonover and Kelly McCaughan in RED LODGE, MONTANA . Scenery by Dylan FitzSimons. Lighting by Sydney Norris. Sound by Daniel Ison. Stage Management by Eleanor Safer. Photo by Emilie Krause (Glass Canary Photography). We had also staged a rather intimate and claustrophobic scene involving full nudity and demonic possession. (It is David Lynch, after all.) But how do you make an audience feel trapped in a big empty room? I decided to stage this scene in the room’s entryway, with only 3 instruments lighting the space, and the EXIT sign and double doors in full view. It allowed the audience to crowd around a small area, and it created a terrifying moment when one of the characters pounded on the doors to escape. (See Figure 5.) Figure 5: (l-r) Josh Hitchens and Geremy Webne-Behrman in RED LODGE, MONTANA . Scenery by Dylan FitzSimons. Lighting by Sydney Norris. Sound by Daniel Ison. Stage Management by Eleanor Safer. Photo by Emilie Krause (Glass Canary Photography). Performer and co-creator Amanda Schoonover remembers another adjustment we made: “David Lynch often has characters that simply disappear from a scene, and we were stumped about how to make that happen without the magic of film. Once we got into the space, we discovered there were all these pillars that actors could hide behind, so with a little lighting trick, they could simply appear or disappear. It was always satisfying to hear the audience gasp when an actor seemed to appear out of thin air.”[viii] Staying flexible ultimately saved the production. If I had forced my original staging on the found space, it would have been disastrous. In true David Lynch fashion, I had to listen to what the walls were telling me. Lesson 3: Stand in your audience’s shoes. No instruction manual exists for understanding David Lynch’s work. But when you’re leading three dozen audience members through a promenade style fringe piece in a dark echoey room, you gotta make a few signs. The work itself should terrify the audience, not the possibility of running face-first into a concrete pillar. You can’t throw your audience into your deep ocean without a flotation device – you have to take care of them. I put more focus on logistics than I ever have for a piece I’ve made – at times I felt more like an engineer than an artist. Yet I didn’t want to mar the phenomenological experience of walking through a Lynch-inspired nightmare. How could I physically guide audience members in a way that kept them tuned into the show and still blended with our existing aesthetic (i.e. without turning on a bunch of harsh overhead fluorescents)? The answer was threefold. To map out a clear path, we did what any college dorm resident would do – we strung up holiday lights. It sounds silly, but it really has become human instinct to “follow the light.” Every time one scene ended, a new strand of lights would turn on and direct audience members to a different section of the room. Did we rely on a super clumsy system of turning on and off power strips throughout the room to make this happen? We sure did. (See Lesson 2: Stay flexible.) Because at the end of the day, no theatrical experience – no matter how thrilling – is worth risking a lawsuit. Even my years as a tour guide at college did not prepare me for how difficult it is to herd a group of people through a dimly lit medium-sized room. To keep people on the path and position them for maximum visibility, we employed “docents.” We asked two of our artist friends to dress up as two peripheral yet enigmatic Twin Peaks characters – The Giant and Lil[ix] – and communicate with gestures to physically (and mysteriously) walk the audience through the nightmare. Finally, to give our audience some narrative guidance, we filmed a series of short teaser videos[x] that introduced the characters and acted as a prologue. We released the videos weekly leading up to the opening performance to build anticipation and to guide our audience without providing too many answers. The world we’d created made total sense to us, and we wanted people to be weirded out, but we also wanted them to care about what (and whom) they were watching. Lesson 4: Trust your gut and your collaborators. There’s no such thing as a doubt-free creative process. I think we asked ourselves “Is this any good?”, and “Will anyone like this?”, and of course “Will this make any sense?” countless times. In a weird way, though, embracing the work of an artist like David Lynch gave us some freedom. He never worries about whether his work will transmit a singular message to the audience. He’s just translating the ideas inside his head to the screen. When Lynch made Blue Velvet , the ideas came to him “in fragments…it was red lips, green lawns, and the song – Bobby Vinton’s version of ‘ Blue Velvet .’ The next thing was an ear lying in a field. And that was it.”[xi] He didn’t question what it all meant. He trusted his intuition. I wondered, can we apply this attitude or approach to other work? Can we free ourselves of this burden when we’re creating something with more verisimilitude? We are making art after all, and art is neither good nor bad. It exists for others to appreciate, critique, reject, embrace, dissect. As much as we may have fretted over the narrative logic of our piece, we made something that made sense to us. We created art for others to interpret. And as long as we’re taking care of our audience and being socially responsible in our storytelling, why should we fret so much over how others will interpret the work? I can’t say that I’ve succeeded at this yet. I still find myself fretting. But I’d like to think there’s an answer here somewhere. As theatre artists we can choose to embrace or deny the increased digitization of our world. If we embrace it, we risk losing the immediacy of a live in-person experience. If we deny it, we ignore our future audiences. I propose we strive for something in the middle. I believe creating a site-specific film-inspired theatrical experience like Red Lodge, Montana accomplishes this. I also know crafting experiences like this can be difficult. I hope these lessons encourage you, inspire you, and prevent you from making too many mistakes…or at least from drowning in your own creative ocean. References [i] David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (New York: TarcherPerigree, 2016), 19.[ii] https://www.findtheantidote.org/red-lodge-montana [iii] Kathryn Osenlund. “ RED LODGE, MONTANA (The Antidote): 2019 Fringe review.” Phindie. http://phindie.com/20057-20057-red-lodge-montana-the-antidote-2019-fringe-review/ (accessed October 21, 2022). [iv] Anne Bogart and Tina Landau, The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005), 154. [v] Lynch, 45. [vi] Bogart and Landau, 129. [vii] Kelly McCaughan, e-mail message to author, March 8, 2023. [viii] Amanda Schoonover, e-mail message to author, March 8, 2023. [ix] https://tinyurl.com/yckx4hfe [x] https://vimeo.com/showcase/6242247 [xi] Lynch, 23. [xii] https://www.michael-osinski.com/ [xiii] https://open.spotify.com/show/6aWe8gTL3tFH2b6Fwve6ul?si=5827da219b474b70 [xiv] https://www.youtube.com/@thisonegoesto11podcast Footnotes About The Author(s) MICHEAL OSINSKI [xii] (he/him) directs theatre because he likes solving puzzles. He manages his self-producing collective The Antidote, and he was co-founder and Producing Artistic Director of Flashpoint Theatre Company in Philadelphia. He received his MFA in Directing from The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago, and he was a Drama League Directing Fellow in 2014. He is currently the Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance at St. Lawrence University, where he will devise another show in Fall 2023, and he produces and co-hosts a music podcast called This One Goes to 11 (on Spotify[xiii] and YouTube[xiv]). 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. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. 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. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. 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.

Mohamadreza Babaee 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 Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Mohamadreza Babaee By Published on May 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF fig. 1: The installation room for Global (re)Entry. 2D game and multimedia installation. “Unforgetting” exhibition, University of California, Santa Cruz, Apr. 2022. Photo by author. "Have you ever held a grenade in your hands?” The participants read on a monitor screen in a room with a view of the Pacific Ocean (fig. 1). A projector screen obstructs the view and displays the live footage of the participants from a bird’s-eye angle. With white walls, a desk, a chair, and a desktop computer and monitor, the room seems desolate. An ambient soundtrack is playing in the background, projecting various sounds that travelers usually hear in any US airport: the occasional announcements, suitcases being dragged on smooth floors, the beeping sound of various scanning machines, and the occasional roarings of airplanes taking off. If the participants sit behind the computer long enough, they could hear the ambient soundtrack of the airport fading into distant notes of a piano playing in an empty alley, birds chirping in a dim forest, and raindrops falling onto thirsty leaves. The question on the screen remains visible until the participants decide to use a “Cosmic” tool to change it. If they click on the cosmic tool icon on the right side of the screen, hover the mouse over the question, and hold down left-click, the question visually morphs into the same text, with one important difference (fig. 2): “Have you ever held a kitten in your hands?” fig. 2: The redesigned immigration form question. Global (re)Entry, 2D game and multimedia installation. And such is the core mechanic in Global (re)Entry , a video game-multimedia installation that gives the participants an opportunity to rewrite the racially presumptuous questions that immigrants need to answer in their change-of-status petition forms and in-person interviews. [1] Made in collaboration with recent University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) alumni, [2] the project was first on display as a part of “Unforgetting,” an MFA exhibition of digital arts and new media projects on display at UCSC from Apr. 22 nd to May 1 st , 2022. The different projects—ranging from video games to multimedia performances—seek to address the common themes of lost histories, hidden realities, and haunting. “The artists,” writes Yolande Harris, an artist-scholar and the exhibition’s curator, “are questioning and actively participating in the destruction of old systems of oppression by imagining new systems in their place.” [3] The system in question in Global (re)Entry is the US immigration system, particularly the process through which an immigrant can petition for residency in the US. While the legal pathway to becoming a permanent resident remains a privileged route to which many undocumented immigrants have no access, Global (re)Entry aims to point out the deficiency and impracticality of legal procedures in the US immigration system built upon historical prejudice and racial bias. In Global (re)Entry , I take a critical and parodic look at the Global Entry program designed by the US Customs and Border Protection agency. Similar to other Trusted Traveler programs, Global Entry allows “low-risk” US citizens and permanent residents to use an automated machine to receive their clearance for crossing international borders. The conditions through which Global Entry considers a traveler as low risk are not disclosed publicly and are open to interpretation and bias. My project borrows textual and visual assets from the US Department of Homeland Security’s (and the associated agencies’) online documents to simulate and repurpose the traveler screening program. The player needs to answer several questions in the game to receive their travel clearance card. However, their resistance to participating in state-sponsored security theatres unlocks a new gameplay branch that leads the player to a utopian way of reimagining the US immigration system. While players can play the game to learn more about unfair border control strategies and oppressive state policies targeting immigrants, they can also creatively redesign discriminatory US immigration forms and generate pro-immigrant, antiracist manifestos. Before discussing the conceptual development of Global (re)Entry in relation to my performance background, I need to elaborate on why I am discussing this project in the special issue of a theatre and performance studies journal. This issue invites reflections on new work development with attention to how theatre artists respond to the realities of the ongoing global pandemic. I designed Global (re)Entry as a playful digital intervention into discriminatory US border politics. Although the project represents my training as an artist in experimental game design, my current work is in continuation of my years-long practice as a theatre director. I started my journey as an artist by designing, directing, and supporting experimental theatre and performance pieces about the memories that immigrants leave behind, the human impact of financial sanctions on Iran, diasporic experiences of queer people of color, and fearmongering and Islamaphobia that ensued after the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11 th , 2001. Over time, I moved away from traditional understandings of theatre to embrace postdramatic and multimedia ways of staging diverse immigrant experiences. Digital mediums and technologies play a central role in my recent projects, but I need to clarify that this digital turn in my practice is not an inevitable assimilation into the techno-utopian rhetorics hailed by megacorporate amalgamations around the country (and the world). Instead, I embraced digital methods of representation and creative intervention as I became increasingly weary of the limited access a live performance space offers to the audience. How could I make more performances about/for immigrants and refugees while many of them did not have the privilege of being in the performance space? The shortcomings of designing a performance around the physical notion of space led me to adapt digital forms of communication, representation, and intervention. Without a doubt, going through a global pandemic, which severely reduced social gatherings, contributed an additional layer to my rationale for opting for a digital sense of performance space as a site of potentials apt for facilitating human-computer interactions. [4] Global (re)Entry represents my investment in interactive digital art as a conditionally more accessible medium [5] while remaining strongly tethered to my experience as a performance maker and scholar. [6] In the following pages, I offer a brief description of Global (re)Entry as a collaborative work of art inspired by my learnings in performance theory. That is not to say that I consider the project a performance piece. Rather, I want to delineate my conceptual itinerary to clarify the significance of performance discourses in my current new work development in digital arts and new media. I am less concerned with disciplinary demarcations and more with the value of interdisciplinary creative production. The initial idea for Global (re)Entry arose from a simple question: What is a utopian vision of the US immigration system? José Esteban Muñoz’s foundational study of utopias informs my investment in utopian art making. Writing on the contemporary politics of queer of color identity formation, Muñoz believes that minoritarian individuals should imagine their lives beyond what he calls the “quagmire of the present.” It is the present-focused thinking that, according to Muñoz, stops the oppressed from imagining a better future outside the contemporary tyranny of systems. Muñoz proposes a “utopian modality” in which feelings, thoughts, and actions follow a utopian function for “fragmenting darkness” and illuminating a “world that should be, that could be, and that will be.” [7] Muñoz dismisses abstract ideas of utopia as they remain dormant in the realm of fantasy. Instead, he calls for concrete conditions of utopia that can invoke a “not-yet-conscious” potentiality, presenting the collective wish of a group that looks back at the “no-longer-conscious” past and renders hopeful “potential blueprints of a world not quite here, a horizon of possibility.” [8] Inspired by such ideas, I approached several immigrants of color that I knew personally and asked them about their utopian visions of the US immigration system. They all expressed a wish to replace the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) with a network of support that facilitates border crossing, not border policing. Concomitant to their utopian thinking was a wish for educating more US citizens about the gross flaws in the legal pathway to becoming a resident and the mental, emotional, and material toll the process could take. Global (re)Entry gives the participants an opportunity to take a critical look at the US immigration system and creatively redesign it in utopian ways. Therefore, the project represents what Claudia Costa Pederson calls “utopian ludology,” a critical-creative perspective that considers games as “places of the radical imagination,” sites that take playfulness as “enabling interactions that afford the necessary freedom to generate new kinds of thinking, feeling, and empowerment to concretize a future that dominant culture renders unthinkable.” [9] Games imbued by concrete ideas of utopia, Pederson asserts, can be “tools of persuasion,” which “open up the question of alternatives” and “reject the mimetic ideals… and commodity models of the video game industry.” [10] While I hesitate to label Global (re)Entry as merely a “persuasive game,” I am inspired by persuasive game designers who use video games for “cultural and social change” and “do so in recognition of the persuasive power of the medium, which is based on its appeal to fantasy and imagination.” [11] Utopian survival strategies of the queer of color, as theorized by Muñoz, shaped how I approached making the game. I could certainly try to make a live performance piece about border crossing (something that I had done in the past), but I could not comfortably make art for immigrants, fully knowing that many of them could not cross the myriad of borders to partake in the privilege of live physical co-presence. I remain cognizant of the ongoing debates in the field as to what constitutes liveness, namely Philip Auslander’s provocative assertion that live experiences are culturally and historically codified in relation to technological changes. [12] But if we allow ourselves to decenter our scholarly polemics in favor of making room for lived experiences of those with less transnational mobility, the question at hand might become as simple as who is in the room and who is not. As I mentioned before, digital liveness and digital spaces continue to be subject to the same question, as not everyone has equal access to entering a digital room, but I take the odds of more people worldwide having access to the internet to download a small-size, low-tech video game over US government easing up on admitting more immigrants to the country. fig. 3: Screenshot from a cutscene inside the game. Global (re)Entry. 2D game and multimedia installation. In addition to queer of color critique, I also used critical discussions of border surveillance to design Global (re)Entry . While I borrowed from scholars in different humanities fields, performance theory continued to play an essential role in my development process. Trusted traveler programs such as Global Entry are ostensibly designed to facilitate easier border crossing experiences, but in fact, they are just a ruse for easy screening of travelers and separating them into potential suspects and trustworthy users. [13] Since Homeland Security agencies are exempt from racial profiling rules, [14] race plays a vital role in designing and implementing border surveillance strategies. Writing on the surveillance of Blackness in the US, Simon Browne uses “racializing surveillance” as a term to describe systematic moments “when enactments of surveillance reify boundaries along racial lines, thereby reifying race, and where the outcome of this is often discriminatory and violent treatment.” [15] Browne contends that racializing surveillance is a “technology of social control” and suggests “how things get ordered racially by way of surveillance depends on space and time and is subject to change, but most often upholds negating strategies that first accompanied European colonial expansion and transatlantic slavery that sought to structure social relations and institutions in ways that privilege whiteness.” [16] Expanding her analysis into the racialized practices of surveillance at US airports, Browne uses the concept of “racial baggage” to identify situations in which certain acts and certain looks at the airport weigh down some travelers, while others travel lightly.” [17] Trusted traveler programs, Browne continues, are clear evidence of how racializing surveillance is practiced at airports to identify, separate, pat down, and investigate the racial baggage some travelers carry across borders. [18] In the racializing matrix of airports, questions of privacy become contested. The state watches travelers, but in that watching, not all travelers are equally suspect. As Jasbir Puar delineates, “the right to privacy is not even on the radar screen for many sectors of society, unfathomable for whom being surveilled is a way of life…the private is a racialized and nationalized construct, insofar as it is granted not only to heterosexuals but to certain citizens and withheld from many others and from noncitizens.” [19] Furthermore, Puar uses the Foucauldian notion of panopticon to suggest that the ever present surveillance technologies throughout borderlands forcefully encourage self-regulation of a sort that is “less an internalization of norms and more about constant monitoring of oneself and others, watching, waiting, listening, ordering, positioning, calculating.” [20] Performance, communication, and feminist studies scholar Rachel Hall similarly focuses on the notion of self-regulation at airports to frame airport security as a “collaborative cultural performance” that requires some passengers to continuously perform “voluntary transparency.” [21] Transparency, in Hall’s critical opinion, is a privilege, the “new white,” that if performed successfully, will grant the traveler with a moment of innocence. [22] However, Hall continues, not all travelers are given equal access to such privilege; within the post-9/11 context, military and security experts design “mediated spectacles of diabolical opacity” to produce “the stubbornly noncompliant, noncitizen suspects in the war on terror.” [23] In sum, there is a clear connection between how the state surveils populations and creates racial categories. Surveillance at airports is a racializing act that seeks to produce transparent travelers and suspect figures of the national adversary. The ubiquitous implementation of surveillance technologies at airports regulates self-monitoring practices requiring travelers to disclose their information voluntarily. Those who successfully perform their transparency might achieve a temporary moment of innocence, but travelers with racial baggage need to struggle against a racist state that considers them likely perpetrators of violence. Global (re)Entry fictionally simulates and repurposes the Global Entry trusted traveling program to (on top of encouraging utopian thinking) draw attention to intrusive methodologies that the Homeland Security agencies incorporate to produce prejudiced surveillance data, specifically about immigrants of color. The game starts as an invitation for voluntary performances of transparency, as theorized by Hall. The participants are asked to submit to an intrusive screening process requiring their biometric data. However, in line with the utopian performance-making rhetorics that undergird the projects, participants can refuse to perform transparency and, as such, unlock an alternative gameplay path that leads to creatively redesigning discriminatory US immigration forms. I use digital technologies and mediums to create interactive art about marginalized experiences. I cautiously navigate this path and remain vigilant about digital accessibility limitations, particularly in the global south. The new projects I develop represent my increasing interest in digital arts and new media. I, however, continue to also identify as a performance maker, an artist of color whose creative journey demonstrates an intertwined and growing web of performance and game design skills. As long as the adapted medium and methodology can empower me in my commitment to increasing representations of immigrants of color, the new work development process personally remains a dynamic terminology applicable to all artmaking practices. In Global (re)Entry , I follow an artistic mission that draws from the power of representation to enable utopian thinking as a necessary first step toward creating change in society. The utopian thinking that Global (re)Entry encourages is my intervention in the ongoing ostracization, surveillance, deportation, incarceration, and murdering of immigrants that state forces commit at US borders. In the face of such destructive realities, my project does not call for neoliberal reformations of the US immigration system. Instead, Global (re)Entry dares to ask the participants to muster the radical audacity, subversive creativity, and insurgent hopes necessary for entirely disabling a killing machine cloaked as the US immigration system. References [1] You can play Global (re)Entry at https://www.mbabaee.com/global-re-entry . [2] Music and sound by Madeline Doss, 2D art and UI by Fion Kwok, and Unity programming by Avery Weibel. [3] “Digital Arts and New Media | MFA Program at University of California, Santa Cruz,” accessed January 9, 2023, https://danmmfa.ucsc.edu/ . [4] Nadja Masura, Digital Theatre: The Making and Meaning of Live Mediated Performance, US & UK 1990-2020 , Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology (Springer International Publishing, 2020), 42. [5] I acknowledge that access to digital technology remains unequal, particularly in Global South. Steven Dixon, for example, writes that even though new digital technology and internet revolutionized performance forms across the US in the 90s, such revolution was absent or less tangible in other parts of the world with less to no resources for building the digital infrastructure that the new digital age demanded. For more, look at Steve Dixon, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015). [6] Although the project was originally presented as a multimedia installation, it is available online to players around the world. [7] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (New York University Press, 2009), 1. [8] Muñoz, Cruising Utopia , 22, 25, 97. [9] Claudia Costa Pederson, Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021), 6. [10] Pederson, Gaming Utopia, 184. [11] Pederson, 222. [12] While Auslander initially made this comment in Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (1999), he later revisited his argument to clarify that he does not believe technologies (vs. the people) to be the determining agent in what is live. For more, look at Auslander, Philip. “Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 34, no. 3 (2012): 3–11. [13] See Matthew Longo, The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). [14] See Nicole Nguyen, Suspect Communities: Anti-Muslim Racism and the Domestic War on Terror (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). [15] Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 8. [16] Browne, Dark Matters , 16, 17. [17] Browne, 132. [18] Browne, 135. [19] Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times , 10th ed. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 125. [20] Puar, Terrorist Assemblages , 156. [21] Rachel Hall, The Transparent Traveler: The Performance and Culture of Airport Security (Duke University Press, 2015), 12. [22] Hall, The Transparent Traveler , 14. [23] Hall, 46. Footnotes About The Author(s) MOHAMADREZA BABAEE is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance at Indiana University, Bloomington. Their interdisciplinary scholarship and transmedia practice primarily focus on issues of migration and surveillance, particularly in connection to the Middle Eastern and Iranian diasporas in the US. Their first manuscript project, tentatively titled Modded Diasporas: Performing Iranian Identity , combines performance studies and critical game theory to explore how Iranian immigrants modify the circumstances of their systematic oppression to turn them into empowering opportunities, tools, and mediums. 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. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. 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. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. 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.

Becca Levy and Jared Rubin Sprowls Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship Becca Levy and Jared Rubin Sprowls By Published on May 16, 2023 Download Article as PDF What began as a peer-reviewed research paper naturally grew into a dramaturgical adaptation of chevruta , a centuries old Rabbinic approach to interpreting Jewish texts. The style of this paper mimics our process of multiple voices in conversation. In chevruta , dialogue is necessary as one voice can’t capture the depth of a text; we can only approach understanding through discussion and interpretation. Through this lens, we push against prioritizing finality (a deadline, production, or publication) which dictates a linear process. Rather, we hold space to return again, offering a process that spans a lifetime as both the people and art deepen and unfold. We share authorship below, identifying the writer above each section. Though our names signify what we initially wrote, through revision, our voices continue to overlap, always in conversation. As we consider how this lens is valuable for new work development, both Jewish and non-Jewish, we invite you to engage in our reflection of Fringe Sects’ script development as a fellow chevruta partner: our voice, your voice, and the text. JARED In March 2020, I was finally ready to write my “Jewish play” based on a Buzzfeed article a friend sent to me a year prior: “Finding Kink in God: Inside The World Of Brooklyn Dominatrixes And Their Orthodox Jewish Clients.” [1] This article complicated the stereotype of Jewish sexuality I saw being portrayed on stage and screen: Jews as less sexual and less desirable. Expanding what a Jewish “man,” “woman,” or “relationship” looked like felt important to my own understanding of Jewish queerness and an inquiry I could share with my community. COVID interrupted that plan as Jewish sexuality onstage was no longer an urgent exploration, instead it was the last thing on my mind. What we thought would be a few weeks of mandated isolation became months. As Passover approached, I felt detached from my Jewish identity without the ability to invite friends over for Seder. The holiday traditions, rooted in community, didn’t feel the same with only me and my two roommates skimming through the Haggadah. In August 2021, I moved to Tempe, Arizona to pursue an MFA in Dramatic Writing. Fear of isolation continued, and I wondered what I’d do for the upcoming High Holidays. Rosh Hashanah felt like an opportunity for a new chapter in the desert, but I wondered if anyone would be there to join me. BECCA That’s where our Research Methods course comes in; it was my first semester of grad school as well, beginning the MFA program in Theatre for Youth and Community at ASU. I had also just moved to Tempe from Chicago, and much to my delight and surprise the old song “Wherever you go there’s always someone Jewish” [2] proved to be true. I overheard Jared talking about Jewish dominatrixes and had to learn more. JARED As I discussed revisions to my research question, I vividly remember Becca leaning over to join the conversation. Another Jewish woman to discuss Jewish womanhood and femininity? Baruch Hashem! On that day, I was paired with Clara, whose Hebrew necklace had sparked conversation a class prior. Marissa would soon ask what we were doing for Rosh Hashanah. She too had overheard the musings of Jewish study and wanted to join. We had all worried that we’d be the only Jew in the program and were relieved to have found each other so quickly. BECCA Jared and I requested to be paired for the final round of peer review. What was scheduled to be a brief meeting about our papers over coffee became a multi-hour conversation relating our artistry to our values and our values to our Judaism. We intuitively worked as chevruta: a non-hierarchical dyadic practice of Jewish text study rooted in traditional methods going back centuries. A chevruta partnership is a meaningful and holy relationship through which we understand text, and our relationship to text, more fully. The word chevruta comes from the Hebrew root chet, vet, reish, chaver , meaning “friend,” emphasizing that this relationship is between more than peers or colleagues. In fact, it’s not just a relationship between two voices, but three: two people and the text. Scholarly discourse around Fringe Sects was a catalyst for our partnership, while genuine friendship became central to our ongoing collaboration. Jared was researching about Jewish gender and sexuality while more deeply connecting with Jewish ways of being through his writing. JARED Where do the stereotypes, roles, and ideas of Jewish women come from? Who perpetuates them within our community and how does that differ from what we see in the media? BECCA In my initial notes, I wrote about the importance of discoveries, using this play to reveal Jewish challenges and provide space for healing while weaving the Jewish with the universal– JARED Questions and themes that simultaneously drew me into Becca’s research. BECCA What is the relationship between creativity, identity, and values in Jewish artmaking spaces? Grad school was the opportunity to further explore our embodied knowledge through research and practice. JARED Research and practice exist over coffee as much as they exist in conferences and classrooms. I got to know Becca through her research, and I better understood her research by getting to know Becca. BECCA We spent the next semester together in a graduate Dramaturgy Workshop course. One of our first readings was from Geoffrey Proehl’s Towards a Dramaturgical Sensibility ; I sent Jared a text, “Ok so I finally started the reading this morning and tbh I think a dramaturgical sensibility is just simply how Jews read Torah” [3] [4] . I quickly recognized in Proehl’s description of dramaturgical practice a kinship with Jewish ways of thinking, conversing, and analyzing. JARED “Isn’t there a Jewish thing about rehearing the Torah and the purpose of that? Helping me connect dramaturgy and Judaism again” [5] , I texted Becca as we continued to quip that “dramaturgy is Jewish.” It became our special segment in class where we reflected on how teachings from Jewish synagogue, camp, and school prepared us to analyze text as dramaturgs. Later that semester, I assembled a team for a staged reading of Fringe Sects at ASU: Marissa as director, Becca as dramaturg, and Clara, Matt (the only other Jew in our MFA program) and Sam (a non-Jewish MFA peer) as actors. The energy of the rehearsal room was immediately alive – BECCA Is the milk a reference to milk and honey? JARED I hadn’t even thought of that. BECCA What about the Binding of Isaac? JARED That sounds like BDSM. BECCA Our playful yet serious conversations around script development were contagious, or perhaps Jared had just gathered the perfect group for this week-long rehearsal process. We were more than Jewish artists chosen for a Jewish play; we were friends. In our first few months of grad school, we had already spent High Holidays, birthdays, and Chanukah together, discussed art that was important to us, and reflected on the ways our Judaism connected us even when it manifested differently. In fact, the different shades of Judaism were what we celebrated most: the variety of latke recipes, family and community traditions, or the way we pronounced “bimah.” Questioning, connecting, and respecting the multitude of text interpretations based on our diverse lived experiences were the foundation upon which the script could develop so significantly in such a short amount of time. Reflecting upon the process, it is clear that this ensemble intuitively worked from a place of shared values. JARED It was interpretive. It was direct. It was Jewish. BECCA Jared and I always bring these values into our creative practice. Through this process we affirmed that we practice those values creatively in specifically Jewish ways. Text Messages between Jared and Becca during Fringe Sects development. JARED Although I had been in a new work development space with other Jewish artists, I had never felt that a room was guided by a Jewish way of reading text in the way this process was. Sam’s active participation proved that anyone can engage with text in this way. Not only did this way of working benefit the script, but it was life-giving. I was no longer an isolated writer but an artist in the community. BECCA Going deeper into the etymology of chevruta, the Hebrew chaver (friend) derives from the Aramaic, chibor , meaning “to bind together.” In this process, chevruta partners’ understanding of text becomes bound together in discussion, creating something entirely new with what is on the page. Below is an example of a text study where a peer and I engaged with the very first Torah portion. The first translation you’ll read is a more standard version and the second is a collaborative translation discovered in shared study. While working with the text, I was drawn to the word “ ruach ” which translates to “wind” or “spirit” and my partner noticed “ pnei ” which can mean “surface” or “face.” We excitedly investigated more translations and read the text anew. Together, we uncovered a translation that neither of us would have found on our own. Hebrew words with multiple meanings are illustrated below in corresponding colors. I invite you to notice what is the same, what is different, and how these changes influence your understanding of the text. When God created heaven and earth, the earth was chaos and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God fluttering over the surface of the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2) When The Universe began to create sky and land, the land was without form and void. Behold darkness over the face of the abyss and the spirit of Creation floating over the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2) [6] Stereotypical depictions of dramaturgy seem so isolating– an image of a lonely scholar with their head in their laptop or a book comes to mind; it’s not so different from the rabbi locked in their study or b’nai mitzvah student up in their room, practicing their Torah portion alone. But these are all misrepresentations of reality. To be Jewish is to congregate. To make theatre is to congregate. In the process of working together we bond with one another and the work binds to the point where it’s sometimes hard to know where one person’s idea ends and another’s begins. Jared and I intuitively did this work with our research papers, with everything we read in Dramaturgy Workshop, and with our collaboration on Fringe Sects . JARED Below is a visual representation of our chevruta-inspired conversations analyzing a paragraph from the opening monologue of the play, Rabbi Moshe’s Rosh Hashanah sermon, which we’ve retroactively formatted in the style of rabbinic commentary of Talmud. Visual representation of chevruta-inspired conversation between Becca and Jared on Fringe Sects script text. BECCA Rabbi Adina Allen writes, “Like the parchment wound around the Torah handles, our reading of this story is not circular, but spiral. We move along the same axis, but drop in and down, unearthing new meanings in the cracks of our old stories” [7] . This concept of time provides repetition while acknowledging that with repetition comes a new depth of experience in the present. During our collaboration on Fringe Sects , Jared and I trusted each other to continue to drop in and down in the reading and re-reading, writing, and re-writing, talking and re-talking of the script. We built trust and a shared language through cultural understanding, shared values, and unearthing new meanings while the script developed. The play is set during The Ten Days of Awe, the time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when we’re tasked with Tshuvah. Tshuvah means to “return:” to return to right relationship with one another, the world around us, and ourselves. We return to something old or familiar – an ancient practice, text, or question. We seek to find something new, not in hopes of the perfect answer or action, but to embrace the multiplicity of interpretations and meaning-making as part of the process. JARED Even in the process of writing this article, we return again. Remembering text messages we forgot we had sent, making notes for our next stage of development. BECCA (I still want Jared to add the shehecheyanu into that scene). JARED (I will). BECCA These conversations ground us because there’s always something new to uncover. JARED If chevruta is three voices, our process contains even more: playwright, dramaturg, director, cast, characters, script, research, prayer, Torah, and Talmud. If Jewish text, ancient and unchanging, contains such multitudes, we must listen to all possibilities as a new work finds its voice. To give a script agency is to understand that it will never actually be finished… BECCA …but it is always where it’s supposed to be. JARED Jewish values tell us that we too are not finished and that growth is a lifelong process. BECCA As the spiral continues to deepen, may we delight in moments of synchronicity and express gratitude for moments of divergence. JARED & BECCA As this article concludes, we invite you to bring yourself into our chevruta practice. In doing so you join us in community and together we begin again. References [1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahfrishberg/dominatrixes-orthodox-jewish-haredi-kink-bdsm-brooklyn [2] Milder, Rabbi Larry. “Wherever You Go There’s Always Someone Jewish.” [3] Levy, Becca. Text message to Jared Sprowls. 23 Jan. 2022. [4] Proehl, Goeffrey. Towards a Dramaturgical Sensibility: Landscape and Journey . Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008. [5] Sprowls, Jared. Text message to Becca Levy. 30 Jan. 2022. [6] This text study and my learnings on chevruta come from Becca’s time with the Jewish Studio Project . She has been participating in the Jewish Studio Process, a Jewish art-making and text study practice, with them since May 2020 and is currently part of their Creative Facilitator Training Cohort. [7] Allen, Rabbi Adina. “The Kernel of the Yet-to-Come.” My Jewish Learning , 21 Oct. 2022, https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-kernel-of-the-yet-to-come/amp/ . Footnotes About The Author(s) BECCA LEVY is an arts educator and theatre artist who facilitates educational programs and theatrical productions that center community, celebrate culture, and foster creativity for people of all ages. Becca worked as a teaching artist, arts program manager, and stage manager in Chicago after earning her BFA in Stage Management from Western Michigan University. Currently studying for an MFA in Theatre for Youth and Community at Arizona State University, her praxis explores the relationship between creativity and values, drawing from many years of work and play in Jewish arts programming and theatre teaching artistry. www.beccaglevy.com JARED RUBIN SPROWLS is a Chicago-based playwright currently in Tempe, Arizona pursuing an MFA in Dramatic Writing at Arizona State University. His work has been produced Off-Broadway through the Araca Project, as well as at Northwestern University and the Skokie Theatre. He is a 2018 O’Neill NPC Semi-finalist and has been a part of Available Light’s Next Stage Initiative, the New Coordinates’ Writers’ Room 6.0, and Jackalope Theatre’s Playwrights Lab. He is a project-based staff member with Crossroads Antiracism Organizing and Training. He holds a B.A. with Honors in Theatre from Northwestern University. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 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 Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. 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. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. 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.

Beth Wynstra, Mary Pinard 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 The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot Beth Wynstra, Mary Pinard By Published on April 30, 2023 Download Article as PDF The final moment of Heart/Roots: Wabaunsee County , a new community-based play, is a poem, called “Sonnet in the Voice of the Ruin.” This moment invites an actor to embody a ruin and state, Some of us, over time, become once restored, what we were, while others of us naturally stir new ideas, art, the infinite sum of dreams, made possible on a stage by stories, breathed to life from a page. These closing lines are a fitting end to a play inspired by stories from residents living in Wabaunsee County, Kansas. The lines also speak to the location of the 2022 premiere production of Heart/Roots , namely the ruin of a burned house on the grounds of The Volland Store, a one-time mercantile and general store that opened in 1913 and soon became the social and cultural center for the surrounding rural community. While The Volland Store fell into disrepair by the 1970s, it was transformed in 2015 by visionary philanthropists Jerry and Patty Reece into an art gallery, with a residence for visiting artists; it now features an outdoor amphitheater, built from the ruin of the burned house (hereafter referred to as the Ruin). Heart/Roots , thus, is a play steeped in local history and lived experience, informed by a specific location, and cognizant of the potential for transformation. These unique characteristics indicate that in-person engagements with space, place, individuals, and narratives would be crucial ingredients for the crafting and rehearsal of the community-based play. The original plan for Heart/Roots included such in-person elements. Yet, like so many theater performances over the last few years, Heart/Roots was a production paved with Covid-induced curves, hurdles, and discoveries. Ultimately, the road we (Mary Pinard, poet and playwright, and me, Beth Wynstra, theater historian and director) needed to travel with Heart/Roots was one that included cross-country dramaturgy, technological tools and methods, and only concentrated bursts of interaction with production team and cast. Yet these elements elicited new kinds of community-building that informed and ultimately buoyed the play in surprising ways. [1] Seeds of the Project In late 2018, the seeds of Heart/Roots were planted. Mary, who had been a poet-in-residence at The Volland Store, was invited to create a work that would serve as the inaugural production in the Ruin and would run in conjunction with a traveling Smithsonian Institute exhibition called Crossroads: Change in Rural America . This exhibition continues to tour museums, libraries, and universities throughout the United States today and had a 2020 visit scheduled at The Volland Store. One goal of Crossroads is to “prompt discussions about what happened when America’s rural population became a minority of the country’s population and the ripple effects that occurred.” The exhibition also poses the question, “Why should revitalizing the rural places left behind matter to those who remain, those who left, and those who will come in the future?” [2] Mary felt a theater production would offer a compelling space to examine these questions and to bring the voices of the specific rural community of Wabaunsee County to life. She invited me, her colleague at Babson College, to join her in imagining the parameters of such a production. We were guided by theater scholars and practitioners, in particular Sonja Kuftinec, who argues that community-based theater is “grounded in locality, place, or identity” and can “directly engage and reflect its audience, by integrating local history, concerns, stories, traditions, and/or performers.” [3] We were inspired by Kuftinec’s assertion that this kind of performance has the potential to be a “site for philosophical and ethical inquiry into the forging of identity.” [4] Indeed, theater for, about, and performed by members of a specific community has the power to bring individuals together for a special, communal experience, where these individuals might recognize their own stories and experiences on the stage. Furthermore, at this time, or “crossroads,” when the landscape of rural America is literally and metaphorically changing at a rapid pace, community-based theater offers space to reaffirm identity, reflect on stories and memories, and ruminate on future possibilities. The plan we initially developed was to travel from Massachusetts, where we both reside and teach, to Volland, Kansas, to meet community members, interview individuals, collect narratives, and conduct historical research, all to create a play inspired by what we heard and learned. We would then return to Kansas for a multi-week residency to audition actors, to rehearse the play, and finally to produce the work in the Ruin. The COVID Pivot The play, scheduled for a 2020 summer production, would ultimately need to be postponed, and the Smithsonian Crossroads exhibit eventually became a digital experience. This COVID moment, while disappointing in many ways, prompted us not only to rethink our creative process, but also to return to and solidify our initial impulses for a community-based production. In other words, the COVID-mandated pause (which, for our project, extended into 2022) gave us a chance to re-consider the why and how of creating a theater performance for and about Wabaunsee County and our place as both creators and outsiders to this locale. While our project would no longer be connected to the Smithsonian exhibit, we still believed a community-based theater production could remain true to the important goals of Crossroads . We also hoped that our project would offer cast, production team, and audience an original, experiential, interactive opportunity to think about and discuss the rich history and changing dynamics in rural America in general, and in Wabaunsee County, in particular. After a two-year delay, we felt safe and ready to launch our community-based project, initially called Theater at the Ruin, in 2022. Our revised plan was to make three trips to Kansas: the first for introducing our project at several different events and venues in Wabaunsee County and to collect stories; the second for auditioning actors; and the third for in-person rehearsals, tech week, and final production. Between the first and second visit (in August and March respectively), Mary would write the play. Between the second and final visit (in June), I would direct rehearsals via Zoom. While before 2020, we could not fathom things like online rehearsals or digital story gathering, the pandemic gave us new tools and methodologies to create and collaborate. It became surprising to us how essential and helpful these technological tools ended up being for our project. Welcome to Kansas and Story Collection During our first visit to Kansas, which was my very first time in the state, we were deeply aware of our outsider status as we introduced the project and met with community members and potential actors, story-givers, and production team members. We held meetings and informational sessions at several different places: The Volland Store, an annual classic car show, the historical society, a local bakery, a yoga studio, an antique store, and even a cemetery. Our goal was to meet community members where they lived and worked, all in an effort for us to demonstrate our desire to listen and to learn. We knew well the dangers of outsiders creating community-based theater productions. Eugene van Erven warns that without careful and thoughtful interactions, community members can be “arguably used as pawns in a professional artist’s aesthetic game.” [5] Overall, we tried, at every meeting and interaction, to emphasize the fully collaborative nature of the experience we were launching and the goal of celebrating Wabaunsee County and christening the new performance space in the Ruin. Our awareness of outsider-ness also helped us to consider some crucial questions for the project: Haven’t we all been outsiders at some point? Been unsure about how to move ethically through and beyond the uncertainty and potential obstacles of difference—local, regional, personal, cultural? How then do we imagine, enter, negotiate, understand, embrace the possibilities implicit in these encounters with others not like ourselves? And how are we, in turn, shaped by them? These questions led us to consider the other outsiders who came before us, arriving and transforming the land and locale that would be central to our production. For example, we considered the turbulent unsettling initiated by European settlers who brought their own cultures, values, hopes, and unavoidable misconceptions about this place. We learned through the stories we heard and the research we conducted that the impact of this “settlement” on its own cannot be underestimated. This disruption also coincided necessarily with other kinds of unsettling developments such as the displacement of Indigenous peoples, and a maze of commerce driven by the carving into the land of more lines: roads, railroads, the establishment of fences for the burgeoning work of cattle driving and ranching, and the swift usurpations brought on by agriculture that followed on the effectiveness of the plow in breaking the prairie sod. With all of these patterns and evolutions in mind, we gingerly entered a small cattle-ranching community with an invitation for storytelling and its eventual embodiment in a play. Notions of outsider-ness would eventually form an important throughline of the stories we would hear and the script Mary would write. We also found inspiration, support, and integrity in Jerry and Patty Reece’s own outsider status and their renewing project of The Volland Store. We were able to apply many of the lessons learned from them about how best to work with—and in spite of—our position as “outsiders.” While we were grateful for the many face-to-face encounters we had on this first visit to Kansas, technological tools aided mightily with story collection. For stories shared with us in person, such as those by two cousins in their 90s who remembered the early years of The Volland Store, or those from a middle-aged rancher and fence builder, we relied on audio recordings that were saved to a file on Dropbox, so that we both could access the recordings in the weeks and months to come. Several individuals did not feel comfortable or could not be available for sharing stories with us in person. We set up a digital story collection page on The Volland Store website. Although we missed seeing and observing these storytellers in action, their narratives, delivered digitally, were significant contributions to Heart/Roots . Other Wabaunsee County residents preferred to speak to us via Zoom, either out of an abundance of caution about the pandemic or due to scheduling conflicts when we were in Kansas. These Zoom conversations, recorded with the storytellers’ permission, proved illuminating in several ways. Some storytellers, like the owner of a yoga studio in the small, nearby town of Alma, had prepared commentary and stories. Others, like a rancher and mother, who studied Agricultural Economics at Kansas State University, was open to answering our questions and actually surprised herself with how much she could detail about the special nuances and appeals of living in Wabaunsee County and her emotional attachment to the place. We found that in these Zoom sessions storytellers were forthcoming and seemed to feel safe in sharing their narratives with us. We hypothesize that perhaps home environments or the protection of a screen made certain individuals more comfortable than they would have been in person. Such dynamics would again emerge in rehearsals. Photo 1, The Ruin at the Volland Store, photo by Maddy Michaelis Heart/Roots: Creation and Zoom Rehearsals The eight monologues and scenes that comprise Heart/Roots were crafted from the stories we gathered and with additional historical details provided by The Wabaunsee County Historical Society and Museum. Mary found the recordings of story-givers especially useful since they provided her not only with narratives, but also with the flow and cadence of local speech, diction, and expression. And since a number of the most powerful stories were lyrical and informed by the rural rhythms of the land, she also pushed the limits of playwriting form. The pandemic had already jarred our process to the core, so why not allow this innovative mode even more space? Mary decided that the sonnet—a 14-line formal poem using stanzaic structure, rhyme, and metrics—would be a perfect addition to the play. It could accommodate the richness and brevity of certain stories, and it also echoed the literal contours of Wabaunsee County on a Kansas map. Suggesting the shape of a broad hand, this county map evokes those most essential capacities: to create and to work. Central to the nature of this county, the work of the human hand is thus at the core of this play, both through its characters’ experiences and in its creation by Mary as the playwright. The fact that the fingers of the human hand have a total of 14 bones also suggests a meaningful connection to the anatomy of the sonnet, whose 14 lines work themselves into poetry across a page. The final script of Heart/Roots is a tapestry of sonnets, monologues, and scenes. Like so many other elements of this project, the script was also enriched and deepened by our efforts to address and embrace the unpredictable impact of the pandemic. In March, we were able to hold auditions at The Volland Store, with again some participants opting to audition via Zoom. It seemed that the groundwork we laid through our visits to several different community locations months earlier as well as the multiple and digital ways we collected stories helped to ensure trust in us and thus a robust audition pool. Our final cast of ten included a former mayor, a grassland ecologist, a yoga studio owner (the same one who supplied a story and who offered her studio as a story-gathering location), a cattle rancher, an undergraduate student, and a paramedic. After nearly two years of teaching on Zoom as well as directing a digital production at Babson College during the pandemic, I felt comfortable using this platform for the rehearsals between March and June, when we would be returning to Kansas for the production. Although we both remain certain that in-person rehearsals for a theater production are the ideal route, Zoom provided opportunities to build important community and relationships in ways we could not have predicted. Like our story sessions on Zoom, actors in Zoom rehearsals joined us from their living rooms, kitchens, dorm rooms, and even ambulance bays. Almost every Zoom session started with one or more of the actors explaining where they were and sharing some detail about their environment. Our undergraduate student proudly shared his fraternity flag. Our paramedic showed how she could adjust her radio system to hear news of incoming emergencies and accidents. Our horse-owning cast member showed his pastures. While at the time we thought of these very local show-and-tells as a way to break the ice of the rehearsal or to get actors talking, in retrospect we see these moments as important for trust-building. It is a profound experience to see someone’s home or work environment and even more profound when that person is willing to share artifacts or facets of that place. Zoom rehearsals, by their nature, are not always conducive to getting actors on their feet or for sketching out blocking. Nonetheless, we found that these rehearsals extended our table work and thus our conversations about objective, language, and timing. I readily admit that in most rehearsal hall scenarios, I am quick to experiment with and solidify movement. The Zoom rehearsals for Heart/Roots slowed down this impulse. The conversations during our rehearsals gave actors a chance to ask questions of playwright and director, to investigate and analyze each line for meaning and objective, and to discuss with scene partners interactions and relationships. Furthermore, almost every actor told us during the rehearsal process personal stories and histories that somehow connected to or resonated with moments in the script. We cannot be certain that these important conversations would have transpired in a traditional rehearsal experience. When we consider the delicate nature of outsiders creating community-based performance, we understand how vital the talking, sharing of stories, and showing of home environments that comprised our Zoom rehearsals were to the creative process of Heart/Roots . A director, understandably, takes on a leadership position in any production. Such a position usually does not disrupt the kind of built-in, equal relationship to place that a theatrical cast and crew share. In community theater performances, when all cast and crew come from the same area, or in regional or professional theater performances, where cast and crew travel from disparate areas to a specific theater to perform, there is, for the most part, a shared connection to place. Not so with community-based theater. There is a large risk that an outsider, specifically an outsider director, might seem too authoritative or all-knowing when starting rehearsal work. This fear, we feel, could have very well come to fruition had the Heart/Roots cast and crew rehearsed in person from the very start. The Zoom moments instead allowed us to learn and talk about the place in which we would be producing the play. We built trust and ensured that when we finally could come together, for the first time, as a cast in June, we knew each other in ways that safeguarded a solid foundation to begin blocking and to begin a compressed tech week. Heart/Roots: Final Moments and Production Another seeming disadvantage that actually turned advantageous for our production was the fact that the performance space in the Ruin was an unseen and unknown entity not just for the cast but for us as well. Re-construction on the Ruin began after our first trip to Kansas in August and was ongoing when we were at The Volland Store in March. Although a few actors ventured out to the Ruin once it was completed in late Spring to practice their lines and work with their fellow actors, the space was a mystery to most of us working on the production. So, unlike many theater productions, where a director would have an intimate knowledge of the performance space and thus could guide a cast with this knowledge, the production of Heart/Roots was a moment where we all were discovering our performance space together. Although there were hurdles in this discovery process—such as how to work in 100-degree heat, how to shade the audience, how to manage interactions with mosquitos and ticks, how to ensure sound enhancements elevated actors’ voices while keeping a naturalness, and how to block a show with audience sitting on three sides—we navigated these challenges together. Perhaps the greatest difficulty, yet the one that became the most fun to solve together as a cast and production team, was the freight trains that ran on a track just yards from the Ruin and on an unpredictable schedule. Mary had written the “Train Sonnet” for just such a moment, where actors would rejoice and celebrate the passing train and then attempt to recreate the train sounds in a sonnet. We did not know, though, if we would end up using this sonnet or how often. Thus, in our 14 days together before the production opened, our team had much work to do and in tough conditions. We do feel that the bonds solidified—largely through technological means—enabled us to work together, to laugh together, and ultimately to produce a successful, sold-out run of Heart/Roots . Photo 2, Act One of Heart/Roots , photo by Stephen Deets Conclusion The final production was a civic celebration, where long-term residents and newcomers to Wabaunsee County and the Flint Hills heard stories, made connections between past and present, and saw their fellow community members perform entirely new roles on the stage. The reverberations of the show continue. In the months following the production of Heart/Roots cast members have been asked to perform moments from the play for small and large gatherings, and a published version of the script that was on sale during the production is now available for purchase at The Volland Store. And, perhaps most importantly, the Ruin has become a vibrant space for music, with future theater and dance productions already in the works. Photo 3, Audience at Heart/Roots , photo by Lorn Clement Photo 4, Curtain call of Heart/Roots , photo by Abby Amick References [1] Please see the Volland Store website for photos and more information on Heart/Roots in rehearsal and production. http://thevollandstore.com/latest-news-on-the-ruin-and-heart-roots/ [2] “Crossroads: Change in Rural America,” Smithsonian, Accessed September 15, 2022. https://www.sites.si.edu/s/topic/0TO36000000aR1sGAE/crossroads-change-in-rural-america . [3] Sonja Kuftinec, Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003): 1. [4] Ibid, xvi. [5] Eugène van Erven, “Taking to the Streets: Dutch Community Theater Goes Site-Specific,” Research in Drama Education 12, no. 1 (2007): 29. Footnotes About The Author(s) BETH WYNSTRA is an Associate Professor of English at Babson College. Beth’s book, Vows, Veils, and Masks: The Performance of Marriage in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill (University of Iowa Press, Theater History and Culture Series) will be published in 2023. Beth has written extensively on the life and plays of Eugene O’Neill and often works as a dramaturg with professional theater companies around the country who are producing the works of O’Neill. Beth regularly directs plays and musicals at Babson and is the Founding Artistic Director of The Empty Space Theater. MARY PINARD is a Professor of English and a poet. She teaches literature and poetry courses in the Arts & Humanities Division at Babson College. Her poems have appeared in a variety of literary journals, and she has published two collections: Portal by Salmon Press in 2014, and Ghost Heart , which won the 2021 Ex Ophidia Press Poetry Book Contest and was issued by the press in 2022. Over the last fifteen years, she has collaborated with a range of Boston-area musicians, theatre directors, painters, and sculptors to create performances and exhibits. She was born and raised in Seattle. 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. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 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 Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. 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. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. 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:

Dr. Kimmika L.H. Williams Witherspoon 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 From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater Dr. Kimmika L.H. Williams Witherspoon By Published on May 13, 2023 Download Article as PDF On, (May 25, 2020), for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the world watched the callous murder of George Floyd at the hands of members of the Minneapolis police department in Minnesota and Black Lives Matter protests erupted—not just in the United States; but, in Ireland the UK and across the globe. Two years earlier, thanks to a $50,000 Lumina Foundation for Racial Justice and Equity grant, the Temple University Theater department worked with a team of faculty, administrators and staff researchers to collect data, conceive and then mount the devised theater piece, called From Safe to Brave. That play was created from a series of Interactive Community Conversations (or, ICC’s), auto-ethnography, body-mapping and poetic ethnographies that pulled together all that research on the effects of race and hate crimes on college campuses across America. It was that research and devised performance—along with the subsequent racialized and polarizing political ecology that led to the development of the Performance Social Justice Model (PSJR) for devised theater. Methodology In response to the rise in hate crimes generally and specifically on college campuses in the US, in the context of a political moment, where a nation has been made to grapple with questions around white supremacy, police violence, Black Lives Matter and socio-political and health care inequities for their BIPOC citizenry, a Temple University team of scholars, staff and administrators, came together to apply for and were awarded a $50,000 Lumina Foundation for Racial Justice and Equity grant. Out of a pool of over 312 proposals, 12 were awarded; and the Temple University project, entitled Moving from Safe to Brave Spaces through Interactive Community Conversations , was one of them (2018-2019). Fifty-seven participants took part in those community conversations over a four-month period and, out of that research, scores of auto-ethnography, body-mapping and poetic ethnographies were created and collected that would become the devised theater piece From Safe to Brave . As PI, playwright and director of just one of the principal deliverables of the grant, that performance piece, From Safe to Brave , was originally produced for Temple University’s Randall Theater (April 23-24, 2019). Playing to standing-room-only crowds for its limited 2-day run, from its conception as a devised theater ecology, the From Safe to Brave project helped us develop a model for digging deep and exploring the impact of race and racism on the relationships of individuals on and through a community like Temple University— a large, urban, educational institution, deeply embedded in what was once, a predominantly Black and Latinx community. And then, there was George Floyd! As protests emerged around the world, the Temple Theater department wanted to remount that piece following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 for a virtual audience to contribute to the discourse and encourage healing. Ethnographies In the Performative Arts and Humanities, conducting and collecting ethnography that can become “performed research” can be an effective tool for mediating difficult conversations and diving deep into the various stakeholder perspectives while capturing community for the non-threatening, non-confrontational performance space. Engaging members of the community in research that results in performance oftentimes tempers and/or defuses their usual defensiveness to publicly discuss the, oftentimes, issues of contention. Instead, these kinds of devised performances can promote a willingness to s hare the other side of the story when convinced that their views will have equal platform and voice . This devised community performance grew out of research with an intergenerational tapestry of fifty-seven community voices made up of students, faculty, administrators and resident participants from the Temple University community, that used memory, narrative, song, poetry, and dance to speak to notions of race, racism , and the impact of hate crimes on college campuses. Performed Social Justice Research (PSJR) Model PSJR Model Model Phase Items Component Parts Purpose Challenges Outcomes ICC’s Akin to Focus Groups Interactive Community Conversation 5-15 participants per ICC Information, Consent Pre and Post Surveys Packing the ICC. Never reached full capacity. Demographic data; consent, Developing a shared lexicon Reflexivity Memory Writing Prompts Identifying Stakeholder Positions. Creation of auto-ethnography and personal narratives. We slotted an hour and one half for this portion. Needs 2-hour minimum Auto-ethnography, personal narratives, & poetic ethnography Visual Model Embodied memory Body Mapping exercises Creation of Body Maps as visual ethnography. Recorded explanations of map and key–– Additional ethnography. Slotted time: 1 ½ hours. Needs to be a minimum of 2 hrs. Creation of Body Maps as visual ethnography Recorded explanations of map and key— Additional ethnography. Data Analysis Analysis of Quantitative and Qualitative data Reviewing and curating auto-ethnography Transcription, Data-mining Archival footage; Body maps Reviews the data; Audio and video ethnography Script development Framed Body Maps Dissemination of “Applied,” research data Devised Theater Auditions Casting Rehearsals Developing a DUI signage Turn-around time from rehearsals, to mounting the production. All the participating researchers should be invited to the performance. Performed Social Justice Research (PSJR) Model Following the murder of George Floyd (May 25, 2020), not long after the start of the pandemic, I was asked by my chair to remount that initial performance of From Safe to Brave . In the initial face-to-face version, my colleagues and I had used the PSJR model that we developed to collect and distill ethnographies from a wide swath of participants as they grappled with an incredibly complex racialized political ecology. As mentioned, that work became, first, From Save to Brave (2019) and then, remounted for a virtual audience, From Save to Brave Redux (November 2020). This PSJR model allows us to expand the understanding and definitions of ethnography and encourages us, as artists/activists to explore the importance of validating community stories in our work to improve social justice outcomes. Interactive Community Conversation (ICC) Relying on focus groups to inform our data collection on the efficacy of interventions, policies and procedures has been part of our work for years. Incorporating the Interactive Community Conversations or (ICC’s) into the model, relies heavily on storytelling and body-mapping. Using Interactive Community Conversations as the first phase of the Performance Social Justice Research, offers a creativity-centric tool that grounds our work in storytelling, theater and performance studies that can be employed to enhance the effectiveness of the kinds of ethnographic data that we capture that might not otherwise be gleaned from any other typical focus group. The ICC’s should still include information about the impetus for the research and mechanisms to consent to the research, as well as options as to whether they will or will not consent to the use of their auto-ethnographies, ethnographies and body maps to be used in the resulting performance. For our research, all of the reflexive auto-ethnographies that were prompt-driven were written in blue books that we provided participants at the start of each ICC. While all of the participants had the option to take part in all of the activities, at the end of each ICC, participants always had the option of keeping their Blue Books to themselves and not contributing their auto-ethnographies to the overall project. Participants could also opt to allow us to transcribe their auto-ethnographies anonymously. The PSJR model still incorporates some of the more traditional focus group components. Our project utilized pre and post-surveys. While optional, these surveys attempted to collect demographic, education and social science data, as well as to evaluative data to quantify the participants’ understanding of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion terminology and theories on race and anti-racism—both, before and after, each new activity would be introduced throughout the ICC’s. The post-surveys helped our research team evaluate the efficacy of the Reflexive Auto-ethnography and Visual Ethnography phases of the project. Cultural Competency: Developing a Shared Lexicon Following the pre-survey, to develop and encourage a shared lexicon, we introduced a discussion of terms that included words like: Power Privilege Racism Prejudice Institutional racism Violence Activism For those who will, likewise, try implementing the PSJR model, whatever your project is, identifying and defining the terms and theories that are integral to the subject matter and your research; then, reviewing and discussing those collectively with each group of participants evens the playing field , reduces the occurrences of misunderstanding and limits the instances whereby one or more participants who already know the terminology (or, terminologies) to then adopt and take on the role as specialists—and, thereby, potentially, intimidating the others. Reflexivity Model Phase Because PSJR operates as “applied performance research”, to promote community understanding and to expand the social justice ecology of the project, allowing participants to craft auto-ethnographies that speak to their own identity as one of the first reflexive exercises gives participants, not only a voice, but also gives them a sense of agency. Later, in the rehearsal process, these auto-ethnographies can be referenced to help mark and solidify how the work should be embodied. Poetic Ethnography Prompts Reflexive Writing Activities provided an easy, structured way to craft quick auto-ethnographies. For this project, we used several Poetic Ethnography prompts that I regularly use in classroom and workshop settings that are meant to operate as easy access points to promote creativity. Poetic Ethnography Prompts One Line on Identity Seven Squared Haiku on Race Happiest Memory free write Saddest Memory free write Using these reflective exercises, seemingly, made crafting and developing the auto-ethnographies easier. While some of the memories that participants wrote about and shared were indeed, rich—full of sights, sounds, feelings and emotions—some were, in fact, triggering and traumatizing. In our project, the prompt sequence allowed participants to quickly access the sometimes, difficult and challenging memories of race and racism and to expeditiously talk about those instances that so impacted their lives. If your project, likewise, tackles sensitive or triggering issues or trauma-informed memories, using auto-ethnography prompts offers a strategic way to briefly gain access to some of those challenging thoughts, feelings, and emotions. The key to collecting meaningful reflections is to keep the prompts focused, short, quick and easy and to give individuals an appropriate amount of time to share their reflections (or not to share , depending upon their comfort level.) Because the prompts are timed, individuals don’t get bogged down in over-thinking any one memory; and because they are being asked to reflect on their own individual stories, the research team has already assured them that they are already invested in each, individual participant’s positionality, personal narrative, participation and input. Visual Model Phase Rethinking Rene Descartes’ notion of Mind/Body Dualism (Rene Descartes, 1993) the Visual model phase of the PSJR work transforms Descartes’ ideas “I think therefore I am ” to one that acknowledges the importance of the emotional connections in our work as artist/activists and social justice advocates. I feel therefore I am (Williams-Witherspoon, 2020) builds on the research of people like Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and others, who acknowledge, that by “triggering moments of deep reflection, when people are thinking deeply about things that are really meaningful to them, they are triggering neurobiological connections.” (Immordino-Yang, 2016: 18) In other words, “reflection promotes deep thinking.” (Williams-Witherspoon, 2020, Performing Race : 45) Body Mapping For our project, we used Body mapping. My colleague Dr. Elizabeth Sweet, led study participants in the creation and collection of visual ethnographies . The body mapping provided for “a more kinesthetic accompanying narrative about how racism impacts the body.” (Williams-Witherspoon, 2020: Performing Race : 38) Participants were asked to think deeply about the answers to the following four questions: Draw how and where racism feels on or in your body. Draw the emotions that you feel when you observe racism. Draw the long-term impacts of racism on or in your body Draw on or in your body where you have strength to fight racism. (Williams-Witherspoon, 2020: 38 Performing Race ) In their creation of the 7-foot-tall body maps , these maps added another layer of texts that visually spoke to the trauma of racism in some spaces. (Williams-Witherspoon, 2020: 38) Before ending the body mapping activities, participants were asked to explain the Body Map Key for each map. These video-taped segments became the filmed ethnographic material and, some of the longer monologues in the final devised performances. The Interactive Community Conversations (ICC’s) validated participant’s thoughts, feelings and poetic ethnographies that would later become the devised or applied research data theatre. (Cohen-Cruz, 2010: 5) Data Analysis Model Phase Before reviewing and curating auto-ethnographies from the Reflexive Writing Activities, they needed to be transcribed. Transcription is one of the most important steps in the analysis process because so much of our communication strategies are tied to cultural competencies—gestures, eye movement, body language. In addition to the quantitative data collected from the pre and post-surveys administered to participants during each Interactive community conversation, the qualitative data gleaned from the transcripts will become the basis of the devised theater piece. From Script to Performance The transcription phase is the longest step in the performed research process. The more accurate and thorough the transcription process, the easier the step to distill the personal narratives, poetry and auto-ethnographies into a devised performance script with ensemble characters based on the real-life research participants from across the community. In performance, it is vital that everyone’s voice is acknowledged and a portion of everyone’s story becomes part of the scripted performance. In this way, we acknowledge the complexity of political ecologies and we contribute to social justice solutions by elevating and expanding community conversations. Because of COVID-19, in response to a world-wide pandemic, by Spring 2020, most of the world had experienced some manner or method of quarantine and sequestering. Many theaters were forced to cancel or reschedule performances—others, simply closed their doors. Following the murder of George Floyd and the season of summer protests that ensued, many of our nation's theaters were prompted to address growing concerns and to investigate and utilize digital and video technologies to continue to create, and to contribute to the expanding public discourse on violence and the racial reckoning. With that in mind, Temple Theaters revised fall season, included both some plays that would be performed as zoom performances along with some offerings that were intended to provide students and audience members alike with a safe in-person experience as well. As COVID numbers continued to rise, our Fall 2020 season needed to happen on Zoom ®. To speak to the racial reckoning following George Floyd’s murder, some new monologues, poems and songs were added to the original script. Actors, quarantining in their homes across the country, were sent ring lights, instruction on how to use them, and, in addition to regular zoom rehearsals, were also given blocking and tips on how to enhance their individual video-taped performance on Zoom. Using green screen technologies designed by Temple Theater graduate students and innovative video and sound editing by my colleagues, Jason Norris and Nick Gackenbach, From Safe to Brave Redux premiered on November 20th through December 7, 2020 on YouTube ®, Facebook ® and Temple Theater’s streaming links. Conclusion Ultimately, because of COVID-19, theater artists/activists, researchers and theaters had to become even more creative and entrepreneurial—for many of us, by using the PSJR Research model and dabbling and using some of the latest cutting-edge technologies to continue to tell our stories—even in a pandemic when our communities were hurting the most and needed to be separated from one another. As hate, injustice, racism, sexism, antisemitism, Islamophobia and oppression continues to raise its ugly head(s) and dominate our collective struggle for equity and justice, Social Activist theater will continue to rise in importance as a vehicle to advocate for social change. Because of the challenges of 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic, theater as we knew it, had to transform and reimagine itself. For those of us already working with devised performance as community engagement, theater during the pandemic necessitated new theatrical devices to continue to do the work important to us as social justice artists/activists. As we have discussed in this work, Performed Social Justice Research (PSJR) is reality-based theater and instruction. It is participatory. It constructs knowledge and aligns history with more inclusive truths . By using the PSJR model, with the Interactive Community Conversations component, applied arts researchers can collect more nuanced ethnographic data beyond the more traditional focus-group studies. By using some of the methods outlined here in the PSJR model to collect, transcribe, analyze, then curate and disseminate Performance research, these same research methods can be used to extend some of the new theatrical devices we all had to develop during the pandemic and to expand our definitions of devised theater. Giving community members “voice” and allowing the ethnographies to speak for themselves, through the art and its text, as applied artists/scholars, we can contribute to our nation’s most challenging problems and to those conversations in the public discourse by providing a “genuine exchange between artists and community”(Cohen-Cruz: 3). In that way, we will not only “act as a witness” (Albert Camus, cited in Charlesworth, 1975:32); but we will also, be a catalyst for change. References Charlesworth, Max. The Existentialist and Jean-Paul Sartre. St Lucia. Queensland University of Queensland Press. 1975. Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy , edited by Stanley Tweyman. Routledge. 34–40. London and New York. 1993. Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen. Emotions, Learning and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience . W.W. Norton Company. New York. 2016. Williams-Witherspoon, Kimmika L. H. "Performing Race: Using Performance to Heal the Trauma of Race and Racism on College Campuses." In Storytelling, Self, Society. Wayne State University Press. (16:1, Spring 2020), https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/storytelling/ Williams-Witherspoon, Center for the Advancement of Teaching, (CAT) Lecture Breakout Session, January 7, 2020. “Performing SHOT: Personalizing North Philly, Poverty and Performance Poetry.” In Ethnographic in Pan Pacific Research: Tensions and Positionings. Routledge: New York. 2015. 36-55. Williams-Witherspoon. “On SHOT!: A Rationale for Research and Dramas Depicting Violence in the ‘Hood.” In Theatre Topics 23, no. 2 (2013): 167-183. Footnotes About The Author(s) KIMMIKA WILLIAMS-WITHERSPOON , Ph.D. (Cultural Anthropology), MA (Anthropology), MFA (Theater), Women's Studies (Graduate Certificate), BA (Journalism); is an Associate Professor of Urban Theater and Community Engagement. Recipient of the 2013 Associate Provosts for the Arts Grant; a 2008 Research and Creative Seed Grant Co-recipient, a 2003 Provost's Arts Commission Grant; a 2001 Independence Foundation Theater Communications Group Grant, the 2000 winner of the PEW Charitable Trust fellowship in scriptwriting, and the 1999, winner of the DaimlerChrysler "Spirit of the Word" National Poetry Competition. Author of Through Smiles and Tears: The History of African American Theater (From Kemet to the Americas) (Lambert Academic Publishing, 2011); T he Secret Messages in African American Theater: Hidden Meaning Embedded in Public Discourse (Edwin Mellen Publishing, 2006). She has had over twenty-three of her plays produced. Her stage credits include thirteen productions and she is a contributing poet to twenty-six poetry anthologies. 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. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming 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 (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. 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. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. 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.

Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder 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 The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder By Published on May 6, 2023 Download Article as PDF On a mild day in June 2020, four actors, each in their own car, paraded through the small, rural college town of Sewanee, Tennessee. Similar to the pageant wagons of medieval times, the goal was to bring theatre to the people all while offering entertainment, enlightenment, and an opportunity for fellowship. The production: The Front Porch Plays , an evening of socially-distanced, Covid-safe, micro-theatre. Actor Virginia Craighill performs for community members. Made popular in Spain, micro-theatre aims to create intimate theatrical experiences by performing short-form theatre to small audiences. Developed in response to the financial crisis in Spain, micro-theatre became a way to produce new theatre at a time when the arts were underfunded. Productions are produced quickly, with minimal financial investment, making them affordable for artists who want to create theatre that is accessible. The Front Porch Plays was also created in response to a crisis: the Covid pandemic. Theatre has always been a communal event: it is both created and consumed together. As it became clear that the country’s three-week social experiment in isolation in the spring of 2020 was going to extend through the summer I began to explore ways to tell stories which allowed for human interaction while also maintaining social distancing. Inspired by the innovative work being done by arts organizations forced to pivot away from their traditional programming, The Front Porch Plays was born. My interest in site-specific theatre makes me look at my surroundings through a different lens. I see possibility in unlikely places. I’ve hosted new work in kitchens, art galleries, and even a freight elevator. However, because of the pandemic indoor spaces were off-limits. Social distancing would require more space. Luckily, our town, which sits on the Cumberland Plateau provided the perfect setting. Like so many theatre artists, I found myself feeling an enormous sense of loss as our new reality became apparent. A world-premiere production of a new play, two years in the making, was shut down eight days into rehearsal while other projects I had planned were put on hold. In the early days of the pandemic, I wrote monologues for two theatre companies that were pivoting to online programming. These events offered me the opportunity to write while contributing to the theatre community that had been decimated. With those two pieces as my foundation, I began writing additional monologues. My hope was to create a short collection of monologues that worked in conversation with one another. Monologues can be deceptive in their simplicity; however, a well-written monologue not only tells a story, but it has a clear objective and is active. Each character I created wanted something very specific: a mother who wanted to pass down her cast iron skillet; a teenager who wanted the freedom to watch a comet she would only see once in her lifetime; a man who wanted to connect with his neighbor. While none of the monologues explicitly mentioned the pandemic, the subtext of each piece informed the audience that these were people unable to move freely in the world, who were trying to make connections with others despite barriers. Once I had several monologues to choose from, I settled on four that I knew I could cast from within my community. The goal was to make the event long enough to feel fulfilling while keeping it short enough to perform multiple times a night for multiple groups of people. We began by rehearsing over Zoom and then gathered outdoors to run the show. To help with transitions we added a guitar player. The monologues, when presented together, ran approximately 12 minutes in total. Because we are a small town, I was able to create a route each night that required only a three to five-minute drive between each stop. We limited ourselves to five performances each night which meant that with performance and travel time, I was only asking for 90 minutes of commitment from the actors. The show was billed as “socially distanced micro-theatre from the safety of your front porch.” Hosts were asked to limit guests to ten. This made it easier to social distance, but in the spirit of micro-theatre, it also created a more intimate experience. Word spread quickly as community members, eager for something to look forward to, signed up. Guests waited; some gathered on their front porches, others in lawn chairs in their yards, and they cheered when we arrived. The project was so popular that we added a second weekend of performances. Community members waiting for the arrival of the Front Porch Plays . The audience was asked to social-distance and limit their group to 10 people. The response from the community was overwhelming. One audience member wrote, “We would like to thank you so much for your efforts in providing a really special experience this past weekend! It was such fun, and really perfection! We continue to marvel at how the community comes together and shares their many gifts with others!” Another responded by saying, “This was such a gift. It was a reminder of the outside world, a way to enter another world, and a way to be (safely) in community.” Once I knew the project was possible, I created a “how to” guide to walk people through the entire process and offered it to theatres royalty-free as long as their performances were free of charge. The project was quickly picked up by the Nomad Theatre, based in Indiana. Rather than charging admission, they chose to accept donations. On their first day of performances, they raised more than $1300 which was then split between organizations that support Black and LGBTQ+ communities. According to producer Connie Blick, “Each and every one of us felt alive again, being able to be creative and share our talents in front of an audience.” Theatre artists have always responded in times of crisis. It is the way we make sense of the world around us. At a time when we were otherwise isolated from one another, theatre once again offered a way to examine the human condition while creating connection and community. Actor Jim Crawford performs his monologue for community members in Sewanee, TN. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ELYZABETH GREGORY WILDER is currently the Tennessee Williams Playwright-in-Residence at Sewanee: The University of the South. Her work has been produced, developed, and commissioned by the Royal Court, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Denver Center Theatre, New Conservatory Theatre, Arden Theatre, Cleveland Play House, Geva Theatre, Sloan Foundation, and Pioneer Theatre, among others. Elyzabeth is a graduate of NYU and an alum of Youngblood. www.wilderwriting.net 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. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming 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 (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. 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. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. 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:

Jackie Rosenfeld and Cade M.Sikora 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 Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Jackie Rosenfeld and Cade M.Sikora By Published on April 28, 2023 Download Article as PDF There is a tremendous amount of grief in the post-COVID world of post-secondary educational theatre regarding missed opportunities and lost time. When we, Professors Jackie Rosenfeld (Playwriting and Pedagogy) and Cade M. Sikora (Scenic Design and Technical Direction), joined the Department of Theatre at Texas AM University-Commerce in the Fall of 2021 we developed a new way for our students to engage in theatre that is epic, flexible, and opens up untold potential to connect to the outside world apart from their scheduled season of shows and regular coursework. The opportunity: workshopping and producing a radio play of Flying in the Face of God [i], a new work and docu-dramatization set aboard the famous Titanic , seemingly ending with the destruction of the ship in real-time. The outcomes: connection to each other, excitement about the production of new works, the creation of an entire extracurricular program called the New Play Development Initiative, and enhancement to the curriculums in our department. *** Sikora: This project did not start as a vehicle for any academic activity or as a radio play. Prior to coming to Texas, I was developing a docu-dramatization of the Titanic disaster as part of my own personal portfolio. The story I wanted to tell is huge. The historical event and the consequences thereof are of interest to me, and I knew early on that I was responding to the historic event as well as pop culture’s depictions of the event. To that end, please note two things about the work: The characters depicted are historical figures. The events depicted are taken from biographic information, survivors’ accounts, implied in survivors’ accounts, or at the very least are possible given the information available. This research-oriented approach to the writing geared the project to an academic environment before that was ever a consideration. Rosenfeld: Before the Fall Semester officially began, Sikora asked if I would be willing to read a draft of a play he was working on; I was. Upon finishing the immense script and sharing my initial response, I asked if I could serve as the dramaturg for this new work. We spent the semester trading drafts and feedback. Sikora was initially resistant to hearing a read-through until he finished the second draft. One afternoon in the last week of the semester, however, I was involved in a meeting with a number of students including two we thought would be particularly strong in some of the roles. When Sikora agreed, I very quickly asked the young men if they were available to read a couple of pages from a new script. Within twenty minutes, a short scene from Flying in the Face of God was read aloud for the first time. Sikora: After this first two-page read-through, I became interested in hearing more of the script. But it was huge and incomplete. I broke the play down into chunks. Instead of the mammoth text, the read-through script was whittled down to tell one of its many plotlines. This allowed us to get through a complete story in a reasonable amount of time, gave the performers an opportunity to see the trajectory of the piece, and allowed me as the playwright an opportunity to really focus on one plot at a time. Rosenfeld: The casting of the play needed to be as simple as possible. There are over 183 speaking roles in the play with many of them being white men middle-aged and older from the United States and abroad. We cast without regard to race, age, or ethnicity, allowing us to engage with a broader range of students. While we assured all the students that accents would not be required, many took it upon themselves to learn the basics of various European dialects. To allow students the opportunity to perform and the playwright to listen, we decided I would read the stage directions. Sikora: At the read-through, students were provided with a very brief biography of the characters they were reading for, and we jumped into the text. They understood that they were not reading the full text but were reading one full story from within the text. In the talkback, the students expressed interest in knowing more. Reading 1/12 of the play and only seeing glimpses of the other 11/12 had whetted their appetites. Rosenfeld: We also created a response form with specific questions for the readers to reflect on in the days after the reading. This was useful for Sikora; it was even more useful for the students. This opportunity to give feedback allowed them to think critically about a work in progress and to begin to understand the value of both their ideas and their participation. Sikora: To continue this process, I had to keep writing the play. By the end of the semester, we held six read-throughs. On any given night, we read one to three new plotlines, each time understanding the story better than the time before. Rosenfeld: Throughout the readings I continued to do dramaturgical work. Relaying all this information to the students as we progressed made it all the more exciting. Both Sikora and I were able to use all our research as teaching opportunities about primary resources and secondary resources. Sikora: There was interest from the student participants in creating some form of production. The solution we landed on was to produce a recording of a staged reading. By using all the tools we had amassed and skills we had honed over the semester of small readings, we could create one reading of the full text. This initiative spoke to a number of wants and needs which were floating around our department: our collective desire to hear what this script sounded like end-to-end, an opportunity to prototype Rosenfeld’s idea for a new play development program, and to provide a sense of closure to what had become a much bigger project than was originally imagined. To prepare for this reading, I combed the script to get a sense of just which stage directions needed to be recorded for a radio play adaptation to be successful. Owing to the precise nature of the storytelling and the huge importance on historicity, certain sections of the original text include absolute paragraphs of stage directions. As the playwright, and knowing that I would be doing the post-production, I attempted to vet out some of these fuller sections. This was also when casting choices were made. Essentially, we expanded on the model we used for the initial read-throughs: Each actor was cast in a small number of lead roles, a comparable number of supporting roles from other plotlines within the story, and any number of tertiary roles with the intention of providing our students with varieties of characters which they could perform and to minimize situations where actors spoke to themselves as different characters. There are still scenes where an actor as a lead character speaks to or around themselves as a secondary or tertiary character, but they were carefully chosen in such a way that the audience would not get confused. Over Labor Day Weekend, 2022, we recorded a final read-through of the text. As the concept of time plays an important role in the script, so too did it play for us as we had no more than three workdays to wade through over 500-pages of text. The first day was largely spent disseminating information about the event, characters, and text so that everyone was on the same page with the production. Days two and three were devoted to reading and recording. We do not have a sound studio capable of recording over a dozen people individually and that was far beyond our intended scope, anyway. We set up an impromptu recording studio on one of our performance spaces, complete with enough microphones that we could pair cast members off to share, a digital soundboard to record, and all of the masking flown in to create as much soundproofing as we could muster. Throughout the recording itself, I took notes in my script of lines or sections which I knew would need to be re-recorded, notes on timing, notes from the sound board operator, and notes on and anything else which I thought would help me in the editing process later. By the numbers, the weekend included: thirteen student performers reading for over 180 characters; one Student Sound Technician; one Prologue, twenty-four scenes, and one Epilogue, spread over 523 pages of dialogue and action; and a 400-slide dramaturgical presentation. Rosenfeld: In addition to the dramaturgical presentation, we spent a bit of time on the first day discussing mic technique. Having spent some time in the audiobook industry, I was able to give basic instructions and tips on placement and pronunciation. These new skills led to four of these students now working as professional voice actors in a curriculum video series with a major university. It became obvious early in the process that recording stage directions as planned proved to be a logistical impossibility. We were already weary of running out of time and while the information was important to understanding the action for the audience it had the contrary effect of slowing down the pacing and energy for the actors. We made the decision to record the stage directions at a later date. Instead Sikora gave important details to the cast as needed to interpret the scenes. This was fortuitous to have the experience later of reading through the play using only the stage directions. It assisted Sikora in fine-tuning some areas as well as understanding his voice as a playwright—particularly toward the end when the stage directions alone had me in tears. As the dramaturg it confirmed for me that the stage directions play a vital role in this play in communicating not just the actions of the play but also the tone, mood, and subtext. Reading a script in this way is an exercise I will use going forward with all of my own plays as well as an exercise in playwriting courses and with new works I dramaturg. The entirety of the Epilogue needed to be recorded after the fact as well. As we neared the end of the play we were more quickly approaching the end of our recording schedule. Adding to the urgency of time was the heightened emotions of the piece which we knew could not be sacrificed for speed. In an effort to bring the piece to a temporary conclusion, as none of the students had experienced the piece fully from beginning to end, Sikora and I briskly and intently read-through to the end in their stead. While the students were disappointed this did not give the cohesion and satisfactory ending preferred with live theatre, it was an opportunity to learn that recorded works have the ability to be altered in post-production. Sikora: Before I could hit the ground on editing, I arranged pick-up recordings with each member of the cast. In these pick-up recordings we re-recorded any lines which were flubbed, any rewrites which occurred after the Labor Day Weekend session, and the Epilogue. Students were brought in separately to complete these recordings in the same makeshift studio setting. To achieve this, I went through my notated copy of the script, compiled an individual document for each cast member listing their pick-up lines in chronological order, and worked with them one line at a time. Many of the actors were able to pick up right where they left off because by this point they were so familiar with the text. Occasionally, and particularly for our newer castmates who were reading the Epilogue for the first time, additional context was required and as Playwright/Director I was able to provide that while we recorded. I also recorded Rosenfeld reading stage directions in much the same way. The post-production process took place in two waves: First, an audio trailer was mixed to demonstrate the quality of work we are able to achieve outside the normal production setting. Second, I set about editing the hours of audio into a ten-and-a-half-hour final product. This mostly involved trimming the recorded dialogue and mixing it with sound effects and diegetic music in Adobe Audition. Everything from lilting period music recorded by a castmate’s father to the gentle patter of the engines to the ominous ticking of the Clock which counts down the Titanic ’s final seconds was mixed into the hours of dialogue. In addition to serving the needs of this project, this part of the process also helped me develop our theatrical sound design and engineering program as I used samples of the recording and mix to illustrate concepts to students in our Sound Design class. Rosenfeld: We released the production in consumable installments over the first week of January 2023. Students were able to share the radio play with their friends and families; the response was delightful. Our fears about the production’s length were put to rest when one listener compared the experience to listening to a limited series podcast and others compared it to an audiobook. The radio play format has a new, eager audience. We held a listening party in the theatre at the end of the month so the students could hear it together. Though not all were able to attend, it was incredibly satisfying as an educator to watch them experience the result of a yearlong endeavor. An unexpected advantage to recording this as a radio play with contemporary technology is that we are able to easily insert changes into the production. This has allowed Sikora not only to record corrections to misspoken lines but to record re-writes as well. This is something we can offer playwrights in the future through NPDI’s workshop series. It also allows us to record additional actors as interest and time allows. As noted, Flying in the Face of God has well over a hundred speaking characters and with the small size of our department that means there are a handful of occasions when an actor plays two different characters within a single scene or conversation. As new students join our program, we are able to insert new voices and create a new dynamic within the same piece without having to record the entire play with the full company. On a larger scale, this project served as a building block and test run of a program designed to prepare our students to work on new plays after they graduate. When Sikora and I decided to turn this workshop reading series into a recorded product, I took the idea to the department head as a trial run of this kind of project using in-house faculty. To that end, the ability to invite working playwrights from the Dallas Metroplex to workshop new plays with our students and provide a recording for both the playwrights and our archive is now possible and the New Play Development Initiative became an official part of the AM-Commerce Department of Theatre. *** Having started this work in 2014, it was never Sikora’s intention that Flying in the Face of God might connect to the current Pandemic, but the confluence of events that led to the production of the works at TAMUC is remarkable on that score. Sikora’s desire to tell a massive story set during the Titanic disaster fed a hunger the students had to participate in telling a theatrical story of that scale. That it is a play about real people who endured a real cataclysm made it relatable to a group of persons living through another great cataclysm. Student Kaden James noted: I felt that the characters were truly living in a once-in-a-lifetime historical event, and with that relation to our everyday life being changed due to the pandemic, I felt that my relation to the characters was on a much more human level, in knowing that they only did what they could do. There was no higher expectation or complaint to what they had done, all for the fact that they were humans in an unknown situation. . . I more related to the direness of their situation than I did to the bleakness of my own. Another student, Kiley Towne, added, “Although they were suffering and scared, the characters always let their hope drive their actions, which was a wonderful lesson for me. We can always hope for a better tomorrow.” The Pandemic stalled our collaborative and individual progress in many ways. So often it seems like we were robbed of the time and opportunities we feel we should have had. While producing Flying in the Face of God , participants came to identify with historic characters whose time also appeared to be running out. They were also able to identify and create with each other in a new, unexpected way. The excitement around this project helped spur the AM-Commerce Department of Theatre’s New Play Development Initiative. This program now includes an annual recorded workshop series, a 24 Hour Theatre Project, and a group of students including playwrights, actors, designers, and technicians who meet weekly to focus on developing new plays. [i] The recording of Flying in the Face of God, including its trailer, is available for a limited time at: https://on.soundcloud.com/VDTRM QR code to Flying in the Face of God References Footnotes About The Author(s) JACKIE ROSENFELD is the Assistant Professor of Playwriting and Theatre Pedagogy at Texas AM Commerce. Her play keepingabreast produced by Blunder Woman Productions is available on Audible. Audible to keepingabreast CADE M. SIKORA is the Assistant Professor of Scenic Design and Technical Direction at Texas AM University-Commerce. Cade Sikora's portfolio 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. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming 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 (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. 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. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. 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.

Jared Strange 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 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area Jared Strange By Published on May 11, 2023 Download Article as PDF For most Americans, the mere mention of “the DMV” summons nightmares of bureaucratic deadlock. For residents of the DC-Maryland-Virginia metropolitan area such as myself, it means something like home—though living a few Metro stops away from the seat of the federal government means deadlock is never far from mind. Apart from residing in the shadow of the Capitol, our DMV is characterized by a curiously disconnected sense of place. For my part, much of that has to do with the University of Maryland, my institutional home in a DC pseudo-suburb otherwise known for housing the local IKEA. Some of it has to do with the peculiarities of the District, which has outgrown its exclusively federal designation and stubbornly progressed through stages of self-rule, though not to the point where it is always clear who is in charge. As in most places, the pandemic affected this DMV in unique ways, and as in most places, theatre artists responded in turn. One of the signature issues artists faced was how to meet people where they are—a troublesome prospect in the DMV even before the advent of the pandemic. In the autumn of 2019, a group of artists came together at the urging of playwrights Jennifer Barclay and Tim J. Lord to address that challenge by leveraging the area’s significant but disparate new play development faculties. The new collective, later to be known as District Dramatists, gathered under auspicious signs at the REACH, a sparkling new space at the Kennedy Center. Optimism ran high, though the challenge of serving artists through decentralized leadership without overburdening volunteers quickly proved an obstacle. The arrival of lockdown, coupled with the furlough of our Kennedy Center advocates, brought that obstacle into especially stark relief, and ended our experiment prematurely. The dissolution of District Dramatists foreshadowed aspects of new play development, and our very artform itself, that would demand consideration over the coming years: the dynamics of space in the time of social distancing and the material needs of artists in a time of social reckoning. Unsurprisingly, the opportunities and limitations of digital space were a significant factor in navigating the first two years of the pandemic. The University of Maryland became a trailblazer in this regard when it transitioned an in-person production of Qui Nguyen’s D&D-centric play She Kills Monsters to the Zoom room under the guidance of media specialist and digital champion Jared Mezzocchi and co-director Lisa Nathans. The move quickly established and tested the rules of Zoom theatre. Over time, many artists adopted similar models, producing everything from daring new works such as FakeFriends’ Circle Jerk to small companies such as Theatre in Quarantine. The DMV also became a hive for new play development programming that sought to recreate the rehearsal space in the Zoom room, often with mixed results. In my own developmental work with Rorschach Theatre Company and UMD’s Fearless New Play Festival, I found myself contending with both the actual expectations of the Zoom rehearsal space and the imagined expectations of the “real” rehearsal space. Crucially, the shift online did suggest positive adaptations for “post-COVID” development, which has so far included making readings on Zoom, solely or in a hybrid format, something like the norm, and allowing artists to participate in initial developmental work from afar. To what degree these accessible arrangements will become standard remains to be seen. While online spaces should continue to bolster new play development through mixed modes of production, other projects speak to the enduring power of the physical. After having its original season stymied, Rorschach Theatre Company, under the leadership of co-artistic directors Randy Baker and Jenny McConnell Frederick, joined with associate artists to develop an immersive, site-specific, mail-in project titled Psychogeographies . Now in its third iteration, Psychogeographies tells epic stories of science-fiction and fantasy through boxes of letters and artifacts mailed out to subscribers monthly. Subscribers are then invited to explore the contents of each box at a corresponding location in the DMV. Each story beat draws inspiration from the location, evoking both its geographical particulars and the power dynamics that have shaped and reshaped that geography over time. The story concludes with a live, immersive performance at a venue in DC, echoing Rorschach’s long-running commitment to exploring the way space informs narrative and experience. While criss-crossing the DMV via bike, train, and car for the project’s second installment, Chemical Exile , I became especially mindful of how embracing location as the primary connective thread of a narrative resonates both with the histories of each site and the renewed appreciation for public spaces that emerged during the early days of the pandemic, when there was hardly anywhere else to go. It helped that Chemical Exile , co-developed with associate artists Kylos Brannon, Doug Robinson, Shayla Roland, and Jonelle Walker, centered on a scientist who returns to the United States to find her material world an eerie mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar. The resulting sense of disorientation chimed with my efforts to grasp the region’s unique terrain and refined my attention to the ways many residents—particularly Black residents, like the play’s heroine—have had to grapple with the forces of gentrification transforming their homes into places that are strange and even hostile. As I alluded in my review of the piece for Washington City Paper , one of the challenges of “bingeing” Chemical Exile in one day—which, to be very clear, is not what Rorschach recommends—is that it made my transition from a self-driven, exploratory process into a delimited immersive performance especially jarring. Even in a space as beautifully rendered by Rorschach’s cadre of set designers (Nadir Bey, Sarah Beth Hall, and Grace Trudeau), I found myself longing for the freedom to explore the tension between the real world and the play’s world on my own. Thankfully, even as the District returns to something like the old “normal,” Baker and Frederick remain committed to producing new iterations of the project and introducing new audiences to the area’s psychogeography. For all the technological innovations and spatial rearrangements that the pandemic has forced new playmakers to adopt, one of the most significant pushes has been to empower audience members and theatre-makers who are often excluded from the head table. For my part, that push is most evident in education. When the pandemic set in, my chief side-gig at The National Theatre in DC shifted online, leading to an expansive website project aimed at documenting the institution’s history, a significant portion of which has been taken up by hosting pre-Broadway tryouts for future classics such as Fiddler on the Roof and M. Butterfly , and integrating them with DC-area high school curricula. More significant, however, was my time as a teaching artist with Young Playwrights’ Theater, an organization that specializes in in-school and after-school playwriting classes for students of all ages, including adults. One of my assignments was at Chelsea School, a small campus stuffed into a commercial building near the Mall at Prince George’s Plaza in Hyattsville, Maryland. The school specializes in helping students with language and learning difficulties, many of whom benefit from a suite of Google tools that include screen-readers and other language-processing technologies. In recognition of their needs, Young Playwrights’ Theater brought me on with license to riff on their usual curricula alongside my Chelsea co-teacher, who just so happened to be the school’s director. I initially took my freedom to experiment as an exciting opportunity to decenter the individual writing in our course and adopt something closer to a devised or writers’ room model. Instead of beginning with Freytag’s pyramid, I urged the students to build worlds based on the stories that moved them, taking note of everything from themes to characters to settings. Instead of drafting dialogue, I encouraged them to fill a Google Slides document with notes, images, ideas, or anything that would evoke what their collective imagination conjured. I wanted to prove that they already knew what made a good story and that we could create one of our own if we worked together. The actual writing would come later in the form of individual monologues set in the world of their design. As it happened, the plan for what we would produce changed over the course of the semester to eventually become a play that was conceived by the group, drafted by me, and presented semi-privately in the classroom. Nearly all those changes were programmatically driven; for example, the initial plan to rotate in new groups was discarded, meaning I effectively had to extend my curriculum by half a semester. Even with that shift in mind, progress was slow-going and sometimes frustrating, though that had more to do with larger issues than with the students. The two groups, one made up of middle-school girls and one of the high-school boys, were like any random sample of teenagers: active and engaged somedays, moody and distant others; some of them eager to bring the text to their feet, others petrified of making a fool of themselves. It was only later that I learned their teachers had brought me and a litany of other arts partners into their classrooms because the effects of pandemic pivots, staff departures, and the usual pressures of adolescent life had simply worn everybody out. My role as a teaching artist had less to do with generating new scripts or even helping the students advance their language facilities (a task I was not suited for on my own) and more to do with helping them release some of the steam that had built up during the past two years of their young lives spent tossing and turning on the waves of unrest. What I had treated as a pedagogical sandbox was really a chance to engage with one of the core values of storytelling: imagining other worlds that help us handle this one. Bearing that in mind, I think we can be happy with the results, even if I still came away with a long list of things to try differently next time. For example, I would take greater initiative to educate myself about pedagogical approaches suited to the environment, rather than referring solely to my already over-worked co-teacher. I also would not be so quick to shove the building blocks of dramatic action and character development to the back; if anything, understanding that a story depends much more on what a character does than what they say could be especially helpful to students for whom language is often a barrier. While my experience at Chelsea was immensely informative, it was also a prime reminder that meeting people where they are often has less to do with “producing” art than connecting with someone else’s reality. In that sense, it highlighted all the ways in which space can, and should, shape new play development. The screen-reading technology that helps some students process text is like the Zoom technology that kept professional read-throughs together: it’s a way to help bridge the gap of access and expand the reach of our room. Chelsea itself, shunted into an office floor above a clinic and a gym, illustrates how young people who are already on the fringes can be pushed even further from the center by physical and institutional architecture. My very presence, summoned by an exhausted administration’s cry for help, proves that no matter the method, what so often dictates the development of new stories is what the participants bring with them. Art does not arise out of a vacuum: it arises out of human beings meeting each other where they are. For all the ways that our new technologies and our old streets have changed new play development, that fact is effectively the same. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JARED STRANGE , Ph.D., MFA, is the Education Programs Manager at The National Theatre, as well as a writer, dramaturg, educator, and scholar based in Washington, DC. His scholarship and reviews can be found in Theatre Research International , Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism , Comparative Drama , Theatre Journal , American Theatre magazine, 3Views on Theater , Washington City Paper , and DC Theater Arts . His plays have been workshopped and produced at the MeetFactory in Prague, DC Source Festival, Rorschach Theatre Company, WildWind Performance Lab, Bath Fringe Festival, Dayton Playhouse FutureFest, and the William Inge Theatre Festival. As a dramaturg, Jared specializes in new play development, audience engagement, and 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 Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. 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. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. 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.

Caitlin A.Kane 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 Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Caitlin A.Kane By Published on May 17, 2023 Download Article as PDF Leigh Fondakowski (they/she) has dedicated nearly 25 years to creating theatre from narrative interviews and archival research. In works including The Laramie Project, The People’s Temple, I Think I Like Girls, and Spill, Fondakowski uses the words of real people to create nuanced portraits of communities in crisis and to illuminate difficult moments in U.S. history. In 2018, they were commissioned to craft a podcast about women’s liberation in honor of the 19th Amendment centennial. That commission led to Feminist Files , [i] an audio theatre series about the “nerdy revolutionaries” (including Dr. Bernice “Bunny” Sandler, Pauli Murray, Edith Green, and Representative Patsy Takemoto Mink) who started the “academic sex revolution” by clandestinely passing the legislation that we now know as Title IX. Although the commission for that work came before the pandemic began, Fondakowski’s research and creative process were undeniably affected and constrained by pandemic-era shutdowns and by rising awareness of the need for more accessible approaches to producing and presenting theatre. In this conversation, conducted via Zoom in November 2022, Fondakowski and I discuss how these forces shaped their development of a hybrid podcast-theatre form that blends Fondakowski’s first-person narrative, recorded interviews with relatives of those who led the fight for gender equity in academia, and performances of edited archival materials. Podcasts and other audio forms, we both agree, have great potential for theatre artists interested in exploring experimental and unconventional dramatic forms and for creating more accessible theatrical works. Caitlin Kane: Can you describe Feminist Files for those who have not yet heard it? Leigh Fondakowski: Feminist Files is a ten-part narrative audio series that tells the secret origin story of Title IX. It covers the years of 1969-1976, tracing how this group of women in Washington went behind the scenes to create legislation that has had an amazing impact. CK: In the series, you describe those women as “nerdy revolutionaries,” and it is such an apt descriptor. LF: Right, there are a lot of cliches about women’s libbers from that period: bra-burning, protests in the streets, all that kind of stuff. That did happen. The radical lesbians were really at the forefront, but the women [whose stories we tell in the series] were not doing that. These were women who were focused on legislative change. The thing that I love about the [timing of this project] – it’s tragic in a way – but Feminist Files was released on the 50th anniversary of Title IX in June [2022], and the day after that, Roe was overturned. So, in 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment and Title IX pass, and in 1973, Roe is instated. Half a century later, Title IX is the last one standing. It is incredible in terms of the arc of history. CK: It makes the series even more urgent at this moment. There is a lot that we can learn about the legislative side of activism from the women whose stories you tell. LF: Right. I think my biggest discovery was realizing the intricacies and the convergence of different people’s work that went into [passing Title IX]. I never really thought about how the sausage gets made. CK: How did you become interested in the stories of this group of feminist activists and the history of Title IX? LF: The project has a bit of a history. I was approached by this media company called Frequency Machine – a young startup co-founded by two women. They wanted to do something for the centennial of the 19th Amendment, so they approached me with this outline they had created for a women’s series, right? I wish I could show you this document. Each episode was an epic chunk of women’s liberation from 1910 to the present. So, I was like, I’ll take this, and I’ll see what I can find. I knew Title IX could be one of the episodes, so I sat down to talk with Rora [Brodwin, another playwright who had previously written a solo show about her Great-Aunt Bunny Sandler, the “godmother of Title IX”], and I realized the series could tell Rora’s story and the story of Title IX. Then, I went to the Schlesinger Library and was convinced that it could be the whole series because I found all this material there. There was so much material, and there were so many parts to the story that I was discovering. So, I went back to [Frequency Machine], and I pitched it. The producers had a background in reality television, so we had to learn how to talk to one another, how to find a common language. I had to learn to speak in TV dramatic logic, which I’m still learning. It took a lot to convince them that there would be enough drama in it because this is not true crime, you know. I told them, “We’re gonna use oral history, but we’re gonna have an actor perform it.” And they were like, “Why are we gonna have an actor perform it? Can’t we just use the real audio of it?” But Bunny Sandler isn’t an actor, so the real audio doesn’t quite have that dramatic energy. I said, “I’m gonna adapt it to my style.” It was a long process of me convincing them this could be dramatic enough, which it turns out it absolutely is. In the end, I think maybe [the producers] were beaten down by my endlessly returning to this pitch! They also gave me the freedom to create something they didn’t entirely understand at first, which is a rare opportunity as an artist, to be trusted in that way. So, the origin story of it was that it was supposed to be this gigantic women’s history. From a hundred years of women’s history, I homed in on Title IX. CK: The audio theatre form that you developed for this project blends the dramatic forms that you use in your interview- and archival-based plays with a more conventional podcast structure. Can you describe how this developmental process built on the processes that you’ve used in the theatre? LF: What’s interesting about it for me as a writer is I really hear text musically when I’m playwriting, both when there’s pre-existing text and when I’m making the text up. In a way, it was like a long rehearsal process. I could live with these recordings and edit from these recordings. Instead of saying to the actor, “Cut that line” or “change this around,” I could just do that with their voice. It did give me the thought that, in the future, when I’m playwriting from big source material again, I’ll have actors record the read-throughs of the whole play so that I have that audio and can play with that audio as I’m playwriting. This form also frees you from having to worry about bodies and space. You create an image world for each episode –you can really focus on voices and story. CK: What do you see as the possibilities for this form looking forward? LF: I think that it’s an underexplored form. I mean, it’s interesting to see what’s happening in the theatre, right? Audible is putting plays on tape… LA Theater Works has been doing it forever, but I think people are more open to audio now, and Hollywood has jumped on the bandwagon because it’s a proof of concept, right? They don’t have to invest in developing a TV series. It can be a podcast first, and then, they can decide they want to make it into a TV series. But there are also people who – instead of selling their intellectual property to someone in Hollywood – they are making an audio version where they have more control and can play with form. It has been called the Wild West because it doesn’t have a lot of rules. SAG and Equity don’t know what to do with it. It’s not governed by any of that stuff, so people are still just exploring. I think it’s a truly experimental landscape right now. It’s also just a different form, right? When [the producers] were giving me notes, they were saying that I needed to imagine someone doing their laundry, being on the treadmill, or cleaning their house. So, we’ve lowered the artistic bar, but it’s also universal. Everybody can access it. It’s not expensive, so in terms of what you were saying earlier– CK: In terms of what the COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated for us as theatre-makers– LF: Right, we still have an issue in the theatre of affordability and accessibility: how much money is spent to make the thing, who gets to watch it, and who are the gatekeepers. In this podcast world, you still have some constraints, but anybody can make a podcast, and most people can access it. CK: You are somewhat present in your theatrical work as an interviewer or narrator figure, but in Feminist Files, you play a much more substantive role. What was it like to be that present as the host and narrator of this series? How did it feel to put yourself into the work in that way? LF: I’ve always resisted that, but in this form, it felt like an inevitability because I’m the one finding this stuff, and I’m trying to recreate this experience for the listener of going on this journey [as a researcher]. Before I found the oral history transcript [in Bunny Sandler’s files at the Schlesinger Library], Rora [Brodwin] had already told me most of Bunny’s history and her own story of sexual assault, including her going into the Title IX office that her great-aunt had created and not being able to tell her great-aunt about that experience. So, that was a narrative arc, right? Then, some of the most moving experiences for me were finding Pauli [Murray’s] journal, realizing that I was working beneath her portrait [in the archive], and Rora introducing me to her as a figure in history. I thought Rora was going to be able to thread all those other elements in. I spent an unbelievable number of hours putting [Rora and Bunny’s] voices together, so they were telling the story together. I thought it was just gonna be the two of them talking to each other because they couldn’t talk to each other in real life anymore, but there was too much that needed to be filled in. I needed to talk people through and give context. I would also say that Sarah Lambert [my co-producer] had a lot to do with it because she is the standard bearer for artistic integrity. So, when Sarah was encouraging me to put myself forward, I knew I had to pay attention. She had never said that in any other process. And, of course, Sarah fact-checked everything to within an inch of its life, so I always felt confident in everything we were saying, you know? And then I had to learn how to direct myself narrating, which was a process. CK: Right – I can imagine how different that felt from working in a theatre with actors, particularly amidst the pandemic. Can you describe your directorial process? How did you do the recordings? Was the whole process done via Zoom? LF: Yeah, [the actors] would set up recording studios, most of the time in their closets, and then they would record, and I would direct via Zoom, but I didn’t have a live feed to the recording because they were sent these kits with SIM cards, so it was nerve-wracking. I could hear how they were sounding over Zoom, and I could hear when they messed up a line, but I couldn’t hear the quality of the recording until they sent us the files, so some of the editing was based on the takes and how they sounded. It was a very different process than when you’re building work in a room with actors. CK: Did you do all the editing yourself, or did you do a rough edit and then have audio engineers who cleaned things up? LF: I did all the editing. I’m trying to think of how many passes on average, but we did a pass, and then, [the producers] would give notes, and then, we’d do another pass, and they would give notes. As it came more into form, they had more and more to say about it. In the beginning, they didn’t know what it was going to be, so they didn’t have much to say, but as it began to take shape, they wanted to weigh in more and more. Then it went to the sound person, Gary [Grundei], and he would edit based on sound, which was such an important element. So, there were probably three to five editing passes for each episode. CK: You mentioned that the process of creating this felt like being in twelve straight weeks of tech. LF: It really did. After I would make the final layout of the words, it would go to an engineer who does a pause pass, which is like a pacing pass. Then, it went to Gary for sound design again, and it came back to me, and I would usually edit out large swaths of the text based on Gary’s work. CK: He does beautiful work, recreating the sounds of the archive for instance, which is both such a quiet space and a space that really comes alive in this podcast. Given how effective this form was in activating this period of feminist history and the capaciousness of the title, Feminist Files, I wonder if there is any plan for additional seasons or episodes? LF: I wanted to call it The Consequential Feminist. CK: What happened to that title? LF: That title never made it out of committee! CK: That’s too bad! LF: I know. I wanted it to be called The Consequential Feminist. I really fought for that title. I think that’s why you hear the term so often in the series. The producers were a bit wary of Feminist Files, too. They wanted to shorten it to be F Files. Because feminism is a “bad” word – people recoil and don’t want to pay attention to feminism. The producers were feminists themselves but having worked in Hollywood for as long as they had, and experienced the sexism and misogyny of the industry, they felt people would be afraid of the word. CK: That’s disheartening. Do you know what the response has been to the project, given the title you chose? LF: It has a steady following but not gigantic because they are a young startup without a big marketing budget. We’re hoping that we’ll be nominated for a GLAAD Award so it can gain some traction. It’s had a steady following, but I only know that from hearing from people that they’re listening to it and enjoying it. CK: If it gets a more robust response, do you think there will be other iterations of the project? LF: That was the idea. The idea was that it could be anthologized, that we’d go back to the archives. I don’t think they’re gonna let me do it, but the story that I want to do next is one I came across accidentally in my research. Somebody left in the scanner a membership card for women in the KKK. It was just sitting there, and Teddy [one of the archivists] said, “Oh, they’ve left this in here.” We were both looking at it and looking at each other, and she said, “Yep, that archive is here.” I mean, that’s a whole different story. We tend to think of the history of mobilization on the left, but I don’t think we think of the history of mobilization on the right. CK: It would be a hard story to sit with for a long time, and you’d have to find an entry point for yourself and audiences, to help them find their way into that story and recognize it as part of our history that we need to grapple with. This project centers on a more uplifting narrative, but it was crafted at a difficult time. You began researching Feminist Files before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the recording and editing of the project was completed in 2020. What was it like to be working on it in the early months of the pandemic? LF: Well, as you know, it was a very scary and isolating time. Once we figured out the mechanics of how to send people the [recording] kits, and I started directing those recordings, though, it was like, “Oh, I’m back in my world.” Being able to spend those hours with Mercedes [Hererro], who is a longtime collaborator of mine, getting to be in the room with Ronald Peet, having conversations with Margo Hall about Black Lives Matter and her life – it was like air in a world without air, you know? And in the end, the producers and I did find a common language and we became strong collaborators, we trusted each other. They were able to get Jodie Foster on board to play Bunny, which shows how much they believed in this project. Getting to work with Jodie [Foster], with that high calibre of an actor… I got off that Zoom call, and I was dancing around the living room. It was lifesaving to have something big to focus on and to be able to connect artistically with people to create it. As a director, working with actors is the whole game, right? Without having that contact, you can think about the projects you want to make and read plays and do other things, but that engagement is where the creative flow really happens. [At the beginning of the pandemic], it felt like that was gone, and it would never be back. But then, it was right there. I could connect with these actors. It was amazing. The decision to have them break character from time to time to have conversations with me was me trying to capture that feeling of creating something together. We’re discovering something together. We’re in community, which is how the women in the story were also in community. I was trying to mirror that. It was a gift. References [i] Fondakowski, Leigh. Feminist Files. Accessed November 10, 2022. https://feminist-files.sounder.fm . Footnotes About The Author(s) CAITLIN KANE (she/they) is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Dramatic Criticism at Kent State University and a freelance dramaturg, director, and intimacy director. Their research and creative practice sit at the intersection of theatre and social change and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies and center on queer and feminist approaches to staging history. 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. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. 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. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.