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Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Robert Wilson Yearbook Volume 1 Visit Journal Homepage Time’s Shadows: Crisis of Subjectivity and Reconciled Concord in Robert Wilson’s Performative Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets Avraham Oz and Tal Itzhaki By Published on May 1, 2026 Download Article as PDF Let us start by a commonplace assumption, one which may correspond to the deliberately vulgar gestures or grotesque grimaces of Robert Wilson’s stage figures performatively delivering Shakespeare sonnets in his 2009 Berliner Ensemble production, * the subject of this essay. The path leading from classical archetypal myths and medieval heroic romance or religious compulsive, single master narrative, towards humanist individualism, navigated Western human subjectivity through common narratives, populated by dramatic characters and what happened to them. Those were commonly attached and clinging to historical characters or their mythological counterparts in the intimacy of modern fiction, but still retained their addressees’ constant desire for salvation in concord: whether endowed by cathartic texture of tragedy or arousing satiric laughter, the sweet resonance of Pythagorean music of the s pheres loomed beyond the ongoing flow of the action as an achieved goal or token of a lost destination. Shakespeare the dramatist is a master storyteller of such narratives, following the footsteps of a Chaucer, Boccaccio, or Rabelais, sharing contemporaneous concerns with Sidney, Spenser, or Cervantes, and preceding the Molières, Dickenses or Dostoevskys of later years. In his sonnets, however, which, as our paper argues, are fundamentally divorced both formally and thematically from the rest of his work, Shakes peare lays the ground for modern dissociation from narrative, the essence of which is informed by the realized or forfeited contingency of salvation through concord . His sonnets (unlike those of other contem porary sonneteers such as Sidney, Spenser or Drayton), eschew plots and action and embrace the emotional subjectivity of the lyric persona delivering them, directly or indirectly derived from the poet's inner world of feelings and sensibilities. In this they may be regarded as very early prefigurations of modernist poetics of non-continuity, anticipating, say, P ound, Eliot or Lorca. The later failures of the Enlightenment to provide salvation through the sustained logic of narrative, culminating in the a pocalyptic abyss of an Auschwitz or Hiroshima (to cite but two primary emblems of the decline of reason in the modern world), re-harnessed human history to the natural vagaries of time. Rather than advancing through the inevitable or probable coherence of narration, they transgress established order, inscribing in the reader's memory a succession of fragmented outburst s of p assionate desire or the ferocious tyranny of all devouring time, challenging the substance behind shadows, or permanently questioning the eternalization of love or beauty in the lines of poetry. All these are inex plicable in terms of the legacy of storytelling, thus undermining the rule of narratives and leading artistic creation into their decomposition or deconstruction of inherent concord. Robert Wilson, among others, initialized his artistic project in countering the rule of verbal narratives or reference to realism by clinging to abstract visual and musical images devoid of any allegiance to stable meaning or harmony. By de ploying through ritual reiteration the texts of Shakes peare’s sonnets for his artistic ventures, and drawing them further on towards his vision of a universe endorsing the paradoxical presence of concord, he intrinsically engages (whether consciously or not) with the very project Shakespeare himself launched in his sonnets, in harnessing, as Joel Fineman would like to see it, the ancient tradition of poetry of praise, “in an unprecedentedly serious way [to] the equally antique genre of the mock encomium, or what may be alternatively called the paradox of praise.” [1] This is a rather simplistic outline or formulation of the cultural scene of modernity and postmodernity out of which Wilson’s production may be described as stemming. Yet it may serve to delineate what one may designate as the battleground on which Robert Wilson meets Shakespeare sonnets at the outset of the current millennium. In our topical reading of its product, it is doubly emphasized in a world continuously turning its back to its age-old origins in humanist narratives yet parodying it in powerfully engaging with their ty p ological conceits, whether visually, verbally, or musically. The topic of Wilson’s ongoing deconstruction of the dramatic text, be it Shakespeare's, Ibsen's, Büchner's, or others, has been exhausted by him and a host of commentators throughout the years. Enough would be to attend a production of Peer Gynt in Norwegian, being familiar with the play but not the language of its performance, to experience the mechanism of Wilson’s intriguing work in separating the verbal from the visual and musical: the stark, geometric set designs and a striking use of color, often creating painterly tableaus on stage; the slow, stylized movements of the actors in a choreographed precision, making each gesture deliberate and symbolic; the lighting, Wilson's notable virtuosity, used to define space, shift moods, and create illusions, often bathing characters in ethereal glows or deep shadows; the music and sound, possibly incorporating minimalist compositions or electronic elements, enhancing the dreamlike atmosphere. All these become a language through which the original stories are being narrated. Wilson's theatrical rendition of Shakespeare's sonnets, however, is a different histrionic challenge, significantly varying from Wilson’s other encounters with the bard, such as King Lear , The Tempest , or Macbeth (the latter via Verdi's melodic intermediation). In the case of The Shakespeare Sonnets production, the audience, while aware of Shakespeare's career as a poet beside his stage plays, may find it hard to ignore its predominant knowledge of Shakespeare as a dramatist once his unique non-dramatic work as reflected in his sonnets sequence challenges the very essence of a vivid theatrical event. However, the core of Wilson's a pproach to the project of devising a fragmented, non-dramatic yet full-fledged theatrical performance based on the texts of Shakespeare's sonnets, we would argue, is not a totally innovative de parture from Shakespeare's own poetic vision, but deeply rooted in Shakespeare's original texts. A prominent product and representative of rising Renaissance humanism, Shakespeare deploys his dramatic oeuvres as pawns in the struggle of a host of writers, artists, and intellectuals to define Western culture's newborn site of human individualism and subjectivity. On the face of it, his foray into the sonnets was supposed to lead him further into the intimate core of individualism. However, with the growing distantiation of the inter pretive reading of the sonnets from the mere biographical hunting for the identifications of its “characters” from real models in reality, it has been suggested more often that Shakes peare's sonnets significantly deviated from his dramatic work designed for the stage, in being devoid of the basic elements turning a verbal sequence into a dramatic narrative subjected to the Aristotelian formula of beginning, middle, and an end. Heather Dubrow, for one, argues that although “we assume that the nondramatic p oetry of a great playwright will in fact be dramatic in many senses of that complex term . . . Several of the characteristics central to other dramatic and narrative poetry, including other Renaissance sonnets sequences, are signally absent from Shakespeare’s contributions to the genre.” [2] Of the examples she uses to substantiate her claim, we may choose to refer here as a point of departure of our discussion of Wilson’s sonnets project to one p articular sonnet which serves Wilson and Wainright as one of the culmination points of the show. Comparing Renaissance leave-taking sonnets, one may remember one of the most well-known sonnets of Shakes peare's contemporary, Michael Drayton, namely, his famous parting sonnet 61 of his sonnet sequence Idea : Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part. Nay, I have done, you get no more of me; And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart, That thus so cleanly I myself can free. Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows, And when we meet at any time again, Be it not seen in either of our brows That we one jot of former love retain. Now at the last gasp of Love’s latest breath, When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies; When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death, And Innocence is closing up his eyes — Now, if thou wouldst, when all have given him over, From death to life thou might’st him yet recover! Not only is the scene of the lover taking leave of his beloved narrated, but it is fully enacted. Indeed the allegorical framework of the third quatrain does create distantiation from the actual moment; yet, as Dubrow rightly observes, it is a ploy designed “to create a foil against which his final appeal to the woman [in the closing rhyme] will seem all the more immediate.” [3] In this, Drayton, although subscribing to the structural innovation of the “English sonnet,” inspired by Wyatt or Sidney, does not depart from the Petrarchan sonnet which even when designed to describe a state of mind will do so by telling a story, as in the famous Canzonière 190, where the poet narrates the story of his finding Laura, his love, in the shape of a white doe, he praises her and then she is lost to him forever. When Shakespeare, however, addresses the same subject of leave taking, in sonnet 87, the story element entirely disappears: Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing, And like enough thou knowst thy estimate. The Charter of thy worth gives thee releasing; My bonds in thee are all determinate. For how do I hold thee but by thy granting, And for that riches where is my deserving? The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting, And so my patent back again is swerving. Thy self thou gav'st, thy own worth then not knowing, Or me, to whom thou gav'st it, else mistaking, So thy great gift, upon misprision growing, Comes home again, on better judgement making. Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter: In sleep a king, but waking no such matter. Shakes peare’s approach to the same topic here substitutes a subjective account of his sentiment (or rather that of his lyrical persona devised as the presenter of the sonnets) for a narrated story depicting the very action of taking leave of the beloved. Whereas the account of departure from an existing stage of love relations with the lyric persona would call, in the sonnets of P etr arch or Drayton cited above, for a p rocedural depiction of the poet’s vision in terms of a story, the concern of Shakes peare's sonnet is rather a state of mind, emanating from the poet's inner subjectivity . Rather than advancing in time, it p rogresses from one image to another: the inner flow between the meta phors has nothing to do with the passing of time , but is navigated by intrinsic successions of insights, feelings and thoughts. In that, Sonnet 87 corresponds with the thematic structure dominating most of the sequence's sonnet, yet it differs from other leave-taking sonnets in its tone of compliance, resignation and self-doubt, with the speaker acknowledging that the beloved is too valuable for him. This contrasts with other sonnets where the speaker pleads for love or rails against betrayal (as in Sonnets 129 or 147). Expressing a trail of thoughts estimating the lover’s situation vis a vis the fair youth, the sonnet uses measurable legal and financial metaphors to discuss love as a transaction, with the speaker seemingly losing possession of his beloved's love, leading him to the realization that he never truly owned it. What he deemed true happiness was indeed an illusion, his possession of his beloved hzving had no more substance than a flattering dream. Of whom does he take his leave , then, if his possession was nothing but an illusion? This ambivalence fits the approaches of various readers of the sonnets, from Catherine Belsey who sees self-division and instability in Shakespeare's poetry, [4] through Joel Fineman, for whom the sonnet marks a breakdown in the speaker’s ability to maintain a stable identity, revealing that selfhood is dependent on the beloved’s recognition (the latter being for him, in Lacanian terms, the master-signifier, the thing that gives his identity meaning yet its own meaning is void, or unachievable). The exclamation “Farewell!” at the outset of the sonnet, which suggests finality, could indeed lead to an action or a story, as it would do in the hands of Sidney, Spenser or Drayton, yet this is immediately undermined by subjective questioning rather than narration: If possession was ever real, why does the speaker need to renounce it? If the beloved was always “too dear,” then was possession ever possible? For Wilson, who uses the text of the sonnets as a point of departure for his imaginative rendering of the sonnets as a theatrical performance, Shakespeare's deployment of a non-dramatic practice in order to convey a crisis of subjectivity serves as an asset. A clue to Wilson's approach to the Shakespearean text may give us a text, included in the original program of the show, by Heiner Müller, who, among other things, served as a director of the Berliner Ensemble, later to be the host theatre of Wilson's production of the sonnets. In this text, Müller states that when he reads a poetic text, he does not first want to understand it, but rather "somehow to welcome it as a perceptive rather than conceptual activity… there is a tradition of rationalism that hinders the sensorial perception of texts. Only if a text is first perceived with the senses, is it then possible to understand it.” [5] Sonnet 87 serves indeed as an act of leave taking: performed by the entire company gradually gathering together on stage, stripped of the colors of their former attire, lost gradually throughout the second half of the show and icked u and collected by the Fool in a recently preceding scene, it is placed just before the Finalé of the show, and (set to the dreamlike music of Rufus Wainright) uses visual images of parting with an unseen object which seems to constantly slip out of their reach. Their hands are stretched towards the sky, then held behind the back, and then raised again with the fingers folding in the gesture of grasping nothingness, some shadowy object that escapes both them and the audience. Is this the performative version of the final verse of the sonnet? Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter: In sleep a king, but waking no such matter. There is a line of development here, since the dream of love at the closure of the show abrogates the dream from Sonnet 43 with which the show has opened: All days are nights to see till I see thee, And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me That opening dream, to which we shall return later, and which affirms love even though through the mediation of darkness and night, serves as a cue for the non-narrated figures populating the show first gather on stage. Here, once the show approaches its Finalé, the dream refers to love suggesting there is "no such matter." Once the characters have gathered all on stage, the scene reaches its culminating point when the Queen herself, perhaps the master signifier of their collective community, whose costume is now stripped of colors like those of most of the other characters but for the functional, meta-theatrical figures of the Fool and the poet, recites the sonnet against their singing chorus. What is it that they are parting with? Is it that Lacanian unachievable "master-signifier " having endowed them with meaning which now is waning away with their lost colors? The dreamlike setting of the scene's movement and music corresponds with the flattering dream of line 13, which by the end of the sonnet proclaims the speaker's possession of love, introducing the poem, a mere illusion. Yet although Wilson uses the verbal foundation of the poem as a bedrock for this fragmented piece, forming a chapter within an overall succession of performative scenes, the meaning of sequence which he borrows from the Shakespearean original is not welded by a train of occurrences progressing in time, informed by a continuity of action and events. In spite of the presence of characters, at this stage of the advances of the show familiar to us, having followed them and been attended by them for two hours (allegedly the standard measure of a stage play as stated by the prologue to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet ), acting, moving, singing and producing meaning through visual images and verbal metaphors, we do not get a story. What we do get is a trail of moving and musical tableaux, whose implicit ordered succession, having no bearing on their original order in Thorpe's 1609 quarto edition – is not easy to fathom or, for that matter, inevitably necessary for the sake of artistic gratification. The combined effect of the show does not depend on any story line or coherent narrative. It is not fortuitous, however, that the dreamlike, melancholic leave-taking of love follows, and indeed ironically abrogates the scorching, feverish emotional eruption of Sonnet 129 , one of Shakespeare’s most intense and deeply psychological sonnets, describing the destructive nature of lust, exploring the cycle of desire, action, and regret, with a relentless and almost obsessive tone: Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action; and till action, lust Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust, Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight, Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had Past reason hated as a swallowed bait On purpose laid to make the taker mad; Mad in pursuit and in possession so, Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe; Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream. All this the world well knows; yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell. Sonnet 129 may be the first poem in English literature depicting the culmination point of desire in sexual orgasm. Here it prepares the audience for the waning of desire, which reverses the "joy proposed" into a void. T. S. Eliot viewed Sonnet 129 as a precursor to metaphysical poetry, particularly John Donne’s conflicted religious verse. He admired its harsh, compressed energy, calling it one of Shakespeare’s most profound meditations on the soul’s struggle with the flesh. In terms of Wilson's reordering of the sonnets, Sonnet 129 fiercely foreshadows the crisis of subjectivity depicted in a complete change of mood in Sonnet 87 . As Joel Fineman sees it, Sonnet 129 is a deconstruction of desire itself, which causes selfhood to collapse in lust. The poem, he argues, exposes the instability of identity, as the speaker is trapped in a repetitive cycle of wanting, taking, and regretting. Sonnet 129 presents a paradox: desire promises fulfillment but delivers only emptiness — a theme that resonates with Renaissance anxieties about self-control and moral failure. Wilson and Wainright manage to capture, both visually and musically, the “lack” that drives desire as it figures in 129. Lust is never truly satisfied — it only intensifies the absence it seeks to fill. The speaker experiences jouissance (self-destructive pleasure in Lacanian terms), where the pursuit of pleasure becomes an unbearable torment. As Jonathan Dollimore suggests, the violent language of this sonnet suggests that the Renaissance ideal of self-restraint was impossible to uphold; and Helene Vendler reminds us that the relentless structure and lack of pauses in the poem, the enjambment and rapid rhythm mirror the breathlessness of desire, showing how lust overrides reason. The poem’s final line, “ All this the world well knows; yet none knows well,” creates a paradox of knowledge and ignorance—we understand lust’s consequences, yet we continue the cycle. It is hard not to notice this attitude simulated in Wilson and Wainright's wild visual and discordant music. By positioning the dreamlike inhibited gazing of Sonnet 87 immediately after the boisterous, pervert turbulence of Sonnet 129 , in which he parodies the Shakespearean text both choreographically and musically in terms of exhibitionist mimicry, Wilson completes a move he has been meticulously promoting and advancing throughout his entire performative rendition of Shakespeare's sonnets. This innovative passage of seemingly fragmentary scenes, substituting a rather abstract ideational progression of thematic images for an Aristotelian narrative informed by a solid story line, navigates the audience's sensibilities throughout a sequence of evolving moods towards a cathartic conclusion at his carefully devised finale, to which we will subsequently return. A product of a nonlinear composition of glimmering histrionic eruptions (remindful of Wilson's performative vision of Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights mounted almost two decades earlier in the same city of Berin), where meaning emerges through accumulation rather than a succession of cause-and-effect, this resolution eschews traditional denouement yet endorses a new kind of subjective concord. This sequence of accumulating scenes may be traced back to the very beginning of the show, using Sonnet 43 to establish the framework of the performance as circumscribed by a dream vision, informing the entire production from "when dreams do show thee me" of Sonnet 43 to the "dream [which] doth flatter" of Sonnet 87 . It is the Fool figure which performs the sonnet at the outset, thus proclaiming Wilson's function as the provisional creator of the spectators' histrionic experience over the next two hours, in pronouncing his version of "Let there be light:" When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see, For all the day they view things unrespected; But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee And, darkly bright, are bright in dark directed. Then thou whose shadow shadows doth make bright, How would thy shadow’s form form happy show To the clear day with thy much clearer light When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so! How would, I say, mine eyes be blessèd made By looking on thee in the living day, When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay! All days are nights to see till I see thee, And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me. The sonnet is recited at the very beginning of the show by the functional, meta-theatrical figure of the Fool, as an enveloping exposition of the entire event. A cultural construct, whose life outside the boundaries of nature as a not entirely human stage artifact, his initial presence which marks the passage from ephemeral reality to the ritual sanctuary of performance, signifies for the spectators their initiation into a stylized, temporal existence within a theatrically mediated sphere. It alerts their consciousness from the very outset the terms of the world Wilson is creating for his audience. It is a world the contours of which are mediated by seeing and hearing, by light and music, and it is not fortuitous that Wilson chooses to cite on the rear cover of the show's program a paraphrase of John Cage's reflection on Henry David Thoreau’s solo sojourn in Walden Woods: “Each day his eyes and ears were open and empty to see and hear the world he lived in." [6] It is a risky frontier of encountering the messages imprinted in the audience' awareness through the bare, pioneering relying on the evidence of words, movement, light and sound. It is a world lacking the protective framework of narrative, designed in turn to cement and provide meaning to one's subjective negotiation with a vast universe, devoid of the providence of a guiding God by the Aristotelian formula of a beginning, middle and an end. It is a world exposing human consciousness even further than the predicament of its habitual fragility to the vagaries of the elements, time, or death, by which the circular cast of the sonnets' universe is surrounded and whereby it is composed. Within the span of 154 fourteen-line measures of situation or reflection, its raw material in the words of Shakespeare's sonnets, becoming the artistic creator's working tools, focuses mainly on three loosely epitomized human characters, surrounded by the remote presence of individual others such as rival poets, or a collective community praising or deriding their predicament. Destiny and decay become adverse digits in a world in which poetry alone, delivered by sight and hearing, enjoys successive continuity endowing meaning to the presence of human life. Thus when Wilson chooses to apply his deconstructive practice to Shakespeare's sonnets, he propels their interchange with meaning further than the protective bosom of enlightenment, led by the signification of the word. In a world where visual images have transcended the halo of avant-garde to become an ephemeral phenomenon shared by everyone; where one's intuitive response to every sensation is an immediate urge to capture and transmit it by camera, which has become almost an organic extension of our presence in the world of phenomena, the return of the sublime text to inhabit artistic practice poses a new, invigorated challenge to the aesthetics of deconstructing human experience. The task of creating a histrionic sequence where privileged texts partake in the theatrical moment not in their customary leading role, but as equal components of the visual and musical effects, without being enveloped by narrative structure, takes Wilson's non-interpretive work with the theatrical text, familiar from previous works to different realms, challenging both concepts of drama and sonnet alike. A more detailed analysis of the Sonnets production than the limited span of this paper allows may shed new perspectives on Wilson's challenge to the traditional treatment of text in the theatre, and, contrary to many responses to this work, ignoring his meticulous delving into the minute details of his verbal raw material, also on his thoughtful and creative encounter, be it combat, or dialogue, with the sublimity of Shakespeare's texts. Within the limited scope of this paper we shall but scantily indicate some of the effects of Wilson's innovative rendering of Shakespeare's sonnet sequence, diving back into the bard's project to substitute subjectivity for detached, objective narration, and pushing forward towards the bitter "joy proposed" of imaginative progression towards a sour concord, full of sound and fury, yet, such as Lacan's master signifier, signifying nothing but the paradox of subjectivity. A major feature of Wilson's treatment of his textual material is his insistence on deconstructing personalities by blurring the binarity of essentialist gendered communities among the characters delivering the text. This procedure serves as a complementary device to his deconstruction of the presence of narrative continuity in his reading of the sonnets, as representing concepts and states of minds rather than essential "stories." Indeed such an act must require a gendered statement as its transformational core, namely, women actors playing men's parts and men actors playing women's parts. This deployment has its bearing on the Elizabethan practice of men playing women on stage. However, once this exchange has been established, the direct implication of its undisguised practice is erasure of binarity, rather than its emphatic preservation as subservient to narrative as in the plays. While exaggerated moustaches or flaring Elizabethan styled robes are used as means of gender transformation, the end result is establishing a diminished insistence on typical gender properties, without erasing the very concepts of manhood or womanhood. The identities qualifying the characters become functions of the intuitive sensation of the impact of abstract concepts such as love and hate, shadow and light, dream and wake. This blurring corresponds with much of the meaning advanced by Shakespeare's texts, which accounts for the notable presence of Sonnet 20 in the theatrical texture of Wilson/Wainwright's production: A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion; A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted With shifting change as is false women’s fashion; An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling, Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth; A man in hue, all hues in his controlling, Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth. And for a woman wert thou first created, Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting, And by addition me of thee defeated By adding one thing to my purpose nothing. But since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure, Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure. The rendition of Sonnet 20 by Wilson and Wainwright initially inhabits a whole scene, recited in German by the hosting poet and sung in English by the androgynous figure, then performed again by the cabaretist, and finally repeated during the curtain call by Wainright himself. However, while in the sonnet the binarity of genders is still manifestly emphatic, not only in the stressed effacement of gendered individuality in the "master-mistress" figure of the addressed lover, but also in the association of "women's fashion" with shifting change, beside their gentle heart, in the performative construction of the human figures as types rather than individual characters, the concept of narrative collapses into performative abstraction. As such, Sonnet 20 , even though not located as the overture of Wilson's multifarious forays into the realm of abstract action, serves an appropriate and charismatic milestone on its road to expunge the individuality of identities of the histrionic formation of Shakespeare's text, making most of blurring the gendered borders of the lovers to foreground the abstract impact of love itself. Binarity, in Wilson's entire production, is transformed into conceptual abstractions, such as the two boy constructs (both embodied by similarly attired, with Seurat like hairdo, female actresses), where one is rather mirthful and romantic, and the other rude and malevolent. It is the latter who serves as the third side of the triangle of deliverers of Sonnet 20 . The others are the Shakespeare figure, who, encapsuled in a remote window high above at the background, rendering him an external entity, recites the sonnet in German, and the androgynous character, corresponding the depiction of the beloved figure in the sonnet, who sings the text in the original to Wainright's moving score, the instrumental accompaniment of which infiltrates the last verses of the poet's emotional recitation of the sonnet. All three, like all the other characters, have their faces painted white, blurring their individuality, and one of the keywords picked up by the boy, the alter ego of the androgynous in the scene, from the text to repeat emphatically, is "painted," which bears a special significance in the sonnet. In the brief interim passage before the androgynous figure starts singing, the "malevolent" boy, temptingly reclined on a small bed, injects some unknown stuff, smilingly, while the androgynous turns in a tempting gesture to the far above poet, dropping down his Elizabethan overcoat the black feathers collar of which he turns into a kind of fan. In a visual pun on " since she pricked thee," the androgynous stoops to pick (Stephen Booth marks one of the double meanings of "prick" as "select") a shawl, to be "used" (another visual pun provided by Wilson to Shakespear's text here) for surprisingly terminate the scene by the sudden self-hanging of the androgynous: an ultimate act of blurring and effacement of the gendered subject by "dying," in its various meanings. The successive sequence of such tableaux and reciting units, originated in a series of dramatic monologues written by the bard, advances in Wilson's performance by subserving the deconstructed words and phrases into a mélange of movements, ranging from concrete ones as dropping sugar cubes, metonymic ones such as the tearing of pages as signifying poetic rivalry to cryptic grimaces, yawns, weeping, or totally abstract actions such as stabbing a child without a pronounced narrative reference; sounds, ranging from meaningful texts and melodic constructs to isolated cries, buzzes, animal laughter, or roaring thunders; and flooding or glittering lights. Wilson's motto for the whole sequence is the couplet ending Sonnet 43 , stressing the ambivalence of day and night, light and darkness as partaking in the complex relation between the speaker and his beloved figure. The text of Sonnet 43 , thus dominating the entire exposition of the non-developing figures of the show, until sudden burst of light, commanded by the Queen, enlarges the borders of the theatrical playground within which the non-narrative action is about to take place. Settled in their gendered blurred formations, none but Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth bear similarity to real life, historical characters, to whom a shade of narrative framework can be attached. However, even that hypothetical shade is not actually realized: the Shakespeare-like figure, virtuously portrayed by a 87 years old female stage veteran, bears no relation in its conduct or choice of delivered sonnets even to whatever scant knowledge one has of the life of William Shakespeare, nor does the grotesque figure of the Queen, brilliantly rendered by an elderly male actor, relate to any concrete episode in the life of Queen Elizabeth I, a fact that is humorously emphasized when the same actor surprisingly appears in a figure remindful of Queen Elizabeth II, endowed by her blurred gendered attire, reciting one of the more episodic sonnets, Sonnet 143 , in which the beloved woman is compared to a neglecting mother. It is perhaps no accident that the sonnet is delivered by the stage figure which seems closest to a real-life historical character : the Queen of England reigning during the time Wilson's production was performed, whose emblematic stature as "the mother of the nation" did not lag much behind Shakespeare's Queen. In a move almost close to narration (but not quite), it employs the metaphor of a housewife chasing a wayward chicken while neglecting her crying child to explore themes of unrequited love, jealousy, and longing. In this sonnet, the speaker likens himself to the neglected child, yearning for the attention of his beloved, who is preoccupied with pursuing another. The sonnet opens with the image of a diligent housewife setting down her infant to chase after a runaway "feathered creature" (likely a chicken). This scenario serves as an extended metaphor: the housewife represents the speaker's mistress, the “Dark Lady,” the fleeing bird symbolizes another man she desires (possibly the "Fair Youth"), and the abandoned child embodies the lyric speaking persona himself. This vivid imagery underscores the speaker's feelings of neglect and his desperate longing for her affection. Even though a visual resemblance is stressed in both images to their historical models, the tentatively implied suggestion that "a queen" is an abstract mental category when in spite of the visual affinity with the actual originals the same actor may condense in himself the entire assembled features of the entity expressed by this stage figure. When it suggests power and dominance, for instance, she wildly delivers the famous Sonnet 18 , while her alarmed subjects are peering at her from the side, a frenzy which may correspond with her later delivery of Sonnet 147 , appended by an outburst of wild laughter. All the other characters figuring on stage, however, are an eclectic assemblage of archetypes and abstractions, serving unindividuated situations, abstract stage metaphors, or geometrical deployment of human figures. Even when an almost narratively justified moment is evoked when the fictionally framed Sonnet 154 is recited by a winged cupid character, its nearly consequential impact is blurred when the same sonnet is later peculiarly repeated within a similar visual framework by the figure of the rival poet, holding the torn pages representing his adverse rivalry with the young poet, who serves as a budding version of the presiding figure of the veteran poet. The avoidance of narrative is also reinforced by the fragmentation and lack of consistency of conduct of the various characters. Whereas characters such as the Fool, represented by an elderly woman actress who accompanies many scenes compassionately as an "aside" figure, winking to and interchanging with the audience, or the superimposed character of the comedian Georgette, who addresses the audience directly in a cabaret manner, sustain a great measure of consistency throughout the entire show, other participants are fragmentary in their function and conduct. Wilson's imagination evokes, for instance, in the expository sequence of tableaux, a "secretary" for the Shakespeare figure, as if to assist the "master of the ceremony" to handle the performative event using the texts of the sonnets as its basic verbal component, that figure, in the introductory chapter of the performance, serves routine functions such as guarding documents or collecting payment from the Queen-Sponsor. However, once its function has been established at the outset, the figure never returns to its "secretarial" role, but partakes in the general distribution of movement, gestural action, and reciting sonnets (in her case, addressing the Queen with Sonnet 121 – "’Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed" – or partaking in the "gasoline pumps turned gun machines" rendering of Sonnet 23 , and the collective delivery of sonnet 71 – " No longer mourn for me when I am dead." What is notable is the metaphor, combined by visual, sound, light and gesture. The scope of this paper, again, is too narrow for a detailed analysis of the histrionic dialogue between Shakespeare's poetry and Wilson's theatrical practice, yet a major theme conspicuous in this dialogue should not go unnoticed, namely, the irrational interchange between scenes of good and evil and its implications on the political level of that dialogue. It looms in the sudden flogging of the figures of the rival poet and Cupid in the midst of a stormy scene, or the above-mentioned gasoline pumps turned gun machines accompanying Sonnet 23. In the current world where the daily augmented presence of human corpses substitutes individuality, and the routine evil of violence replaces meaningful narrative, Wilson's reading of Shakespeare's sonnets often approaches the Guernica of our time. If one wishes to relate the impact of Wilson's work here to the current mood of world reality and its cultural reflection, one may speak to it in terms of the blurring and fragmentation of sensibility. Individuality of love and pain is fading in a world of inequality busy counting the victims of aggression, poverty, famine and neglect by masses, rather than promoting humanism and individuality. Scenes of violence abound and are dispersed with no obvious succession of rational narrative throughout the scenes of Wilson's show, mixing sources of inspiration and reference. Such is the appearance of a fragment of the video Deafman Glance (1970) by Wilson, which is incorporated in the scene devoted to Sonnet 29 , placed at the beginning of the second half of the show. The video evokes a murder scene of an innocent boy, much remindful of Lady Macbeth's shocking juxtaposition of innocence and evil in her famous (or notorious) "naked babe" speech. It is evoked in the context of a sonnet whose first octet depicts an alienated subjectivity lost in an alienated world and then shifts into an elated mood: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think on thee, and then my state, (Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate; For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings. Joel Fineman, as we mentioned above, contends that Shakespeare's sonnets mark a pivotal moment in literary history, wherein the poet crafts a novel form of poetic subjectivity. This innovation emerges through the interplay of traditional poetic forms, such as panegyric (poems of praise), and their subversion via mock encomium (ironic or satirical praise). By intertwining these elements, Shakespeare delves into the complexities of self-perception, desire, and the reliability of language (see p.2 above). In the context of Sonnet 29 , Fineman's argument may elucidate the poem's exploration of personal despair and redemption. The sonnet commences with the speaker's profound sense of alienation and envy, lamenting his misfortune and longing for the attributes and successes of others. This introspective anguish exemplifies the "poetic subjectivity" that Fineman identifies—where the speaker's internal emotional landscape becomes the focal point, diverging from the external praise typical of traditional panegyric poetry. As the sonnet progresses, a transformative shift occurs when the speaker reflects on a cherished relationship. This turn towards the redemptive power of love not only alleviates the speaker's despair but also underscores the tension between personal experience and poetic expression. Fineman's analysis suggests that such moments in the sonnets reveal the instability of identity and the challenges inherent in articulating genuine emotion through language. The speaker's oscillation between despondency and elation reflects the broader theme of "perjury" or self-deception, as the language employed strives to convey the profundity of personal transformation, yet remains inherently limited by its own constructs. Applying Fineman's critical perspective to Sonnet 29 illuminates how Shakespeare navigates the intricate dynamics of selfhood, desire, and linguistic representation. The sonnet becomes a site where the poet interrogates the capacity of language to authentically capture the fluidity of human emotion and the complexities of personal identity. Wilson's rendering of the sonnet, which opens the second part of the show, starts, like most other scenes, in the rise of the curtain, revealing a luminous backdrop; but in this case the composition is more complex: it hosts chairs, characters seated or stretched out in different poses, two supports with lights, and, focuses of the visual frame, two easels each supporting a monitor, placed symmetrically at the center of the scene. Inside them is the same video, duplicated: it is a fragment of the 1970 Wilson video. The dark figures on the light background start singing the sonnet, in English, to a balladic score. The black figure in the film resembles the real figures. The long shot continues the space of the stage into that of the monitor. The Ladies move, creating relationships with the images on the monitor. The Rival at the end repeats the sonnet, this time recited in German, while behind him the video offers a scene of surreal cruelty: first, the child is softly and kindly offered a glass of water, then we see the sharpening of a knife, and following this, the shar pened knife is stuck in the child's body. Is there a message of hope and concord at the end of Wilson's dialogue with the sonnets of one of the champions of humanist individualism? May it be invested in the rendering of Sonnet 87 memory of past dreams caught and released like unseen butterflies at the final scene, or the clinging to love as the only counterpart of injustice and death at the end of Sonnet 66 , repeated at the Finalé? To time, the big rival of vitality in the sonnets, the answer is reserved. Enough would be to indicate a topical view of what Wilson offers us here, to regard a stereotypical anti-humanist figure such as Trump or Netanyahu, in an appearance calling up a perpetual election campaign, passionately mumbling insouciant narratives and texts in front of a captive audience, as impersonated by the Wilsonian vulgar figure of Eve, reiterating the ominous world view of Sonnet 66 between the stereotyped figures of the poet and the Queen: Tired with all these, for restful death I cry: As, to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimmed in jollity, And purest faith unhappily forsworn, And gilded honor shamefully misplaced, And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, And right perfection wrongfully disgraced, And strength by limping sway disablèd, And art made tongue-tied by authority, And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill, And simple truth miscalled simplicity, And captive good attending captain ill. Tired with all these, from these would I be gone, Save that, to die, I leave my love alone. It would take great measures of neglect to ignore the significant political presence contributed by Sonnet 66 to the thematic structure of Wilson's production. The sonnet is one of the most politically informed in the entire sequence. It presents a bleak view of the world, listing one injustice after another, exposing a world in which truth is suppressed, power is corrupt, and justice is perverted. One of the most striking features of the sonnet is the repetition of "Tired with all these" at the beginning and near the end, an anaphora reinforcing the speaker’s exhaustion and despair. Only ultimately, at the closing couplet, love is presented as a reason to continue living. In his rendition of the sonnet, Wilson aptly translates it into a visual and musical conceit which brings out its lament, its critique of power, its ironic inversion of values (such as "Folly (doctor-like) controlling skill"), and an example of Shakespeare’s linguistic genius in layering meaning, such as the structural paradox whereby a desire for death (corresponding with his surprising suicidal act performed by the androgynous figure terminating his former episodic rendering of Sonnet 20 , not fortuitously reminded by Georgette right before the Sonnet 66 scene) interrupted by the necessity of love. [7] The black silhouette of a tree, clad with red apples, stands out in the center of a scene uncovered by a dark curtain. In correspondence with the tree, the performer having formerly represented the Lady, now appearing as Biblical Eve dressed in white, to evoke the mythological sense of guilt informing humanity. This symbolic image of shame is completed when she raises her right arm, holding a wriggling rubber snake between her index finger and thumb, while the other hand exhibits a red apple. symmetrically, on either side of both object and character, sit Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare. They sing in turn the song composed on sonnet 66: the perfect immobility of the figures contrasts with the gesture of avidly biting Eve's apple (a gesture anticipated formerly by Georgette's munching the strawberries...), with drool and spit: the verses of the sonnet sing of the rottenness of the world and the desire to abandon it, if it were not for the fact that the poet's death would leave the beloved alone. As Christina Grazioli reminds us, the tree, "image of guilt (but whose risk is taken into account by the love of beauty)" had appeared in a “barer” version before, where a structure formed by the carcass of a car impaled on a tree trunk is introduced. [8] Thus, Wilson's mixing of images from the cold, bare powerhouse of the modern, fragmented world of 2009 with the fiery and decaying conceits of 1609, endows us with a most charismatic artistic account of the progression of time over four stormy centuries, bringing together the crisis of subjectivity and a revived view of concord, in summing up the tortured way we have come since Shakespeare's time to ours, in the attempt to open our empty eyes and ears to see and hear the world we live in. Endnotes Note: The production debuted on April 12, 2009 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. [1] Joel Fineman, Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 2. [2] Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), 171-72. [3] Ibid., 173. [4] See Catherine Belsey, Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism (London and New York: Routledge, 2005) and Shakespeare in Theory and Practice , Edinburgh University Press, 2008. [5] Robert Wilson, Shakespeare's Sonnete program, Berliner Ensemble, Berlin, 2009. [6] John Cage, Lecture on the Weather , A Multimedia Performance, 1979. [7] See for example, William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1947). [8] Cristina Grazioli, “ Shakespeare’s Sonnets by Robert Wilson,” Dramaturgia , 2010. https://drammaturgia.fupress.net/saggi/saggio.php?id=4481&utm_source About The Author(s) Avraham Oz is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Haifa and a resident director at the Alfa Theatre, Tel Aviv. Tal Itzhaki is a Theatre designer and the Managing Director of Alfa Theatre, Tel Aviv. Robert Wilson Yearbook The Robert Wilson Yearbook, published annually by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, offers a dedicated platform for scholarly and creative engagement with the life, artistry, and enduring legacy of Robert Wilson (1941–2025), one of the most original visionaries in contemporary theatre and performance. The Yearbook seeks to explore and expand upon Wilson’s groundbreaking approaches to staging, lighting, movement, and visual composition. Each issue will feature a diverse range of content—including original essays, critical commentary, archival materials, artist reflections, and photography—examining facets of Wilson’s multifaceted practice across genres, eras, and geographies. The Robert Wilson Yearbook is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - This Issue “Going on a Journey”: Space, Time, and Experience in Robert Wilson’s Installations and Museum Interventions Re-Viewing Stefan Brecht’s The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson from a (B.) Brechtian Perspective Towards a Formalist Ritualistic Theatre: An Artaudian Reading of Robert Wilson’s Aesthetics The Theatre of Autobio-hetero-thanato-graphic: The Life and Death of Marina Abramović Time’s Shadows: Crisis of Subjectivity and Reconciled Concord in Robert Wilson’s Performative Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets They Asked Me to Draw a City: Postdramatic Imaginings in Robert Wilson’s Direction of Strindberg’s A Dream Play Robert Wilson's Oedipus: The Postdramatic Journey of the Oedipus Story from Sophocles through Freud Robert Wilson and Norway Robert Wilson’s Art of Senses and Emotions Listening to Deafman Glanc Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken Thinking in Structures: Working as a Dramaturg with Robert Wilson Bertolt Brecht and Robert Wilson: The Dialectical Triad of Playwright, Director and Berliner Ensemble Actors in Wilson’s The Threepenny Opera Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Robert Wilson Yearbook Volume 1 Visit Journal Homepage Towards a Formalist Ritualistic Theatre: An Artaudian Reading of Robert Wilson’s Aesthetics Keren Cohen By Published on May 1, 2026 Download Article as PDF Antonin Artaud is associated with a mythopoetic vision of a ritualistic theatre of dream, magic, and total spectacle, which would replace speech with a visual-kinetic sign language, influencing spectators directly and completely immersing them into the performance. Although his elusive and often contradictory theoretical writings are sufficiently ambiguous to allow for wide interpretations , they have often been interpreted in a selective way, favoring aspects associated with primitivism or violence. [1] As Christopher Innes accurately put it, “Artaud’s name elicits a formula: Primitivism – Ritual – Cruelty – Spectacle.” [2] Artaud’s vision is therefore most commonly identified with the experiments of directors and groups who (knowingly or unknowingly) took up his project and explored the primitivist aspects of his work, such as Jerzy Grotowski or Peter Brook. Within the American context, the publication of the first English translation of The Theatre and Its Double in 1958 made the Frenchman’s theories much more accessible, [3] and his ideas soon gained wide influence among the avant-garde theatre collectives of the 1960s. There Artaud was most particularly associated with Richard Schechner’s Performance Group or Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theatre, who adopted his ideas and integrated them into their aesthetics. These groups’ aggressive combination of “hot,” physical, ritualistic performance was greatly disliked by Robert Wilson, who said, “I hated the theatre in the 60s. I was never part of that movement. What I was doing did not resemble the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, or the Performance Group. I went against everything they were doing.” [4] The cool and stylized formalism of Wilson’s work has in fact been traditionally understood as the opposite pole to the experiments of the 1960s American theatre collectives associated with Artaud’s vision. Emerging in New York in the late 1960s, Wilson’s visually-oriented work—which included very little intentional speech or sound—presented an eclectic collection of neo-Surrealist images that unfolded in a continuous process of transformation executed in extreme slow motion. The resulting performance turned away from representation, reverting instead to an interior universe of consciousness. Michael Kirby saw this kind of work as a manifestation of what he termed the “hermetic” avant-garde, which turned inward to a more private and personal world, as well as to other arts and formalism, rather than content. This was contrasted with what he defined as the “antagonistic” avant-garde, associated with the Artaud-inspired work of the American avant-garde theatre collectives of the 1960s, which intentionally attacked traditional tastes, and was characterized by performances oriented toward drama, expressive acting, meaning and content, intended to bring about social change. [5] A similar polarity was highlighted by E linor Fuchs, who believed that the Artaudian aspiration for presence taken up in the work of Grotowski, Brook, and others, was lost in the cool formality of Wilson’s stage, which broke off the performer’s ritual communion with the spectator. [6] Although Wilson’s cool, reserved aesthetics was very different from what is usually associated with Artaud’s vision, his work nevertheless unknowingly answered the Frenchman’s call for a non-verbal, visual, poetic, ritualistic stage language for communicating mythic material, which would recover “the religious and mystic” in theatre and would “restore all the arts to a central attitude and necessity.” [7] I will shortly examine some of the significant and mostly unrecognized affinities between Wilson’s and Artaud’s work. While in no way exhaustive, the discussion points to some significant parallels, including both men’s aspiration for a theatre of ritual and myth, their employment of visual images, formality, and stylization, and their use of language, music, and sound. The examination will encompass these aspects in both theory and practice. Here, however, lies one significant difference between the two men: there is some irony to the fact that Artaud—who famously wanted to downgrade verbal communication on stage to an incantation and replace speech with a direct, visual sign language [8] —has exerted his wide influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century theatre mainly through the written words of his theoretical texts, while h is practical work has traditionally been dismissed . [9] Wilson, by comparison, never put his artistic views down in writing, let alone formulated any comprehensive theory of performance, and his evolving vision is manifested in the many performances he created. While Artaud never realized his ideal theatre, the few practical experiments he conducted nevertheless provide significant clues about his artistic aspirations for the theatre he envisioned. This is particularly true for his staging of his only full-length play, The Cenci , which premiered at the Theatre des Folies-Wagram on May 6, 1935. The production was anticipated as “none other than the conclusion to [the] ‘Manifesto of the Theatre of Cruelty’,” published by Artaud not long before the premiere. [10] In an article printed shortly before the opening night, however, Artaud himself explicitly framed The Cenci as merely a stepping stone towards the realization of his vision, claiming that it “is not yet the Theater of Cruelty but is preparing the way for it.” [11] Nevertheless, following the premiere, critics immediately noted the gap they felt existed between Artaud’s theory and practice, and many believed the play was proof that Artaud was unable to realize his “Theatre of Cruelty” in practical terms. While audience reception seems to have spanned between (some) enthusiasm to (mainly) boredom or amusement, [12] the general impression was summed up by Guermantes, writing for Le Figaro : “Artaud announced it was to be a cruel play. He could not have phrased it better. I did not see that his play was particularly cruel, but the public who came to see it certainly was.” [13] Despite this gap between Artaud’s theory (as it is usually perceived) and his practice, The Cenci still provides the most significant indication for the way in which Artuad envisioned the realization of his Theatre of Cruelty in practice. The play therefore serves as a central example in the following comparative examination of the parallels between Artaud’s vision and practice and Wilson’s aesthetics. The discussion of the American director’s work focuses mainly on performances staged until the mid-1970s. I also establish connections between the practical work of both Artaud and Wilson and the Frenchman’s theory. The valuable insights gained from Innes’s analysis of The Cenci serve as a starting point for the discussion. Approaching the play independently from Artaud’s theory, Innes demonstrates that the Frenchman created a surprisingly calculated and highly formalized performance, which has little in common with “cruelty” or “violence” as they are usually perceived. [14] As the following examination shows, the contrary seems to be true: Artaud’s practical work appears to lead directly to Wilson’s formal dream visions — and most particularly to his early work. [15] Myth and Ritual Wilson’s spectacles until the mid-1970s shared Artaud’s aspirations for a ritualistic performance, which would recover the religious and magical function of theatre, presenting myths in the form of ceremonies overwhelming the audience. [16] This seems to have guided both men’s choice of source material. Based on a true story, The Cenci depicts the occurrences of count Cenci’s family in late sixteenth-century Rome. Artaud’s play drew on Shelley’s and Stendahl’s previous versions, with Shelley’s play serving as the main model for the plot. Most of the dialogue and stage directions, however, were originally written by Artaud, whose version converted Shelley’s emphasis on words and character psychology to stage actions. [17] It appears that the play’s plot was the most violent thing about the production, depicting the story of the tyrannical Cenci, who plots the murder of his two sons and rapes his daughter Beatrice and is then himself murdered by assassins sent by his daughter. The sensationalist source material provided violence, cruelty, and bloodshed in the traditional sense, with issues of incest, rape, and parricide challenging social taboos and society’s basic family structure. In a letter to Andre Gide, Artaud expressed his fear that spectators may react violently to the play, due not to its staging but to its dialogues, which were “of extreme violence,” attacking “notions of Society, order, Justice, Religion, family and country.” [18] The themes which appear in Wilson’s work from its very beginning are no less violent. The prologue to Deafman Glance (1971), widely considered to be “the signature piece of Wilson’s theatre,” [19] presents a murder scene, in which a mother performs a ritualistic killing of her two children. In fact, from the death of Freud’s grandson, which opens The Life and Times of Siegmund Freud (1969), to the nuclear explosion, which concludes Einstein on the Beach (1976), the Wilsonian stage is obsessed with death and destruction. The cool surface of beautiful images hides a silent horror. The violence presented on Artaud’s and Wilson’s stages is directly related to the fact that the figures who stepped on them were not psychological or historical representations, but unnaturalistic characters of mythic proportions. Reducing speech and psychology to a minimum, Artaud saw the figures of The Cenci as metaphysical “beings,” incarnations of natural forces: “In The Cenci , the father is destroyer, and in this way the theme may be assimilated to the Great Myths.” [20] Just as in the ancient tragedies, Artaud attempted to give speech “not just to men but to beings , beings each of whom is the incarnation of great forces.” [21] Wilson has gone even further in stripping his characters of psychology. Instead of presenting stories, his stage weaves different historical, literary, and cultural sources, but his approach to them always “lingers in myth and dream, the liminal zone between literature and history,” as Bonnie Marranca observes. [22] His early works were often created around immediately recognizable iconic figures, such as Freud, Stalin, or Queen Victoria, who became the work’s associative center, replacing plot. Einstein on the Beach , based around Albert Einstein, was seen by the director not as a historical representation of Einstein but as a poetic work, which centered around what he called “a mythic character” [23] or “a god of our time.” [24] Accordingly, he set about to investigate the popular mythology surrounding Einstein, collecting photos of the scientist and talking to people about him. “We come to the theatre sharing something, knowing something about this mythic God,” he said about Einstein, “just as Racine wrote about the Gods of his time and Euripides wrote about the Gods of his time.” Therefore, Wilson concludes, “we don’t have to tell a story, we can present a piece of poetry.” [25] After selecting the performance’s mythic content, Artaud noted that “the next step was to make this Myth tangible.” [26] The form conceived by both men for their mythic material was that of a non-naturalistic, formal theatre ritual, which made wide use of all theatre elements subjugated to their total control. A religious and ceremonial quality characterized both their stages. Artaud described how in The Cenci he attempted to come closer to a theater which would “once again become a religion.” [27] Stefan Brecht, who performed in some of the silent operas, describes how performances “felt to be in the nature of a humorous religious activity,” [28] as participants approached them with “the intense radiation of a magical rite.” [29] Nevertheless, one significant difference existed in the manner in which the rituals of mythic violence were presented on their stages — a difference which may have veiled many of the affinities between their work. On Wilson’s stage, acts of violence such as the horrific murder in Deafman Glance were distanced and performed in complete silence, without any overt expressions of emotionality. Artaud, on the other hand, wanted to draw spectators into his stage by the great intensity, exaggeration and loudness of the acting — a style modeled perhaps on silent film, as Innes argues, where exaggerated acting was necessary for conveying meaning and emotions without words. [30] His performance as Count Cenci seems to have combined a declamatory, monotone delivery of the dialogue with heightened intensity, characterized by “absurd violence, his eyes bewildered and his passion scarcely pretended.” [31] Wilson is typically regarded as a total director, and he aspired for complete and total control over all aspects of production to no lesser degree than Artaud. [32] However, while both Wilson and Artaud perceived performance as an overall composition carefully uniting different arts, they differ with regards to their perception of the relation between the artistic elements. Discussing The Cenci , Artaud highlighted the essential need for using all artistic elements in performance, including the sets, text, gesture, sound, and lighting, believing that each is equally important for creating a work which constituted a whole. [33] Artaud’s aspiration to “restore the central attitude to all arts” [34] manifested in The Cenci in his “attempt to achieve a single, integrated theatrical language,” where “light will constantly be associated with sound in order to produce a total effect.” [35] Wilson’s theatre famously maked similar wide use of all artistic elements, assisted by collaborations with artists such as composer Philip Glass or playwright Heiner Müller. However, the American director’s total vision did not strive for complete harmony between all elements. In fact, Wilson gradually came to think of performance as comprising two separate tracks, the visual and audial, referring to them as the “visual book” and the “audio book.” When the two tracks were combined, Wilson made a conscious effort to ensure they did not repeat or illustrate one another. [36] The Wilsonian totality always incorporated contradiction. Both Artaud and Wilson developed aesthetics based on a rejection of Naturalism, creating on their stages a separate universe with its own rules, using dreams as a model. For Artaud, “nothing is less likely to produce an illusion than the illusion of unreal props, flats and painted canvas drops the modem stage offers us.” Instead, he advocates for a stage which is “a whole self-sufficient reality which does not need any other to live.” [37] Wilson expressed similar sentiments when he said, “I think naturalism on stage is a lie, because the stage doesn’t represent a natural situation. I think it is more honest to be artificial.” [38] With language demoted from its primal role in traditional theatre, Artaud—like Wilson after him—focused on poetic visual images, which were to become the center of his new theatre of myth and magic. Eschewing mimesis, Artaud turned to dreams as a model for his poetic visual image: “The public will believe in the theatre’s dreams on condition that it take them for true dreams and not for a servile copy of reality.” [39] The famous dream-like quality of the Wilsonian stage was similarly described by Louis Aragon, who wrote after viewing Deafman Glance , that “it is at the same time, waking life and life with your eyes closed." [40] Furthermore, the dreamworlds created on Artaud’s stage were meant to free the spectators’ imagination, “to allow the public to liberate within itself the magical liberties of dreams.” [41] This liberation was to be achieved via cruelty, which — as he repeatedly insists — does not mean sadism or bloodshed. [42] This is also highlighted in his comments on his staging of The Cenci: “ Let us not be mistaken, Cruelty for me has nothing to do with blood or duty. . . It means doing everything the director can to the sensibilities of actor and spectator.” The intention was to stun and overwhelm the audience, directly involving them in the performance: “I believe in the necessity of using physical means to bring the spectator to submission, to compel him [ sic ] to participate in the action.” [43] Artaud’s intentions for The Cenci echo his vision of a ritualistic theatre which would possess its audience by the sheer power of its “violent physical images,” and “crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theatre as by a whirlwind of higher forces.” [44] Wilson’s visually striking images, which stun the audience’s senses by their sheer power, seem to be a realization of Artaud’s “concrete signs” or “hieroglyphs,” which were to influence spectators directly, without the mediation of rational means. [45] Like Artaud’s stage, the American director’s powerful images —famously called an “ extraordinary freedom machine” by Louis Aragon [46] — similarly liberate the spectators’ imagination, and enable them to imagine a different reality. Formality, Stylization and Precision The attempt to construct dreamworlds on stage brought both Artaud and Wilson to create performances distinguished by high formality, stylization, and calculated precision. In fact, one of the major inspirations for Artaud’s conception of his ideal theatre — the performance of the Balinese dance company which he famously witnessed at the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931 — was characterized by the exact opposite of what is usually associated with cruelty. Despite Artaud’s many misunderstandings of the performance and its context, his interpretation of it and his foregrounding of its formal elements are significant for understanding his vision. Much of the Frenchman’s praise of the Balinese theatre can be applied with very few alterations both to his staging of The Cenci and to Wilson’s performances: Artaud believed that the Balinese performance’s “spiritual architecture” was “meticulously calculated,” “precise,” “mechanized,” and “mathematical,” and saw it as a theatre of ceremony where everything was predetermined and nothing spontaneously improvised. He emphasized the minute gesture, the “systematic depersonalization” and “the musical qualities of physical movement.” The result was “a sort of spiritual architecture,” created from the evocative power of the entire system. [47] The Cenci (1935) demonstrates how Artaud attempted to achieve a ritualistic, dream-like experience via similar precision and strict organization. The shocking and brutal occurrences of the play were placed in a fixed formal structure, in accordance with Artaud’s demand that any experimentation that took place during rehearsals should “culminate nevertheless in a work written down, fixed in its least details.” [48] The fixed and precise work of art to which Artaud aspired was no longer the written dramatic text, of course, but the performative text — including, among other things, the moves, gestures, and intonations: “The composition, instead of being made in the brain of an author, will be made in nature itself, in real space, and the final result will be as strict and as calculated as that of any written work.” [49] Artaud’s demand that the performance should be “recorded by new means of notation” [50] was realized in the prompt book of The Cenci , in which production notes and blocking diagrams were recorded during rehearsals by Roger Blin, [51] who played one of the mute assassins in the play and served as Artaud’s assistant in the production. As Innes observes, for Artaud, the “scenic rhythms” were the most important aspect of the performance, and the prompt book contains more notes on patterning and tempo than on any other aspect. [52] Artaud himself refers to his staging of The Cenci in terms not unlike his description of Balinese theatre. Relating to “the clock-work precision” which he tried to impose on all scenes, he emphasizes “the precision, the strictness, and the mathematical entrances and exits of actors moving around one another,” which created “a spatial geometry” on stage, ruled by “an inhuman rhythm.” [53] The formalized acting style in The Cenci required actors to move in organized, formal patterns, either in progressions, opposition or unison, forming a calculated symmetry. Mass and individual movements were based on simple geometric forms, such as parallels, triangles, and, mainly, circles. Maurice Dabadie describes Artaud giving almost Wilsonian, spatial directions to his actors, asking them to form a triangle or turn in circles. [54] Artaud explained that The Cenci was based on a kind of gravitational movement, “which moves the plants and human beings.” [55] This “secret gravitation” was manifested in obsessive circular movements of different kinds executed by the actors throughout the performance and described by Artaud in evocative terms (“Orsino traces circles of a bird of prey” or “the veiled guards turn in a circle).” [56] The stylization could also be discerned in the production’s use of slow motion, with stage directions calling for characters to move “exceedingly slowly, like figures on the church clock at Strasbourg.” [57] In performance — as one critic noted — this made some of the slow-moving characters “act like complete robots.” [58] The third scene of the first act depicts a banquet, in which Cenci invites a crowd of noblemen to celebrate what turns out to be the arranged killing of two of his sons. Like much of the production, the scene is based on circular movements, which are indicated in the stage directions, as well as in the blocking diagrams and production notes. Blin’s notes reveal that the scene — depicting what is described in the play as a “violent orgy” [59] — was intended to be performed according to a carefully and densely organized choreography of geometric movements and stylized sounds. [60] The guests dance in circles of varying speeds or move in unison. [61] At other times they “all stand and take one step forward” or “takes one step together, very marked.” [62] The timing of many actions is accurately indicated, with notes such as “all the men freeze for two seconds”. [63] As Innes rightly contends, the scene appears to have been “the opposite to what one normally expects from ‘a scene of orgy’.” [64] The stylization and formality of the actors in The Cenci points to the geometric, rhythmic work of Wilson’s performers in productions such as Einstein on the Beach , with their stylized actions executed with the exactitude of ceremony. Wilson — who said he had a “spatial way of thinking” — often treats performers’ bodies as vectors. [65] Anyone who has ever witnessed a Wilson rehearsal is very familiar with his insistence on the same parameters which interested Artaud — tempo and exactitude of movement. [66] Similarly to Artaud, the movement patterns of his production are often constructed around geometric forms, repeated obsessively by figures and objects on stage. “In working on A Letter for Queen Victoria ,” for example, the director described how he “used a design of an envelope. . . . The shape of the envelope was traced through all four acts and served as the visual structure of the piece.” [67] On Wilson’s stage, everything is set and determined, down to the smallest gesture or detail. Thomas Derrah, who worked with the director on The CIVILwarS at the American Repertory Theatre, described Wilson’s way of working: “It’s all about precision of movement. He demands meticulous attention to detail, down to the angle of the fingers and the eyes.” [68] Furthermore, the slow motion used by Artaud in The Cenci would later become the trademark of Wilson’s stage, and his performers have often been compared to puppets, moving automata, or gestic sculptures . [69] The stylization, the extreme slow motion, and the careful repetition of concentrated actions without emotional expression — all combined to create a sense of otherworldliness and magic on Wilson’s stage. This gave his performances a “devotional air” and “the form of solemn celebrations,” [70] which Artaud’s use of the same techniques probably also aspired to achieve. The geometric movements on Artaud’s stage were not random but symbolic in a way that cannot be found on Wilson’s stage. Artaud’s mythic characters seem to directly and kinetically affect those around them. At times, characters move around others they wish to dominate (“Camillo and Orsino turn and move around Giacomo. . . like the hypnotist of carnivals around a client he wants to petrify” [71] ). Other characters — most particularly Cenci, who describes himself as a force of nature [72] — appear to produce a gravitational field, around which other characters revolve. At the banquet scene, for example, Cenci is placed at the center of the mise-en-scene, creating a “whirlwind” of characters tracing circles around him in a trance-like state. [73] While Wilson’s performers appear to be like “lines of force moving through space” [74] similarly to Artaud’s characters, his non-narrative work typically avoids the kind of symbolism found in The Cenci , which associates the “force” projected by characters with specific meanings. Nevertheless, the Wilsonian performers’ presence, with their stylized, expressionless slow motion, again seems to create an effect which is very similar to the one created in Artaud’s play, generating “the impression that the human figures on stage do not act of their own volition and agency,” but are “at the mercy of some mysterious magic.” [75] Dreamworlds Despite significant differences in their visual languages, much of the sense of other-worldliness created on Artaud’s and Wilson’s stages is achieved through their use of sets and lighting. The Cenci ’s sets, created by Balthus, were highly praised for their beauty. [76] Artaud believed that the “ultra-real décor is ultra-constructed but, like ruins, it creates an impression of an extraordinary dream.” [77] This impression was undoubtedly created by the Surrealistic-like composition: though each element of the set appears realistic, their combination creates an eerie feeling, with three-dimensional, constructed shapes presented in “distorted perspectives through Escher-like staircases built on opposing diagonals.” [78] Wilson’s sets were usually much more abstract and minimalist than the sets of The Cenci. Yet his work — particularly in its earlier stages — was characterized by similar Surrealist-like juxtapositions of elements which do not belong together, such as Freud’s office and a cave with wild animals in Freud . This evoked frequent comparisons to Lautrémont’s “fortuitous encounter upon a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella.” [79] The logic-less dreamworlds of the Wilsonian stage — where anything could happen without reason or warning — were similar to the ones created in Surrealists films such as Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (1929). Like Surrealist cinema, Wilson’s early plays used montage techniques to dislodge logical thinking, continuity, and causality, leading Aragon to declare that Deafman Glance was “what we others, who fathered surrealism, what we dreamed it might become after us.” [80] Significantly, both artists also put great importance on lighting. For Artaud, lighting was essential both for creating a total theatre language which unites the different artistic elements, and for engaging the spectators in the performance. [81] According to Artaud, light, combined with sound, was capable of surrounding and immersing the audience, putting it “in the middle of the action.” [82] Light is particularly significant for Wilson’s theatre as well. It is probably the theatre element most identified with the American director’s aesthetics, which gave his “images their distinctive character.” [83] Wilson himself, just like Artaud, perceived light as a unifying element of the stage, capable of transforming its images: “Light is the most important part of theatre. It brings everything together, and everything depends on it. From the beginning I was concerned with light, how it reveals objects, how objects change when light changes…Light is a magic wand.” [84] This transformative quality of light combines in the work of both theatre men with the Surrealist-like sets to transport the stage image to a world of dreams, where — as the Surrealists believe — the mysteries of the unconscious mind could be explored. Total Theatre of Immersive Sound The sound tapestry in both Artaud’s and Wilson’s work comprised different audial elements — including spoken language, music and sound (what Wilson called the “audio book”). In Artaud’s ideal theatre structure, the separation between stage and auditorium — or the domains of art and life — would be abolished, replaced by a single site, without partition or barrier of any kind. There, the spectator would be engulfed by the action and physically affected by it. [85] In his “total spectacle,” “visual and sonorous outbursts” were to be spread “over the entire mass of spectators,” completely immersing them in the performance. [86] While Artaud’s vision of an immersive, total theatre structure incorporated both sight and sound, he appears to have come much closer to achieving his vision in practice in his use of sound. In his staging of The Cenci , Artaud used innovative sonic techniques intended to immerse the audience in the performance, as Wilson would do after him. Artaud “was quite explicit about the music and effects that he wanted” for the production. [87] He therefore worked closely with Roger Desormière, who created the music and sound for The Cenci. Together, as Adrian Curtin tells us, they “devised prerecorded sound cues, billed as music (a mixture of short pieces of music, vocalizations and sound effects),” which included cathedral bells, metronomes, recorded voices, wind and thunder effects, and musical instruments such as flutes and tam-tams. [88] As Curtin notes, many of the sounds used in the performance were abstracted in a fashion that prefigures the technique of musique concrète , incorporating recorded, abstract, found sounds. [89] These were layered on top of vocal sounds and words treated sonorically, which were both recorded and delivered by live actors. Drawing on Desormière’s wide experience working with microphones and recording techniques, the performance utilized new sound technologies to surround the audience with sound by projecting and amplifying recorded sound via loudspeakers spread in the auditorium. This makes The Cenci “the first time stereophonic sound was used in the theatre,” as Blin notes. [90] Artaud’s original intention was to surround the audience with direct sound emanating from real instruments and objects spread across the auditorium. As this proved impractical, recorded sounds were used instead. Therefore, instead of bringing real cathedral bells to the auditorium, Artaud settled for a recording of a great cathedral bell , which was played via loudspeakers placed at four corners of the auditorium in a way that created “ a volume of vibration comparable to that of a cathedral’s great bell,” placing the audience “in the center of a network of sound vibrations.” [91] The spectators who attended The Cenci ’s opening night, appear to have been overwhelmed by the loudspeakers: “The audience was surrounded and constantly bombarded by sound,” wrote one critic. [92] Another referred to the production’s “alarming noises,” [93] and yet another wrote that the spectators’ ears were “tortured by deafening music by loudspeakers,” which put them in a state of alert “as if we were hearing the wail of sirens during an evening of ‘air raids’.” [94] Even sounds associated with the human figures on stage, such as voices or footsteps, did not always emanate from the stage but were sometimes projected to loudspeakers. Footstep sounds in particular recurred obsessively in the performance. As Barlatier reports, the performers’ actual steps “were echoed by recorded footsteps at full volume,” backed by “the sound, broadcast at different volumes, of a metronome oscillating at various speeds.” [95] The omnipresent sound of the footsteps soon gained the significance of a leitmotif which came to be identified with the threatening forces of Count Cenci and the danger he poses to others. Significantly, his footsteps are sometimes heard when he is not seen on stage, a manifestation of his superhuman powers, which extend beyond his physical presence. Curiously, while Wilson’s aesthetic is identified with the strict separation of stage and auditorium of the proscenium stage, his use of sound in different productions has often spread from the stage into the auditorium, coming close to that of Artaud. The latter’s total soundscape anticipated the total, sophisticated sound environments created by sound artist Hans-Peter Kuhn in his work with Wilson on productions such as Death, Destruction & Detroit (1979). As in the audioscore of The Cenci , Wilson and Kuhn’s experiments combined live and recorded sound, used very similarly. Live sound included the actors’ voices and the sound created by the objects on stage; these were usually amplified and transmitted to various speakers in the theatre. The second and greater part of the audioscore comprised taped material, consisting of prerecorded speech, music and sound effects — many of which were “found sounds” recorded by Kuhn and used as raw materials from which he fashioned a vast and often densely layered tapestry, with sometimes as many as a dozen tapes running simultaneously. [96] The immersive sound environment created for DD&D , which would become characteristic of Kuhn’s entire work with Wilson, employed multiple and different loudspeakers grouped around the sides and the back of the auditorium, as well as the ceiling, the proscenium, and backstage, “so you were completely covered by sound,” as Kuhn says. [97] This enabled the artists to flood the audience with auditory information and to create a sound universe which seemed to be controlled by different laws than our reality. Wilson’s non-representational stage lacked much of the symbolic content which lies behind Artaud’s use of the footsteps in his production, for example; nevertheless, Wilson and Kuhn’s formal investigations of sound in itself echoed Artaud’s innovative sound experiments, and produced a complex immersive sound environment, incorporating abstract, recorded, found sounds dispersed throughout the auditorium. The use of sound in the last scene of The Cenci , depicting a procession march to Beatrice’s execution, was particularly praised by reviewers. The stage directions call for the procession to be accompanied by a “seven-beat Inca rhythm,” [98] organized into repetitive cyclical rhythmic patterns instead of melody. The “haunting rhythm” [99] of the music was to become increasingly louder as the scene progressed, intended to induce ”a hypnotic effect,” which Artaud believed would be caused by the “repetitious sounds.” [100] Pierre Barlatier tells us that the music for the performance of the scene was created using “anvils, screw nuts, files and other metal objects.” [101] The cyclical rhythmic pattens produced by the metallic objects seem to be reminiscent of the repetitive rhythmic cycles produced by the metallic percussion instruments dominating the gamelan music that accompanied the Balinese dance theatre that Artaud witnessed at the Paris Colonial Exhibition. Although music did not play a major role in Wilson’s early performances, its introduction as a significant element into his theatre with Einstein on the Beach in 1976 further exposes his work’s affinities to Artaud. In Einstein , image and sound combine to overwhelm the audience, as in Artaud’s vision. Based on the structure of the Indian Tala, Philip Glass’s music for the opera consciously reversed the priorities of Western music, which is traditionally structured around harmonic progressions and melody. Einstein ’s music was instead organized around complex rhythmic structures, similar to the Tala’s cyclical rhythmic organization. [102] Wilson’s mesmerizing images were therefore complemented by Glass’s trance inducing repetitive, cyclical rhythmic structures, creating a synergic effect and inducing a hypnotic state in spectators. In this respect, Glass’s music reminds us both of the music for The Cenci and of the repetitive rhythmic cycles of Balinese gamelan music — despite the fact that the audioscores composed for The Cenci and Einstein sounded very different (and both also differed significantly from the sound of gamelan music). Not surprisingly, critics spoke of the hypnotic, other-worldly quality of Einstein ’s music and stage, [103] declaring it to be “almost religiously moving.” [104] Language in The Cenci was largely treated as sound , in accordance with Artaud’s aspiration for a non-literary theatre, which would affect the audience without the mediation of verbal language. The dialogue was therefore organized musically and rhythmically and delivered in a formalized manner. Many times, the sonoric treatment of words and vocal sounds carried symbolic meaning. The stage directions for the scene depicting the attempted assassination of Cenci (III, ii) detail how “merged with the wind, we hear voices repeating the name ‘Cenci’;” the directions go on to describe the use of sound in visual terms, stating that the count’s name is heard “first on a high, drawn out tone, then like a pendulum. . . At times the names intermingle like countless flocks of birds, gathering in the sky. Then amplified voices heard nearby, like flights swooping past.” [105] A reviewer’s description of the musical effect of this scene in performance seems to depict a twentieth-century, technologically-supported, Baroque-like musical embellishment on the name Cenci: over the sounds of a raging tempest and loud haunted melodic tones, one could hear “recorded voices that shouted and whispered Cenci’s name in a contrapuntal composition; the words crossed one another and were at first separated in time but came closer, rising in a crescendo that was immediately silenced.” [106] Non-verbal vocal sounds were also treated musically to symbolic effect. In the banquet scene, for example, an evocative vocal montage-like pattern must have created an uneasy effect, which complemented the eeriness of the sets, as “all of a sudden, a cry rends the air, a jarring laugh rises to a high pitch, a woman's voice wails.” [107] Blin reveals that Artaud wanted each of the princes in the scene “to resemble an animal,” and therefore asked “them to play animals and make certain throaty noises.” [108] The stylized sounds combined with the scene’s calculated geometric arrangement to symbolically expose the bestial nature of the characters, which lies beneath the controlled surface. The result was a complex musical-kinetic tapestry, which also characterized Wilson’s work. Wilson’s early performances, with their near-elimination of language, seem to have taken Artaud’s concept of a non-literary theatre to the extreme . Artaud himself, however, did not envision a silent stage: not only in practice, but also in his theory he famously advocated the musical use of language as incantation. [109] This characterized Wilson’s work with language from the first production in which l anguage was incorporated into his theatre as a significant element, A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974). What fascinated the director about the work of autistic youth Christopher Knowles, who wrote many of Victoria ’s texts, was the musical sense of construction and the energy and rhythms of his texts, where “words were all carefully patterned.” [110] Victora ’s dialogue was an associative aural collage, including obsessive repetitions and a montage of partial sentences and found language, characterized by disjunction and discontinuity. This created an alogical, interrupted dialogue, in which language was separated from its semantic meaning in favor of its sonoric, formal qualities. [111] Like Artaud, Wilson also often thinks of the texts of his performances in structural, formal, visual, and sonoric terms, describing the text of Death, Destruction & Detroit, for example, as “an architectural arrangement of musical verbal elements.” [112] The formal treatment of language continued even as dramatic texts entered the director’s work in the mid-1980s. In Wilson’s staging of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine (1986), one of his first stagings of dramatic texts, the actors used diverse techniques of vocal production, from screaming to whispering, from stuttering to over-melodic speech, sometimes imitating animal sounds or sirens. Wilson even went as far as claiming that “What interests me about Heiner’s writing. . . is how it sounds." [113] Although the semantic meaning was almost always secondary to the sonoric effect, sometimes the musical treatment of words from the play’s dialogue illustrated their meaning. When the text depicts a character torn to pieces by wolves, for example, the words become almost an onomatopoeia, as the sentence is increasingly torn to pieces by the speakers in each of the five times it appears. Another example is the word “blood,” which was expressed as a rising siren. [114] The American director’s sonoric treatment of language therefore sometimes carried symbolic meaning, which brought his work closer to that of Artaud’s treatment of the dramatic text. Conclusion The comparative examination of Artaud’s and Wilson’s work reveals some significant parallels, alongside some important differences. It seems that Wilson unknowingly took up some of the innovative aspects of Artaud’s theoretical and practical work and continued to perfect many of the techniques employed by the Frenchman. Both artists staged violent themes of death and catastrophe within a precisely-set, stylized, and formalist performative language. Both aspired for a total theatre of ritual and myth, which makes wide use of all artistic elements to create a poetic dreamworld on stage. Constructed as a carefully planned audio-visual tapestry, these dreamworlds drew the spectators into the performance by means of physical and concrete sounds and images . The analysis presented here of course in no way claims that Wilson’s work continued Artaud’s project in all respects: the coolness of the Wilsonian stage contrasts sharply with the intensity of Artaud’s vision, for example. Neither does this examination suggest that Wilson’s theatre is the only possible way to take up and evolve Artaud’s vision; the projects of directors such as Brook or Grotowski clearly demonstrate that this is not the case. Moreover, it is of course impossible to draw any general conclusions about Artaud’s practical work from a single production, the only attempt he made to realize his Theatre of Cruelty. Nevertheless, this discussion demonstrates that Artaud’s vision and practical work at the very least point to Wilson’s work as one possible direction in which the Frenchman’s project can be taken up. This can potentially enrich our understanding of Artaud’s practical work and theory, beyond the surface level of what is usually associated with a ritualistic spectacle of cruelty. The discussion can also help to better contextualize Wilson’s aesthetics with regards to both the first wave of the European avant-garde and the American avant-garde of the second half of the twentieth century, from which his work sprang. It also exposes the surprising political potential of Wilson’s aesthetics, often considered apolitical. As we saw, in The Cenci , the creation of a stage world which does not imitate daily reality but which establishes a separate and distinct reality was used by Artaud to attack the structural principles of society, such as order, justice, religion, and family. This suggests that Wilson’s stage — with its similarly distinguished dreamworld — could also enable its spectators to imagine an alternative world , something which in itself has political implications. Endnotes [1] Scholars have often commented on the elusiveness of Artaud’s opaque formulations. See, e.g., John Louis Styan, Modern Drama in Theory and Practice 2: Symbolism, Surrealism and the Absurd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 105; Christopher Innes, Avant Garde Theatre: 1892-1992 (London: Routledge, 1993), 61; and Arnold Aronson, American Avant-garde Theatre: A History (London: Routledge, 2000), 30. [2] Innes, Avant Garde Theatre, 60. [3] Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double , translated by Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958). [4] Arthur Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2. [5] Michael Kirby, A Formalist Theatre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 96-101, 105, 107. [6] Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 69-71. [7] Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double , 46, 80. [8] Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double , 69, 94. [9] Susan Sontag even claims that a constituent part of the authority of Artaud’s ideas is “precisely his inability to put them into practice.” Susan Sontag, “Approaching Artaud,” in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 48. [10] Le Petit Parisien , April 14, 1935, reprinted in Roger Blin, et al., “Antonin Artaud in ‘Les Cenci’,” The Drama Review: TDR 16, no. 2 (1972): 97. [11] Antonin Artaud, “‘The Cenci,’ La Béte Noire no. 2, May 1, 1935,” reprinted in The Cenci, translated by Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Grove Press, 1970), vii. [12] F.D., “Les Cenci: A Theatrical Evening,” Le Temps , May 8, 1935; reprinted in Roger Blin, et al., “Antonin Artaud,” 130; and Francois Porche, “Le Theatre,” La Revue de Paris , May 15, 1935; reprinted in Roger Blin, et al., “Antonin Artaud,” 138. [13] Guermantes, “Cruel Theatre...,” Le Figaro , May 7, 1935, reprinted in Roger Blin, et al., “Antonin Artaud,” 129. [14] Innes, “Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty,” in Avant Garde Theatre , 57–91. [15] The examination presented in this paper is part of a larger research project currently prepared for publication, which focuses on Robert Wilson’s aesthetics and contextualizes it, among other things, within the tradition of total theatre. [16] Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 5, 46, 60, 72, 73, 89, 91, 129. [17] For a comparison of Shelley and Artaud’s versions see Jane Goodall, “Artaud's Revision of Shelley’s The Cenci: The Text and Its Double,” Comparative Drama 21 no. 2 (1987). [18] Antonin Artaud, Letter to Andre Gide, February 10, 1935, reprinted in Roger Blin, et al., “Antonin Artaud,” 91. [19] Laurence Shyer, Robert Wilson and His Collaborators (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1989), 5–6. [20] Antonin Artaud, “What the Tragedy The Cenci at the Folies-Wagram will be about,” Le Figaro May 5, 1935, reprinted in The Cenci , x. [21] Artaud, “‘The Cenci’,” ix. [22] Bonnie Marranca, Ecologies of Theater: Essays at the Century Turning (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 37. [23] Mark Obenhaus, dir, Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera (New York.: Obenhaus Films, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and WNET, 1985), 7:50 min. [24] Katharina Otto-Bernstein, Absolute Wilson: The Biography (Munich: Prestel, 2006), 145. [25] Obenhaus, Einstein on the Beach , 7:30. [26] Artaud, “What the Tragedy The Cenci ,” x. [27] Artaud, “What the Tragedy The Cenci ,” xii. [28] Stefan Brecht, The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 199. [29] Stefan Brecht, 199n85. [30] Innes, Avant Garde Theatre , 80. Artaud famously accumulated wide experience both as a scriptwriter and an actor in silent film, remembered for his roles in Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927) and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). [31] Pierre Audiat, Paris-Soir , May 9,1935 reprinted in Roger Blin, et al., “Antonin Artaud,” 133. [32] Some of the many references to Wilson as a total director include Aronson, American Avant-garde Theatre , 133 and Laurence Shyer, Robert Wilson and His Collaborators , xvi. Christopher Innes and Maria Shevtsova similarly classify Wilson as an “auteur director” in their Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 161–167. [33] Le Petit Parisien , April 14, 1935, 97. [34] Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double , 46, 80. [35] Artaud, “What the Tragedy The Cenci ,” xi. [36] Ellen Halperin-Royer, “Robert Wilson and the Actor: Performing in Danton’s Death,” Theatre Topics 8, no. 1 (1998): 77; Stefan Kurt, “In Praise of Emptiness [and Buster Keaton],” in Robert Wilson from Within , ed. Margery Arent Safir (Paris: The Arts Arena, 2011), 281. [37] Antonin Artaud, The Collected Works , vol. 2 (London: Calder and Boyars, 1971), 68–69. [38] Wilson, quoted in Otto-Bernstein, Absolute Wilson , 30. [39] Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double , 86. [40] Louis Aragon, “An open Letter to André Breton from Louis Aragon on Robert Wilson’s Deafman Glance,” trans. Linda Moses, Jean-Paul Lavergne, and George Ashley, Performing Arts Journal 1, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 3. [41] Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double , 86. [42] Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double , 79, 86 101–104, 113–114. [43] Le Petit Parisien , April 14,1935, 97. [44] Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double , 82–83. [45] Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double , 39, 40, 54, 61, 90 94, 124. [46] Aragon, “An open Letter to André Breton,” 7. [47] Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double , 54–57. [48] Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double , 111. [49] Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double , 111–112. [50] Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double , 111. [51] Blin, et al., “Antonin Artaud,” 112–125. [52] Innes, Avant Garde Theatre , 66–67. [53] Antonin Artaud, “After ‘The Cenci’ (Après ‘Les Cenci’),” in Artaud on Theatre , ed. Claude Schumacher with Brian Singleton (London: Methuen Drama, 2001), 166. [54] Maurice Dabadie, Echo de Paris , April 24, 1935, reprinted in Roger Blin, et al., “Antonin Artaud,” 102. [55] Artaud, “‘The Cenci’,” vii. [56] Antonin Artaud “After Les Cenci,” La Bete Noire , June 1, 1935; reprinted in Roger Blin, et al., “Antonin Artaud,” 144. [57] Antonin Artaud, The Cenci, in Collected Works , vol. 4 (London: John Calder, 1999), 142. [58] Fortunat Strowski, “A Four-Act Tragedy in Ten Tableaux,” Paris-Midi , May 9,1935; reprinted in Roger Blin, et al., “Antonin Artaud,” 132. [59] Artaud, The Cenci , 126. [60] This was also the impression of critics. Dabadie, Echo de Paris , 100–102. [61] Blin, et al., “Antonin Artaud,” 113. [62] Blin, et al., “Antonin Artaud,” 119 and 121. [63] Blin, et al., “Antonin Artaud,” 121. [64] Innes, Avant Garde Theatre , 64. [65] Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson , 147. [66] This was true of Wilson’s work from the very beginning. Bill Simmer, “Robert Wilson and Therapy,” The Drama Review: TDR 20, no. 1, Theatre and Therapy, (March 1976): 102–104. [67] Otto-Bernstein, Absolute Wilson , 132. [68] Quoted in Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson , 137. [69] Stefan Brecht, The Theatre of Visions , 117; Halperin-Royer, “Robert Wilson and the Actor,” 75; and Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , trans. with an introduction by Karen Jürs-Munby (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 78, 80. [70] Brecht, The Theatre of Visions , 117–18. [71] Artaud “After Les Cenci.” [72] Artaud, The Cenci, 123 . [73] Blin, et al., “Antonin Artaud,” 121. See also Goodall, “Artaud's Revision of Shelley,” 118–21. [74] Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson , 147. [75] Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , 78, 58. [76] Henry Bidou, Le Temps , May 13,1935; reprinted in Roger Blin, et al., “Antonin Artaud,” 136; and Pierre-lean Jouve, “Les Cenci by Antonin Artaud,” La Nouvelle Revue Française , June 1, 1935; reprinted in Roger Blin, et al., “Antonin Artaud,” 141. [77] Pierre Barlatier, “Regarding Les Cenci, M. Artaud tells us why a Theatre of Cruelty,” Comoedia , May 6,1935, reprinted in Roger Blin, et al., “Antonin Artaud,” 107. [78] Innes, Avant Garde Theatre, 73. [79] Comte de Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror , trans. Guy Wernham (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1965), 263. For comparisons, see Maria Shevtsova, Robert Wilson (London: Routledge, 2007), 56; Arthur Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson , 175. [80] Aragon, “An open Letter to André Breton,” 4. [81] Artaud, “What the Tragedy The Cenci ,” xi. [82] Barlatier, “Regarding Les Cenci,” 107. [83] Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson , 121. [84] Robert Wilson, quoted in Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson , 121. [85] Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double , 96. [86] Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double , 86. [87] Barlatier, “Regarding Les Cenci,” 108. [88] Adrian Curtin, “Cruel Vibrations: Sounding Out Antonin Artaud's Production of Les Cenci, ” Theatre Research International 35 no. 3 (2010): 251. [89] Curtin, 260n17. [90] Blin, Interview by Charles Marowitz, 110. [91] Artaud, “‘The Cenci’,” viii. [92] Barlatier, “Regarding Les Cenci,” 108. [93] F.D., “Les Cenci: A Theatrical Evening,” 130. [94] Gerald D'Houville, “Theatre Chronicle of Paris,” Le Petit Parisien , May 12,1935, reprinted in Roger Blin, et al., “Antonin Artaud,” 136. [95] Barlatier, “Regarding Les Cenci,” 108. [96] Shyer, Robert Wilson and His Collaborators , 235–7 and Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson , 177. [97] Hans Peter Kuhn, quoted in Shyer, Robert Wilson and His Collaborators , 235. [98] Artaud, The Cenci , 152. [99] Artaud, The Cenci , 153. [100] Le Petit Parisien , April 14, 1935, 97. [101] Barlatier, “Regarding Les Cenci,” 108. [102] Philip Glass, “Notes on: Einstein on the Beach,” Performing Arts Journal 2, no. 3 (Winter 1978): 67–68. See also Shyer, Robert Wilson and His Collaborators , 220–21. [103] Mel Gussow, “’Einstein’ is a Science-Fiction Opera Play,” The New York Times , 28 November 1976. [104] John Rockwell, “Music: ‘Einstein’ Returns Briefly,” The New York Times , December 17, 1984. [105] Artaud, The Cenci , 143. [106] Barlatier, “Regarding Les Cenci,” 108. [107] Dabadie, Echo de Paris , 100. [108] Roger Blin, Interview by Charles Marowitz, reprinted in Roger Blin, et al., “Antonin Artaud,” 110. [109] Roger Blin, Interview by Charles Marowitz, reprinted in Roger Blin, et al., “Antonin Artaud,” 110. [110] Shyer, Robert Wilson and His Collaborators , 71. [111] For more on the different technique of language deconstruction employed on Wilson’s stage, see Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson , 41–75. [112] Robert Wilson, “Death, Destruction & Detroit in Berlin: Robert Wilson’s Tale of Two Cities,” Performance Art Magazine no. 1 (1979): 7. [113] Arthur Holmberg, “A Conversation with Robert Wilson and Heiner Müller,” Modern Drama 31 no. 3 (September 1988): 457. [114] For more on language used as sound on Wilson’s stage see Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson , 72. About The Author(s) Keren Cohen is a PhD candidate at the Department of Theatre Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is part of the Hebrew University’s Honors Program for Outstanding Candidates in the Humanities. Her PhD dissertation, written under the supervision of Dr. Jeanette Malkin, examines the aesthetic of American avant-garde theatre director Robert Wilson from an intercultural German-American perspective. Initial conclusions of this research have been presented at international conferences and published as journal and book articles. Robert Wilson Yearbook The Robert Wilson Yearbook, published annually by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, offers a dedicated platform for scholarly and creative engagement with the life, artistry, and enduring legacy of Robert Wilson (1941–2025), one of the most original visionaries in contemporary theatre and performance. The Yearbook seeks to explore and expand upon Wilson’s groundbreaking approaches to staging, lighting, movement, and visual composition. Each issue will feature a diverse range of content—including original essays, critical commentary, archival materials, artist reflections, and photography—examining facets of Wilson’s multifaceted practice across genres, eras, and geographies. The Robert Wilson Yearbook is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - This Issue “Going on a Journey”: Space, Time, and Experience in Robert Wilson’s Installations and Museum Interventions Re-Viewing Stefan Brecht’s The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson from a (B.) Brechtian Perspective Towards a Formalist Ritualistic Theatre: An Artaudian Reading of Robert Wilson’s Aesthetics The Theatre of Autobio-hetero-thanato-graphic: The Life and Death of Marina Abramović Time’s Shadows: Crisis of Subjectivity and Reconciled Concord in Robert Wilson’s Performative Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets They Asked Me to Draw a City: Postdramatic Imaginings in Robert Wilson’s Direction of Strindberg’s A Dream Play Robert Wilson's Oedipus: The Postdramatic Journey of the Oedipus Story from Sophocles through Freud Robert Wilson and Norway Robert Wilson’s Art of Senses and Emotions Listening to Deafman Glanc Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken Thinking in Structures: Working as a Dramaturg with Robert Wilson Bertolt Brecht and Robert Wilson: The Dialectical Triad of Playwright, Director and Berliner Ensemble Actors in Wilson’s The Threepenny Opera Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Robert Wilson Yearbook Volume 1 Visit Journal Homepage Re-Viewing Stefan Brecht’s The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson from a (B.) Brechtian Perspective Markus Wessendorf By Published on May 1, 2026 Download Article as PDF When Bertolt Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel returned to Europe from their Californian exile in 1947, their son Stefan stayed in the United States. [1] After getting a PhD in philosophy from Harvard (for a dissertation on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel), teaching philosophy at the University of Miami, and pursuing postdoctoral studies on Hegel and Karl Marx in Paris, Stefan settled in New York City in the mid-1960s, where he got involved in the experimental theatre scene. Apart from writing poetry (and publishing it in German and English), [2] his most ambitious project was to document The Original Theatre of the City of New York: From the Mid-Sixties to the Mid-Seventies in a series of monographs. Out of ten books of a planned series, he only completed three: The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson , which was first produced by the West German publisher of his father’s works, Suhrkamp, in 1978; [3] Queer Theatre , with chapters about Jack Smith, The Theatre of the Ridiculous, Andy Warhol, John Waters, and others, also first published by Suhrkamp in 1978; [4] and two volumes on Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre , first published in 1988 by Methuen and Routledge, who also published translations of his father’s works. [5] Volumes on Richard Foreman’s diary theatre, on the collective improvisation of Mabou Mines, on theatre as psychotherapy, on Black Theatre, and on Dance were announced but never published. (New York University’s Fales Library now holds the Stefan Brecht Papers.) In the late 1980s, during a one-year stay in the PhD Program of Theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York—then housed in the Grace Building and the adjacent building on 42nd Street—I bought a copy of Stefan’s book The Theatre of Visions at a small bookstore in the Broadway district. At the time, I found the book rather impenetrable—with its unwieldy combination of barely edited interview transcriptions, journal-style rehearsal notes, multi-page footnotes, moment-by-moment descriptions of productions, detailed formal analyses of these productions, and aesthetic, phenomenological, and psychological reflections on Wilson’s work. It is probably because this English-language book was first produced by a German publisher that little attention was paid to the overall structure and composition of the manuscript as well as its copyediting. There are many aspects of the book that would be considered problematic these days (for example, inappropriate references to lesbian performers and performers with disabilities). However, while re-reading The Theatre of Visions recently, I was surprised by the analytical depth and quality of reflection on Wilson’s early work that the monograph provides. Stefan performed in several of Wilson’s productions, for example, The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud in 1969, Overture in 1972, and A Letter for Queen Victoria in 1974. In The Theatre of Visions , he covers Wilson’s work from the late 1960s to 1977, and he distinguishes two periods in Wilson’s work: the early non-verbal, image-driven projects—including The King of Spain , The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud , Deafman Glance , Overture , KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE , and The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin —and the later ones, in which Wilson started to experiment with texts, including A Letter for Queen Victoria , The $-Value of Man , Spaceman , Einstein on the Beach , and I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating . Stefan considers the first period—in his view: the theatre of visions proper—a successful attempt to create a theatre dominated by the right brain’s visual, spatial, and synthesizing powers, [6] whereas the use of language in Wilson’s later productions failed to play to the “right brain’s peculiar prowess for verbal communication” in terms of contextual considerations, “semantic liberality,” and “phonetic sensitivity.” [7] Because they did not “incorporate speech independently of its syntactic and semantic essence,” “freed of the habitual conscious left brain domination,” Stefan argues, the productions of this period destroyed Wilson’s theatre of visions. [8] The focus in the following will be on Stefan’s description and analysis of the key aesthetic characteristics and underlying assumptions of the first period, and especially on the production of Deafman Glance , to which he devotes almost ninety pages. [9] Subdivided into three sections (i.e., a detailed description of the performance and two sections on its meaning and form), each consisting of a numbered sequence of paragraphs, these pages almost read like a “Short Organum [CS1] ” of Wilson’s early work. As a performer in and spectator of Wilson’s early pieces, Stefan was in a privileged position to write about Wilson’s work. Since Wilson himself, differing from some of his peers in the New York theatre scene like Richard Foreman and Richard Schechner, did not articulate his own vision and approach in writing, The Theatre of Visions filled a gap, even though it represented Stefan’s point of view, not Wilson’s. Although Stefan makes few direct references to his father and his father’s theatrical concepts, many of his reflections and observations resonate with Bertolt’s theories, despite the fact that Wilson did not work with dramatic texts at this stage, was less overtly interested in politics than many of his contemporaries in experimental theatre, and supposedly played towards the strength of the other side of the brain usually identified with Bertolt’s work. It is also useful to draw out the resonances between Bertolt’s theories and Stefan’s text because other scholars and critics—partly due to Heiner Müller’s mediation and his assertion that “Bob [Wilson] achieved what [Bertolt] Brecht only dreamed of doing: the parting of the elements” [10] —later identified and discussed features of Bertolt’s aesthetics in Wilson’s work, [11] and Wilson himself later directed Bertolt’s The Ocean Flight and The Threepenny Opera at the Berliner Ensemble. The following exploration compares and contrasts Bertolt’s aesthetics and Wilson’s early work (as theorized by Stefan) to identify resonances as well as differences between their respective formal, thematic, and conceptual frameworks. Stefan makes it clear that one of his father’s key notions, Fabel , is absent from Wilson’s work. Fabel presupposes a dramatic text and is this text’s “dialectically interpreted plot . . . made ‘playable’ for a modern audience” [12] by the dramaturg, director, designers, etc. If a Fabel is still present in Wilson’s work, then only in a modified shape no longer recognizable as a verbally distillable narrative that informs the entire production’s structure. Stefan writes about Deafman Glance that there “is no forward pointing line, fable or plot.” [13] However, the show still plays with the audience’s expectation of a Fabel and makes the search for it an active part of their viewing experience: “Indications are given, commitments withheld, traces obscured.” [14] Different from his assessment of the Bread and Puppet Theatre in his later publication, [15] Stefan emphasizes in The Theatre of Visions that Wilson’s theatre does not engage with “practical and social concerns” and “has no propagandistic, moral, emotional, educational intentions or effects.” [16] He even goes so far to insinuate that his father’s theatre resembles Wilson’s in this regard and therefore falls short of Bertolt’s own stated goals: “the spectator of a Wilsonian spectacle like the spectator of most other kinds of spectacle (even a B. Brechtian one) is apt to have abandoned for the time of the spectacle, his/her practical extra-theatrical interests and concerns.” [17] It is therefore interesting that Stefan himself provides a Marxist analysis of one aspect of Deafman Glance : the construction of three, horizontally lined-up wooden bins by several performers on stage, which goes on for a long time. Once these bins have been completed, they just stand there empty before they are finally filled in. Stefan argues that the ordinariness of the “staged image” of constructing the bins juxtaposed with other images on stage invites the spectator to identify it “with the chief horror of industrial capitalism in his own life: the alienation of labor.” [18] Stefan’s discussion of Wilson’s later $-Value of Man , however, which had both “an explicit and pervasive theme, money” and “a message: one shouldn’t have to pay for things,” is more critical. [19] This show included an ironic recitation of a New York Times article about a classroom experiment by a Long Island University professor that was supposed to demonstrate “to his students their hypocrisy in denying putting a monetary value on the life of human individuals and/or in affirming their pricing to be independent of who or what those individuals are.” Stefan argues that the resentment of monetary value in practice “works out as elitism”: he considers the professor’s experiment “foolish liberal stuff” and “the show’s protest … childish.” [20] Both Bertolt and the early Wilson focus on and showcase ordinary objects, characters, and lives, and ordinariness also applies to the mode of representation. Bertolt’s Galileo famously proclaims: “ Unhappy the land where heroes are needed,” [21] and this sentiment is also voiced in some of his other plays. Bertolt rejected histrionics and overacting and favored clarity of presentation. Stefan writes about the “marvelously unpretentious matter-of-factness” [22] of Wilson’s Deafman Glance and takes away from it that “we need not strain to be extraordinary.” [23] He describes the movements of Wilson’s performers as “intense but relaxed” [24] and the “actions required [as] simple. They demand no unusual skills or exertions.” [25] Both Bertolt and Wilson, however, also estrange the familiar and ordinary. In his plays and productions, Bertolt employed Verfremdungseffekte , that is, devices and techniques to render seemingly familiar and ordinary objects, actions, or persons strange and therefore alterable. Estrangement of the ordinary in Wilson’s work takes a different form: Stefan points out that one “of the ways that Wilson puts ordinary life in the perspective of strangeness is with animals [i.e., animal performers and puppets on stage].” [26] As alluded to in the statement by Heiner Müller quoted above, Bertolt aimed for “a radical separation of elements ”—that is, of words, music, design, etc.—in his epic theatre, [27] and Stefan describes Wilson’s theatre in comparable terms: “In a disassociated manner various events occur. They are out of unrelated frames of reference. . . . conventions of representation are played off against one another.” [28] The structure of most of Bertolt’s plays is episodic and characterized by a dramaturgy of interruption to maintain the spectator’s focus on the moment-to-moment development of the plot instead of its outcome. Stefan characterizes Deafman Glance as a spectacle that is “divided into movements by a radical stop and go: successive endings, staged and experienced as true endings, followed by beginnings, staged and experienced as new beginnings, ” [29] and he states that Wilson “has the gift of discontinuity. His figurations are discrete: he neither leads into them nor out of them.” [30] Both Bertolt and Wilson favor a detached, unemotional, relaxed, and observant attitude of the performers towards their own performance on stage. Bertolt, for example, using classical Chinese theatre as a model, writes that the actor in this tradition “ expresses that he knows that he is being watched ” [31] and “ observes himself .” When he represents a cloud, he “observes his own arms and legs, pointing them out, examining them and perhaps finally praising them.” [32] Wilson as a performer, according to Stefan, in his own productions “never seems tense, but seems continually aware of the whereabouts of every part of his body, seeming to relate to these parts […]. He leaves no doubt that as he stands there, he is conscious of himself as a performer.” [33] “Conventional theatre’s ostentatious indications of acting-on, being-affected by another” are absent in Wilson’s work. [34] For Bertolt and the early Wilson alike, the performers’ relationship towards their performance is also supposed to instill an equally observant relationship to the performance in the spectators. Bertolt wants the spectator to develop the cool, critical, and detached attitude of the connoisseur (for example, of a sports fan) towards the actions on stage. Stefan, similarly, emphasizes that in Wilson’s Deafman Glance neither performance style nor staging “seem designed to evoke emotions in the spectator, but on the contrary to give no occasions for his passions to arise, but to calm him.” [35] Bertolt appreciates about classical Chinese Theatre that the “audience identifies itself with the actor” not through emotional identification but as “an observer, and accordingly develops the attitude of observing or looking on.” [36] He himself wants his spectators less to emotionally engage with the plot and feel empathy for the characters than to further their critical attitude toward both. Bertolt coined the term “complex seeing” for the audience’s ability to simultaneously think along with a play’s actions while also thinking about them at a meta-level: “thinking across the flow is almost more important than thinking in the flow.” [37] In his productions, this complex vision was facilitated by projections on screens, half curtains, or the laying bare of the technical apparatus. According to Stefan, the experience of watching Wilson’s Deafman Glance was simultaneously also “pervasively dual: we are watching images and performers creating images.” [38] Bertolt was known for an open-ended creative process in which texts were rarely ever completed but often worked on and revised over several decades. With regard to Brecht’s works, Tom Kuhn has suggested that “we should try to conceive of an almost continuous and multi-stranded process of invention and development, which only came to any sort of rest or conclusion in particular completed ‘works’ when the opportunity happened to present itself.” [39] As for Wilson, Stefan mentions that “wholeness is not an ideal of his, but bothers him.” [40] In his early productions, Wilson frequently reused material from other projects— The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud repeating material from The King of Spain ; The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin combining most of Freud with parts of Deafman Glance and KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE , etc. [41] Bertolt’s directorial understanding of mise-en-scène was similar to Denis Diderot’s notion of a theatre production as a succession of tableaus, [42] and this approach is also prominent in Wilson’s work. Bertolt aimed for stage compositions that would bring out what he called Gestus , by which he meant the social relations and attitudes of characters physically expressed and externalized through “posture, tone of voice and facial expression.” [43] As a recitable sign revealing the social positionality of each character, the Gestus needed to be legible—and this aspect of Bertolt’s work is particularly well documented in the photographic record of the modelbooks of his productions with the Berliner Ensemble. Wilson too, according to Stefan, told the actors in his early performances “to aim at the production of a clear image, one that reads well.” [44] In contrast to Bertolt, however, Wilson’s stage images, pulled from his unconscious and deliberately not interpreted, needed to be legible as strikingly enigmatic images, as symbols that even though they were “carrying symbol function, . . . [did] not function as symbols” and “mean[t] nothing.” [45] One notion closely related to Gestus in Bertolt’s theatre theory is Haltung (“attitude”), which combines “what is usually a mental state in English with embodied expression or an actor’s bearing.” Both Gestus and Haltung “are generated in and by the body,” with Gestus being “the smallest element of Haltung ” and condensing “the dialectic of movement and balance.” [46] Both Gestus and Haltung are also related to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of Habitus as “a subjective but not individual system of internalized structures, schemes of perception, conception and action common to all members of the same group or class.” [47] Without using the word explicitly, Stefan analyzes the Haltung not of any characters (of which there aren’t any in a traditional sense) in Wilson’s productions but of the members of his Byrd Hoffman School of Birds: Byrds, generally white Protestants from upper middle class families, or assimilated to a WASP manner, are apt to be undemonstrative, unemphatic, reserved people, superficially cool and off-hand, not given to shows of emotion, generally keeping their feelings, if any, to themselves, rather carefully controlled in their conduct, with unexpressive faces and voices. . . . Generally well-read and -informed (and college graduates), they tend to be non-verbal, with few opinions, careful to avoid abstract terms, generalisations. . . .Politics is never discussed. [48] And Stefan also discusses the Haltung of other New York theatre companies with regard to the religious and class background that inform their work: “The ethos of . . . the Bread and Puppet theatre is Protestant and upper middle class, that of all forms of ‘ridiculous’ theatre is catholic and lower class, that of the Open Theatre, the Manhattan Project, the Living Theatre, the Performance Group is Jewish and middle class.” [49] Both Bertolt and Wilson developed what could be called “theatre pedagogies” in response to the alienation inscribed on the body through capitalist and bourgeois socialization. Bertolt developed Lehrstücke —learning plays—that were conceived of as training pieces for the self-orientation of participating performers, often non-virtuoso amateurs (“ workers’ choruses, amateur dramatic groups, school choruses and school orchestras ” [50] ). As Bertolt remarked in a letter in 1956, his learning play “ The Decision was not written for an audience but exclusively for the instruction of the performers,” [51] and he stated in a different context that “underlying the learning play is the expectation that the participant/player can be influenced socially by performing specific ways of taking action, assuming specific attitudes, reproducing specific dialogues, etc.” [52] By isolating, enacting, and criticizing specific postures and gestures relating to class conflict and power structures, the participants could learn to perform them differently and recognize, deconstruct, and refashion their own socially shaped social Gestus and Haltung . Stefan, in comparison, writes about Wilson’s work with the untrained members of the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds that he “has found a way to do great theatre precisely with not just totally unskilled people, but with people peculiarly unfit to perform” and argues that Wilson’s physical workshops and group sessions helped his performers to transmute “their painful impotence . . . into the grade and dignity of an individuality as it is.” [53] One could say that Wilson’s workshops contributed to a deconditioning of the Haltung of his group members by alleviating the socially conditioned fear of “acknowledging one’s identity with one’s body.” [54] Stefan writes: “Participating in Wilson’s sessions, one realizes that a specific inhibition underlies the common sense, decency, economy of normal adult movement: an object-less fear . . . felt in permanency, so regular a state of muscular inhibition one is not conscious of it.” [55] Stefan’s own participation in Wilson’s sessions left him with a “certain appreciable rather lasting elation and increased ease” with his own body. [56] One of Stefan’s major claims about Wilson’s early work is that it is focused on individuality—as opposed to personality. Stefan claims that for “individuals to reveal themselves was probably his original theatrical intention.” [57] This may first seem in strong opposition to Bertolt’s work and his rejection of the ideology of individualism, but a closer look reveals similarities of both approaches. Stefan contends that, in Wilson’s theatre, there “are no ‘characters,’ the performers do not imitate, impersonate or represent personalities,” [58] and emphasizes that Wilson, for his shows, “does not pick particularly beautiful or graceful, nor strange-looking people, but aims at a diversity of appearance within the range of conventional appearance,—‘just people.’.” [59] Stefan argues that in modern times,—during the bourgeois epoch,—people have tended to identify themselves . . .in terms of . . . an integration . . . of will and consciousness into a peculiar functioning whole, and the arts . . . have tended to represent people in terms of it, viz. as PERSONS possessed of a PERSONALITY or PERSONAL IDENTITY. I believe that. . . individuality or individual identity are something else. [60] The notion of personality rejected by Stefan is similar to the concept of the individual attacked by Bertolt: what Stefan embraces as the individual ( Individuum ), his father conceives of as the “dividual” ( Dividuum ). [61] Stefan’s statement that “[b]ureaucratisation and proletarianization have made personality seem pointless,—no identity” [62] echoes his father’s notion of the “dividual” as equally lacking a unified and coherent identity. Instead of conceiving of the masses from the point of view of the individual, the individual should be conceived of from the point of view of the masses: “And it is precisely the divisibility of the individual that should be emphasized (as belonging to several collectives).” [63] To Stefan, the identity-less individual he associates with Wilson’s work is in a state of “becoming,” in a constant process of “self-actualisation,” inhabiting the Gertrude Steinian temporality of an “eternal present . . . experienced as all there, at the moment,—not as having a reality before or after.” [64] Stefan argues that the “awareness of the performers’ individuality in Wilson’s theatre replaces the awareness of a personality (or . . . a character) represented by an actor.” [65] However, the spectator becomes aware of the performers’ individualities not because Wilson’s direction highlights and isolates specific performers as extraordinary but because his performers move collectively without a concern about appearances, easily following their own bodies’ kinetic impulses while being sensitive and attuned to the movements of the other performers on stage. Stefan describes the counter-intuitive effect that, despite Wilson’s encouragement of his performers not to show themselves as individuals on stage, “a powerful communication,—of individualities,—results.” [66] Similar to Bertolt’s epic theatre, the spectators, “not the performers, have to be the active party” in Wilson’s productions. [67] Stefan writes that in Wilson’s theatre “there are so many things happening simultaneously, we cannot dwell on everything, but have to search, select, focus, in order to see, mere looking won’t do.” [68] Stefan applies a predominantly psychological vocabulary to describe the attention-raising and -expanding processes in Wilson’s work that would have been alien to his father. Bertolt’s goal is to turn his audiences into critical spectators who translate their awareness of the social issues represented on stage into political action beyond the theatre: “The attitude is a critical one. . . . [W]e hand the world over to their brains and hearts for them to change as they see fit.” [69] The early Wilson, by contrast, is interested in awareness not as a cognitive and intellectual but a pre- as well as un-conscious sensory and creative potential to be fully actualized: “Looking becomes imagination.” [70] The “extended expositions and repetitions, the silence and the slow movements, the unaccented evenness with which new things appear, and above all the self-sufficient concreteness of the individual images” in Wilson’s productions “liberate our awareness” [71] by eroding our “perceptual acquisitiveness,” relaxing “our analytic, identifying, retentive propensities,” [72] and circumventing “the ego-structure of perception.” [73] Similar to Bertolt’s vision of “a type of performance that will keep the spectator’s mind free and mobile” [74] to allow for the critical awareness and viewership of the audience unimpeded by emotional identification, Wilson’s work, according to Stefan, provides a “loosening-up exercise for the mind,” and the “free movement of . . . awareness” encouraged by this exercise makes “awareness itself. . . a medium of enjoyment and even awareness . ” [75] This brings to mind Friedrich Schiller’s notion of art as providing the “highest pleasure” defined as the “freedom of the mind in the vivacious play of all its faculties” [76] —except that in Wilson’s theatre, different from Schiller, the transformation of the “sensual world . . . into a free creation of the spirit” is not about controlling the “material word through ideas.” [77] Wilson’s early theatre is thoroughly grounded in the body, not in ideas or idealism—but also not in Bertolt’s materialism—and that applies to the notion of awareness as well. Awareness as a “medium of enjoyment” is conceived of in physical terms, as a dynamic energetic potential. The “loosening-up exercise for the mind” that a Wilson production aims to provide to the spectator is “of the same sort as the physical free motion exercises by which Wilson trains and prepares his performers.” [78] Stefan argues that “somewhat like spectators in normal theatre [who] may emphatically share the feelings of characters,” the spectators in Wilson’s theatre mimetically share in the performer’s “group-aware bodily self-awareness.” [79] His audience becomes aware of their awareness not as an act of intellectual recognition or self-reflection but “as an energetic state . . . of participation,” [80] with the “modification of the spectator’s awareness” occurring in three steps: from observing the “things the performers are doing” and “sensing their movements,” to contemplating the “images produced by what the performers are doing,” to getting in touch with and participating in the “process of creative energy producing the fluctuating imagery.” [81] A comparable modification of the spectator’s awareness in Bertolt’s theatre would more likely move from a critical observation of the characters’ moment-by-moment choices (and the options rejected in each case) to a consideration of alternative solutions to the translation of these solutions into political action outside the theatre. One key to stimulating and liberating the audience’s awareness in Wilson’s early theatre, according to Stefan, is the dream logic and content of his images: “the presence of fantasy-elements . . . , the show’s composition out of images . . . , [the] manner of development,” [82] etc. The “cumulative effect” especially of the enigmatic characters in Deafman Glance “suggests the presence of emblems in life . . . which carry purpose and true meaning indifferent to us and not to be comprehended by us.” [83] . Different from Freudian psychoanalysis, however, the “dream is uninterpretable. Life is a language without denotation.” [84] This notion is closer to Franz Kafka and Antonin Artaud than to Bertolt. Stefan argues that “Wilson’s theatre is dream-like because it makes us suspend the reality principles of waking consciousness,” including the “principles of discontinuity and uniformity.” [85] For example, “we don’t see a wall until we have supplemented an unseen house that makes it a wall,” [86] and “we attribute to objects of experience a minimal completeness even in cases where actual experience does not positively warrant this.” [87] As a result, “waking perception . . . never perceives anything changing—in space or in time. Its world is discontinuous.” Wilson’s theatre is closer to sleeping than waking consciousness, according to Stefan, because it doesn’t invoke “a single world in which things happen uniformly” and fails “to assume that before something can be something else it must have ceased to be what it is.” In Wilson’s theatre, “we perceive things changing into other things. From moment to moment and place to place one form goes into and turns out another,” which implies a fusion and blurring of forms. [88] Bertolt, with his dialectical-materialist as well as Taoist outlook, also strongly embraces the possibility of change at any given moment, but as a discontinuous change from one set and established state to another. One example would be his poem “Everything Changes,” which includes the lines A new beginning Is possible with your last breath. But what happened, happened. And the water You poured into the wine, you can No longer pour out. [89] A new beginning is always possible, but only if it is based on the acknowledgement of the determinate earlier state left behind (“what happened, happened”). According to Stefan, sleeping consciousness conceives of dream objects in varying modes of non-identity. The identity of “individuals, acts, events, or situations” in dreams is either over- or under-determined but rarely self-identical. In one passage, he refers to his father as an example of the over- or under-determined identity of the dream object typical for the sleeping consciousness: “When I meet my father in my dream, I have no doubt of his identity, but at the same time, there is nothing about my identification that would preclude that figure from not only being something else, but from not being my father.” [90] Bertolt’s indeterminate identity in his son’s dream makes him a figure more likely to appear in Wilson’s theatre than in his own, which Stefan seems to equate with conventional theatre: Whereas conventional theatre so fashions the appearances acted out as to suggest real people whose appearances they are and to which, through the appearances, we are to relate, Wilson’s theatre makes us relate to the appearances created only: in themselves, as phenomena; and so fashions them that we perceive them as possibly other alternatives, intrinsically ambiguous, of multiple identity, non-self-identical, as definitely incomplete and inconsistent. [91] Even though Bertolt also rejects the illusionism of realism and the audience’s engagement with supposedly real people qua identification with their appearances, he equally rejects the Nietzschean reduction of the phenomenal world to mere appearance. He wants his audience to become aware of and interrogate the appearances created by capitalist ideology and commodity fetishism—not as phenomena without any underlying material reality but as disguises of an economic system effectively concealing its mode of operation. Bertolt doesn’t want to suspend the reality principles of waking consciousness listed by his son—“efficient causation,” “discontinuity,” uniformity,” “substance” and “self-identity” [92] —but to change the socio-economic reality in which they are at work. His “dividual,” by default, involves incomplete and inconsistent, multiple and non-self identities, but they result from social, not unconscious forces and processes, and are discontinuous and separate, not in flux and morphing into each other. The multiple identities of the “dividual” co-exist but do not merge. The Fabel of Bertolt’s play The Good Person of Szechwan , [93] for example, involves the impossibility of the altruistic protagonist Shen Teh to ever transform into Shui Ta, her invented capitalist alter ego, in the presence of other characters, and even the change of Shen Teh into Shui Ta in front of the curtain during a song interlude maintains the discreteness of the identities of the two characters as well as the performer. In any case, Stefan’s dream example can be understood as a critique of his father’s notion of the indeterminacy of identity as not going far enough. Overall, both Wilson’s and Bertolt’s theatre are about the rejection of the world as it is. Stefan repeatedly states that Wilson’s theatre, in a utopian sense, “makes us feel that anything might happen,” [94] and according to Bertolt, “things won’t stay the way they are.” [95] The work of both Wilson and Bertolt is about the liberation from oppression, but they mean different things by it. As discussed above, Wilson’s early productions may be unemotional, but Stefan argues that their themes (in the case of Deafman Glance : death, murder, and rebirth) are “emotionally highly ‘charged’” and that the emotional content of these themes (“anxiety”) and their concomitant feelings (“from vague perturbation through fear to dread, horror and terror”) are suppressed. [96] Even though Stefan concedes that Wilson’s early spectacles only have a Fabel to the extent that it has been fully “subvert[ted] into imagery,” [97] (120), they still reflect a particular viewpoint, namely the viewpoint of a “self-contained . . . boy child, autistic in the eyes of an adult world continually busy in a make-believe show of exchange of affect and intelligence. . . . The shows are like that child . . . . Their hidden violence is his suppressed rage.” [98] Stefan implies that Wilson, who early in his career worked with children, is invested in “the personal liberation of the stunted or repressed vital energies of children” [99] that have been killed off, physically and spiritually, by family and society. [100] Bertolt’s theater, on the other hand, is about liberation from oppression by a capitalist system. His main themes are also highly emotionally charged (exploitation of labor, the ruthless pursuit of business interests, the impossibility of being a “good person” under the conditions of capitalism, etc.), and his work also suppresses, deflects, and estranges the associated emotions (most famously, in Mother Courage’s silent scream in response to her son’s execution offstage), but he does this in order to allow the audience to detach themselves emotionally from the situations portrayed on stage so that they can think critically about them. If Bertolt’s plays, much like Wilson’s early productions, are motivated by a sublimated emotion—anger at social injustice—this emotion is not grounded in childhood trauma and articulated in a far less personal manner. Most of the formal similarities of Wilson’s early work with Bertolt’s theatre aesthetics also continued in Wilson’s later work and often became even more pronounced: the separation of elements, the use of interruption, the clarity of gestures and stage compositions, the quotation of elements from earlier productions in later ones, etc. Collaboration, always a key aspect of Bertolt’s work, was already important in Wilson’s early productions but intensified and became more relevant and wide-ranging later on. Even after he began directing classical and modern plays and working with professional actors, dramaturgs, and playwrights, often in Europe, Wilson not only continued to use and expand his extensive repertoire of estranging staging techniques but also to push them further than Bertolt had. Despite the fact that Theatre of Visions includes very few direct—and mostly critical—references to Bertolt’s work, Stefan does convey the sense of a strong resonance—and of differences in that resonance—between his father’s theatre theories and Wilson’s early productions. Endnotes [1] For convenience’s sake, I will refer to Robert Wilson by his last name, and to Stefan Brecht and Bertolt Brecht by their first names in the following pages. [2] Stefan Brecht, Gedichte (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1984); Stefan Brecht, 8th Avenue Poems (New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2006). [3] Stefan Brecht, The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978). [4] Stefan Brecht, Queer Theatre (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978). [5] Stefan Brecht, Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre , 2 vols. (London and New York: Methuen/Routledge, 1988). [6] Theatre of Visions , 10. [7] Theatre of Vision , 265. [8] Theatre of Vision , 266 & 267. [9] Theatre of Vision , 54–140. [10] Qtd. in Arthur Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 52. [11] See, for example, Andrzej Wirth, “Vom Dialog zum Diskurs: Versuch einer Synthese der nachbrechtschen Theaterkonzepte,” in Theater heute 1/1980: 16–19; Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006), 33, 70; Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, “Brecht and Contemporary Experimental Theater,” in Brecht in Context , ed. Stephen Brockmann (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 282–290, here 283–85. [12] Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn, “General Introduction,” in Brecht on Theatre , 3rd ed., ed. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 1995), 7. [13] Theatre of Visions , 120. [14] Theatre of Visions , 124. [15] See, to just give one example, Brecht, Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre , vol. 1, 484: “The Bread and Puppet Theatre during the ’60s became the artistic organ of the pacifist-anarchist-liberal wing of the Peace Movement in New York City.” [16] Theatre of Visions , 118 & 238. [17] Theatre of Visions , 238. [18] Theatre of Visions , 88–89. [19] Theatre of Visions , 308. [20] Theatre of Visions , 309. [21] Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo , trans. John Willett, in Collected Plays: Five , ed. and introd. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015), 91. [22] Theatre of Visions , 47. [23] Theatre of Visions , 48. [24] Theatre of Visions , 115. [25] Theatre of Visions , 116. [26] Theatre of Visions , 50. [27] Bertolt Brecht, “The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre,” in Brecht on Theatre , 449. [28] Theatre of Visions , 88. [29] Theatre of Visions , 130. [30] Theatre of Visions , 177. [31] Bertolt Brecht, “ Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting,” in Brecht on Theatre , 151. [32] Brecht, “ Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting,” 152. [33] Theatre of Visions , 172. [34] Theatre of Visions , 116. [35] Theatre of Visions , 100. [36] Brecht, “ Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting,” 152. [37] Bertolt Brecht, “Notes on The Threepenny Opera ,” in Brecht on Theatre , 72. [38] Theatre of Visions , 115. [39] Tom Kuhn, “General Introduction,” in Brecht and the Writer’s Workshop: Fatzer and Other Dramatic Projects , ed. Tom Kuhn and Charlotte Ryland (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2019), 4. [40] Theatre of Visions , 308, n 47. [41] Theatre of Visions , 197, n 82. [42] See, for example, Denis Diderot, “Conversations on The Natural Son [selections],” in Diderot: Selected Writings , ed. Lester G. Crocker, trans. Derek Coltman (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 88–102. [43] Bertolt Brecht, “Short Organum for the Theatre,” in Brecht on Theatre , 248 (§61). [44] Theatre of Visions , 177. [45] Theatre of Visions , 50. [46] Silberman, Giles, and Tom Kuhn, “General Introduction,” 6. [47] Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 86; cf. Evi Stamatiou, “Pierre Bourdieu and Actor Training: Towards Decolonising and Decentering Actor Training Pedagogies,” Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 13 (1): 96–114. [48] Theatre of Visions , 199 –200. [49] Theatre of Visions , 199 –200, n. 86. [50] Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler, “Open Letter to the Artistic Board of the ‘Neue Musik,’ Berlin, 1930,” in Collected Plays: Three , ed. and intro. John Willett (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 1997), 343. [51] Bertolt Brecht, “Open Letter,” 347. [52] Bertolt Brecht, “Zur Theorie des Lehrstücks [On the Theory of the Learning Play],” BFA 22.1, 351. Trans. Markus Wessendorf. [53] Theatre of Visions , 201. [54] Theatre of Visions , 203. [55] Theatre of Visions , 205. [56] Theatre of Visions , 206. [57] Theatre of Visions , 223. [58] Theatre of Visions , 215. [59] Theatre of Visions , 222. [60] Theatre of Visions , 224. [61] See Bertolt Brecht, “Individuum und Masse [The Individual and the Masses],” in Werke: Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Werner Hecht et al., 30 vols. and Register (Berlin and Frankfurt am Main: Aufbau and Suhrkamp, 1988–2000), vol. 21, 359. (Abbreviated in the following as BFA .) [62] Theatre of Vision s , 224 [63] Brecht, “Individuum und Masse,” BFA 21, 359: “Und am einzelnen ist gerade seine Teilbarkeit zu betonen (als Zugehörigkeit zu mehreren Kollektiven).” Trans. Markus Wessendorf. [64] Theatre of Visions , 230. [65] Theatre of Visions , 223 . [66] Theatre of Visions , 222. [67] Theatre of Visions , 114. [68] Theatre of Visions , 114. [69] Brecht, Short Organum , 235 (§22). [70] Theatre of Visions , 123. [71] Theatre of Visions , 122. [72] Theatre of Visions , 123. [73] Theatre of Visions , 124. [74] Brecht, Short Organum , 241 (§40). [75] Theatre of Visions , 126. [76] Friedrich Schiller, “Über den Gebrauch des Chors in der Tragödie [On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy]” in Sämtliche Werke , vol. II.2, ed. Peter-André Alt (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004), 816. “Der höchste Genuß aber ist die Freiheit des Gemütes in dem lebendigen Spiel aller seiner Kräfte.” Trans. Markus Wessendorf. [77] Schiller, “Über den Gebrauch des Chors in der Tragödie,” 816–17. “[…] die sinnliche Welt […] in ein freies Werk unseres Geistes zu verwandeln und das Materielle durch Ideen zu beherrschen.” Trans. Markus Wessendorf. [78] Theatre of Visions , 126. [79] Theatre of Visions , 208. [80] Theatre of Visions , 126. [81] Theatre of Visions , 236–237. [82] Theatre of Visions , 136. [83] Theatre of Visions , 51. [84] Theatre of Visions , 50. [85] Theatre of Visions , 136. [86] Theatre of Visions , 137. [87] Theatre of Visions , 138. [88] Theatre of Visions , 137. [89] Bertolt Brecht, “Alles wandelt sich,” BFA 15, 117. Trans. Markus Wessendorf. Cf. Bertolt Brecht, “Everything Changes . . . ,” in The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht , ed. and trans. Tom Kuhn and David Constantine (New York: Liveright, 2019), 905. [90] Theatre of Visions , 138. [91] Theatre of Visions , 139. [92] Theatre of Visions , 136. [93] Bertolt Brecht, The Good Woman of Szechwan , trans. John Willett, in Collected Plays: Six , ed. and introd. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2009), 1–112. [94] Theatre of Visions , 122; cf. 294 n. 32. [95] Bertolt Brecht, “Lob der Dialektik [Praise of Dialectics],” in BFA 11, 238. “So, wie es ist, bleibt es nicht.” Trans. Markus Wessendorf. [96] Theatre of Visions , 100. [97] Theatre of Visions , 120. [98] Theatre of Visions , 203 –4. [99] Theatre of Visions , 96. [100] See Theatre of Visions , 95–96. [CS1] Either "Short Organum" or "Kleines Organon" About The Author(s) Markus Wessendorf is a Professor of Theatre at the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Robert Wilson Yearbook The Robert Wilson Yearbook, published annually by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, offers a dedicated platform for scholarly and creative engagement with the life, artistry, and enduring legacy of Robert Wilson (1941–2025), one of the most original visionaries in contemporary theatre and performance. The Yearbook seeks to explore and expand upon Wilson’s groundbreaking approaches to staging, lighting, movement, and visual composition. Each issue will feature a diverse range of content—including original essays, critical commentary, archival materials, artist reflections, and photography—examining facets of Wilson’s multifaceted practice across genres, eras, and geographies. The Robert Wilson Yearbook is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - This Issue “Going on a Journey”: Space, Time, and Experience in Robert Wilson’s Installations and Museum Interventions Re-Viewing Stefan Brecht’s The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson from a (B.) Brechtian Perspective Towards a Formalist Ritualistic Theatre: An Artaudian Reading of Robert Wilson’s Aesthetics The Theatre of Autobio-hetero-thanato-graphic: The Life and Death of Marina Abramović Time’s Shadows: Crisis of Subjectivity and Reconciled Concord in Robert Wilson’s Performative Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets They Asked Me to Draw a City: Postdramatic Imaginings in Robert Wilson’s Direction of Strindberg’s A Dream Play Robert Wilson's Oedipus: The Postdramatic Journey of the Oedipus Story from Sophocles through Freud Robert Wilson and Norway Robert Wilson’s Art of Senses and Emotions Listening to Deafman Glanc Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken Thinking in Structures: Working as a Dramaturg with Robert Wilson Bertolt Brecht and Robert Wilson: The Dialectical Triad of Playwright, Director and Berliner Ensemble Actors in Wilson’s The Threepenny Opera Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Robert Wilson Yearbook Volume 1 Visit Journal Homepage Robert Wilson’s Art of Senses and Emotions Maria Shevtsova By Published on May 1, 2026 Download Article as PDF Preamble The intention of this keynote address for the Segal Center Conference on Robert Wilson in New York and at Watermill on Long Island was to select from Wilson’s more recent theatre works, grouping them around specified elements of his aesthetic. My oral presentation on notes has here expanded into a written version that seeks to keep the speaking voice I had preferred for a well-judged and timely celebration, on his home soil, of Wilson’s achievements on a world scale. My choice of productions was clear from the outset, as were the questions to be raised, but my opening gambit eluded me. Wilson, unknowingly, provided the cue. We had warmly met up again in Romania in May 2024 at the Craiova International Shakespeare Festival, celebrating its thirtieth edition. This biennial festival had invited Wilson’s The Tempest, made and premiered in Bulgarian in 2021 at Sofia’s Ivan Vazov National Theatre. Performed twice at the National Theatre of Craiova (NTC), the festival’s prime venue, The Tempest was the fourth Wilson production to be seen at this festival. During the after-show social gathering with the Bulgarian actors, NTC actors (whom Wilson had directed in Craiova in 2014 for Eugène Ionesco’s The Rhinoceros ), staff, and friends, Wilson suddenly asked: “Maria, which scene did you like best?” Taken aback, I hesitated for a split second and said “the last.” Wilson, looking surprised, said: “I thought it would be the first.” To which, on a party occasion when everyone wanted to be photographed with Bob , I uttered a few hurried words before someone snapped my photo with Bob, too. Instantly I knew that my New York presentation had to begin with a veritable reply to his query and that answering it was the best way for me to pay homage to a fundamentally unclassifiable, ever-creative, and ever-growing unique artist. The Choreography of Sound Wilson’s The Tempest begins with a phenomenal sea storm constructed by the play of light, sound, and timing, which are not synchronized but in counterpoint, and in counterpoint again for juxtaposition against the dark visual imagery so as not to make this opening scene illustrative but expressive by association with the event. These are foremost traits of Wilson’s aesthetic in relation to which he offsets movement. Where there is light in Wilson there is color, so add “color” to “light,” “sound,” “timing,” “counterpoint,” “juxtaposition,” “ association,” “movement,” and “motion.” Other of his aesthetic elements will present themselves as we go. Movement in the tempest scene is stylized, as always in Wilson, and the eye discerns bodily images that suddenly appear in sharp, shaped flashes signifying lightning. These movements flash out and, suddenly, seem to be stilled for a split second. Juxtaposition like this of the moving body and the still body is also a Wilson trait, and here it implies (rather than “says”) the attempts the scene’s indistinct humans make, twisting in angular fashion to steady their bodies in the violence of a ship rolled and tossed by a ferocious tempest. Note my “still body,” whereas, in fact, there is little stillness in Wilson’s theatre since there are always tiny movements, sometimes so small – like the blink of an eye or the twitch of a finger – that they are barely perceptible. Shakespeare’s story component is embedded in the scene’s composition whose blasting sounds stimulate spectators to conjure up images of thunder and roaring ocean: thus they “see the sound” or “see with [their] ears,” as Wilson usually puts it. [1] This crossover of the senses is one of his fundamental synesthetic principles. The scene suggests colossal cosmic upheaval and the devastation of the planet, and its immense sonic build-up explodes into the roar of a gigantic all-consuming wave rushing straight into the audience. Those of you who have experienced a mini-earthquake’s deep-throated growl, swelling up at top speed out of nowhere, would have recognized the terrifying, but also thrilling – because this is theatre – sonic revving up to the explosive wave, heard but invisible, of Wilson’s score. The scene ends abruptly with a swift blackout, followed, almost immediately, by low blue light announcing the next episode. Its overt theatricality, prodigiously powered sonically, is a metonym for Shakespeare’s words, a figurative replacement of them while, nevertheless, relaying their story: here is a tempest, a shipwreck, people stranded somewhere, which, as in Shakespeare, is said to be an island. Identification of the what, when, and where of this scene and of all subsequent scenes gives Wilson the structure of his production. Structure is habitually his starting point for arranging space (his term is architecture ) and for everything else that enters it, which is decided through testing and checking during the working process. Light is fundamental from the very beginning, counter to the standard practice, which is an anathema to Wilson, of bringing light in at the end, after everything else has been “done.” [2] For The Tempest , Shakespeare’s story is stripped back, offering what could be called the gist of its essential parts: Prospero seeks revenge; Miranda, his daughter, and Ferdinand fall in love; the foolish Stefano and Trinculo drink alcohol, as they plot a political coup – if braggart natter can be called “plotting” in anything but the vaudeville-type comic-ironic treatment that Wilson gives it; Ariel, demure, plays the role of Prospero’s fairy-angel helper (another ironic touch); Caliban appears, learns to get drunk, and is otherwise subordinated to Stefano and Trinculo’s antics. Caliban’s role in Wilson’s arrangement is really no more significant than that of the usurper Duke Antonio, Prospero’s treacherous brother and father to Ferdinand, or that of Alonso, King of Naples and Prospero’s former friend. Antonio and Alonso are shown in an incidental, rather than vital, run-by-magic banquet scene, attractive for its visual panache but without further consequence. Wilson’s is a “short” version of The Tempest – and of short duration, too, taking only ninety minutes – whose excisions in terms of storyline and, especially noticeably, of dialogue can be argued to be as valid as any of the plentiful “short” Shakespeare at the 2024 Craiova Festival, not to mention across the world. None, of course, is like Wilson’s theatre, which is truly one of a kind, sui generis . A few phrases on second viewing of the production seemed over-repetitive, but they were most likely reiterated because a given line or the one that followed it in Shakespeare’s text was too long for the beat, or meter, or rhythm considered more suitable, and therefore necessary, for performance purposes. In other words, the artistic exigency was a matter of the perceived right form rather than one of staying with the right text – the text, so called to the letter of literary concerns. Wilson’s approach here recalls the repetitions used in opera, when, at certain moments, a singer sings again the same phrase or sentence from the libretto to exactly the same music specifically for formal reasons, that is, the arc of the musical writing requires repetition for musically satisfactory completion – such as, for instance, the completion in returning to the tonic of musical composition. More than story, then, is at issue in this not immediately evident, indirect approach to narrative typical of Wilson’s theatre. The production elides to its close and to Prospero, alone with Miranda. Wilson condenses Prospero’s lines, but their subject is clearly his bygone suffering and inner turmoil, and this, his internal tempest, is transcended at the very moment when forgiveness, reconciliation, and renewal begin in an atmosphere of peace at play’s end. Prospero’s spiritual voyage is the core of the production and, from it, come new beginnings. His last scene with Miranda is gently moving, and this emergent emotion, together with Wilson’s elision of Antonio and his courtly entourage as extraneous to this particular denouement, opens the space for suggesting that Prospero’s last scene is a legacy offered not only to Miranda but also to all listening and watching in the theatre. “In my end is my beginning” wrote T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets of his own spiritual rebirth . [3] Wilson’s focus and closure on this very note is a clue to his insight into the spiritual dimension of Shakespeare’s play. You can see why it was not possible to speak to Robert Wilson about his first scene in The Tempest without speaking about the last: they are, essentially, two parts of the same scene because Wilson’s structural line is straight, going from tempest to reconciliation – to illumination, in fact – in a continuum of thought and action. Further, all factors considered, this emergent emotion emanates principally from the actor in the role of Prospero (Veselin Mezekliev): it stems from something in his manner coming from deep within him, and the sensation transmitted is sustained by the quality of his voice – a long-road-traveled voice that has been and seen and understood. The phenomenon of performer attention nurtured from within rather than settled on an external, extraverted, starting point allows what Wilson calls “filling the form,” that is, you, the actor, are filling the form from yourself, from whatever you are thinking, dreaming, feeling – in sum, experiencing there and then. Wilson sets the outer form to which he holds you, down to the angle of your little finger, but whatever it is that keeps you centered and permeates the form quietly, unostentatiously, gives it its interest for both actor and spectator. Wilson frequently maintains that, without this “inner” experiencing – let us also call it an inner energy – the form, however outwardly splendid it may be, is simply empty. [4] It is important for me to say, in anticipation of the last section of my talk, that the spiritual in Wilson’s work is rarely noticed, let alone written about, yet it is often there to a lesser or greater degree, depending on the work. It was present in his utterly innovative 1976 Einstein on the Beach (its premiere at the Avignon Festival, where I saw it), incarnated in the white beam of light, glowing against black, that took twenty minutes to rise from the floor and, incredibly slowly, slide into a vertical position at the center of the stage. Slowness, with nothing to detract attention away from it, measured time, while accentuating the sense of time as a palpable entity and, also slowly, the sense of time as eternal; and all of this happened to one long note, with minor modulations, held on an organ in the orchestra pit. That was spiritual, reaching beyond material being without signing itself conspicuously as “Spiritual!” Mary Said What She Said, premiered in 2019 in Paris two and a half years before The Tempest in Sofia, is a useful cross-reference, although not solely because it also took ninety minutes, which is long for a monologue, but because it relies and, this time, consistently relies, on an incisively fashioned soundscape, now, however, primarily generated by language; and, while Wilson never tires of stressing that all elements of his theatre works are equal, equal can be understood as “all playing their part,” which does not exclude the prominence of selected parts at some point in the multiplicity of a given composition. Language, here, is the eminent factor because it provides an exceptionally dense text, an unavoidable verbal mass with which its performer, Isabelle Huppert, has to deal, or fail. Mary Said What She Said is the second of Huppert’s Wilson-directed solos, following her 1993 French version of Orlando , its text extracted from Virginia Woolf’s novel by Darryl Pinckney and Wilson. [5] Pinckney, the author of Mary Said , draws on the letters of Mary Queen of Scots, cousin of Elizabeth I Queen of England, who imprisons her for eighteen years before executing her. The time is the eve of Mary’s execution. Huppert’s monologue requires pristine diction and enormous stamina so that nothing is lost from her gamut of enunciated letters, syllables, words, phrases, but also sentences that flow one after another without marked punctuation. In Orlando she often hurled or spat out words, often defiantly. [6] In Mary Said , she affirms, as if the substance of the text that she is saying need not be explained or defended. Timbre, tone, innuendo, register, pitch, pace, and tempo weave her vocal choreography while she paces up and down, back and forth, and frequently on a diagonal (Lucinda Childs’s signature angle for walking in Einstein on the Beach ). A sense of urgency filters here and there through Huppert’s volley of words, while an occasional hop, skip, or cantering motion breaks into her walking, accentuating the intermittent sound of her footsteps, audible only when her feet, hidden by her long dress, press on the heels of her shoes. Meanwhile, Ludovico Einaudi’s horizontal piano music runs counter to Huppert’s much thicker textured sonorities, while the latter in turn runs counter to Wilson’s palette of light. The palette is elegant, comprising soft pinks (some folding on the back wall into a sliver of white before sudden disappearance), soft blues, subtle shifts of nuanced shadings of peach-apricots and dimmed yellows, and eventually billowing white feathered clouds that envelop Huppert as the performance draws to a close. Space is non-figurative – common to Wilson’s oeuvre – thus enabling the sensorial impact of the light design as well as that of the unexpected and incongruous apparitions, at different moments, of a thinly framed white chair (almost faded out by a white-fog effect); a high-healed white shoe evoking Elizabethan courtly attire, which stands in profile on the floor; and a white envelope whose enclosed page Huppert burns, presumably of an incriminating letter, before Mary’s end. Huppert’s black, slightly shimmering, figure-length sleeved garment has a hint of Elizabethan costume around its neck and sleeves. [7] A high beehive wig completes Mary-Huppert’s silhouette. All of these constitutive elements come together, and although operating on the principle of contrast, they combine into a coherent and cogent artistic unit, grounded in its linguistic intensity. The cogency of this particular work is instrumental in evoking sensation and eliciting responsiveness of some kind from spectators, and the language wielded by Huppert, although meaningful, is keyed to Wilson’s non-representational means, none geared to apperception through the reasoning mind and all-affecting intuitive sensing and subconscious release. After all, the subconscious harbors feelings – tangibly in such instances as Huppert’s voice rising repetitively with just enough urgency to trigger spectators’ intuitive perception that she is approaching Mary’s demise. There is no trace of outburst when Huppert accelerates pace and pitch, but acceleration is noticeable enough to communicate the wisps of emotion that emanate from her sonorities at these very points in her soliloquy. Spectators are free to link them to earlier vocal points since they are all integral to her “filling the form,” aspects of which could be attributed to Mary’s “inner tempest” (initiated, not unlike that of Prospero, by political machinations) before her death. They are free, as well, to link the entire soundscape—including Einaudi’s musical notes—to the continually changing colors of light, for instance, since all of it together elicits some kind of emotion, not least the feeling of beauty or the wonder that Huppert could have managed it all. “Emotion,” for Wilson, is not about being “emotive,” nor is it “histrionics” or forced or fake “acting emotion,” any more than it is for Huppert. On occasion, Wilson seeks external signs capable of arousing a performer’s feelings behind their actions, as happened during the dress rehearsal of The Tempest (May 19, 2024). The scene involved Tom Waits’s recorded voice singing of love, through which Wilson urged the actor in the role of Ferdinand to look at his partner: “Eyes, eyes . . . Show your eyes. Look at her. . . . You love her.” At this juncture, the actor was so fixated on correcting the arm and hand movements prescribed by Wilson’s template that lifting his eyes for the audience to see them or to look at his partner, let alone allow stimuli to feed into what might pass for inner experience, seemed out of the question. Concern with outer form inhibited inner response. This brief episode shows that Wilson is by no means solely interested in impassive performers, or that he is immune to the sense of words. The dense presence of language in Mary Said What She Said is a reminder that language most certainly exists in Wilson’s collected works, and not only as playful enigma, as had transpired in his 1974 A Letter for Queen Victoria . The latter heralded his break from the highly imaginative and highly innovative group of “silent opera” preceding it (give or take Wilson’s play of words on opera from the Latin denoting “work”). Yet, while Wilson had avoided using language semantically for meaning and interpretation in his “silent” pieces, language in some of his later ones is expressly tasked to convey meaning. Such was the case of his own three solos – Hamlet, A Monologue (1995), Krapp’s Last Tape (2009), and Lecture on Nothing (2012). By comparison with Huppert’s solos, they are not as tightly packed linguistically, thus conveying meaning more immediately. They are also more straightforward, which makes them more quickly recognizable as dramatic texts rather than any other kind of text. Drama-acknowledged works like these (collaboration with Heiner Müller had doubtlessly ignited Wilson’s interest in drama) draw attention to the variety within Wilson’s theatre, but also of his oeuvre as such, which embraces the artefacts – paintings, drawings, sculptures, video portraits, glass, and other objects – that have won them international acclaim as visual art, while leaving their imprint on his theatrical art. Wilson is not beyond self-reference, within or across his artistic forms, as occurs in the unexpected fleeting presence of a video portrait of Aleksandr Rodchenko in Lecture on Nothing , high in the corner front-stage, who, in an inspired joke, winks at the audience! Humor is no stranger to the Wilson repertoire. The Music of Opera Einaudi’s music is integral to Huppert’s sonosphere, but, then, music is of utmost importance to Wilson’s theatre as a whole. [8] It can come in mixtures of musical genres in his manifestly spoken-word/drama creations, as happens in The Tempest , where a Tom Waits song co-exists with fragments of Schubert played by string instruments. His music theatre proper is, by comparison, different in that it is sparked off by music and is music-led; and, notwithstanding the hybrid characteristics that layer his music-led constructions, it is musically genre-specific, which lends itself to grouping into three categories. The first is what I call the “rock-folk” group, whose masterpieces are The Black Rider (1990, Hamburg), where Waits’s music predominates, Woyzeck (2000, Copenhagen), whose music and lyrics are by Waits and Kathleen Brennan, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2009, Berlin), music by Rufus Wainwright, with Wainwright rising up on a small platform from the pit (only once in a “star” gesture), singing into his microphone. The second is “baroque opera,” notably Monteverdi’s The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland (2011) at La Scala (Milan) and The Coronation of Poppea (2014) at the Opéra de Paris Bastille, the second, modern house of the Paris Opera, while the older, nineteenth-century house is known as the Palais Garnier. The third music-theatre group is “grand opera” (the commonly used but awkward terminology), which, in Wilson’s case, primarily comprises operas from the Romantic repertoire of the nineteenth century, with Verdi foregrounded since the 2000s, giving seven Verdi operas to date. Even so, he staged a sparse but fire-flamed, overall ritualistic and quite mesmerising Ring cycle, all four of Wagner’s operas of this major opus taking two years to be premiered sequentially at the Zurich Opera (2000 to 2002) and be performed in relatively quick succession during 2002 in Paris at the Théâtre du Châtelet. Their Wagner predecessors were Lohengrin in 1998 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the glaringly only grand opera Wilson was to stage there at all, and Parsifal in 1991 in Hamburg. Weber’s Der Freischütz ( The Freeshooter ), connecting this opera with the rock-folk The Black Rider, came in 2009 in Baden-Baden. Just these few geographical details for Wilson-crafted operas show a pattern of European patronage and audience engagement that have sustained his operatic output right until the present. Still within Wilson’s grand-opera diapason are two key Symbolist works, both strong and both staged for the Paris Opera – Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1993, at the Bastille) and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1997, at Garnier). These productions are still in the Paris Opera repertory, with another reprise of Madama Butterfly scheduled for the 2024–2025 season. And there are various modernist works, going from Bela Bartok’s Blue Beard’s Castle and Arnold Schoenberg’s Expectation in 1995 in Salzburg to Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts , premiered at the Houston Grand Opera in 1996 and performed shortly afterwards at the Edinburgh Festival in the fresh, light-hearted way conceived by its authors. Note too Richard Strauss’s The Woman Without a Shadow at the Paris Opera Garnier in 2003, which, in my view, had an undeservedly short life. Not to be forgotten in the modernist canon is Igor Stravinsky’s stand-alone 1927 Oedipus Rex, an “opera oratorio,” in Stravinsky’s own classification, for orchestra, narrator, soloists, and male chorus, which Wilson staged in 1996 on a huge staircase designed for the occasion at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. The work was introduced by a twenty-five minute Silent Prologue involving performance artists and dancers in the vein of Wilson’s “silent opera” and so too of his earlier experimentation with hybrid forms. Perhaps Wilson’s not altogether successful conjuncture of Oedipus Rex and his prologue (I was among the unconvinced) is best placed not with opera but alongside Debussy’s 1911 hybridized Le Martyr de Saint Sébastien, also a stand-alone piece. Debussy wrote its music for unconventional dancer Ida Rubinstein with text by Symbolist-influenced Gabriele d’Annunzio featuring a narrator. Jean Cocteau, who had collaborated with Stravinsky, also featured a narrator. Wilson staged Le Martyr de Saint Sébastien in 1988, showcasing Paris Opera Ballet’s superstar ballerina Sylvie Guillem in her then home, the Garnier. Opera, when “grand” – including, for the purposes of this presentation, the maverick modernist works that had contested the habits of the grand traditional opera houses ( Blue Beard’s Castle and so on) – significantly outweighs, in some twenty-six productions so far, the total number of Wilson’s baroque variety combined with his “popular,” more “home-spun” music-theatre. His prolific opera work points not only to his attachment to classical music, but also to the great importance of established opera to his artistic vision and the materialization of that vision. Given that these are matters of fact and not of opinion, it is more than disappointing that theatre scholarship has paid little to no attention to Wilson’s world of opera, within which are to be found some of his most outstanding works. Works of this caliber have enriched the field of opera of the past fifty years, while challenging and changing the field’s artistic vocabulary, outlook, and possibilities of being new in the present rather than entrenched in the practices of the past. Thus, when Wilson’s legacy is at issue, one need not look much further than his achievements in grand opera to gauge that legacy’s enduring force. My contextual remarks are a framework for ascertaining characteristics of Wilson’s direction and design shared by his operas. But they help to identify, as well, characteristics that are heightened in individual operas or are simply unique to a particular production. When looking from the perspectives of what is heightened and what singular, two recently acclaimed opera productions command attention: Puccini’s Turandot, staged in 2018 at the Teatro Real in Madrid, with this theatre’s orchestra and chorus, conductor Nicola Luisotti (returning to Madrid in 2023 before traveling to the Paris Opera Bastille in the same year, the performance discussed here); and Verdi’s La Traviata , first in Linz in 2015, but reaching glory only in the 2016–2017 version in Russia at the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre with MusicAeterna, founded and conducted by Teodor Currentzis. This rendition was then performed at the Grand Théâtre de la Ville in Luxembourg in 2018, which is the one discussed here. Of foremost importance in these two productions is their uncluttered space, which, having distinguished Wilson’s very early career, has become a recognizable aesthetic principle across his body of work. What needs to be stressed, however, is that Wilson’s varied opera directing has completely ratified his principle of bare space. He may well have begun with an understanding of space from visual-art and dance perspectives, but opera progressively showed him that the musically complex organism that is opera required uncluttered space to be fully heard and be heard commensurately with its ambitions. Opera consists of orchestral music, singing soloist voices, choral voices, a libretto replete with names of characters and story and plot – these are its drama components – and architectural, painterly and other scenographic features as well as dance and related physically trained practices like the commedia dell’arte , which Puccini had borrowed for Turandot . All these multifarious elements notwithstanding, opera, if pan-artistic (or “interdisciplinary”) in its very essence is, above all else, a sonic universe, and Wilson accedes to this when he observes that he is usually “visually distracted” when he goes to the opera because it is “so busy on stage” that he has to close his eyes “in order to hear carefully. . . . I can [then] listen to the violin, to the harp, to the flutes, I can listen to the singer.” [9] His “biggest challenge” as a director is to “give a space so that we can hear [the] music,” and, for his work, “which is highly visual, the visual must give a space for us to hear music so that, with my eyes open, I can hear better than when my eyes are closed.” In other words, hearing the music, which is imperative, cannot be impaired by busy décor (among other “busy” factors) or, for that matter, in the case of Wilson’s design, by what is visually arresting and even potentially overpowering. Turandot is a salient example of what is exceptionally visually powerful, even by Wilson’s standards, with its architecturally imposing but constantly moving big blocks and tall columns of colored light in a range of deep blues and some black; sometimes there is only black, barely lit. Vibrating masses of purple protrude and fill the space, also saturating the comical “Chinese” commedia trio whose costumes by Jacques Reynaud, as if cut from heavy paper in an angular fashion, hold the gaze. The rarity of purple in Wilson’s palette makes its loud presence all the more striking. Purple may well allude to Turandot’s regal power – indeed, imperial tyranny – to which Wilson unmistakably refers through her appearances, standing on a narrow black platform that moves and juts out from the wings, high up above the stage, and then retreats after her pronouncements to behead her unsuccessful suitors. She poses her three riddles to her last suitor, Caleb, from this same platform. Wilson perceives, in one of the most striking expressions ever of his imagination, just how daunting, how fearful the height and position in the air of his platform really are to eyes that see as they listen. The visual potency of this device is matched by Turandot’s stiff, stridently deep orange dress (which she wears throughout) of triangular shape and squared shoulders, accompanied by black squared headgear and long black gloves. Towards the end of the opera, the orange of her dress seems to radiate against washes of rich, warm brown on the back wall; at another moment, an outsize vibrating orange ball appears on it, referring, by association through color, to Turandot’s beginning to be transformed by the power to love. Turandot, without the capacity to love, is a forbidding sight, countered only by the softer contours of Liu’s, but especially of Caleb’s, simple but confident bearing and the garments both wear. Reynaud and Wilson here approach Puccini’s chinoiserie with discretion, dressing these characters from top to toe in monochromatic, one-patterned thick but stylish fabric which is the color of stone, tinted with very pale green (unless this slight tint is an optical illusion created by light). But discretion is evident most of all in their contained gestures and movements. More physically restrained still – Wilson’s understatement to another degree – are the duets between Turandot (Iréne Theorin) and Caleb (Gregory Kunde), particularly their closing series where Caleb is at last able to declare his love instead of continually proving it through his successful feats. The singers’ kinaesthetic minimalism is precisely what allows the cumulative release of the full power of their voice – for nothing can obstruct its intense focus; and the singers bring out vocally, even more than does the orchestral playing, the music’s enormous emotional range. Wilson understands only too well that music is both a source and generator of emotions and that it can be this form of energy – distilled, pure – when all the energy of singing is channeled through the singing and is condensed in it. Gestures and movements at this level of condensation can be nothing other than mere clutter, irrelevant to the supreme translucence of the singing voice as it sings from the movement within each singer. And once you can fully hear, untrammeled, what the voices are telling you – the voices rather than the words – Wilson’s sumptuous visual presentation falls into place, holding its own, but not overbearing – “equal,” Wilson would say – while you can hear all the music, vocal and instrumental together, at ease, with your “eyes open.” A comparable kind of translucence and musically elevated synthesis occurs in La Traviata , with the great difference that the music at the end of this opera soars into transcendence, instantaneously as Nadezhda Pavlova, in the title role, soars into transcendence. This extraordinary metamorphosis happens most of all through the emotional depth and finesse of the vocal and instrumental music from the very beginning of the production until its last note. This refined unison is due to the completely attuned togetherness of all the players, necessarily, including the singer-players, who are inseparable from, and totally sensitive and attentive to, the finely tempered ensemble that is MusicAeterna, nurtured by Currentzis. Wilson, meanwhile, pursued his designer-director course, sensitive, by some kind of alchemical intuition and affinity to the tenor of the musical work. His visual imagination, in response, is especially delicate: colors are largely pastels – creams and pinks tinged with gold for Violetta (Marguerite in Alexandre Dumas’s The Lady of the Camellias , the source of the opera’s libretto), as they are for her apartment and other spaces related to her. Objects are few, a good number of them floating in the air. Wilson’s more pronounced visual compositions are reserved for Violetta’s lover Alfredo (Dumas’s Armand), Alfredo’s father, and Violetta’s demi-monde friends. Accordingly, the opera’s ballroom scene of Act II (Wilson calls it a “party”) is replete with stunning bull-like heads and horns and cat’s-eye masks, pervasive red light, and red and black costumes evoking bullrings, matadors, and flamenco dancers. All are intrinsic to Verdi’s score but, nevertheless, give room for Wilson’s fantasy cabaret-camp-and-queer pianist to do his number with brio in the merriment that, before too long, becomes disaster. [10] The production’s closing scene is breathtaking. Wilson places Pavlova-Violetta in the shadow of death, her image in the illusion of a darkening skeleton (this through Wilson’s masterful lighting) in her large white bed, until she rises, training a long unfurling white sheet behind her, which is her nightgown and shroud in one. Attached to one of her fingers is the loop of a sheet that she trains along the air, like the sail of a ship, as she takes steps forward, her radiant face looking ahead as she sings her love of Alfredo. She biblically curves her index finger upwards to the Divine. And she is now smiling, smiling as she sings her love, not collapsing in a heap, as in melodramatic views of this opera, but standing tall, with dignity. The strings of the orchestra tremor and gently recede into silence, as does Pavlova’s voice, except that the silence seems to be an illusion of silence and the musical notes seem still to be heard. Never have I heard the quality of such a silence – a holy silence, the silence of miracles – in any Wilson work before. If pressed, I would have to say that this silence is the silence of spiritual experiencing – or, perhaps, more accurately, of spiritual being . The Spiritual Dimension La Traviata closes without closing, having suffused a distinctly palpable sense of togetherness on the stage and between the stage and spectators, binding them all as one. This particular kind of togetherness is in itself a kind of spiritual experience. It is, in the same instance, something like a celebration of life, akin to Pavlova’s celebration of love for and with Violetta. For Wilson, a spiritual experience is not a religious one because, as he sees it, the church (temple, mosque, synagogue) is the place for religion while the theatre can be spiritual without the religious dogmas (my paraphrase) that he believes are divisive. [11] The spiritual dimension of Wilson’s theatre appears in what may be called “secular” works, but it is more evident in music that is culturally accepted to be sacred music, (differently, of course, in the diverse cultures of the world), or thought to have sacred origins and uses, or which, by its spiritual qualities, is entitled to sanctified places. Such music gave rise to the following in Wilson’s oeuvre, in chronological order: Bach’s St John’s Passion (2007, Théâtre du Châtelet); Adam’s Passion (2015, using four pieces by Arvo Pärt, whose pivotal piece is a Russian Orthodox lament sung in Russian, which in 2009 Pärt had named Adam’s Lament ), presented in Tallinn’s Noblessner Foundry, newly renovated for performances; The Messiah ( Der Messias, 2020) , Mozart’s arrangement and sung in German of Handel’s English-language The Messiah, premiered right at the beginning of the Covid pandemic at the Mozartwoche in Salzburg); Bach 6 Solo (2021, Wilson in collaboration with violinist Jennifer Koh and Lucinda Childs choreographing for five dancers, of whom she was one). Bach 6 Solo was performed at the Chapelle Saint-Louis of the renowned seventeenth-century hospital Salpêtrière in Paris. The concert-dance was integral to France’s celebration of Wilson’s eightieth birthday in recognition of Wilson’s artistic services to France. [12] Two additional works on the outer edge of this time span rightly belong to the sphere of the sacred, broadly understood. The first is Gloria , a 2022 recorded sound installation in which Wilson speaks in tandem with Huppert and saxophonist Richard (Dickie) Landry playing his own music. Sound was transmitted through unobtrusively situated small microphones in that most venerated of holy sites in France, the Sainte-Chapelle, in the heart of Paris. Most unfortunately, the stream of tourists passing through (some stopping for a minute or two to figure out what was going on) brought in unsettling noise, while the sound installation, although respectfully quiet and intentionally transmitted as if from afar, was altogether too quiet to be heard adequately in such circumstances. The second work is an art installation, the 2024 STAR and STONE: a kind of love…some say , which is Wilson’s bold and frequently startling painting of Notre-Dame de Rouen in Normandy via digitally projected images from technology placed in the grounds of the Cathedral. Several of these images, although by no means newsreel reproductions, are surely allusions to the damages done to the Cathedral during the Second World War. Compelling in their destructive mode, particularly given the Cathedral’s beautiful facades in real life and the beautiful colorings that Wilson otherwise inscribes on them, these tougher images can justifiably be interpreted as his profoundly critical thoughts on the devastations of war. In the face of semiotics like these, it can hardly be assumed that Wilson’s consciousness of the world has been smothered by aesthetics because his is not social-issue art, nor, as a consequence, does he make “social theatre.” The latter, although a comprehensible label, is unsatisfactory for individuating theatre centered on social issues since all theatres, by virtue of being made in societies, are social. Adam’s Passion , created before Covid and the spate of horrendous wars fought in 2024, picks up Pärt’s underlying theme that Adam, the symbol of all humanity, had precipitated the tragedy of humanity, while transposing it into the key of hope. Myriad hues of blue permeate the work from start to finish, suggesting, in the context of Pärt’s thought, the celestial plane of salvation evoked by the painters of the Renaissance. These are the blues, too, of Wilson’s first four minutes of silence (Pärt’s choir sings straight afterwards) in which Adam, Wilson’s “Man,” is Everyman and stands for collective responsibility as well as collective atonement and pardon. The very abstraction of his name gives Man (Humanity) a plural identity, composed of single individuals. Atonement and pardon, two aspects beyond darkness, buoy up the production’s motif of hope and summon to the imagination the Man who was Christ. The silver, piercing light, which first appears on the backstage wall as a vertical line, opens out from the line’s central slight swell, growing bigger and brighter, like organic growth from a seed. This iridescent emanation returns periodically, also in order to light a hanamichi-style walkway extended from the edge of center stage into the audience. By the time the choir starts singing, the stage has been set for the journey of Man, played by a stocky and naked Michalis Theophanous, who, by a curious trompe l’oeil, does not, at first, look naked at all. This optical deception is probably due to the magnetic light, but also to the attention drawn of the viewing eye to the pearly silhouette of a tree, suspended in space above the stage, with its leafless branches hanging upside down. This can only be the Tree of Man, an evocation of faith and myth; a memory of antiquity and the holy. The Tree visually connects to a branch – possibly, symbolically, a branch lopped off the hanging tree (albeit with some leaves) – that rests on the floor at the point where the hanamichi reaches into the audience. Pärt’s religious musical meanings meld into Wilson’s projected humanist vision of human resilience and endeavor, while his pervading play of light conjures up the human spirit, as does, in tandem, the singing choir. Man walks steadily towards the branch as if walking into the future. The performance, at the same time, draws to an end, and nothing in it contradicts the idea that naked Man (who is, also “cleansed” Man), walks forward confidently, with hope. Wilson, being an artist of point and counterpoint, sets up rotund creatures in puffball shapes as comical counterparts of the central seriousness of his production. Yet this ploy, in my view, misses the mark, since the puffball scene looks like misplaced kitsch, nor is it particularly funny. Nor is it witty enough to counter and thus puncture high-minded sentiments, as comedy is said to have done for tragedy in Ancient Greece. Choreographer and dancer Lucinda Childs’s incomparable hieratic style is most certainly suitable for the composition, but for some reason – too withheld, or simply lackluster – it does not enhance a work that, by its very nature, poses the greatest of difficulties for rendition as theatre. The subject of Handel’s The Messiah concerns humankind, and Handel wrote it theatrically; but, then, he was also a writer of operas . Mozart, who was a prodigious composer, also wrote operas, and this meant that his version of The Messiah made it less problematic for staging than compositions lacking an inbuilt sense of theatre – the case of Pärt’s compositions, which are in the range of prayer and meditation. Mozart’s arrangement is lighter and bouncier than Handel’s original. It willingly displays its joyous tonalities and dance-like beats and rhythms, which Wilson caught quickly for his direction and design. Mozart’s and Wilson’s accord was cut short. No sooner was Der Messias premiered in Salzburg in January 2020, playing for three nights, then Covid drove it into “storage.” Wilson, in the meantime, was prevented by the outbreak from traveling back to the United States and found refuge in Berlin, where, in isolation, he continued the black and white drawings of The Messiah begun in Salzburg. Wilson, apart from generally working with and through drawings in the gestational phases of his productions, drew this particular set with the intention of exhibiting it in an art gallery in Paris to accompany planned performances of The Messiah in that city. My impression of these drawings so full of movement, much of it suggesting wind, was that they were of a different order from the joyousness of the stage movement. The two impulses appeared to be in opposition, the one steered towards shadowed turbulence, the other towards the radiant skies. It might well be that Wilson’s bi-vocality, couched in two different artistic forms, entered into dialogue with The Messiah, which recalled his earlier dialogue with Pärt in Adam’s Passion . Wilson could well have used Pärt’s name Adam’s Lament for the whole work. Instead, he chose Passion whose nuances of meaning differ significantly from those of Lament , the first coming from the Bible’s New Testament and the second from the Old. Passion inescapably references “Passion of Christ,” which is a singularly New Testament event, and Wilson probably felt that its nuances were closer to the positive, proactive dimensions that shaped his part of the collaboration. Five years later, the spirit of The Messiah is indubitably positive. The Messiah resurfaced three times in September 2020 at the venerable Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris, while Covid escalated. The theatre management took maximum precautions, and audiences complied, but, as Wilson notes, all the theatres of Paris were shut down after the third night. (Theatres in London, on the other hand, were closed down months sooner.) What, in retrospect, is striking is how uplifting in such fearful times The Messiah would have been to those who had heard and seen it (which argues for the importance of the arts to society). Just as striking is how true this production was to the certitude, breathed by Mozart into The Messiah, that humanity could and would overcome adversity; here the Christian basis and full significance of “Messiah” cannot be ignored. The Grand Théâtre of Geneva dared two performances in October 2020. The Messiah then retreated until its six performances at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona in March 2024. Wilson took up the abstractions of the dramatis personae of The Messiah. Mozart had identified them musically, that is, by voice and so by Soprano, Tenor, and so on. This pattern dramaturgically organizes all of the production’s participants, except its magnificent dancer Alexis Fousekis. Wilson’s main goal was to have the whole space full of joy, starting with the tenor, Richard Croft, who, light on his dancing feet, is graceful, gracious, and urbane as he cuts across his “roles,” including that of singing narrator. Like a thread of continuity, he weaves in and out of various tableaux. Tableaux is the most appropriate word in this context for Wilson’s sequences of slightly “stilled,” momentarily “held” images in the manner of Symbolist tableaux. Soprano, dressed in white with long white hair standing in a gondola, is “caught” in a gesture of rowing; Tenor is caught in an echoing, similar gesture: Alto stands with a jet of steam behind her; elsewhere fire burns in the sky; somewhere else a huge moon hangs (in my memory behind Tenor); and, somewhere else, the Tree of Man stands upright in the sky and not upside down, as in Adam’s Passion . Most of the solos and duos are offset by rows of iridescent thin lines on the stage floor; sometimes they are set into relief by the illuminated outlines of the rectangular shape of the stage; at others, a box framed in white-silver light is framed within another similarly framed box to create depth of image. The effect is entrancing, but does not etiolate the singing. There are also group tableaux. Sometimes the chorus walks in a line of darkened silhouettes behind this or that soloist. Mostly, however, choral singers divide the stage space into two (as in Turando t), with a wide passage between them, usually for entrances and exits. Occasionally, all horizontal space is filled, as happens when, a spaceman in the image of the first man on the moon emerges from clouds and massive effects of exploding snow. No sooner glimpsed, then the singing chorus in black flanks the moon man on either side. Even so, this splendor upon splendor is outshone by Dancer Fousekis whose impeccable virtuosic technique gives his jetés the power to leap high and free of the earth, an ethereal not terrestrial being with variations of the position of his arms. Airborne, Spirit incarnate, he leaps through the skies of Wilson’s blues; clouds thicken and darken; black planks, well spaced from each other and held up on “invisible” strings, look downward while he passes to land. At one point, Fourakis leaps and comes down to stand with his shoulders and arms pulled behind him, suggesting they might be touching or even be attached to the plank now settled nearer the floor. It dawned on me afterwards that the image, angled as it was, alluded to Christ carrying the Cross. The whole work is surreal, engrossing, exhilarating, and its instruments and singers perform music less like Handel’s church music (even if touched by theatre) and more like Mozart’s spiritual translucence, here symbolized and materialized in dance. Epilogue There can be no adequate “conclusion” to this presentation except to affirm that Wilson’s spiritual dimension is integral to his legacy. Further commentary waits silently for his future work. Endnotes [1] “News,” Robert Wilson , accessed September 28, 2024, https://robertwilson.com . [2] My Robert Wilson , 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2019) offers an extensive account both of Wilson’s working processes and the aesthetic of his works. [3] T. S. Eliot, East Coker, in Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 20. [4] Confirmed for another context by Ann-Christin Rommen (Wilson’s assistant director on The Tempest) , in Ann-Christin Rommen and Maria Shevtsova, “Working with Robert Wilson,” New Theatre Quarterly 23, no. 1 (February 2007): 58–66. [5] Jutte Lampe first performed Orlando in German in 1989 at the Schaubühne in Berlin. [6] For a detailed study of Orlando accompanied by an interview with Huppert, see my “Isabelle Huppert Becomes Orlando,” Theatre Forum , no. 6 (Winter/Spring 1995): 69–75. I here coin the notion of “vocal choreography.” [7] The costumier is Jacques Reynaud who also designed the exceptional costumes with Elizabethan echoes of The Winter’s Tale (2005) and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2009) ; both premiered at the Berliner Ensemble. [8] See my “Robert Wilson’s Sonosphere,” in Meredith Monk, Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson: Landscapes of Consciousness , ed. Ann Shanahan, vol. 6 of Great North American Stage Directors (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 175–208. [9] Robert Wilson and Maria Shevtsova, “Covid Conversations 5: Robert Wilson,” New Theatre Quarterly 38, no. 1 (February 2022): 4. Amply illustrated with photographs. [10] See, for this terminology, Susan Sontag’s renowned essay “Notes on Camp,” Partisan Review 31, no. 4 (1964): 515–530. For a considerably fuller account of this Perm production of La Traviata , see “Robert Wilson’s Sonosphere,” 193–97. [11] Robert Wilson and Maria Shevtsova, “Covid Conversations 5,” 7 and 14. [12] Ibid., 14 and 24–5. About The Author(s) Maria Shevtsova is Professor Emerita at Goldsmiths, University of London. Robert Wilson Yearbook The Robert Wilson Yearbook, published annually by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, offers a dedicated platform for scholarly and creative engagement with the life, artistry, and enduring legacy of Robert Wilson (1941–2025), one of the most original visionaries in contemporary theatre and performance. The Yearbook seeks to explore and expand upon Wilson’s groundbreaking approaches to staging, lighting, movement, and visual composition. Each issue will feature a diverse range of content—including original essays, critical commentary, archival materials, artist reflections, and photography—examining facets of Wilson’s multifaceted practice across genres, eras, and geographies. The Robert Wilson Yearbook is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - This Issue “Going on a Journey”: Space, Time, and Experience in Robert Wilson’s Installations and Museum Interventions Re-Viewing Stefan Brecht’s The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson from a (B.) Brechtian Perspective Towards a Formalist Ritualistic Theatre: An Artaudian Reading of Robert Wilson’s Aesthetics The Theatre of Autobio-hetero-thanato-graphic: The Life and Death of Marina Abramović Time’s Shadows: Crisis of Subjectivity and Reconciled Concord in Robert Wilson’s Performative Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets They Asked Me to Draw a City: Postdramatic Imaginings in Robert Wilson’s Direction of Strindberg’s A Dream Play Robert Wilson's Oedipus: The Postdramatic Journey of the Oedipus Story from Sophocles through Freud Robert Wilson and Norway Robert Wilson’s Art of Senses and Emotions Listening to Deafman Glanc Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken Thinking in Structures: Working as a Dramaturg with Robert Wilson Bertolt Brecht and Robert Wilson: The Dialectical Triad of Playwright, Director and Berliner Ensemble Actors in Wilson’s The Threepenny Opera Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Robert Wilson Yearbook Volume 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Theatre of Autobio-hetero-thanato-graphic: The Life and Death of Marina Abramović Petra Egri By Published on May 1, 2026 Download Article as PDF A transgression of traditional theatrical frameworks characterizes Robert Wilson's productions: the creation of illusion through spectacle, duration-based plays, and the disorientation of the spectator's gaze. Wilson is a persistent fighter against logocentric theatre, his tool being not so much the word as the image. One is that it reminds us of Jacques Derrida, and his writings on Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation. [1] The prominent philosopher argues that Western theatre seeks representation and is only organized by the repetition of the voice of authority and is always deprived of presence and identity. But Wilson's theatre is closer to Antonin Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty . ” An unreliance on presence and self-identity characterizes it. Wilson (echoing Artaud's earlier concept) incessantly bombards the spectator with voices and questioning of master discourses. It is also common for the production to mix recorded texts or noises with live words performed by the actor. This forces the viewer not only to take in the play but also to linger over its details. The productions are designed to make the audience understand the visuals rather than the story itself. Wilson seeks to separate the theatrical sign systems (music-singing, dance-movement). His aim is not to make the sign systems blend but to draw attention to themselves individually. But Wilson is much more sophisticated in his approach to this sign separation than Meyerhold or Brecht had been in the past. He creates a completely unique theatre. In Wilson's directing process (the creative process of the production), the word is subordinate, the dramatic text is practically one of the last elements to be created, and everything else is planned much earlier (from movement to scenery). In Wilson's productions, the visual world is always created first. “While the scene sketches emerge, Wilson ‘finds’ either music or a text from the time period of the production; if a text, he fragments it as a minimalist musician would, breaking the text into units which he varies freely . . . Wilson treats words as object, not as meaning units.” [2] Holm Keller also points out that Wilson's staging is not determined by speech acts. [3] This implies that Wilson plays with words: sometimes deliberately breaking them up and then reassembling them in a new order. This is culminated in actors on stage not talking to each other, but turning to the audience, talking to the audience. Ivan Nagel aptly observes that while other directors staged dramas, Wilson invented a new kind of theatre far away from the standard theatre practice. [4] As Katherine Arens observes: Wilson is identified as a graphic artist, who ‘finds’ some visual material – often a picture, or his own image of how someone sees (usually encompassing some distortion or an extreme way of seeing.) Wilson then ‘sketches’ the visual material to fill space and time, turning an image into a theatre performance. The first step in this conversion is production of series of scene sketches, which look not unlike tanagrams or minimalist art. Wilson usually sketches each scene as one in a series of black-white pattern variations, which are then blown up into stage backdrops. [5] Wilson is interested in several fields of fine art, including painting. The visual world of his productions has admittedly been inspired by Paul Cezanne and René Magritte. As with the painters in painting, light plays a prominent role in his work. But Wilson's vision of light is also akin to that of Adolphe Appia, who argued that light has a spatial role, in itself capable of structuring space. Stefan Brecht compared Wilson's stagings to the surrealist painters' visual world. [6] This connection is not coincidental, of course, not least because the dreamlike is constantly present in Wilson's work, the actors on stage appear mostly dreamlike in the structured space. However, Wilson's staging focuses not on the actor but on light, space, and movement. The world of the stage follows Wilson's own internal laws. "Abstract images often motivate each other. Sometimes creating interspersed tables of multiple details throughout the performances" [7] thus creating continuity between performances, building a specific referential system of references (like a labyrinth) in Wilson's oeuvre. It is no coincidence that Katherine Arens calls him a "visual-jigsaw-puzzle genius." [8] Very early on, various theatre scholars have made it clear that Wilson's theatre is different from that of other directors. Stefan Brecht in 1978 described it as a “Theatre of Visions.” Hans-Thies Lehmann in his book Postdramatic Theatre lists artists whose work can be described as postdramatic: one of the first names to stand out in this list is Robert Wilson. As early as 1991, Katherine Arens, drawing on Hans-Thies Lehmann's earlier argument, poses in the title of her book the question: "Is postmodern performance possible?" However, I believe that Wilson's theatre is not to be described in simple terminology and represents a whole new way of thinking about theatre, visuality, objects, movement, and space. This paper seeks to take a new angle on Wilson's rather under-analysed production of The Life and Death of Marina Abramović , from the perspective of the influential philosopher Jacques Derrida, who, like Wilson, is constantly in dispute with logocentrism, and his “autobio-hetero-thanato-graphic” concept. The aim is not to put Wilson's staging behind a definition, or to align it with the terminology of others (such as “Visual Theatre” or “Postmodern Performance,” or perhaps “Postdramatic Theatre”) but to point out the possibility of autobiographical discourse, which Wilson himself may have wanted to point out, not only in The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, but also in Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (1973), or Einstein on the Beach (1976). And although Wilson's productions create a continuity between one performance and another, my paper aims to analyse The Life and Death of Marina Abramović specifically from the perspective of Jacques Derrida, thus providing a fresh and fruitful approach to Wilson and the stageable (or unstageable) biography, which critics have already written "Biography is not a genre that typically ends up getting played out of the stage." [9] This paper focuses on how logocentric meaning-intensity, referentiality is disintegrated, and how the “autobiographical theatre " constructs the death narrative, or in a Derridean term, develops it into an “autobio-hetero-tanato-graphic “narrative. Discourses of Life, Death, and Survival Robert Wilson presented the The Life and Death of Marina Abramović in Manchester in 2011. In the play, not only her life, but also her death was staged—a death that did not (and has not yet) happened in a bio-logical sense. Even more, the performance artist herself played roles—herself and her mother too—she was present on stage in the bio-graphic piece. If we didn't know that Wilson's theatre is a “Visual Theatre” (and not primarily a theatre of texts nor a regular staging of dramas) and that in his productions the actor does not play as important a role as other elements of scenography, we might wonder why Wilson puts on stage the famous performance artist Marina Abramović, who makes a sharp distinction between theatre and performing art. Or we could also legitimately ask—of the performance artist herself—what she is doing in a theatre play as a known “resistor.” We understand that Marina Abramović has been a vocal critic of dramatic theatre and has highlighted the following: Performance is the moment when the performer enters the audience constructed by his own mental and physical ideas. It cannot be considered theatre in the traditional sense, because theatre has an element of repetition, of substitutability (you play someone else), so theatre is a black box. Performance is always the real. In theatre, the blood and the knife are never real. In performance, the knife and the blood coming out of the body are real. [10] Two years later, Marina Abramović makes an even more forceful statement. “The theatre is fake: you sit in a black box, you pay for your ticket, you sit in the dark and watch someone play someone else's life." [11] But Robert Wilson is also a strong critic of this kind of theatre, which is perhaps why he prefers to call his productions "opera". In an interview with him, he explains: “I don’t like the theatre much. But I love the abstract, fluttering visual patterns of ballet, and I think that is basically what I’ve done in theatre: architectural landscapes that are structured” (Wilson quoted in Walsh 1984:85). The common point between Wilson and Abramović seems to be the questioning of the means used by dramatic theatre, the rejection of text-based theatre. Naturally, it is clear that Wilson was ambivalent about the performance art and happenings of the 1960s and 1970s: there were aspects of these artistic projects that he explicitly rejected, but he himself preferred the process of collective creation (and the desire for total “presence”). From this point of view, it is not surprising that after several years of work, The Life and Death of Marina Abramović , a specific biography and thanatography reflecting on the life of a well-known figure—what the theatre critic Lui calls a “hagiographic” [12] —was created in 2011, which significantly rewrites the question of the representability of presence-based performance art. Wilson's attempt to dissolve the performance art versus theatre opposition is striking,. Jorn Weisbrodt Montauk reflects on this issue in his book on The Life and Death of Marina Abramović : “I don't know if the piece dissolves the dichotomy between performance art and theatre . . . but it shows that differences and definitions don't matter at all.” [13] And perhaps a more intriguing question when analysing the production is how life and death are presented in the light of biography and authorship (and staging). According to Jacques Derrida, there is an almost invisible line between the inside of philosophemes, for example, and the life of a nameable author. [14] The biography inevitably extends to the death of the person; that autobiography in principle cannot do. But life as bio-logy and bio-graphy is not simply an opposition to death as thanato-graphy and thanato-logic. What prevents this direct opposition is precisely the objectification and its impossibility. [15] An autobiography, if it is exchanged into biography may include death. Perhaps this Derridean idea and the problematic nature of the objectification of performing art can be understood in Wilson’s play in which Abramović’s earlier performance pieces are incorporated into the theatre play as a fort/da game . [16] Abramović throws them away (the same way Ernst did with his wooden spool) and then sends them into battle. In Wilson’s play, repetition compulsion drives these performance piece references. Most of Abramović's performances are already clearly linked to the death drive. [17] Bio-graphi(es) as Iterability The screenplay of the The Life and Death of Marina Abramović based on the first manuscript of Abramović's autobiographical book Walk through Walls: A Memoir ( 2017) and Abramović's handwritten notes. Wilson only starts using these materials at one point in the production design. According to Krisztina Rosner, the staged story also shares some affinities with Biography (1989), directed by Charles Atlas. (Abramović and Atlas use autobiography as a diachronic structuring principle in an investigation of identity as defined by personal history.) It also resonates with The Biography Remix (1997), created by Belgian director Michael Laub. Marina Abramović has appeared in both of these, not only in a bio-graphical sense, but also in a bio-logical sense, physically. However, Wilson's approach differs in two very important respects from the earlier elements of the “ biography series. ” Whereas Atlas and Laub focus primarily on Abramović's creative work, Wilson focuses mainly on Marina's childhood memories. [18] Wilson mobilizes distinctly subjective, personal (more autobiographical ) stories rather than the story of the professional performer. The other, truly radical innovation is already in the production's title, "the thematisation of Marina's death and the staging of life events as seen through the lens of her own death." [19] The gesture of how the production came into being was also unusual: it was Abramović who approached the director with the idea of a staged biography : Every time I make a biography, I start with the same principle of I give up the control completely. When I hand the material over to a director, he gets the opportunity to remix my life in a certain sense. It can follow chronological order or not. It doesn't matter. I am material, nothing more. My life is a novelty for me every time. Wilson doesn't detail Abramović's entire career at all, nor (as expected) does he follow the chronology. Wilson's performance deliberately goes against logocentricity. The structure of the script, which divides the planned performance into a total of four large sections, is a good indication of this very important reworking (drawing, redrawing). It also divides the life to be presented into four major units (childhood, maturity, adulthood, and death). Within these four, however, there is always a triad of life stages: I. A Death (0 minutes) B Childhood (8 minutes) C Adulthood (9 minutes) II. B Childhood (6 minutes) C Adulthood (8 minutes) D Maturity (9 min) III C Adulthood (6 min) D Maturity (8 min) A Death (4 min) IV. D Maturity (7 min) A Death (3'2 min) B Childhood (8 min) Wilson uses the rules of mathematical permutation to arrange the performance into almost random triple-time units. The Performativity of the Autobiographical Layer: Mask as De-facement Wilson's staging, due to Abramović's multiple presences, is autobiographical in one of its defining layers. It seems, however, that in Wilson's performance, "the (autobiography), understood as a performative material” [20] The contradictions become the deepest essence of the production. Autobiography is never innocent, descriptive discourse, but behind its apparent referentiality and objectivity destructive-deconstructive subjective rearrangements lie. Autobiography is . . . not a genre or a mode, but a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts. The autobiographical moment happens as an alignment between the two subjects involved in the process of reading in which they determine each other by mutual reflexive substitution. The structure implies differentiation as well as similarity, since both depend on a substitutive exchange that constitutes the subject. [21] A very similar observation is made by Jacques Derrida in his Life Death seminar (1976). In this structure, a Derridean sense of différance is at work, in which the author makes himself the object of understanding, and a constant movement, a kind of constructive-destructive alignment and separation takes place between the reader of the life and the author of the biography , which must be one and the same person. In the theatrical performance, a duplication of this process (which is also active in normal autobiography) takes place. At least two mirrored structures are in motion, side by side. Abramović writing and delivering of her own autobiography inevitably involved in confronting the subjective meaning of her life with its referential facts. We know that she also collected and added correspondence and other referential documents which she gave to Wilson at the first workshop. A further deconstructive mirror-situation in the production arises from the fact that The Life and Death of Marina Abramović is not her own work; she is not the author of her own autobiography; she is not the director of the production. Robert Wilson is editing a life narrative from fragments of Abramović's life story. But he was creating one that also speaks to the audience in Abramović's “language.” Wilson “gives us the fragments of a life with its daily trials, doubts, insecurities, its familiar struggles, phases of youthful rebellion and tireless search for selfhood amidst the domestic din of a life really lived like any other.” [22] The autobiography, although it remains covertly in the depths, in fact liquidates itself and becomes a biography. One of the storyteller (or MC for the evening) of the play is Willem Dafoe, who, as the surreal narrator of Abramović's story, speaks in a rather cynical manner, wearing a white joker mask (porcelain face, a typical Wilsonian element) and military clothes (an allegorical evocation Abramović father's position). His dominant acting style is mime. The mirror structure is deconstructed: there is no metaphorical (prosopoeic) reflection, but someone else speaks, and the autobiographical discourse becomes metonymic. Dafoe's speech is often incomprehensible. Speech that is supposed to be intelligible ends up in a cacophony, which throws the viewer off, as does the repetition. Dafoe's endless repetition of words empties out the linguistic units. In Wilson's work, this is also an extension of the Artaudian tradition. Particularly controversial is the autobiographical technique with which Abramović's death is represented on the stage. She imagines and plans her own funeral, which Wilson incorporates into the work, pretending that Abramović is dead. Abramović herself takes part in this theatre play: she and two other actresses lie in the coffin, wearing funeral masks. The idea of the “three Marinas” is Abramović's idea of her own funeral, which Wilson exploits in the opening scene. On stage, we can observe three coffins, one of which actually contains Abramović, and the other two contain actors playing “Marina,” masked on her face. Around the coffins, dogs run—they are looking for food—among plastic bones blood red, and disappear from the stage as the performance begins. The scene is a reference to Abramović's idea of “three Marinas,” whereby Marina Abramović's own funeral will be held in three separate cities and with three separate coffins at some point in the future. One body in Amsterdam, one body in Belgrade, and one body in New York. These are important places in Abramović's life and artistic activity. Of the three coffins, only one will contain the “real body” in bio-logical terms, but no one will know which. With this opening scene, Wilson transforms the autobiography into an epitaph. The epitaph is the personification of a dead person, the inscription of his/her subjective essence on the material surface of the tombstone. The epitaph includes no references or deconstructive events; it only refers to the subjective essence. The opening stage scene functions just like an epitaph, only with images rather than text. Paul de Man argues that in the autobiography, the real person is always and disturbingly present, but in the case of the epitaph, we never think of the real dead body but rather of an idea. The epitaph poem, or Abramović's gestures, create a prosopopeia in Wilson's work. Prosopoeia means “to give a mask or face,” and it is with such funeral masks (and triple coffins) shown that the play itself begins. At one point, Abramović removed this mask from her face on the stage. Abramović's attempt to narrate her biography in a Wilsonian “(visual)language” implies a transition in which the referentiality of the biography and its subjective relevance are called into question. The staging of the life of the performing artist is thus a destructed, deconstructed prosopopeia in the Paul de Man sense, both facement a nd de-facement . Wilson's staging implies a de Manian prosopopeia, a transition in which the referentiality of the biography is called into question, and its subjective relevance is questioned. For this biographical (or rather, phonautographically) opening scene, Wilson himself indicates three different realisations, three separate versions, in his 2008 plans for the script of the performance. The first version would have three funerals taking place simultaneously on stage, with three or three piles of mourners (male and female) of exactly equal numbers around the coffins, weeping. Each of the three “stage spaces” is a different color (white, black, gray), the only noise on stage is the sound of people sobbing. In Wilson's second plan, the stage is lined with open coffins facing the audience, the actors wearing death masks and everyone in black. The mourning crowd is made up entirely of women, weeping and tearing their hair. Wilson's third opening scene consists of three closed coffins, with as many people on stage as can fit, all in colorful ceremonial dress, all talking and laughing, all surrounded by food and drink. Goran Bregovic's band plays. To the fast and dynamic music, everyone dances hysterically; then suddenly the coffins open, and Marina (with a live snake coiled around her body) is hoisted onto the shoulders of the crowd, and at the same time Frank Sinatra's “My Way” is played. Finally, in 2011, for the first performance of the three versions, Wilson uses none of the three plans. In the first scene, we see Abramović wearing a funeral mask lying in three black coffins and dogs prowling among the illuminated red bones. Bio-graphic and Thanato-graphic Wilson stated in 2008, “If I do this work, I’m not interested in your art. I only want to work with your life.” [23] The question is also posed by Derrida in a lecture at the Life Death seminar on the autobiography of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle , through Freud’s famous fort/da analysis. Can Freud’s mourning (after the loss of his daughter, Sophie) be separated from the writing of his famous Beyond the Pleasure Principle ? Is the work written separate from its author? And can Wilson not talk about Abramović’s art when he creates this thanato-graphic play? Is Abramović the performance artist really present when she plays the roles as an actor? Abramović's self-reflection is constantly called into question in Wilson's theatrical performance as he stages the life and death of the performance artist according to his own ideas. What is presented is no longer an autobiography but a biography. Firstly, Wilson sophistically eliminates the artistic expression, the performing art, which was Abramović's original mode of self-creation and self-expression. At the same time, the boundary between performing art and theatrical performance is blurred, or more precisely, performing art becomes visual theatre. Thus, The Life and Death of Marina Abramović is an autobio-hetero-tanato-graphic narrative constructed by Wilson that essentially both reveals and conceals the Abramovićian itself, and deprives the viewer of reading the theatrical performance as an opposition to performing art. Derrida indicates that the discourse on life/death—which is also the true depth of Wilson's play—“must occupy a certain space between logos and gramme, analogy and program, as well as between the differing senses of program and reproduction. And since life is on the line, the trait that relates the logical to the graphical must also be working between the biological and biographical, the thanatological and thanatographical " [24] In the case of the Wilson production, in the discourse that follows up and links Abramović's life and death, there is not a clear opposition between the pairs, but rather a dynamic reversal. “This borderline—I call it dynamis because of its force, its power, as well as its virtual and mobile potency- is neither active or passive, neither outside nor inside.” [25] According to Derrida, an invisible line is drawn between the inner content of the works and the life of the author who can be named. We cannot speak of simple pairs of opposites. “Life as bio-logy and bio-graphy is not simply the opposition to death as a thanato-graphic and thanato-logical. ” [26] What prevents this direct opposition is precisely the objectification and its impossibility. A biography (of life) is always also a biography of death . Derrida's Otobiography is an interpretation of Nietzsche's Ecce homo. Derrida's fundamental thesis is that autobiography is always a function of the objectivity of a name, of a signature, open to a primary identity formed in the absolute proximity of life and death. In this primary identity, in this regression, the specific self-constitutive role of mother and father operates. Nietzsche writes that he himself exists as a reflection of the father and mother, as a trace of their gaze. The father is long dead when he writes his autobiographical Ecce homo ; the mother is alive and will outlive her son. In him, in the wake of these two gazes, the a utobiographical and the biographical are summed up in his name, in his signature, in his presence. Abramović's self-construction is surprisingly similar. Soundscape Wilson collaborated with Anthony Hegarty (and Balkan folk singer Svetlana Spajic) to create the soundscape, which consists of an intermingling of pop music, the rock ballad, Balkan folk music and simulated orchestral music, and other dadaist noise experiments. From the autobiographical layer it is certainly worth analysing Hegarty's theme song, “Your Story, My Way”: I will tell you a story Through my man’s eye Your story My way Your black and blue story Through the white of my eye My loneliness My pain I will tell you a story Grind it through my eye Crush it through my white’s eye I’m gonna cry I’m gonna use our eyes I’m gonna cry I’m gonna cry through your eyes” The lyrics are an interesting field of analysis in many ways. In an interview with El Pais, Abramović points out that “Everything is seen through masculine eyes. My work has developed in a world of men. I am not a feminist: art does not have a gender.” [27] Hegarty's curious monologue is superimposed on Abramović's life, on the writing of his life. The man-eye, the white of the eye (which is not seeing but only some mirror) is a reflection of the (perverted) gaze that deconstructively forms the self. The gaze, however, is anamorphic: it weeps, it cuts, it destroys and builds, it shapes bodies, it creates tears. At the same time, a deconstructive referentiality is at work in Hegarty's song, which also makes the storytelling perspective unstable. He tells a story from his own point of view by telling the story not of himself but of “you,” in the singular second person ( your story ), in his own way, in the first-person singular ( in my way ), and in doing so he assumes the narrative. This eye through which the life story is told is also a man's eye through which a woman's story is told. From the very beginning of the performance, the viewer is placed in this self-constructive, almost anamorphic position. Lacan states that “we are beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world. That which makes us consciousness institutes us by the same token as speculum mundi .” [28] The gaze is paradoxical, that is anamorphic in nature, because “You never look at me from the place from which I see you. Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see.” [29] The subject's autobiography is always organized by an essentially paranoid gaze that looks at it from the material world, “in this matter of the visible, everything is a trap” [30] and “in our relation to things, in so far as this relation is constituted by the way of vision, and ordered in the figures of representation, something slips, passes, is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded in it—that is what we call the gaze.” [31] Wilson's entire visual representation mobilizes this anamorphic gaze. The female-male perspective is also challenged in Hegarty's Cut the World : “For so long I've obeyedThat feminine decree I've always containedYour desire to hurt me But when will I turnAnd cut the world?” Hegarty is preparing twelve songs for the performance. These include: “Marina,” “Cut the World,” “Saint Ascend,” “Empathy,” “Snake Piece,” “Salt in my Wounds,” “Volcano of Snow,” “Why Do You Cut Yourself?,” “The White of Eyes,” “Floods My Body,” “You Will Show Me that You Love Me,” “Elements of Suffering,” “There Is No Piece.” Each song draws on her personal and fairly recent friendship and experience with Marina. The friendship was formed back in 2010 when Hegarty sat across from Abramović at The Artist Is Present , and the two met in a restaurant in London and started talking. This meeting in 2010 is reflected in the very first draft of the script of the production from 2008 in which no song inserts are marked at all in Wilson's plans. [32] Hegarty will deliver the first audio material of the songs to Wilson on 11 May 2011. Hegarty is therefore the second narrator of the biography (alongside Willem Dafoe). The songs written always convey a sense of intimacy that comes from an identification with Marina. While Willem Dafoe as narrator usually addresses the audience from a more distanced position. The 'distanced' narrator role is only dissolved in one of the last scenes of the performance, when Dafoe switches positions with Hegarty and sings Why must you cut yourself , almost replacing him. Conclusion Wilson's talent also manifests itself in his ability to take on a subject that is not in itself a simple task to bring to life. To stage the biography and death of a living artist is just such a challenge. The production also raises philosophical questions about what we understand by 'presence', but it is also an important question: can this play be a 'biography' of a performance artist born in 1946 (still alive!) if Abrmović herself (as an actress) is present on stage? Can we discuss, then, whether the fragments of Abramović's life story can be assembled from a postmodern-ironic montage into a Derridean, tanatographic narrative? Derrida's ideas may bring us closer to understanding Wilson's production, but Wilson's entire production cannot be understood solely from this perspective. Endnotes [1] Jacques Derrida's essay is a critical understanding of Antonin Artaud's “theatre of cruelty” concept. See Jacques Derrida, The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1978). [2] Katherine Arens, “Robert Wilson: Is Postmodern Performance Possible?” Theatre Journal 43(1): 27. [3] Holm Keller, Robert Wilson (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), 98. [4] Ivan Nagel, Liebe! Liebe! Liebe! ist die Seele des Genies – Vier Regisseure des Welttheaters (München: Carl Hanser Verlang, 1996), 212. [5] Arens, 26. [6] Stefan Brecht, The Original Theatre of the City of New York: From the mid-60s to the mid-70s Book I. The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 239. [7] Árpád Kékesi-Kun, A rendezés színháza (Budapest: Osiris, 2007), 394. [8] Arens, 28. [9] Lui, “Being There:LaDoMA,” Allegriconfuoco , January 18, 2014. http://allegriconfuoco.blogspot.com/2014/01/being-there.html [10] Marina Abramović, What Is Performance? MoMA, April 13, 2010. https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2010/04/13/marina-abramovic-what-is-performance/ [11] Abramović quoted in Tamás Jászay, “Játék életre, halálra.” Revízor. https://revizoronline.com/the-life-and-death-of-marina-abramovi-holland-festival-2012/ [12] Liu. [13] Jorn Weisbrodt, Preface to One day in the Life of Robert Wilson’s: The Life and Death of Marina Abramović by Tim Hailand (New York: Hailand Books, 2011), 3. [14] Jacques Derrida, Life Death , edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Peggy Kamuf, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago-London: Chicago University Press, 2020), 27. [15] Ibid. [16] In Life Death, Derrida analyses the well-known example of Sigmund Freud (the fort/da phenomenon), the play of his grandson Ernst, Freud uses this (as a representation of the duality of the death instinct and the life instinct) to illustrate the repetition compulsion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle . In LifeDeath , Derrida counts this as an important autobiographical component of Freud, i.e., he argues that Freud is then writing an autobiography (also because of Ernst) when he describes the fort/da problem. (Freud, 1923) [17] Lips of Thomas or Cleaning the Mirror are all performances by Abramović that are clearly motivated by the death drive. [18] Krisztina Rosner, A színészi jelenlét és a csend dramatikus-teátrális játékai (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2012), 33. [19] Ibid. [20] Ibid. [21] Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 70. [22] Liu. [23] Abramović quoted Wilson 2016, 266. [24] Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1988), 4. [25] Ibid., 5. [26] Derrida, Life Death , 27. [27] Daniel Verdú, “This Is the Opposite of Opera: It’s Folk,” El Pais in English, April 10, 2012. https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2012/04/10/inenglish/1334083138_915138.html [28] Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis–The Seminar of J. Lacan Book XI , translated by. A. Sheridan (London: W.W. Norton, 1977), 75. [29] Ibid., 103. [30] Ibid., 93. [31] Ibid., (73. [32] Information based on the transcript of the 2008 play, Robert Wilson Archive, Watermill Center, New York, USA. About The Author(s) Petra Egri is an assistant professor at the University of Pécs, and a research fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Arts, Research Institute of Art Theory and Methodology. Robert Wilson Yearbook The Robert Wilson Yearbook, published annually by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, offers a dedicated platform for scholarly and creative engagement with the life, artistry, and enduring legacy of Robert Wilson (1941–2025), one of the most original visionaries in contemporary theatre and performance. The Yearbook seeks to explore and expand upon Wilson’s groundbreaking approaches to staging, lighting, movement, and visual composition. Each issue will feature a diverse range of content—including original essays, critical commentary, archival materials, artist reflections, and photography—examining facets of Wilson’s multifaceted practice across genres, eras, and geographies. The Robert Wilson Yearbook is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - This Issue “Going on a Journey”: Space, Time, and Experience in Robert Wilson’s Installations and Museum Interventions Re-Viewing Stefan Brecht’s The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson from a (B.) Brechtian Perspective Towards a Formalist Ritualistic Theatre: An Artaudian Reading of Robert Wilson’s Aesthetics The Theatre of Autobio-hetero-thanato-graphic: The Life and Death of Marina Abramović Time’s Shadows: Crisis of Subjectivity and Reconciled Concord in Robert Wilson’s Performative Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets They Asked Me to Draw a City: Postdramatic Imaginings in Robert Wilson’s Direction of Strindberg’s A Dream Play Robert Wilson's Oedipus: The Postdramatic Journey of the Oedipus Story from Sophocles through Freud Robert Wilson and Norway Robert Wilson’s Art of Senses and Emotions Listening to Deafman Glanc Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken Thinking in Structures: Working as a Dramaturg with Robert Wilson Bertolt Brecht and Robert Wilson: The Dialectical Triad of Playwright, Director and Berliner Ensemble Actors in Wilson’s The Threepenny Opera Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Robert Wilson Yearbook Volume 1 Visit Journal Homepage Listening to Deafman Glanc Sophia Cocozza By Published on September 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Listening to Deafman Glance Multisensorial Listening and d/Deafness in the Silent Opera, Television Production and Gallery Video Installation Deafman Glance began as the result of Robert Wilson’s chance encounter with thirteen-year-old Raymond Andrews during a moment of impending violence at the hands of New Jersey police. Wilson’s recounting of their meeting tells the story of his rescuing Andrews, a young, deaf, black child. The forging of a relationship between Andrews and Wilson—an adult, white male—in the face of police brutality does not remain unnoted. In Absolute Wilson , a documentary-style portrait of the director, Wilson recalls of the event, “I was walking down the street, and I saw a policeman about to hit this child over the head with a club. I stopped the policeman and said, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ He said, ‘It’s none of your business.’ I said, ‘But it is . . . it is. I’m a responsible citizen.’” (1) Wilson continues to recall that he first noticed Andrews’s deafness through “…sounds coming from him. I recognized them as the sounds of a deaf person.” (2) This recognition of Andrews’s voice—“the sounds of a deaf person”—arises as Wilson’s first inspiration for the silent opera. Wilson eventually became Andrews’s legal guardian to prevent him from being placed in institutional care and, over the course of many years, developed a close personal, creative, and working relationship with him. In a 1970 interview, Wilson described his communication with Andrews stating, "[H]e’s so amazing to me, his paintings, his drawings are so amazing to me—cause he doesn’t talk, he’s never been to school, he doesn’t hear sound he hasn’t learned to read lips—he—so his way of communicating is a whole other way.” (3) This “whole other way” of communicating with Andrews, which Wilson speaks of, makes accounting for Andrews’s agency within this creative, working relationship increasingly difficult. Aside from photographs and archival letters between Andrews and Wilson, there are few indicators of Andrews’s involvement in the creative process. Wilson notes that Deafman Glance came as a direct result of Andrews’s drawings and means of communication. Wilson states, “You know, because it’s almost like, it’s his material [ Deafman Glance ] almost—to me—I’m helping him—arrange.” (4) In an effort to restore Raymond Andrews’s creative voice within this production and credit him in the development of Wilson’s celebrated use of movement and sound, I make the small, overdue gesture of referring to the production as Andrews and Wilson’s Deafman Glance . By restoring Andrews’s authorship to the production (which Wilson continually reinforces in interviews, yet publications constantly undo through naming the production solely as “Wilson’s”), Andrews’s multisensorial voice—as mediated through sound, gesture, and vision—can be more clearly heard. Andrews and Wilson’s various versions of Deafman Glance —the 1970 silent opera, the 1981 televised production, and various video installation exhibitions—demonstrate how performance mediality and direction shift audience perception of Andrews’s experience of d/Deafness. Situating Deafman Glance’s History within a Critical Disabilities Studies Framework In contemporary performance studies and musicology, discussions about difference have generally referred to the representation of more commonly visited categories of gender and race. While the role of disability has seen less critical attention, discussions of disability in the field of musicology reflect a vibrant and growing subdiscipline. Critical disabilities studies has emerged as a field of cultural analysis within the humanities. More recently, the social model of disability, advocated in politics by the disability rights movement and in scholarship by disability studies, has argued for the importance of bodily difference. Under this model, disability is not a fixed, medical condition; rather, it emerges from a society that chooses to accommodate some bodies and exclude others. Attention to d/Deaf studies within music, sound, and performance studies is crucial in forming an accessible and inclusive understanding of hearing and, by extension, listening. Moving away from the assumption that auditory hearing is paramount to musical experience can offer interpretations of sound that allow for a diverse set of experiences within the full spectrum of listening. This research on Deafman Glance has been shaped by an arena of disabilities studies that has begun offering inclusive interpretations of listening through an understanding of multisensory listening practices. (5) These practices attend to an understanding of sound informed by listening, feeling, seeing, touching, and resonating. Several performances of Deafman Glance are crucial in considering the work’s history. The 1970 work in Iowa City was initially performed by Raymond Andrews, Robert Wilson, Sheryl Sutton, and The Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds. This production would later be reimagined as the prologue, or overture, to Deafman Glance focusing entirely on the “murder scene.” A televised production of Deafman Glance was produced in 1981. The televised production would later be reimagined as a video installation experience as part of the touring exhibition Robert Wilson’s Vision in 1991 and as a solo exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1993 and 2010. The initial theatre productions of the 1970s notably came during a period where the arts were increasingly tied to notions of “identity politics.” (6) Women artists, artists of color, LGBTQ+ artists, disabled artists, and artists of decentered identities created ways to present their life experiences, interrogate social perception of their identities, and critique systemic issues that marginalized them in society. “Identity politics” gained traction in the United States in the 1970s and the 1980s to designate art that addressed issues of identity—including race, gender, sexuality, and disability. At the same historical moment, disability rights activists of the 1970s in the United Sates lobbied Congress and marched on Washington to include civil rights language for people with disabilities in the 1972 Rehabilitation Act. In 1973, the Rehabilitation Act was passed, and for the first time in history, civil rights of people with disabilities were protected by law. (7) Just prior to this moment, the 1960s saw an increase in disability advocates joining minority groups to demand equal treatment, equal access, and equal opportunity for people with disabilities. The civil rights movement of the 1960s used marches, sit-ins, and protests as tools for change, and inspired many minority groups, including the d/Deaf community, to press for greater self-determination and economic opportunity. (8) The fact that these interventions occurred at the same historical moment as Andrews and Wilson’s Deafman Glance serves to highlight the production’s distinction as a work directly tied to the “identity politics” artistic movement and underscores the production’s investment in providing an accessible, multisensorial interpretation of sound. Andrews, as both co-creator and lead of the production, literally enmeshes his own perception of the world through his performance. Stefan Brecht writes, “The one and only individual in this show, almost the protagonist, is the fictitious character created by Raymond Andrews.” (9) The entire production exists only through Andrews’s own performance and perception. Wilson, as co-creator of the work, similarly incorporates his own experience and chooses to feature his own “intrusive voice” at points of the production. (10) Wilson’s stuttering growing up, while called into question, largely influenced and continues to influence his work. (11) He credits work with Byrd Hoffman, a teacher who taught expression through dance, in helping him develop his verbal expression. Wilson notes, Byrd Hoffman was in her seventies when I first met her. She taught me dance and she understood the body in a remarkable way. She talked to me about the energy in my body. About relaxing. About letting my energy flow through. She was amazing because she never taught a technique. She never gave me a way to approach it. It was more that she helped me to discover my body and dance on my own. (12) Hoffman’s influence on Wilson’s life was eventually credited in 1968 when Wilson founded the experimental performance company the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds in honor of his teacher. (13) The company performed Deafman Glance and worked with local groups of individuals with disabilities coordinating movement workshops. These workshops explored and developed movement exercises that showed the effect that physical stimulation could have on the brain. (14) This movement-based work, which engendered sensitivity to how movement could be used to cross between various perceptual modalities, especially where the use of language was not sufficient, influenced Wilson’s emphasis on the use of movement, gesture, and sound to communicate alternative frames of mind in his theatrical works. Disability importantly lies at the core of Deafman Glance and allows for the creation of an alternative mode of theatrical expression and practices of listening. Listening to the Silent Opera Deafman Glance , the silent opera, was first performed as a workshop production at the University of Iowa in 1970. Subsequent performances in 1971 included an appearance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City, the Grand Théatre de Nancy at Festival Mondial in France, Teatro Eliseo in Rome, the Théatre de la Musique in Paris, and the Stadsschouwburg Theater at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam. The various productions are noted to have run anywhere from four to seven hours in length. Limited accounts of the performances show glimpses into theatrical productions of Deafman Glance . Noting that each performance was distinctly different, however, makes providing a general overview of Deafman Glance difficult. Available video recording footage of the 1970 Iowa performance provided by the Robert A. Wilson Collection in the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and Stefan Brecht’s account of the February 25, 1971 performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music together provide a cohesive construction of the production. Noteworthy to mention, however, is that while there was music, sound, and occasional dialogue incorporated within the production, available video footage of the 1970 Iowa performance does not feature sound. This perhaps stands to highlight that Andrews and Wilson’s vision for the production was in no way dependent on auditory sound. Rather, the listening portion of the production was intended to be experienced through multisensorial interpretation—as mediated primarily through gesture and vision. Figure 1: “Murder Scene” from Deafman Glance. Photo courtesy of The Watermill Center. The production opens with a prologue, also called the overture, which is often referred to as a the “murder scene.” (Figure 1) This scene, which Wilson claims he never quite understood, becomes the basis for both the televised and installation adaptations of Deafman Glance . Within this scene, a killing is carried out two times. A tall woman, played by Sheryl Sutton, wearing a dark Victorian dress pours a glass of milk and gives it to a small child who is sitting in a chair with his back to the audience. The child slurps the milk. Sutton turns away, goes back to the table where she picks up a knife, wipes it off, goes over to the body and stabs him. The boy dies and falls from his chair. Sutton then repeats the action with a young child sleeping on the ground downstage left. Notably, both killings enacted by Sutton are witnessed by a young boy played by Andrews who is wearing a bowler hat. In some versions, it is noted that Andrews screams. The rest of the production consists of three core, slow-moving scenes. One scene, which sometimes occurs prior to the prologue, takes place at the seashore where a series of images emerge and disperse including Sutton and a raven posed motionless, a turtle, and “a dancing mistress who counts 1-2-3, seemingly endlessly.” (15) An angel later appears, after which the stage fills with characters performing a swing dance. (16) Runners and a slow-moving turtle continuously cross the stage. Another scene, which also occurs prior to the prologue in some productions, takes place in a Victorian world. Bradley Winterton writes of this scene, “Shaded, heavy mauve. Entries, confrontations, stares, silences. A huge silence surrounds everything. A poem of the past imperfect.” (17) The third scene, which is documented well in both Brecht’s account and the surviving video recordings, features a dream-like world in which Andrews is always present. The stage, which largely resembles a forest, provides the backdrop for several surrealist situations. A large frog presides at a banquet table where members continuously join at stage right. An individual who is fishing also sits at the base of this table. Just behind the table, a cottage-like structure with a decorative palm tree, that grows and shrinks throughout the performance, is positioned. At stage left, turtles become the basis of a structure, which is continuously built upon throughout the performance. Andrews sits on a bench just beyond this structure for the majority of the scene. The background consists of a forest scene with a mountain just in the distance. Throughout all of these scenes, a chair is suspended from the sky, rising and falling very slowly. The general plot of this scene is remarkably slow moving with very little, highly intentional movement. A number of figures enter the scene, perform actions, and leave. Two small turtles move across stage and a giant frog wearing a suit sits at a table. Two individuals serve the frog a martini. Another individual enters stage left carrying planks of wood. Two additional turtles join the stage. More individuals move across stage carrying planks of wood. These planks of wood are placed around the turtles and a structure begins to form. More individuals join the stage, some sitting at the banquet table. Wilson appears on stage and sits down at the banquet table. Brecht writes, “in a normal voice, though with many odd pauses and in a slightly puzzled manner, [Wilson] relates a rare, perhaps occult, obscurely very relevant experience into the mike on the table, reading from some papers he has pulled out from inside his jacket.” (18) This moment constitutes one of the only appearances of dialogue in the production and features Wilson’s own “intrusive voice.” (19) Smoke begins to emanate from the cottage. Many individuals pass by and around Andrews, who has been sitting stage left, with his head bowed down and forward since the beginning of this scene. Individuals carrying panes of glass form various positions around Andrews. More individuals carrying babies cross through the stage. Andrews finally raises his head and begins conversing through movement with a dancing woman. Andrews, still sitting on the bench, moves right of center stage, almost as if by magic. Individuals interact with Andrews. They perform ritualistic actions on the boy, and eventually Andrews’s bowler hat is removed and a pointed crown is placed upon his head. Andrews ascends into the air as he watches an ox down below. A paper moon falls from the sky and a figure below crumples it feeding it to the ox. The ox is later beheaded. Notably, this ox frequently appeared in Andrews’s drawings. Wilson states, “He’s [Andrews’s] very involved with an ox, for some reason. It’s almost like—he’s drawn an ox, and something about this image that keeps coming back, he almost for-for a time, he almost used it like a signature, he almost signed things with an ox—it’s like other things were happening, with this ox, and people or characters or other things, but somehow always the ox was there”. (20) Additional individuals and animals enter and leave the stage. The props and scenery begin to dissipate until the stage is nearly empty. Andrews lowers to the ground from the sky. (Figure 2) A crowd of figures emerge on stage and Andrews looks around just before leaving. Finally, apes flood the stage. These animals play with apples and one begins playing the harp, though no sound is heard. Sutton again enters the stage watching the ape play the instrument. Snow falls and the curtain closes. Figure 2: Raymond Andrews suspended on a chair in Deafman Glance. Photo courtesy of The Watermill Center. The plot of this production while slow moving and intentionally disorienting at times is nonetheless important to follow. The prologue sets the tone for the production and introduces themes that carry throughout Deafman Glance . Themes of death and birth in addition to murder and motherhood run throughout the production, however, only in the prologue are these themes directly addressed. The choice to cast Sutton and Andrews purposefully incorporates black identity into late twentieth-century America’s primarily white avant-garde theatre. The prologue stresses the mother’s maternal solitude for her victims as well as for the survivor, Andrews. Performing as a Medea-like character, Sutton subverts the stereotype of the black woman as a domestic “mammy” figure. (21) While Sutton’s performance has received criticism, particularly in the 1981 televised version, Sutton importantly does not view her part in this production as one where the black woman enacts a stereotypically violent act. The murder scene may serve to represent a subversive act which kills the stereotypical representation of black women. This idea is further reflected upon within the context of the 1981 televised production. The slow-moving plot, punctuated by silence and highly intentional gesture, arises as a rumination on the themes foregrounded in the prologue and as a meditation on the multisensorial experience of hearing. Through the intersection of hearing and deafness in Deafman Glance , visual and acoustic registers operate in tandem with each other and address, without providing answers, the crisis in speaking and the apparent absence of voice. Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren notes that the multisensorial listening presented in Deafman Glance can be read as the “surreality of the ‘hearing eye,’” which Julia Kristeva writes of. (22) Kristeva writes that the Surrealists failed in their efforts to create a communal theatre of play because they were unable to reconstitute the sacred within the field of theatre. Furthermore, Kristeva argues that through experimentation with gesture, sound, color, and non-verbal sign systems the supremacy of symbolic order can be challenged. (23) This challenging of symbolic order through a manipulation of listening as a visual-spatial experience in Deafman Glance is perhaps why Surrealist artist Louis Aragon, fifty years after the Surrealist movement’s moment had passed, praised Deafman Glance as “an extraordinary freedom machine.” (24) Aragon wrote, “Bob Wilson is, would be, will be [the future tense would have been necessary] surrealist through silence, although one could also say it of all painters, but Wilson—it’s the wedding of gesture and silence, of movement and the ineffable.” (25) The surrealist aesthetic, which is accomplished in Aragon’s opinion through the pairing of silence and movement, is in fact a direct result of the d/Deaf experience of listening. Andrews and Wilson’s intentional use of gesture throughout the performance presents Andrews’s experience with sound. Wilson recalls learning from Andrews that listening has to do with the connection of sound and the body. The vibrational quality of sound largely influences Andrews’s mode of perceiving. In sound studies, scholars including Nina Eidsheim have offered a vibrational theory of music that re-envisions the ways in which we think about sound, music, and listening. This focus on the physical, vibrational nature of sound opens space for sensing otherwise. Nina Eidsheim writes, “approaching music as a vibrational practice offers much more: it recognizes, and hence encourages, idiosyncratic experiences of and with music.” (26) I claim that the material qualities of this approach to listening are made evident in the visual, highly gestural character of Deafman Glance . This visual and gestural experience becomes the lens through which audience members perceive the silent opera. Where auditory sound once stood in the traditional opera experience, visuals now construct an aural image for the audience of Deafman Glance . This rift in the traditional experience of theatre and opera produces a shift in audience perception enabling viewers to listen otherwise. Whether audience members pay attention, what they pay attention to and, furthermore, what kind of attention they pay—as mediated through the visual and sonic—are entirely dependent. Audience members must adapt to the theatrical presentation and orient themselves, choosing to determine how and what they make of the performance. While Deafman Glance is lauded for its “wedding of gesture and silence,” noting sound’s presence in the original theatre production remains important. (27) Andrews and Wilson’s productions were not entirely “silent” by the standard definition. Stefan Brecht’s account of the 1971 Brooklyn Academy of Music performance notes inclusion of voice, sound, and music. In terms of voice, an “almost neuter scream, emotionally colorless jabs at utterance, not too loud,” (28) Robert Wilson’s “normal voice, though with many odd pauses and in a slightly puzzled manner,” (29) a “Slavic accented” voice (30), and “remarks overheard as if not intended for us” (31) are featured at various points throughout the silent opera. Musically, the production incorporates a “hum of music, humming,” (32) an “ominous sequence of piano chords,” (33) “the fateful piano tickle” (34) that apparently accompanies the entrance of Andrews on stage, “the magician’s chords,” (36) “the brash music of a pop tune ( Mutual Admiration Society ) blaring out,” “organ music,” (37) “gongs and bells . . . That shivery, eerie music is at its height,” (38) “Fauré’s Requiem ” played at the moment of the ox’s death, (39) “the soprano aria,” (40) “a lugubrious music,” (41) and “the sounds of “When you’re in love, it’s the loveliest time of the year” from the accordion, a waltz.” (42) Additional sounds throughout the production include repeated “forest noises,” (43) “the thin sound of the ice cubes in the shaker,” (44) repeated “sounds of ocean waves,” (45) and a “hammer blowing sound from afar as though his carpentry were unreal.” (46) The voices, music, and sounds throughout this production all notably serve various functions but do not arise as the primary means of plot comprehension throughout the production. Voices do not share important plot information or dialogue, but they rather showcase the intrusive nature of language. Music seemingly serves no greater function than to signal what the visuals of the production are already pronouncing. Sounds, furthermore, set the scene which is already visually present. The silent opera is mediated through a visual listening style. This is, perhaps, why Andrews and Wilson’s archival record of Deafman Glance erases the sonic portion of the work’s documentation. The visual listening presented in Deafman Glance offers audience members a glance into Andrews’s perspective of the world and becomes the guiding concept of both the televised and installation adaptations of the work. Watching Television Figure 3: Sheryl Sutton in televised Deafman Glance. Photo courtesy of The Watermill Center. In 1981, the murder-scene of Deafman Glance was excerpted and adapted to become a twenty-seven-minute-long work for television. (Figure 3) Produced by the Byrd Hoffman Foundation, Sutton again stars with Jerry Jackson and Rafael Carmona playing the two children. Interestingly, Andrews does not appear in this work, yet remains central to its visual listening style. The televised Deafman Glance contains a nearly identical plot to the silent opera’s prologue. Sutton moves from the kitchen throughout various spaces in a home, murdering two children along the way. Similar to the silent opera, Sutton’s performance works to subvert the stereotype of the black woman as a domestic “mammy” figure. (47) The noticeable lack of remorse and almost-emotionless murders are emphasized through intense repetition, focused shots, and intensified sound. Not a word of dialogue is uttered, and this silence suggests Sutton’s rejection of her role as mother figure. The performance is filled with paradoxes: the events are terrifying but not violent, characters are both real and symbols of reality, pacing reduces action to abstraction, and morality and mortality are ambiguous. Within this dreamscape scene, gesture, vision, and sound collide to become a reflection on and refraction of a dark American history interlaced with racism and prejudice. Sutton’s performance, as mediated through the camera lens, becomes an undoing of stereotypes created through the white gaze of the late-twentieth-century avant-garde cast upon her and her character. Despite the performance’s intent, however, critics reacted negatively regarding Sutton’s performance. Amy Taubin questioned, “What does it then mean to present without any critical context a black woman as a totally omnipotent figure, with complete power over life and death?” (48) Furthermore, others negatively critiqued the work’s depiction of a black woman enacting a stereotypically violent scene. The implications of race within Deafman Glance demands further research, and points to the work’s relationship to the “identity politics” movement of 1970s. Despite the consistency in plot to the prologue of the theatre production, the televised mediality of the performance has distinct implications for viewers. The New York Times “Television Week” reads the following: There will be sound but no dialogue in ‘Deafman Glance,’ which will be this week’s presentation on the “Matters of Life and Death” series Sunday at 11 P.M. on Channel 13. Described as “a gothic video-drama,” the half-hour work uses sound effects, as well as time and space, light and movement, in lieu of spoken words to recount a stylized tale of murder. (49) The televised adaptation of Andrews and Wilson’s silent opera harnesses the medium of video to amplify division, difference and multiplication within the experience of multisensorial listening. By segmenting, narrowing in, further stylizing, and more directly navigating viewers’ experiences, the televised production becomes Wilson’s first aestheticized interpretation of Andrews’s experience. The theatre performance of Deafman Glance provided the ground for Wilson’s interrogation of video, even as the televised production worked to challenge and extend the terms of the live work. In these ways, Wilson’s televised production is bound to the terms of performance, which the work has developed through radical steps into and out of these media. Samuel Weber argues that television’s operation confuses the relationship between representation and its object. In bringing events “closer,” television sets before the viewer not simply the reproduction of the distant object but a mode of perception. (50) In this operation, Weber proposes that television “transports visions as such and sets it immediately before the viewer. It entails not merely a heightening of the naturally limited powers of sight with respect to certain distant objects: it involves a transmission or transposition of vision itself.” (51) Figure 4: Pre-production storyboard of televised Deafman Glance. Photo courtesy of The Watermill Center. This “transposition of vision” is evident in the planning of the television production. Pre-production storyboards from the Watermill Center Archive are timestamped and carefully illustrate each still of the production highlighting the highly visual listening style of the production. In fact, only one initial sound—that of running water—is indicated in the storyboard. (Figure 4) The opening moments of the piece orient audience members to a stylized, very intentional viewpoint. Intensified sounds of birds chirping and running sink water open the performance with a close shot of Sutton’s back to the viewer as she presumably looks out of a window. The camera momentarily follows her line of gaze but redirects down to her hand which slowly and carefully turns off the sink. She continues washing and drying dishes with the sounds of the cloth wiping each plate noticeably intensified. Here, each action performed by Sutton is matched with an intensified sound of the task literally at hand. The gestural, visual, and sonic collide into one creating a close-up and sonically amplified view for viewers. In a 1970 interview, Wilson speaks of Andrews’s experience hearing. He refers to this mode of listening as “seeing-hearing” noting, He [Andrews] developed another sense of seeing-hearing that, that’s very amazing—his association with color or light with people is—just amazing, amazing—and he always, if he wants to—if he wants to tell me about someone he doesn’t know how to write their name or spell their name he can draw some symbol or some meaning, that you know who that person is or what it is. (52) Through video and post-production processing, the multisensorial, “seeing-hearing” experience is edited and reimagined by Wilson. The viewer’s gaze nearly becomes the tactile experience of Sutton’s actions. Listening, feeling, seeing, touching, and resonating coalesce in Wilson’s stylized interpretation of the multisensory listening experience. The televised production continues to explore this seeing-hearing relationship with the opening of the fridge, pouring of milk, pacing throughout the space, reading of pages, drinking of milk, and killings. The murderous act is repeated twice with amplified sounds and close-up shots. Only with Sutton’s stabbing of each child can non-diegetic, foreboding cello music be heard. Existing outside of the television production’s visual landscape, these musical moments create an alternative space where hearing beyond gestural, object-relationality is possible. Sound within the televised production is closely linked to the visual except in the musical, ineffable moments of murder. Viewing the Gallery Figure 5: Installation view, Robert Wilson: Deafman Glance , Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, September 24 - November 13, 2010. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © Robert Wilson. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York The televised production would later be reimagined as a video installation in several gallery spaces. Within the context of the exhibition Robert Wilson’s Vision , Deafman Glance became a portion of a video installation. (Figure 5) The show was organized as a traveling tour, first opening in Boston and thereafter Houston and San Francisco. The Epilogue: Video Room featured five video works that Wilson created since 1978, including Deafman Glance . The space featured several monitors each paired with nearly seven-foot tall, white Wilson-chairs. Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston writes of the chairs that “Wilson designed [these] as surrogate viewers.” (53) These chairs remarkably resemble magnified versions of the hanging chair Andrews sits in throughout the silent opera. Visitors of the gallery are placed within a noticeably uncomfortable space forced to either gaze from behind the large, looming chairs or strain their necks as they wedge in front of the chairs to view the screens. The chairs, which serve as surrogate viewers, block and nearly physically disable gallery visitors. As viewers struggle to navigate the space and overcome obstacles, the videos play on loop creating an overlay of sound for visitors. Notably, the entrance and three additional rooms of the exhibition were designed with an accompanying sound environment by sound artist, Hans Peter Kuhn. While the rest of the exhibition featured a sound environment, the five video projects were placed separately as an Epilogue. To prevent their soundtracks from undermining Kuhn’s sound environments, and their televised images from interfering with the free flow of visitors through the spaces, the videos were shown separately. This intentionally created a multilayered video-sound installation separate from the larger exhibition. In 1993 and again in 2010, a solo video installation of Deafman Glance was exhibited at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City. (Figure 6) Similar to the Epilogue: Video Room in Robert Wilson’s Vision , the exhibition again featured monitors paired with elongated chairs, only this time Deafman Glance was exclusively played on all monitors. In 1993, New York Times ’s Charles Hagen noted, perhaps not in the best terms, “These constructions suggest dunces’ chairs, for slow learners to sit in while they struggle to understand the dark deeds portrayed in the tape.” (54) Whether interpreted as figures of disability, surrogate viewers, or performers in their own right, the chairs alter viewers’ physical encounter with and perception of the work. Here, a complex experience of encountering the art object, the space, and the viewers’ own body is carefully at play. Notably in the installation, the videos play on the six monitors at a three-second delay causing not only an undulation of images, but also a rippling, overlay of sound. The placement of the six monitors operating at various playback times in a single installation serves to amplify the “vibrational acoustic” that video artist Bill Viola has suggested marks the “real-time” operation of the video technology. Viola notes, “All video has its roots in the live. This vibrational acoustic character of video as a virtual image is the essence of its ‘liveness.’ Technologically, video has evolved out of sound.”(55) In Viola’s view, video is an intrinsically multisensorial media. In addition to temporal manipulation, sound is aesthetically manipulated yet again through looped layering further reinforcing sound’s secondary importance to gesture and vision in the exhibition. Once again Wilson creates a space in which the audience is forced to choose where and how they focus their attention. Listening, feeling, seeing, touching, and resonating all became possible modes of interacting with the space, however, a certain discomfort remains hyper-present. Staging the gallery space as inaccessible and overstimulating can be viewed as Wilson’s reflection on the experience of disability. The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston writes of the video installation: Wilson claims that he has never understood the murder scene from ‘Deafman Glance,’ which may explain why he returns to it as he does. It is the clearest example of an involvement with relativity in his art. He insists that meaning depends on so many factors that it [is] pointless to ascribe single interpretation—however obvious it might seem—to a given work of art. Things are perceived differently depending upon the time, space, and frame or context in which they are presented. One intention of all Wilson’s art is to stretch our awareness of these conditions: he wants to teach us to listen with our whole bodies, as a deaf person must, and not only with our ears; and to see with a similarly expanded sensibility. (56) Each iteration of Deafman Glance explores Andrews’s multisensory experiences of sound as a d/Deaf individual. Visuals construct an aural image for the audience of the staged production, unlike in traditional experiences of theatre and opera. Wilson’s critical move produces a shift in audience perception enabling viewers to experience a multisensorial interpretation of listening. Gestural expression and visual cues become the means by which audience members hear Andrews’s perspective as shared through Deafman Glance . Furthermore, adaptations of the initial silent opera, in the form of a televised production and gallery installation video exhibition, continue to explore the multisensory experiences of sound that characterized the staged production. In each re-mediatization of Deafman Glance , alternative modes of listening and sensing are explored as Wilson’s curation pushes viewers to “listen with their whole bodies.” Endnotes Absolute Wilson , documentary (New Yorker Films, 2017), 38:34–39:00. Ibid., 39:04–39:10. Stefan Brecht, The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978), 429. Ibid., 430. For further reading see Joseph Straus, “Normalizing the Abnormal: Disability in Music and Music Theory,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 59, no. 1 (2006): 113–84; Neil Lerner and Joseph Straus, eds., Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music (New York: Routledge, 2006); Joseph Straus, Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Jessica Holmes, “Expert Listening Beyond the Limits of Hearing: Music and Deafness,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 70, no. 1 (2017): 171–220; and Jonathan Sterne’s Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021). Nizan Shaked, “Conceptual Art and Identity Politics: From the 1960s to the 1990s” in Conceptual Art and Identity Politics (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2017), 27–59. Mara Mills, “Deafness,” in Keywords in Sound (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 51. Doris Fleischer and Frieda Zames, The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). Brecht, 121. Ibid., 122. Telory D. Arendell, “Thinking Spatially, Speaking Visually: Robert Wilson and Christopher Knowles,” International Journal of Music and Performing Arts 3, no. 1 (June 2015): 18. Liam Klenk, “Robert Wilson, The Master of Experimental Theater,” TheatreArtLife (blog), September 9, 2020, https://www.theatreartlife.com/artistic/robert-wilson-the-master-of-experimental-theater/ . Maria Shevtsova, Robert Wilson (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), 4. Arendell, 21. Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, “Hearing Difference: The Third Eye and the Performance of Diversity” (PhD diss., New York University, 1991), 84. Ibid., 85. Bradley Winterton, “Theatre Feature,” Time Out , June 18–24, Columbia University Archives, Wilson Papers. Brecht, 63. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 432. Kochhar-Lindgren, 85. Ibid., 89. Julia Kristeva, Alice Jardine, and Thomas Gora, “Modern Theater Does Not Take (A) Place,” SubStance 6/7, no. 18/19 (Winter–Spring 1977–78): 131–34. Louis Aragon, “An Open Letter to Andrew Breton on Robert Wilson’s ‘Deafman Glance,’” Performing Arts Journal 1, no. 1 (1976): 7. Ibid., 5. Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 10. Aragon, 5. Brecht, 55. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 64. Ibid. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 56. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 77. Ibid. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 81. Ibid. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 74. Kochhar-Lindgren, 85. Amy Taubin, Alive , vol. 1, no. 2 (1981), Columbia University Archives, Wilson Papers. C. Gerald Fraser, “Television Week,” The New York Times , July 11, 1982, sec. A, 2. Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media , 116. Ibid., 116. Brecht, 429. Gallery Notes (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 1991). Charles Hagen, “Art in Review,” The New York Times , December 17, 1993, sec. C, 29. Bill Viola, “The Sound of One Line Scanning,” in Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973–1994 (London: Thames and Hudson and Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 1995), 157. Gallery Notes . About The Author(s) Sophia Cocozza is a PhD Candidate in Music Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on avant-garde installation art, sound, and multisensoriality, using performance, media, and disability studies to explore how ephemeral artistic practices shape accessibility and audience experience. Robert Wilson Yearbook The Robert Wilson Yearbook, published annually by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, offers a dedicated platform for scholarly and creative engagement with the life, artistry, and enduring legacy of Robert Wilson (1941–2025), one of the most original visionaries in contemporary theatre and performance. The Yearbook seeks to explore and expand upon Wilson’s groundbreaking approaches to staging, lighting, movement, and visual composition. Each issue will feature a diverse range of content—including original essays, critical commentary, archival materials, artist reflections, and photography—examining facets of Wilson’s multifaceted practice across genres, eras, and geographies. The Robert Wilson Yearbook is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - This Issue “Going on a Journey”: Space, Time, and Experience in Robert Wilson’s Installations and Museum Interventions Re-Viewing Stefan Brecht’s The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson from a (B.) Brechtian Perspective Towards a Formalist Ritualistic Theatre: An Artaudian Reading of Robert Wilson’s Aesthetics The Theatre of Autobio-hetero-thanato-graphic: The Life and Death of Marina Abramović Time’s Shadows: Crisis of Subjectivity and Reconciled Concord in Robert Wilson’s Performative Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets They Asked Me to Draw a City: Postdramatic Imaginings in Robert Wilson’s Direction of Strindberg’s A Dream Play Robert Wilson's Oedipus: The Postdramatic Journey of the Oedipus Story from Sophocles through Freud Robert Wilson and Norway Robert Wilson’s Art of Senses and Emotions Listening to Deafman Glanc Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken Thinking in Structures: Working as a Dramaturg with Robert Wilson Bertolt Brecht and Robert Wilson: The Dialectical Triad of Playwright, Director and Berliner Ensemble Actors in Wilson’s The Threepenny Opera Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Robert Wilson Yearbook Volume 1 Visit Journal Homepage Thinking in Structures: Working as a Dramaturg with Robert Wilson Konrad Kuhn By Published on September 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Thinking in Structures: Working as a Dramaturg with Robert Wilson As a longstanding collaborator of Robert Wilson in the field of dramatic theatre and opera, I have always been amazed by his special approach to a given subject. Whether it be a classical or modern drama, a production based on a theme to be developed freely, or an opera, the first thing Bob examines or invents is the structure. One example is when Bob started working on Einstein on the Beach together with Philip Glass in the spring of 1975. All they had was the title. An intriguing title. It was clear that in some way this “opera” (I’ll come back to what the term opera means for Bob) was going to deal with Albert Einstein as a seminal figure. Einstein’s discoveries about the relation between time and space, known as the “theory of relativity,” undoubtedly changed the world. Among their consequences were the invention of the atomic bomb and the Apollo mission to the moon. Einstein would be the subject. Einstein was also a musician. There was no text, no plot, no biographical storyline. The character of Einstein was to be represented as a solo violinist in the orchestra pit. The role has often been interpreted by a woman, wearing a wig and mustache. The violinist, regardless of gender, would always be recognizable as Albert Einstein. The first thing Bob and Philip Glass did was set up a structure, asking “How many parts is our opera going to have? What will be the duration of each part?” They ended up with a design for the time structure, giving each part a precise length—the first act was to be, for instance, forty-two minutes long, the second one fifty-three minutes, etc. There would be what Bob called “knee plays” in between, which were short scenes that served as junctions between the acts. The next step would be for Bob to draw sketches of the set. Glass would then put the sketches on the music stand of his grand piano and start composing. Still no lyrics, no libretto, nor anything resembling the two. In fact, at some point in the completed score, the chorus was given only numbers to sing. No other text was available: “one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. . . .” It is only at this point that Christopher Knowles came into play, improvising stretches of text for certain scenes. They were cascades of words sounding much like the ones pioneering Dadaists like Hugo Ball or Kurt Schwitters invented. Another element that was added was choreography by Lucinda Childs. The result of all of these elements was a landmark production that would have a tremendous impact on western theatre. A word about the term opera : Bob would say: “ Opera comes from the Latin word for ‘work’: ‘opus.’ That’s what theatre is for me.” When Bob started creating his first works, they had no text nor music. He would call them “silent operas.” An example is his Deafman Glance , which premiered in 1971. When describing this form of opera, he would quote John Cage: “The most beautiful music can be found in silence.” During this period of Bob’s work, he declined all offers to stage existing plays. When he met Eugène Ionesco in Paris after the Deafman Glance made a splash in France (titled in French Le regard du sourd ), Ionesco asked Bob to stage his Rhinoceros . It would be forty years later that Bob would take up the proposal: a production in the Romanian city of Craiova in 2014. It was a production I had the privilege to be part of as a member of the team. To avoid what Bob would call “ping-pong dialogue,” he introduced the figure of a narrator who recited most of the text. Simultaneously, the actors played the scenes in silence. The desired result was a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt or “distancing effect.” Brecht had always been a strong influence for Bob. It was not, therefore, unusual that he did so many productions at the Berliner Ensemble, the theatre Brecht founded in Berlin. Among these productions was his acclaimed The Treepenny Opera . A narrator figure breaks the fourth wall: he addresses the audience directly and doesn’t try to be in character. The same applied to another production I collaborated with Bob on: Sophocles’ Oedipus . The special challenge was to bring this ancient Greek tragedy to the Teatro Olimpico, the first roofed indoor theatre of the modern age, built by Italian architect Andrea Palladio in the city of Vicenza. The theatre opened in 1585 with a production of this very play by Sophocles. The set represented the city of Thebes with its seven gates—a set which is still in place. Of course, this set is now part of a museum; you are not permitted to come any closer to it than one meter. Bob staged a completely new version of Sophocles’ play on another stage that was positioned in front of the 1585 set. Since the Palladio theatre is modeled on the ancient Greek amphitheater, the decision was made to present the production first at the Teatro Grande of Pompey–a performance space dug out of the ashes of the Vesuvian eruption in 79 C.E. Later it was transferred not only to Vicenza, but also to the ancient amphitheater of Epidaurus in Greece. In order to avoid dialogue, I proposed reversing the dramaturgy of the tragedy. Instead of Oedipus discovering his past bit by bit through the questioning of people (the “ping-pong dialogue” Bob wanted to avoid), we told the story of the original myth chronologically starting with Oedipus’ childhood, followed by the oracle foretelling that Oedipus was going to kill his father, and so on. I took only Sophocles’ original text (in an early twentieth-century Italian translation) without adding a single word. The text was there but not used as dialogue. What Bob did first was to determine a structure. There were to be five acts; the duration of each was decided without knowing how the parts would correspond to each other in the overall structure. Then these five parts were ultimately placed in relation to each other: the first was echoed in the fifth, the second in the fourth, the third positioned at the center. The five acts were freely improvised during a staging workshop at the Watermill Center in New York. Only when the structure had been established did I suggest elements of the text for each scene, which again would be spoken by a narrator. The titular character was played by a dancer. A typical approach to designing the structure of a production involves determining some of the following features: Is a scene (or part) calm or vivid in relation to the others? Is it peaceful or violent? Bright or dark? Fast or slow? Does it accelerate or slow down? Is it crowded or solitary? Is the process deductive or additive? In one scene of Oedipus , for example, the dancers carried folding stairs onto the stage building several rows that were later destroyed by Oedipus in an outburst of despair: the climax of the show. Most dramaturgs, especially in the German-speaking countries, tend to concentrate first on the literary text, the musical genre and specific form, or the historical, cultural and artistic background of a subject. Robert Wilson takes a more abstract approach. What he always explores first is the basic structure of the production—visually, dramatically, and musically. In Bob’s words: “Many stage directors tend to study only the text, trying to stage a play or an opera from there. In Western culture, as André Malraux has put it, theatre ‘has been drowned by literature.’ Therefore, it is a shock for the audience if the other elements of theatre are treated as being equally important. Take Balinese theatre, the Indian Katakali, the Peking Opera or the Nô theatre of Japan: they’re all about form.” When conceiving a theatrical production, establishing a structure is a creative process in its own right. In the case of a new opera it can be discussed together with the composer. It precedes the content that this structure is going to be filled with. This may seem arbitrary, but it is always linked to a deep understanding of the subject. When we start discussing an existing work or a subject to draw a new work from, the one question Bob always puts forth is: “What is it about? Say it in one sentence.” A difficult task for a dramaturg like me. We tend to make long speeches. . . . This was not possible with Bob. There are exceptions to this process, however. I first met Bob back in 2010 at the Zurich Opera House. I had admired his work for decades, but never had the chance to work with him. I was appointed by the house’s management to act as his dramaturg for the production of Bellini’s Norma . Having heard that Wilson has a tendency of being shy with a new collaborator he doesn’t know yet, I resolved before the first meeting not to say a word. When we were all seated around a long table, together with the whole team, he put forth the question: “What is the overture of Norma about?” No one dared to answer. After a long silence, I plucked up courage and began to talk. I said, the whole story of this opera is a confrontation between the male principle represented by a beam of sunlight and the female principle metaphorically expressed by the moon—Norma’s famous prayer “Casta Diva” is addressed to the goddess of the moon, whereas the belligerent “Guerra” chorus conjures the help of the Sun, a male god. Musically, the basic contrast between the two can be found already in the overture. While I was pointing out which sections of the overture stood for the two different principles, Bob had taken his pencil and started drawing. After ten minutes I finished speaking. He passed over to me a series of sketches picturing what would happen in front of the closed curtain during the overture and asked: “Do you think this will work?” “Perfectly,” I said enthusiastically. He had translated what I had said into images. The male principle was represented by straight lines, the female principle by circles, with Norma in the center of it. Here’s another example from the theatre-with-music genre. In 2015, we did a production called Adam’s Passion . It was based on music by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. The venue was the Noblessner Foundation in Tallinn, a former submarine shipyard: a hall measuring 40 meters by 60. An enormous space. Bob had met Pärt at the Vatican when they were both invited for an audience with the Pope. Bob said: “I’ve always admired your music. I would love to use it for a stage production.” Pärt answered: “I’ve always admired your theatre. Please feel free to use whatever you like of it.” During the workshop in Watermill, we listened to a variety of pieces by Pärt. I informed Bob of their structure. In fact, Pärt’s composing methods are strongly based on very abstract formal principles. One example is Tabula Rasa , a composition from 1977. It is structured, among other things, by a chord on the prepared piano that is played eight times—each section opened by this chord is twice as long as the previous. Accordingly, the moments when you hear the chord are stretched out in time. This is something Bob can immediately relate to. We also used a choral piece called Adam’s Lament based on a text by the Russian monk Silouan. The set consisted of a stage with a cyclorama as backdrop (typical for Bob) and a sort of narrow runway stretching out into the audience. The chorus was placed behind the audience in an upper floor gallery. The main character identified as “A Man” was again a dancer; in fact, it was the same artist who interpreted Oedipus : Michael Theophanous. He was naked. During the twenty minutes this section of the production lasted, he walked in slow motion from far upstage to the very top of the runway where he picked up a tree branch with leaves for the next part. Adam’s Lament tells the story of Adam after he has been driven out of paradise. The chorus expresses his feelings of guilt. Arvo Pärt attended both the final rehearsal and the opening night. Subsequently, he came to me, extremely upset, and asked: “Why did you change it? At the end of Adam’s Lament , Adam was kneeling down asking God for forgiveness—it didn’t feel like that tonight!” I said: “Well, all the actor does is pick up a tree branch—in the rehearsal, he did it the same way as he did it tonight.” Arvo, who is a man of profound Christian faith, said: “He was not asking God to pardon him?” “No,” I said, “he was picking up a branch.” And the composer answered: “Just as good.” This story shows how audience members have their own associations about what they hear and see. As Bob would say: “I never try to tell the audience what they are supposed to feel or think. I am not interested in psychology on stage. I have no ‘message.’ It’s not about ‘interpretation.’ I don’t want to impose an ‘idea’ on the spectator. It’s up to them what they experience. Experience is a way of thinking; Zen philosophy tells us this. I follow what I experience. And I try to stay open.” What a relief it was for the German playwright Heiner Müller when Wilson staged his drama Hamletmachine back in 1986. First presented in New York in English, then in Hamburg in the original German, both productions used students still in drama school. Müller had seen many interpretations of his play, which attempted to make sense of his text, which is full of allusions, full of latent meaning. A very dense text, it is highly concentrated. Most of these stagings merely illustrated the text without contributing anything new. What did Bob do? He invented a choreography of movements in a set with nothing but tables and chairs. And a tree. Then he had this pattern repeated three times, each time rotating the set by 90 degrees. The audience then could see the identical movements of the group of actors four times, but each time was from a different perspective. The production had a totally abstract structure; at first glance it appeared to have no relation to the play. Yet it resonated with the text in many ways, leaving the audience the freedom to pursue their own associations. Regarding the text, when Bob was asked by the Schauspielhaus in Düsseldorf to create a new piece based on Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray , he approached US author Darryl Pinckney. Darryl had collaborated with Bob for many decades on different projects, among them a monologue in 1989 based on the novel Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Bob knew that it was out of the question to transform the plot of the novel into dialogue. Instead there was to be only one actor and that was Christian Friedel. Friedel was known in the US as a film actor in such movies as The Zone of Interest . Darryl drew phrases from the novel, turning them around in many ways. He also used extracts from Oscar Wilde’s letters and poems by Wilde’s lover Alfred Douglas. The general idea was to tell a story about the painter and his model. Bob also incorporated the story of the famous painter Francis Bacon and his lover George Dyer, a burglar he surprised when Dyer was breaking into his studio. Instead of calling the police, he asked him to become his model. The text Darryl created with Bob had three parts. In the first part, he used only sentences in the past tense and the third-person singular: “He fell through the window and it gave him new life.” In the second part, all sentences were in the present tense and the first-person singular: “I look in the litter of tin tubes and dry brushes, looking for my maker.” And the third part, still in the present tense, was in the second-person singular: “When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting.” Thus these very basic structures—the grammatical syntax—came to define the text. To conclude my remarks, let me draw your attention to another aspect of Robert Wilson’s work. He stated: “My theatre is a formal theatre. For me, in theatre all elements are equally important: movement, dance, gesture, costume, make-up, architecture, sculpture, design, light, words, music . . . all the arts come together in theatre. You may call it Gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art] like Richard Wagner did.” This means that for Bob, each of these elements stands for itself and is treated independently. It also means: no illustration. What one element expresses does not have to be doubled by another element. If a scene is tragic, maybe the actor will play it with a smile and the lighting will be bright. As Bob says: “Black can only be seen against white.” Life consists of contradictions. A Wilson production is, therefore, much more “real” than the many performances aiming at “realism.” Often I have heard Bob say to his actors: “The stage is not a bus stop. You can’t stand or walk on it the same way you do in the street.” True indeed. About The Author(s) Konrad Kuhn studied in Berlin. He has served as a dramaturg, among others, in Vienna, Munich, Zurich and since 2015 to date in Frankfurt. He was invited to festivals in Paris, Salzburg and Bayreuth, or the State Operas in Berlin and Vienna. In 2010, he started working with Robert Wilson on numerous productions. Robert Wilson Yearbook The Robert Wilson Yearbook, published annually by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, offers a dedicated platform for scholarly and creative engagement with the life, artistry, and enduring legacy of Robert Wilson (1941–2025), one of the most original visionaries in contemporary theatre and performance. The Yearbook seeks to explore and expand upon Wilson’s groundbreaking approaches to staging, lighting, movement, and visual composition. Each issue will feature a diverse range of content—including original essays, critical commentary, archival materials, artist reflections, and photography—examining facets of Wilson’s multifaceted practice across genres, eras, and geographies. The Robert Wilson Yearbook is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - This Issue “Going on a Journey”: Space, Time, and Experience in Robert Wilson’s Installations and Museum Interventions Re-Viewing Stefan Brecht’s The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson from a (B.) Brechtian Perspective Towards a Formalist Ritualistic Theatre: An Artaudian Reading of Robert Wilson’s Aesthetics The Theatre of Autobio-hetero-thanato-graphic: The Life and Death of Marina Abramović Time’s Shadows: Crisis of Subjectivity and Reconciled Concord in Robert Wilson’s Performative Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets They Asked Me to Draw a City: Postdramatic Imaginings in Robert Wilson’s Direction of Strindberg’s A Dream Play Robert Wilson's Oedipus: The Postdramatic Journey of the Oedipus Story from Sophocles through Freud Robert Wilson and Norway Robert Wilson’s Art of Senses and Emotions Listening to Deafman Glance Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken Thinking in Structures: Working as a Dramaturg with Robert Wilson Bertolt Brecht and Robert Wilson: The Dialectical Triad of Playwright, Director and Berliner Ensemble Actors in Wilson’s The Threepenny Opera Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

L. Bailey McDaniel Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 2 Visit Journal Homepage Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. L. Bailey McDaniel By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation . Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. Julius B. Fleming Jr.’s Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation is an invaluable contribution to, among other fields, civil rights historiography, theatre studies, Black performance studies, and African American history. With painstaking documentation supporting shrewd analyses, Fleming maintains that the Civil Rights Movement was more than a fight for social justice, but additionally a conflict over temporality—a battle whose victors often violently decide(d) who must wait, for how long, and under what threat. Fleming provides an important rethinking of civil rights studies by locating Black theatre and performance as central to “the cultural and political fronts” of the movement (2). Including but also moving beyond understandings of performance as an abstracted concept encompassing marches, speeches, sit-ins, or media, Black Patience reveals how Black theatre functioned as an effective instrument with which artists and activists redefined a racialized notion of time, a framework shaped by the anti-Black projects of white supremacy. Rather than a neutral backdrop to history, Fleming’s construct of racialized time denotes deferral, delay, and gradualism, a chronology that dictates a “waiting” that is “weaponized as a technology of anti[B]lack violence and civic exclusion” (1). 1 Fleming’s central claim is that the Civil Rights Movement’s focus on immediacy — a theoretical and acted-upon notion of “Freedom Now” — is more than just a demand for equality and justice; it is a direct confrontation with a white supremacist temporal order he terms “[B]lack patience.” The ecology of [B]lack patience encompasses the long history of enforced waiting, deference, and all forms of endured suffering imposed on Black bodies from the Middle Passage to twenty-first-century Liberals’ calls for moderation. Black patience warrants attention, Fleming writes, because “the overriding ambition that drives the racial project of black patience is its singular desire for Black people to suffer, and to do so without complaint” (241). Black Patience confidently demonstrates how Black theatre achieved victories in the Civil Rights Movement’s (contingent and incomplete) battle by staging “now” not as a stagnant passage to an always-deferred future, but an immediate place to act, without waiting, and without patience. Working deeply across broad archives, Fleming considers Black theatre and cultural production across diverse geographies and theatrical spaces illuminating how Black theatre enabled civil rights audiences to feel political time differently and — at its best — cultivated collective action. Among the valuable sources included in his archive are the Free Southern Theater; works from Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Alice Childress, Douglas Turner Ward, Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes, and Duke Ellington; and ephemera such as programs, oral histories, and reviews. Fleming’s Introduction establishes the book’s terminology and its multi-disciplinary stakes while unpacking a compelling methodology. He begins with an examination of Fannie Lou Hamer’s inspiring response to a 1964 performance of Waiting for Godot, during which “Hamer and . . . the actors used the body in performance to unsettle modernity’s racialized logics of waiting” (3). Fleming invokes a crucial theatrical moment that crystallizes the book’s arguments: anti-Blackness functions through forcible delay, and the theatre acts as a critical tool for rejecting white supremacist sanctions of Black patience. Chapter One effectively reframes the Emancipation Proclamation’s one-hundred-year anniversary as a temporal and political battleground. Investigating Emancipation’s centennial, Fleming argues that the 1963 commemorations revealed the white supremacist preference for deferral. Relying on a rich body of evidence that includes presidential speeches, pageants, and theatrical works, this chapter demonstrates how the centennial simultaneously 1) proclaimed freedom and 2) demanded Black restraint. In exposing this contradiction, Fleming argues that civil rights activism must be understood as a struggle over time itself . Building on his historicization of Emancipation as incomplete and temporally deferred, Fleming's second chapter performs a compelling case study in its examination of the Free Southern Theatre (FST) and productions across the south. Founded in 1963, the FST performed in churches, fields, and community centers under dangerous conditions of state and civilian surveillance/threat. Fleming reveals how the FST effectively redrew the spatial and temporal map of the Civil Rights Movement by bringing theatre directly into organizing spaces. He further outlines the ways that the FST productively reduced the space between art and activism in ways that presaged the political work of the Black Arts Movement that would follow and, as a result, enabled audiences to inhabit a revolutionary present. This chapter also provides a meaningful meditation on Fleming’s understanding of Afro-presentism . Alongside the call for “freedom now,” Afro-presentism concretizes a “refusal to accede to the temporal demands of [B]lack patience” (26). Fleming points out that “far from a cure-all for the violences of [B]lack patience,” Afro-presentism instead conjures “seizing and enjoying the good life in the here and now, knowing that in the context of anti-[B]lackness the future is always a zone of precarity” (128). Fleming impressively complicates his established analyses of racialized time with his third chapter, asking us to consider whose time counts more than others. Providing a needed intervention into queer temporalities within civil rights scholarship, Chapter Three rightly maintains that the temporal politics of the Civil Rights Movement cannot be separated from gender, sexuality, and embodied desire. With its consideration of Baraka and Paul Carter Harrison, among others, Fleming demonstrates how queer temporalities disrupted the respectability scripts that more typically accompanied anti-Black/white supremacist appeals for patience. Considering how desire, vulnerability, and intimacy potentially complicate, if not intensify, the (hoped for) immediacy of liberation, this chapter expands the archive of civil rights performance beyond heteronormative narratives. Turning to the “territory of erotic desire,” Fleming recognizes “that [B]lack patience not only engenders anti-Blackness but also (re)produces the cultural and political logic of heteropatriarchy” (133). Insightfully contrasting theater with photography and television, Chapter Four argues that the present tense of theatre can productively disrupt the (false/misleading) narratives of gradual progress that visual documentation can unintentionally reinforce. In addition to its stunning contribution to theorizations of racialized feeling, theatre, and visual culture, this chapter also identifies a parallel phenomenon to Black patience taking place as Black people are urged to be patient: white impatience — a tetchy temporal intolerance that can be seen in white critical reception, photography, and spectatorship. Fleming successfully maps the ways that white publics express irritation, fatigue, or hostility toward Black demands for immediacy. Or, as Fleming savvily explains, by reframing “the problem of race” as “a problem of whiteness,” Black theatre artists “recalibrated the visual economy of the Civil Right movement . . . and shift[ed] their audiences’ gazes from injured [B]lack bodies to white people” (37). Alongside its consideration of Hansberry, Baldwin, Childress, and Ward, this chapter reveals how Civil Rights theatre made racialized affect visually legible while it simultaneously critiqued the policing function of white impatience. With a performance analysis previously applied to live theater in earlier chapters, Black Patience 's final chapter examines the performance of waiting in live political events such as sit-ins. This (productively) strategic waiting seizes back temporal control and weaponizes the (deferred) time meant to discipline, exclude, and control Black bodies. With this pivot, Fleming maintains, Black protest effectively transformed patience into a consciously-employed, tactical practice during sitins, freedom songs, and jailins. This determinedly-invoked patience converts the notion of waiting into a mode of pressure and endurance that exposes the anti-Black violence of statemandated, white supremacist delay. In pointing out how activists also weaponized stillness/duration to force public confrontation with anti-Black racism, Fleming’s final chapter re-presents Black patience as performance that can both dismantle and repurpose temporal categories off the stage as well as on. Black Patience skillfully reframes the Civil Rights Movement as a performance-driven struggle over time, a struggle shaped by questions of how long equality and justice will take and how demands for patience (if not enforced waiting) work as tools in a white supremacist control of time. Challenging historiography that heavily credits civil rights momentum to photography and television, Fleming instead foregrounds the liveness, risk, and collective spectatorship of live performance as powerful engines driving political feeling and action. The book’s successful theoretical synthesis of dramaturgy, theatre history, geography, affect, and temporal theory offers a model for studying performance within social movements that will benefit educators, their syllabi, and scholars far beyond theatre or civil rights studies. Footnotes: 1. Throughout this review I capitalize the word “Black” when it refers to the culture, history, and people of a shared racial identity, as opposed to a color; any changes to Fleming’s original are noted with brackets. References Footnotes About The Author(s) L. BAILEY MCDANIEL is an Associate Professor at Oakland University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses from anti-racist and anticolonialist contexts. Her pedagogy and scholarship focus on African-American drama and performance, while also considering intersectional explorations of race, gender, sexuality, class, and (dis)abilities. Her first book (Re)Constructing Maternal Performance in Twentieth-Century American Drama (Palgrave Macmillan) explores the discursive and material intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and performances of motherhood in US Drama. Her second book (in progress) investigates the furtive interconnectedness of trauma, resilience, and recovery as explored in African-American performance. 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 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Reflections on Fundamental Principles An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T The Wild Duck Picnic at Hanging Rock Last Call: A Play with Cocktails The Dinosaurs The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Khalid Y. Long and Le’Mil Eiland Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 2 Visit Journal Homepage 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” Khalid Y. Long and Le’Mil Eiland By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF William Edward Burghardt Du Bois is regarded for his astute sociological insights into black life, as reflected in his various publications. His philosophical interventions, through publications such as The Souls of Black Folks (1903), the theory of double consciousness, and the concept of the Talented Tenth—among many others—enrich the sociological, political, and intellectual histories worldwide. His community leadership with organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.) and circulation of N.A.A.C.P.’s The Crisis magazine wed his scholarly investments with the Black public intellectual tradition. Negro drama, as it was termed at the time Du Bois wrote, was a particular means of reframing the perception of Black people in America. In July 1926, Du Bois published his essay “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement.” In it, he codified his vision for “four fundamental principles” of a “real Negro Theatre”: it must be about Black life, written by Black authors, performed for Black audiences, and situated within Black communities. These principles challenged prevailing theatrical norms and directly confronted the commercialization and racial gatekeeping of the broader American stage. According to Tejumola Olaniyan, Du Bois’s manifesto “challenged the reigning fashion of ‘Negro Theater’” written and packaged by whites, and also the idea of audience and related theatrical success defined merely commercially, within the asphyxiating parameters of Broadway” ( Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance 21). Later that year in October, Du Bois published a second critical article titled “Criteria of Negro Art” in which he insisted that “all Art [i.e., true art] is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists ... I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.” 1 By establishing himself as a progenitor of a Black aesthetic centered on the social responsibility of Black art, especially during the height of the New Negro period, Du Bois would inspire theatre scholars, critics, educators, and playwrights to consider the role and function of theatre in the decades that followed.  Du Bois’s activism and scholarship offer an opportunity to center the conditions of Black life and the afterlives of the New Negro era. Although Du Bois died on August 27, 1963, his words continue to illuminate and resonate with artists, scholars, and activists today. For example, Clark Atlanta University and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution online newspaper recently reenvisioned Du Bois’s “Exhibit of American Negroes.” In 1900, at the World’s Fair in Paris, Du Bois, along with Daniel Murray and Thomas J. Calloway, compiled photographs of Black people and visual data in the wake of the Civil War. In 2026, the university’s exhibit and the Atlanta newspaper reproduced images from the exhibit alongside contemporary photographs of Black folks and current racial demographics. These photographs, alongside sociological data, visualize and collapse the boundaries between art and sociology. We’d argue that theatre, during the turn of the twentieth century and today, also stitches these two disciplines together as a continuation of Du Bois’s cultural investments.  Du Bois’s four principles on Negro theatre are arguably the most significant and often cited assertion that this theatre is “About us, By us, For us, and Near us.” Du Bois’s proposition repositions caricatures as subjects, passive spectators as playwrights and performers, displaced voyeurs as patrons, and distant destinations for neighborhood establishments. We’d be remiss to ignore the repetition of “us” as a rhetorical device. About us . Du Bois is situating himself in a relationship with the reader(s) to affirm community. By us . Du Bois challenges American individualism in favor of collective participation. For us . Du Bois hailed Black communities with his ideologies on race. Near us . Du Bois acknowledges the importance of shared space, proximity, and immediacy. About us . Du Bois reiterates his priority: the souls of black folks. As the Crisis magazine began the 1920s with a monthly circulation of over 100,000 copies, more than a citation for publication, Du Bois penned an edict on Black theatre. Du Bois offers us, as editors and contributors, and you, as readers, a moment to consider the space between 1926 and today. While some of Du Bois’s evocations are firmly rooted in the early twentieth century, much of his work redirects our attention to pressing concerns for Black theatre today. Although we focus on Du Bois, we also position his works as mediators alongside Alain Locke, Thomas Montgomery Gregory, and countless contributors and patrons of Black theatre and drama in the 1920s. Unlike several of his contemporaries, including Locke and Gregory, Du Bois held a more radical Black philosophy, recognizing the potential of theatre and drama to reshape perceptions of Black people in America. There have been many shifts since Du Bois wrote in 1926. Just as Negro has been refashioned in title and subjectivity to African American and Black, theatrical genres, sensibilities, and genealogies have shifted and multiplied as well. Race and propaganda drama propelled an urgent response to minstrelsy, as post-Black drama built on and pressed beyond the Black Arts Movement. In 1926, Du Bois advocated for a regional theatre movement, through the Krigwa Players’ Little Negro Theatre, to expand across the nation. After over five decades since the end of the Great Migration, when approximately six million people moved across multiple regional destinations to develop a national culture, we can investigate the profile of Black theatre across America. Returning 100 years later to this essential figure and these vital archival documents, this special issue of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre  marks the centenary publication of Du Bois’s “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art.” Across a range of essays, the authors revisit Du Bois’s foundational works and recognize them as theoretical interventions that continue to shape our understanding of Black performance, aesthetics, and cultural politics. Contending with how Du Bois’s essays reverberate today, the articles in this special issue focus on the enduring insistence of his call for art as a bold cultural intervention against an entrenched supremacist order and its pervasive norms. Isaiah Matthew Wooden opens this special issue with his essay, “‘One Great and Fine Mode of Expression’: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre.” Focusing on Du Bois’s resignation from the Krigwa Players and his lifelong reflections on theatre, Wooden reconsiders Du Bois not only as a critic of Black representation but also as a devoted practitioner and theorist of Black drama. Through archival letters, manifestos, and essays, Wooden traces how Du Bois understood drama as a vital mode of collective expression grounded in shared memory and struggle. In her essay, “W.E.B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond,” Kirsten Lee argues that Du Bois envisioned Black theatre not as a localized Harlem phenomenon but as a movement shaped by the demographic and cultural shifts of the Great Migration. Drawing on archival research, the essay shows how the Krigwa model fostered cross-regional collaboration and the development of Black artistic communities across the United States. Kellen Hoxworth’s “An Expansive ‘Us’: W.E.B. Du Bois’s ‘Pan-Negro’ Theatrical Vision” reexamines Du Bois’s theatrical philosophy by placing it within a broader pan-Africanist and internationalist framework. Through close readings of  The Star of Ethiopia  and of Du Bois’s intellectual influence on figures such as Lorraine Hansberry and Alice Childress, the essay shows how his work articulates a transnational conception of Black identity and performance, arguing that Du Bois’s theatre constructs an “expansive us” that bridges Black American experiences with global Black histories and political struggles. In “It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s  The Talented Tenth, ” Kristyl D. Tift examines the evolution and limitations of Du Bois’s “Talented Tenth” theory through a reading of Richard Wesley’s play  The Talented Tenth . Tift highlights Wesley’s engagement with intra-racial class tensions and generational divides. In doing so, she traces Du Bois’s ideological shift from elite-driven racial uplift to a more collective, institutional vision of Black cultural production. Ultimately, Tift positions the play as both a dramatization and a revision of Du Boisian thought, revealing the enduring complexities of race, class, and aspiration. In Jonathan Shandell’s “Reflections on Fundamental Principles,” he revisits Du Bois’s foundational manifesto on Black theatre. Shandell argues that Du Bois’s formulation—“About us, By us, For us, Near us”—remains a vital analytic framework for understanding the historical and contemporary trajectories of Black theatre. The essay foregrounds the collaborative and communal dimensions of theatrical production, emphasizing the centrality of Black audiences and the spatial politics of performance. At the same time, Shandell interrogates the scholar’s positionality, especially his own, in relation to Du Bois’s conception of “us,” ultimately proposingan expanded, more inclusive revelatory perspective. Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green closes this special edition with her article, “Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community.” Drawing on Du Bois’s philosophies and August Wilson’s dramaturgy, Green examines the tensions of teaching Wilson’s American Century Cycle at a predominantly white institution. The essay traces how Du Bois’s principles inspired her to extend Wilson’s work beyond the university into a community-based Freedom School model rooted in mutual aid, intergenerational learning, and Black cultural inheritance. As we look back on the contents of this special issue, we must acknowledge the peculiar position of Black drama and theatre in 2026. Black theatre is currently sandwiched between national accomplishments—such as the recent recognition of numerous Black playwrights and artists with industry accolades like the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in America and The Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Broadway Theatre (Tony Awards)—and a conservative shift in which discussions of race, even in theatre spaces, are framed as culturally adversarial. As a continuation of Du Boisian thought in dialogue with August Wilson’s “The Ground on Which I Stand” and Suzan-Lori Parks’ “New Black Math,” we must contend with the current condition of Black theatre in America NOW . We need a cultural response to inequities in funding streams and institutional support for theatre artists, scholars, and Black brick-and-mortar theatre buildings. We need strategies to address labor precarity and the underrecognized, undercompensated racial labor within performance and educational spaces. We require, in addition to representation, that Black theatre cultural producers have autonomy across the various stages of production to advocate for Black artists and contributors as active participants and partners (not just witnesses and patrons). We desire and deserve sustained dialogue about how Black theatre is taken up, especially by predominantly white educational and industry institutions that, due to power imbalances, continue to shape theatrical training and production practices in ways that can inadvertently diminish the integrity and continuity of our vibrant theatrical traditions. The articles in this special issue take up that charge in distinct yet resonant and imaginative ways, tracing lineages, interrogating institutions, and imagining alternative modes of practice, critique, and sustainability. Together, the authors remind us that Black theatre has never been merely reflective but integral—actively shaping the conditions of its existence. As such, this special issue stands not only as a commemoration but also as a continuation of Du Bois’s call to think and build through the arts. References 1 “The Criteria of Negro Art” was originally presented as an address at the NAACP’s annual conference held in Chicago in June 1926. Footnotes About The Author(s) Khalid Y. Long is the Associate Dean of the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts at Howard University. His books include Contemporary Black Theatre and Performance: Acts of Rebellion, Activism, and Solidarity (Methuen Drama) and August Wilson in Context (Cambridge University Press). He has published in several journals and edited scholarly collections, including  Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre, and Performance; tBTR: the Black Theatre Review; The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT);   Modern Drama ;  Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism; Theatre Topics; Theatre Journal; Theatre, and several edited collections. A freelance dramaturg, he has collaborated with numerous theaters nationwide, partnering with a wide array of theater artists.  Le’Mil L. Eiland is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History at Illinois State University. Eiland is the Director of Graduate Studies and Program Head for the Theatre Studies programs at Illinois State University. Eiland is currently working on his first manuscript, The Black Archives: Fugitive Historiographies . As an interdisciplinary scholar, he studies and researches at the intersections of black cultural production, theatre history, and performance theory. He has publications with the Black Theatre Review , with upcoming publications in the American Theatre magazine and Theatre History Studies . He is a director and movement-based theatre artist whose work centers poetic text, physical storytelling, and imaginative staging. Eiland’s assistant directing credits include the Illinois Shakespeare Festival and the American Players Theatre. As a director, his recent projects include Everybody by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Red by John Logan. 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 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Reflections on Fundamental Principles An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T The Wild Duck Picnic at Hanging Rock Last Call: A Play with Cocktails The Dinosaurs The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Bess Rowen Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 2 Visit Journal Homepage Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T Bess Rowen By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T Bess Rowen Debbie with a D performs in Debbie with a D’s Tennessee with the Tea at the AllWays Lounge in New Orleans in March 2026. Photo: Nick Shackleford. In March of 2026, I had the pleasure of seeing my second Debbie with a D drag show in New Orleans. The first time I had seen her perform was as part of a drag brunch connected to the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival a few years ago, and this year she returned to the festival program with Debbie with a D’s Tennessee with the Tea . This adult Drag Queen Story Hour was produced by The Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans, led by Co-Founding/Producing Artistic Directors Augustin Correro and Nick Shackleford. Drag queens Tara Shay Montgomery, Vantasia Divine, Muffy Vanderbilt III, Kozmik, Laveau Contraire, and Debbie herself each read the plot of a specific Tennessee Williams play before performing a lip sync inspired by the plot. Debbie served as the emcee and also contributed a story herself. After seeing her perform in two shows involving Tennessee Williams, I wanted to ask her more about her connection to theatre and how she sees it connecting to her drag work. And, of course, in the current political climate, I wanted to know more about how being a full-time drag queen feels at this moment. Debbie with a D has received many awards and honors, including two Mardi Gras Bourbon Street Awards, 2026 King Cake Queen, and Gambit ’s #1 Drag Queen in New Orleans. You can also find her in the newest iteration of Queer as Folk . She is not only a celebrated and talented drag queen, but she also has a master’s degree in public health. She is particularly adept at combining her advocacy work in this field with her drag, which is something we discuss at the end of the following interview. We also discuss her theatrical origins, her love of Tennessee Williams, her drag journey, the importance of queer art, and how she came to be a public health drag queen. This interview was conducted via Zoom on April 24 th , 2026. It has been edited for length and clarity. Bess Rowen : Thanks so much for doing this! You had teased a bit of your theatrical past and your involvement with Tennessee Williams, so maybe we could start there? Or maybe how you got into drag? Debbie with a D : I guess the quickest way to go through it all is to start all the way back. I was homeschooled Pre-K through 12 th grade, but I was part of this megachurch. My father was a pastor, and they did huge theatrical productions for Christmas and Easter. And because I was homeschooled, that was my first introduction into a theatrical situation. Of course, I loved it! Once I started college, I still wanted to do like whatever theatre I could get into. But because it wasn’t part of the church and I wasn’t necessarily great because I hadn’t been to acting classes in home school, I was not getting roles in college. But I did do a bunch of theatre classes there, but oddly enough I did not really come across any of Tennessee Williams’s works at that point. BR : I’m not surprised by that. A lot of people don’t actually encounter him in the discipline of Theatre anymore. DwaD : It’s crazy! Because his work is so good. There were a couple other theatre-related things I did along the way. Eventually, I was cast in Picasso at the Lapin Agile in college. After coming out, leaving the church, and finishing college, I was working in a coffee shop—where I actually met my partner. He was in town for a post-bac program to get into medical school in New Orleans. He had already lived in New Orleans, so we always knew that he was going to be coming back. We did long distance for a little bit and then I followed him down here. I went and got my master’s in public health at Tulane. I didn’t want to move solely for a relationship, so I had to do something for myself. That’s why I went back to grad school. All of that time, there was no theatre really in my life. But then I got my day job managing a clinic at Crescent Care. About a year into that job, I started feeling like I had no big projects. I asked myself: What are my interests now? What are my hobbies and art? So I tried out for a play here in New Orleans and started working with a couple of the small production companies. Then I auditioned for a show at Le Petit Theatre and was cast in Jesus Christ Superstar . I was a swing, one of the priests, and an understudy for Jesus. But it was there that I met Augustin Correro and Nick Shackleford, co-founders of the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans. Nick was playing Jesus, and Augustin was the director. I had met Augustin earlier that year as he had come in and interviewed for a job in the clinic. Then, within that year, I auditioned for the show and he hired me. Shortly thereafter, they started the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans. They asked me if I’d be interested in being a production manager. I’d also started doing drag by then. I became the production manager for Small Craft Warnings and The Rose Tattoo in the first two years the company was producing work. BR : Weird Tales was the first thing I saw from Augustin and Nick. And that was before they had a connection with The Lower Depths Theater at Loyola University. DwaD : I had never experienced Tennessee Williams until I was the production manager for the company. And what was the first one they did? Kingdom of Earth ! That was my first experience with Tennessee Williams. I went in not knowing anything. But I came out changed, and deeply feeling things. As someone who, at that point, had experienced lots theatre, it was just one of the most visceral feelings I’ve ever left a theatre feeling. Somehow, Williams makes new what you’ve been feeling your whole life. You think, “How did he put words to that?” BR : I am delighted by that way into Williams! I feel like we often encounter people who love Williams, and even queer people who love Williams, but most people only know the “big three”: A Streetcar Named Desire , The Glass Menagerie , and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof . So, I’m delighted that your intro was Kingdom of Earth and Small Craft Warnings , which are absolutely bread and butter parts of what his entire work means to those of us who love all of it, but now what most people encounter for the first time. Have you ever seen or encountered those big ones that everyone talks about? And what did you think when you saw them? Were you expecting this other version of him and his work from later on in his career? DwaD : I saw Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Le Petit the last time they did it. That was my first time seeing it. My second time seeing Cat was when the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans put it on. BR : Do you have a favorite Williams play? Is Small Craft Warnings your favorite? DwaD : Small Craft Warnings for sure is up there. I also love The Rose Tattoo . I love the scene where Serafina comes in covered in the ashes. Camino Real too. BR : So out there! But also a delight. There’s a one-act version and also a full-length version of Camino Real . The Williamstown Theater Festival did a production with Pamela Anderson this summer, which was the perfect casting that none of us knew we wanted. DwaD : That’s amazing. BR : It’s such a wackadoo play. I don’t know if you know where it comes in his oeuvre, but it’s after Streetcar and before Cat . Williams was convinced that it was going to be his next big hit. And people were like, “What is this?!” They kept putting him in this box of playwrights whose plays are sentimental and realistic. But he was never actually writing that. But Camino Real has these grander themes that I think—for those of us who really dig the later plays—are used to seeing. But boy were his audiences not ready for it when it premiered. DwaD : But maybe they are now . It’s like the original White Lotus ! BR : That’s such a good connection! I have never thought about it like that, but absolutely. Talk about family dynamics gone astray, and failing aristocracy. DwaD: Miserable people that don’t necessarily meet, but then are all in the same station and place. But then: Who’s gonna die ? BR : Is Small Craft Warnings the original White Lotus ? DwaD : I think so. You heard it here first! BR : I think you’re so right that Williams puts words to things that we feel deeply. I think especially as queer people—although I don’t know that we have sole ownership over Williams at this point—we see that he has compassion for all of his characters. And he’s deeply interested in how society treats the most vulnerable. He’s able to really see that and unflinchingly look at that in a way that still makes it seem like there is hope. I’m wondering if you can loop in your fabulous drag work by talking a little more about this latest version of Debbie with a D’s Tennessee with the Tea that I know you’re doing in collaboration with Nick and Augustin. Can you talk a little more about how you got involved in that? DwaD : I’d like to jump back to the bookmark we left on my drag from before. I had just started my day job, finished grad school, and had done the production of Jesus Christ Superstar . After three weeks of intense rehearsals every night after work, and I was exhausted. I loved it, but it wasn’t sustainable and I had to pay off my student loans. So, I let theatre go for a while, but stil attended the various festivals in New Orleans on nights and weekends. But soon I started getting that theatre itch again. And I thought: I’m queer. I could try drag. But I had no clue where to start. It was Vinsantos DeFonte who started the New Orleans Drag Workshop. I had seen a couple of little articles pop up about that. I looked it up and sent him a message to see if I could join the workshop. I ended up being in the eighth cycle of that workshop. That experience gave me knowledge of the drag basics: what I need to purchase, creating a character, and starting on the journey of learning costuming, wigs, and makeup. Because each of those is its own profession! But an eight-week course does not a drag queen make. I started with a booking maybe once or twice a month. But then the pandemic hit and I was locked in my house. I had so much time that I just started practicing a lot of those skills, and thankfully, it went really well. At one point, right before the pandemic hit, Poppy Tooker—an institution in New Orleans—put out a casting call for her Drag Queen Brunch book. It was a Facebook open call, so any drag queen who wanted to be in it could be in it. She could pay $50 for the day for the photo shoot. And I, being a new queen, was like “$50 for a gig? Absolutely!” But I think a lot of the other queens that had been doing it longer were not so impressed. But I lucked out and ended up on the back cover of that book. Then I ended up doing a bunch of brunches with Poppy at Tujague’s, Dickie Brennan’s, and all around New Orleans. So there’s the Vinsantos tie-in, the Nick and Augustin tie-in, and the Poppy Tooker tie-in. Unintentionally, these were my introductions into the Tennessee Williams scene in New Orleans. After the drag brunch book was published, I ended up getting a bunch of bookings, which allowed me to put more money into costuming and better products, and consequently more gigs. Later, I was on the new version of Queer As Folk as an extra in New Orleans, but that paid so much money. They wanted all the local queens to be in the show as regulars to make it feel like New Orleans. That pushed me to take the leap into full-time drag three years ago. BR : And here you are, a multi-award-winning drag queen. Debbie with a D. Photo: Scotty Kirby. DwaD : I still cannot believe it. Through Poppy Tooker, I got involved in some of the Tennessee Williams drag brunches. And Nobu or [Dickie] Brennan’s wanted us to do a Tennessee Williams themed drag brunch. That was the first time I started thinking about what it would look like for a drag queen to interpret Tennessee Williams. I did a mix where I cut in different clips from Streetcar of Blanche saying crazy things into Ava Max’s “Sweet but Psycho.” BR : Yes, I remember that! And one of the other queens had been the runner-up in the Stella Shouting Contest that year, and she did the Stella shout for us. Iconic. DwaD : I think we did that show three times with Poppy. Then Nick and Augustin approached me about doing Tennessee with the Tea in the annual Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival in New Orleans. They were really the visionaries on the project. They approached it as a Drag Queen Story Hour where we would get local playwrights to write reimagined versions of the plays, and then various local queens reading the stories and interpreting them. BR : Now that you’ve gotten to do this show a few times, what’s your favorite play that’s covered in there? And were there plays that you didn’t know before the show? DwaD : At this point, I have seen everything covered in Tennessee with the Tea , so getting to see the drag interpretations has been a lot of fun since I get the references. But not all of the queens doing the interpretations have seen all the plays. Probably most of the queens didn’t really know much about Tennessee Williams other than A Streetcar Named Desire or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof . So, some of them were like, “What the fuck is going on? What is the story here?” BR : Which is a correct response. DwaD : I loved it. It’s been fun to get to watch them know Tennessee Williams in this draggy way for the first time. And then get to explain to them a little bit the plot of each show. BR : I appreciate that when you set up the conceit of the show at the top you say that these are actually not exaggerated versions of the plot. The stories are literally telling the audience the plot, but I feel like some audience members don’t believe that. But it’s true! People are also rarely describing a Williams play blow by blow. Williams plays have been kind of deranged since the start, so that’s half the fun! DwaD : Yes. And my favorite performance in the show is probably The Glass Menagerie version that Muffy Vanderbilt III did as the unicorn. BR : The splicing of Menagerie with the Toni Braxton song “Un-Break My Heart” as “Un-Break My Horn!” was hilarious. As a Tennessee Williams scholar who also loves and writes about drag, I saw this show as an amalgamation of all the things I like in one place. The things that I love about Tennessee Williams are his deep sensitivity, and the ability to see the strange, the crazed, the queer, as the characters say in The Mutilated . You’re here to see the strange, the crazed, the queer, but you’re also here to see drag queens do what drag queens do best, which is to both poke fun and look at something from a really interesting angle; to highlight something you didn’t see before. They let you see the work in a completely different way. I mean, talking about Cat on a Hot Tin Roof dressed like Cat in the Hat, I was living. Like, give me a drag queen name pun in real life, Cat in a Hat on a Hot Tin Roof is exactly what I want. I mean, The Glass Menagerie is my favorite Williams play, and now I will never look at it again without thinking about “Un-Break My Horn”! What is your dream role, in drag or out, in Tennessee Williams’s oeuvre? DwaD : I think there are two that pop to my mind. One is Maxine from Night of the Iguana . And the other is Violet from Small Craft Warnings . I mean, come on, reimagined as a drag queen? Handies under the table? BR : Handies under the table, yes. But also such deep feeling. I love Violet. I also think a drag version of Maxine running the hotel in Night of the Iguana would be really fun. DwaD : Also Lot in Kingdom of Earth . He dresses in his mother’s clothes. BR : Definitely. Also, you’ve touched on this a little bit, but I’m curious about why you think we keep going back to Williams today, especially from a drag perspective. DwaD : As humans, we love stories and storytelling. But his work is more than just stories. It leaves you feeling more human. And somewhere in the midst of this onslaught of language and words—and bless all the Williams leading ladies who have to memorize all of that—something from the words falls away and you’re left with the emotion and impact of being human that Williams is trying to convey. I feel like his plays are like those optical illusions where if you look at it long enough, another picture emerges… BR : Magic Eye! DwaD : Tennessee Williams is Magic Eye. His words come at you fast and fierce, but once you sit there and lock in, you get what he’s saying. And not every playwright has that ability. With Williams, in just about every scene there are moments that you’re like “oh, they’re human. Oh I’m human. I felt that.” He was ahead of his time in storytelling, in creating relatable characters that are timeless. Regardless of it being decades after he has written these characters, they are still incredibly human. And there’s drama of course! And who doesn’t love a little bit of tea? BR : That’s beautifully put. Part of this interview series is also about what it’s like to make queer art now at this tumultuous moment. Williams is part of that, but as a queer artist who’s making queer art right now, what is that like? DwaD : Since it’s my full-time job, I have to find ways to be marketable in a country where an event can be targeted, or where it is not beneficial for a business or brunch spot to be widely visible. If they hire a drag queen now, they’re very clearly aligning themselves with one political view. It’s become very political to be visible. I have to find ways to survive and make a living by being palatable. However, I don’t always necessarily think of that part as creating the art. Being a drag queen and being visibly queer is an act of resistance at this juncture in the country. And so there is an aspect of any visibility—regardless of if it’s for work or as a creative outlet—there is an aspect of art in it because I’m a product of the time, and the things I’m doing are products of the time. But for me, it doesn’t always feel like that because I also do drag for a living. However, there are spaces when I get to do art more explicitly, and that is really special. I host this show at Oz on Tuesday nights on Bourbon Street—it’s a competition every week. It’s mostly drag queens who compete, but we’ll get some burlesque performers, drag kings, comedians, and live vocalists. But it’s heavily drag queens, and many of them trans. Especially over the last three years it’s been really great to see—and great to create a space—where there is a little bubble of safety, where everyone gets to be and express themselves through art. Part of my art is creating the space for others to create art. A lot of these queens have started their journey during the last three to five years while in this show. And that’s brave given the political state of things. Do we need to vote? Yes! Do we need to do other things? Yes! But in this queer space where we are creating art tonight, it is okay to take a deep breath, enjoy art, enjoy your creative process, and find a way to refresh oneself for the work ahead. So, I think that’s what queer art is doing now. It is an outlet and a way for us to take a breath, reflect, figure out what is important to us, so when it’s time to work, we can work . BR : Times of great political upheaval and repression often produce astonishing art. It’s radical to have a space of queer joy right now because there are people who don’t want that to exist. And I know whenever I’ve had the privilege to be in spaces like that, I always feel refueled and recharged. And that’s what drag does for me. That is why I try to see as much live drag as I possibly can, everywhere I go. That community and that art is sustaining, especially right now. DwaD : You know, I’m just putting it together right now, but you saying that you seek out drag wherever and thinking about how it helps us recharge—it’s kind of how we feel human, which is also what Tennessee Williams is doing. It’s like watching people create and perform their art that is about themselves. There’s something similarly trance-like, especially right now when it is political, and it means that much more that you’re being visible and okay with that. You are seeing someone who is being real, maybe afraid, but they’re being brave. You’re seeing all of these different aspects of a person and that’s so beautiful and relatable . And I think that touches on the things that Williams captures in those plays. He gets you to see those things in his characters. And maybe that’s why I like both of these things! BR : I love that connection. The vulnerability involved in making art that shows people as they truly are is definitely a commonality between Tennessee Williams and drag. I do think there’s a special experience I have when I watch drag as well as when I watch Williams’ plays. I’m on this ride, and I’m ready for you to take me wherever you want. I want to transition to another area of your life where I think you’re making some brave space and also leaning into your Master’s in Public Health and the training you have involved in keeping communities safe and informed. Can you tell me a little bit more about how you got into this sort of activism, education, and work? DwaD : After I completed my Master’s degree, when I first started doing drag, I was still doing full-time work at the clinic. I was managing the HIV testing program, and a couple of the clinic’s programs had done community outreach. We had medical mobile units that went out to churches, parks, festivals, concerts and do free testing. We started giving out at-home HIV test kits. And we were doing testing at the bars in the French Quarter for years before the pandemic. When I started doing drag, I knew what was possible in terms of outreach from where I was performing and the resources I could bring into the community. I was doing grant writing for a CDC clinic and knew what deliverables they were looking for, especially community-based programs. We were supposed to identify members of the community who would be able to help us reach the community and make a finded program more likely to succeed. As I started doing drag, I was finding myself in this place where I was becoming that community person who knew everybody, and I was trusted by the community. I also had the access and knew how to code switch into the public health speak. Our healthcare system is a mess. A superpower I have is connecting people with resources. Even when I first started doing drag, I joked that I would be the “public health drag queen.” I created an event called Debbie with Plan B where I was bringing out Plan B and HIV test kits and then doing referrals for PrEP at the events. Eventually, the Plan B stuff dried up, but I was still able to have a medical mobile unit out or have someone from the clinic there for referrals. But I usually still had tests to give away, and that eventually turned into COVID test kits. When I made the jump to full-time drag, a clinic started asking if I’d be their person on the ground for PrEP referrals. They started compensating me to put on the talent competition that I was telling you about on Tuesday nights. They would sponsor a lip sync battle halfway through the show. I’d have two queens come out and do a lip sync battle, but before that, I’d say a sixty-second thing about PrEP and DoxyPEP and U=U [Undetectable = Untransmittable]. And then the lip sync battle would happen, and the audience would choose a winner. After that, I would quiz people on the information that I had told them. If they answered questions correctly, they got drink tickets. So there was motivation for people to recall that information. More recently, that also became connected with the anti-smoking campaign that Louisiana is doing too. BR : That’s fantastic! Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. DwaD : Thank you! References Footnotes About The Author(s) BESS ROWEN is Associate Professor of Theatre at Villanova University. She is also affiliate faculty for both Gender & Women's Studies and Irish Studies. She is a member of Actors' Equity and an intimacy choreographer. Her first book, The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment (2021) focuses on affective stage directions. Her next book project looks at the theatrical archetype of the “mean teenage girl.” She also serves as the President-Elect of the American Theatre & Drama Society and co-editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) . 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 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Reflections on Fundamental Principles An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T The Wild Duck Picnic at Hanging Rock Last Call: A Play with Cocktails The Dinosaurs The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Daria Kerschenbaum Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 2 Visit Journal Homepage Last Call: A Play with Cocktails Daria Kerschenbaum By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Last Call: A Play with Cocktails by Hansol Jung Directed by Hansol Jung & Dustin Wills Various New York City Apartments New York, NY September 22, 2025 Reviewed by Daria Kerschenbaum Figure 1: Esco Jouléy. Photography: Fred Charles. One of the allures of immersive theatre is the promise of intimacy. And intimacy requires trust. Last Call: A Play with Cocktails, a new work by Hansol Jung and The Pack, not only understands this facet of the genre, but exploits it. Performed in a rotating variety of homes for roughly thirty attendees, and produced by the site-specific company En Garde Arts, the play promises solace to those “craving connection.” But instead of creating closeness or community, the piece lies to the audience at close-range until they become complicit in a murder. Last Call uses the unique features of immersive performance to underscore how vulnerable audiences are to misinformation, both at a national level and an interpersonal scale. The seduction begins as soon as guests arrive at that evening’s location—in my case, a Boerum Hill brownstone—and deliver a password into walkie-talkie before entering a private house party. The gathering has an air of exclusivity; audience members mingle over drinks, glimpsing the ephemera (fridge magnets, framed posters, bookshelf collections) that suggest the host’s private life. This sense of gaining access to a unique affair is only heightened by the fictional circumstances of the gathering. A welcome letter sets the scene: “Congratulations on leaving the comfort and safety of your homes during this crisis... Leave your street disguises, bulletproof vests, night goggles, and other PPE [at the door].” Through the language that is reminiscent of recent events, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the South Korean martial law crisis, the letter implies that an authoritarian government looms over the function. Participants are subtly asked to trust one another in the face of extraordinary circumstances. The party is interrupted when someone disguised as a mailbox steps through the door. This is our bartender for the night. Identified as the Tender in the program, this character is played by a rotating cast of The Pack regulars, including Nicole Villamil. She apologizes for her tardiness as she sets up her bar cart for the night. It appears that we, the audience, have hired her despite the curfew. A fascinating power dynamic emerges as the Tender mixes a Vieux Carré: we have the security and capital to hire entertainment amid a catastrophe, and the Tender is precarious enough to risk her safety. She sends a tip jar around, causing guests to squirm and cough up a few singles. The gesture highlights the dynamic of the wealthy patron and starving artist, uncomfortably amplified by the production’s intimacy. It also places the audience on the back foot as they attempt to prove their liberalism or disown their privilege, many of them made vulnerable by their eagerness to please. Figure 2: Dorcas Leung. Photography: Fred Charles Though it might appear that the audience is in control, the Tender holds all the cards. Participants are selected to guess if a given piece of liquor trivia is true or false. A correct answer results in a coveted cocktail (though the Tender is happy to hand out drinks to patrons who offer her a compliment, too). The Tender also determines who amongst the audience gets attention, doling out banter and asides throughout the performance. In this way, the very structure Last Call sets up an uneven power relationship between actor and audience, in which audience members seek something from the performer and must follow a set of rules to win her over. When the Tender steps outside to answer a call, a new character saunters to the center of the living room. This is the ghost of the Tender’s husband, referred to only as the Other Tender, played by Esco Jouléy. He brags about his glory days behind the bar. He had a gift for knowing exactly what a patron needed—a Rum Negroni, a hug, or even a tryst in the supply closet. Holding the keys to someone else’s desire is his superpower, as is his disarming honesty. He asserts his reliability by telling the audience he has nothing to hide, even if it means admitting to past infidelity. So, when he claims that the Tender murdered him in cold blood, the audience is forced to pause. “She’s an actress. She believes her lies until they become true!” he warns. Last Call magnifies the real-life tension between patron and performer, customer and service worker, even further; what feels like intimate emotional caretaking easily morphs into manipulation. We need them, and it feels dangerous. When the Tender returns to the apartment, she stirs an Aviation and recounts her version of the marriage. She refused to acknowledge her husband’s affairs for months until they became unavoidable. After a blow-up fight and weeks of silence, the Other Tender was caught in a crossfire on the way to a bartending gig. Whose version of events do we believe? Or, rather, which story do we prefer? The play concludes in a “shot off” in which guests vote for one of the mixologists by drinking a shot they prepared. At the show I attended, an overwhelming majority of guests sided with the liar, including myself. Yet in retrospect, the truth was plain to see, practically waved in front of our faces from the first moments of the play. One of the Tender’s first trivia questions involves a line from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden , “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” She personally couldn’t disagree more: when life is short, expensive, and filled with terror, the Tender would much rather take the love, money, and fame. Truth, the play suggests, is already null and void under an authoritarian regime. This search for pleasure and avoidance of pain motivates the Tender to ignore her husband’s cheating, and, to a certain degree, drives this audience to go to a brownstone in Boerum Hill and indulge in the fantasy of community. It is one thing to watch a play about manipulation, and another thing entirely to experience that manipulation firsthand. The latter forces spectators to confront their fallibility, their desire for comforting fabrications, with far more immediacy than the former. That confrontation takes on particular significance for New York audiences; many liberal-leaning participants would like to believe they are immune to the narratives peddled by the current administration. Last Call compels them to reexamine who and what they trust. References Footnotes About The Author(s) DARIA KERSCHENBAUM is a writer and theater artist whose work centers on the intersections of gender, sexuality, and experimental performance. She is currently a DFA candidate in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, where she also earned her MFA. Daria serves as Associate Editor of  Theater magazine. 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 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Reflections on Fundamental Principles An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T The Wild Duck Picnic at Hanging Rock Last Call: A Play with Cocktails The Dinosaurs The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Bess Rowen  Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 2 Visit Journal Homepage Picnic at Hanging Rock Bess Rowen By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Picnic at Hanging Rock Based on the book by Joan Lindsay Book & Lyrics by Hilary Bell Music & Arrangements by Greta Gertler Gold Directed by Portia Krieger Greenwich House Theatre, New York January 17, 2026 Reviewed by Bess Rowen (l to r, front row) Sarah Walsh, Gillian Jackson Han, Tatianna Córdoba, Kate Louissaint, (back row) Alexandra Humphreys, Lizzy Tucker, Maddie Robert, Carly Gendell, and Erin Davie in Picnic at Hanging Rock at the Greenwich House Theater. Photo by Matthew Murphy. When I think of the 1975 Australian film Picnic at Hanging Rock, it conjures images of beautifully rich natural landscapes filled with ethereal teenage girls in ankle-length white dresses. My main question about a theatrical version of this story was about what the titular natural rock formation would look like in an intimate space like the Greenwich House Theatre. But this new musical adaptation, directed by Portia Krieger, shifted the focus from the landscape surrounding the Australian schoolgirls to the girls themselves, which made the material fresh while still paying homage to the first globally successful Australian film. It follows the story of three popular and promising teenage girls and a teacher who vanish from a group picnic at Hanging Rock that arranged by their boarding school. Were they abducted? Did they run away? Or did something unexplainable occur? Although the film is the most famous adaptation of this story, Joan Lindsay’s 1967 book of the same name has inspired music, dance, and theatre pieces for decades. Both the book and the film focus on a private boarding school in Australia during the last year before Australia’s independence from England. The Headmistress is strict, and the high school girls are both studious and romantic. Instead of featuring a stereotypically mean popular girl, at the top of the school’s social ladder is Miranda, who is beautiful, smart, and kind beyond belief. She befriends a new student, Sara, an orphan whose adoptive family sent her away to boarding school. Sara is smitten with Miranda, as is everyone else, but Miranda tells Sara that she needs to try to love other people because Miranda will not be around for long. Miranda’s sureness is tinged with sadness, but her words (of course) prove prescient. When all of the girls except for Sara are treated to a picnic at the beautiful and dangerous vistas of Hanging Rock, Miranda, Irma, Marion, and Edith want to walk up to the base of the rock formation. Edith, who stopped to rest as the other girls continued to walk, returns to the picnic site, screaming and unable to say what she saw. She can only remember passing her teacher, Miss McCraw, walking up the rock as she ran down. The other girls and Miss McCraw do not return. In the following days, a rich eligible bachelor, Michael, and his male chaperone, Albert, feel a strong pull to go look for the girls. After Michael collapses, Irma, is also unable to say what has happened. As the days stretch out without new information, tensions build at the boarding school. Eventually, Sara dies by suicide while waiting for Miranda, and the strict headmistress dies at the base of Hanging Rock, ostensibly after falling while trying to climb. The audience is left with the sense that the mystery of what happened to the missing girls and teacher will never be satisfactorily solved. The first notable choice in this stage adaptation is to make the story a musical with catchy songs and memorable lyrics from Hilary Bell and Greta Gertler Gold, which literally gives voice to the schoolgirls from the start and establishes this Picnic at Hanging Rock as their story. While the film is about the event of the disappearance, this musical version is about how this event impacted the schoolgirls. There is very little dialogue in the film, meaning that the striking images and vaguely unsettling soundtrack tell most of the story. But having Miranda, Sarah, and the other girls speak and sing immediately shifts the piece from a vaguely allegorical tale to a meditation on the pressures felt by teenage girls stuck between Victorian societal expectations and the boundless energy they long to express. When the girls first appear on stage, in costumes mirroring the silhouettes of those in the film, they immediately called to mind some other important plays about teenage girls in school environments, such as Christa Winsloe’s Girls in Uniform (which also has film versions, both called Mädchen in Uniform ) and even Frank Wedekind/Duncan Shiek’s Spring Awakening . Those plays focus on the way regimented environments put additional pressure on those students who do not conform to the norms. But this adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock homes in on the individual stories of the characters and their interpersonal relationships as opposed to whatever mysterious larger forces might be at play in the disappearance. It particularly leans into celebrating the communal ties that mostly revolve around Miranda. Even after they vanish, Miranda, Irma, and Marion appear on stage and in the house, both frightening and comforting the rest of the characters. Their positions within the social fabric of the school community are more important here than their disappearances. The cast of Picnic at Hanging Rock . Photo by Matthew Murphy. This piece featured strong ensemble work overall, but the actors playing the three girls who vanish were able to capture the larger-than-life qualities of these idealized high school seniors with performances that struck a balance of charm, intelligence, and drive. This production also diversified the many blonde and blue-eyed white characters from the original by adding an important aspect of indigeneity to the plot. Portraying Sara and her estranged brother Albert as indigenous put the school’s harsh treatment of Sara in racist and colonialist terms, while Albert is explained to be an indigenous tracker conscripted to work who respects the sacred importance of Hanging Rock. This change highlighted an important aspect of the political context of 1900 Australia (and one easily relevant to the United States today). It therefore makes sense that he is the one who rescues Michael and then Irma, whose lack of respect for the land they tread on is part of what causes them trouble. Gillian Jackson Han’s Miranda had a genuine kindness and free spirit while showing hints of Miranda’s awareness of her impending absence. Tatianna Córdoba’s Irma was delightfully bubbly and bouncy in a way that still managed to sell the ridiculously large bow in her hair. Her earnestness made the scenes where people lash out at her (because she is the only girl to return) particularly difficult to watch. And, finally, Kate Louissaint’s Marion was a delightful nerd whose role was the most expanded of the core girls. She has almost no lines in the film, but here it is Louissant’s Marion who explains the history of Hanging Rock and who dreams of continuing her education while knowing that her fate will be to marry instead. Rounding out the main characters is Sarah Walsh’s Sara, who is the outsider now left without Miranda’s protection. Sara’s love for Miranda is implied to be romantic in the film, but this adaptation makes that far clearer, and perhaps more mutual. Her queerness further explains her feelings of isolation and difference from the rest of girls. Walsh’s portrayal of the awkward outcast gave the audience the clearest sense of Miranda’s kind nature, and Sara becomes the audience stand-in as she tries to put together what happened. Sara also sees Miranda’s ghost throughout the second act, which is a nice departure from the film, where it is often the male characters who believe they have caught a glimpse of her. As this account has shown, I was far more riveted by the many scenes from the girls’ perspectives than I was by any of the interactions with the two men. This is not a comment on the strength of Bradley Lewis’s performance as Albert or Reese Sebastian Diaz’s Michael, but was a result of how compellingly the musical’s focus on the girls foregrounded their stories. Although the performances were what stood out about Picnic at Hanging Rock , I must conclude by applauding the musical’s design, which abstracted the stunning landscapes and buildings in the film to further spotlight the stories of the characters. Daniel Zimmerman’s set captured the feeling of an inspiring but also vaguely menacing landscape and the regimented order of a Victorian school. And Ásta Bennie Hostetter’s costumes were stunning, evoking the uniformity of the originals while expanding the color-palette of the play into a dynamic display of character. Barbara Samuels’s lighting design coupled with the dynamic set to make a small stage contain multitudes. And Nick Kourtides’s sound design evoked the wilderness just outside the school walls. Finally, Mayte Natalio’s choreography enabled the characters to truly express the inner turmoil that bubbles under the surface in the film version. The choreography was a standout aspect of this production, and Krieger’s direction incorporated it seamlessly into the overall flow of the story. I hope that this short run of Picnic at Hanging Rock at the Greenwich House Theatre paves the way for more opportunities to produce this musical elsewhere. Its messages about the power and resistance of teenage girls is right at home in a world where the success of John Proctor is the Villain and musicals like Six ask us to reconsider our previous assumptions about how teenage girls show up on American stages. It also reminds us that the most important stories in any mystery are those of the victims, whose stories should not be limited to the events surrounding their disappearances or deaths. Despite being a work of fiction, this victim-centered version of Picnic at Hanging Rock shows that what was lost when these girls climbed Hanging Rock was not just a series of pretty faces, but rich futures that might have changed the world. References Footnotes About The Author(s) BESS ROWEN is Associate Professor of Theatre at Villanova University. She is also affiliate faculty for both Gender & Women's Studies and Irish Studies. She is a member of Actors' Equity and an intimacy choreographer. Her first book, The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment (2021) focuses on affective stage directions. Her next book project looks at the theatrical archetype of the “mean teenage girl.” She also serves as the President-Elect of the American Theatre & Drama Society and co-editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) . 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 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Reflections on Fundamental Principles An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T The Wild Duck Picnic at Hanging Rock Last Call: A Play with Cocktails The Dinosaurs The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Dominic Finocchiaro  Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Dinosaurs Dominic Finocchiaro By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF April Mathis, Kathleen Chalfant, and Elizabeth Marvel, photo by Julieta Cervantes The Dinosaurs By Jacob Perkins Directed by Les Waters Playwrights Horizons New York, NY February 19, 2025 Reviewed by Dominic Finocchiaro If the ever-present countdown clock in Oedipus was the defining image on Broadway this past season, a much more inefficacious timekeeper demanded attention Off-Broadway: the cheap, broken wall-clock that hung on the wall in Les Waters’s premiere production of Jacob Perkins’s The Dinosaurs at Playwrights Horizons. The piece of scenery, easy to disregard in its anonymity, managed, in its inutility, to hold within itself the very dramaturgical structure undergirding the production. The world presented to audiences on the Judith O. Rubin Theater stage was one in which time was not linear but broken open and palimpsestic, containing both past and future in the eternal here and now that is the life of the addict in recovery. Perkins’s play is an addiction recovery play, a genre highly present onstage recently in the form of Jake Brasch’s The Reservoir , Joe White’s Blackout Songs , and Sean Daniels’s The White Chip, among others. However, it is perhaps more useful to place Perkins’s play in conversation with Annie Baker’s Infinite Life and its abiding interest in formally exploring the liminal spaces of recovery (from illness in Baker’s play) and the ways that such spaces fracture and distort one’s experience of time. The Dinosaurs follows the Saturday Survivors, a weekly AA support group for women, as they prepare for and undertake one of their meetings. The women (portrayed by Kathleen Chalfant, Elizabeth Marvel, April Mathis, Mallory Portnoy, and Maria Elena Ramirez) are of various ages and ethnicities, similar only in their addiction. A newcomer to the meeting, Reyna, or Buddy (Keilly McQuail), arrives briefly at the top of the play before quickly skittering off (although she will reappear later). Everything is set-up for a hyper-naturalist, minimalist, real-time drama to unfold. dots’s design further established this expectation in the audience: their set was perfectly banal, painstaking in its recreation of the anonymous, threadbare, and utilitarian nature of the rooms in which AA meetings are often held. The folding chairs were mismatched, and stray items were neatly lined up against the back wall—a period painting (whose subject cheekily evokes The Dinosaurs ’s origin as a Clubbed Thumb prompt about The Decameron) , exercise mats, cardboard boxes—as if to showcase the various and random usages that the room was in service to. And let’s not forget that broken clock. Perkins’s characterizations, like the set, are relatively sparse on the page, underscoring the importance of anonymity to the addict in recovery; although every addict’s story is different in its details, at their core they are all the same, and to engage meaningfully in the work of recovery is to throw off the uniqueness of the individual self and accept being one of many. The women all have names that start with the letter J, further signaling this lack of individuality. Waters and the ensemble offset this sense of anonymity somewhat through the specificity of their work, but the sparseness of Perkins’s text resists too much actorly embellishment. Indeed, the performances that seemed to push hardest against this simplicity of characterization are the ones that risked dissonance vis-a-vis the larger vision of the production. Perhaps the most unadorned—and strongest—performance was Mathis’s as the gentle, conciliatory Jane; in giving over to the text completely, Mathis exuded a quiet but resounding presence that reverberated in its utter simplicity and helped ground the production. Maria Elena Ramirez and Elizabeth Marvel, photo by Julieta Cervantes The Dinosaurs was the first production in Playwrights Horizons’s new Unplugged program, which aims to promote new plays in simple realizations with low-production values, focusing on the creativity of the work itself rather than the spectacle afforded by large design budgets. A one-location play set at an AA meeting is a smart choice for such a program, but the fact that Waters was directing gave audiences a hint that the realm of pure naturalism was not this play’s likely home. Waters’s oeuvre is perhaps most striking in his productions’ ability to manifest psychogeography, to create haunted, liminal atmospheres so rich in emotion and memory that they become another character in themselves—his recent, deeply moving (and deeply underappreciated) staging of Eliya Smith’s Grief Camp at the Atlantic was a prime example of these tendencies. For Waters, a room is never just a room—certainly not a room with as much embedded memory as one that has housed a support group for over fifty years. What audiences came to realize, little by little, in Waters’s production was that what they were witnessing was not a single meeting, but in fact fragments of many meetings over many years. The first significant evidence of this (besides the broken clock) was the reappearance of Reyna during the group’s three-minute silent meditation and the asynchronous conversation she had with Jane that went unacknowledged by the other women. Another example was Joan’s (Marvel) days of sobriety ricocheting from forty-five days to twenty-seven to ten to five to one to thirteen years, all in the span of a single minute. Later, Jolly (Chalfant) vanished from the stage without fuss and was spoken of in fond remembrances by Joan, mourning her passing. This was a world in which time is a tenuous, fragile thing that is as uncertain as each character’s hard-fought sobriety. Time in this room, then, was a purgatorial time that flattened. If, as Thornton Wilder writes in his essay “Some Thoughts on Playwriting,” theatrical time is always now, then so is it the case in recovery, with its emphasis on living in the moment and on being in “the present tense,” as Perkins’s characters often reiterate. Recovery is anti-teleological, the inherently cyclical time of eternal return—every day is a new day, but every day is also the same struggle, and the women in the play must, as they cheerily invoke, “keep on coming back” to this same room. What Perkins and Waters attempted to do, therefore, was to give to such an experience a theatrical form attuned to its psychological truth; while a more linear structure that moved towards a climactic resolution would be false for the addict in recovery, the production’s dreamlike distortions of time recreated the addict in recovery’s ongoing relationship with their own addictions. It is a relationship whose routines are so repetitive that they blur together into an endlessly occurring, singular present. Although the play refuses dramatic resolution, Perkins does offer audiences something to grasp onto at work’s end. Reyna returns after having been integrated into the group. Chalfant then arrives back on stage, only this time, she is a new character. The eldest member of the group now embodies the newbie, and Reyna has moved from newbie to welcoming veteran. The names and roles have changed, but the cycle continues in the empty room. The two women then left to meet the others at a nearby diner, and the audience was left with the room itself, in a silence that screamed. The room will be there after these specific women have gone, and it will continue to hold their love, their care and generosity for each other. Waters succeeded at creating another of his haunted spaces, the ghosts that inhabited it not fearsome but friendly, guides rather than demons. References Footnotes About The Author(s) DOMINIC FINOCCHIARO is a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research focuses on late 20 th  and 21 st  century anglophone plays and playwrights, with a particular emphasis on queer theatre. As a playwright, his work has been developed and produced nationwide, including at Clubbed Thumb, the Kennedy Center, the New Group, and the Roundabout Theatre. 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 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Reflections on Fundamental Principles An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T The Wild Duck Picnic at Hanging Rock Last Call: A Play with Cocktails The Dinosaurs The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Lynn Deboeck Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Lynn Deboeck By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences . Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Lee Brewer Jones’s monograph on Paula Vogel offers a comprehensive, largely admiring account of one of the most influential American playwrights and teachers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Structured chronologically and thematically, the book traces Vogel’s development from her early life and formative artistic influences through her emergence as a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and, finally, her enduring legacy as a mentor whose pedagogical reach has shaped contemporary American theatre. Jones’s study will be of particular interest to theatre historians, dramaturgs, and scholars of feminist, queer, and experimental performance, though it also raises questions about methodology, critical focus, and editorial cohesion. The opening chapter, “Early Life and Influences,” grounds Vogel’s dramaturgy in her biography, emphasizing how her upbringing shaped her theatrical worldview. Jones carefully details Vogel’s family history—her Jewish father’s abandonment, her Catholic mother’s complex influence, and her close relationship with her brothers—as foundational to her recurring themes of loss, survival, and fractured intimacy. Vogel’s coming out at seventeen and her deep connection to her gay brother Carl establish what Jones frames as an LGBTQ+ foundation that informs much of her work. This chapter also addresses Vogel’s early professional disappointments, particularly her time at Cornell University, where shifting faculty politics led to the rejection of her dissertation and what Vogel herself described as being “fired.” Jones characterizes this period as a “false start” (3), though the material reveals not failure but a nontraditional trajectory that resists the heteronormative, white, male model of theatrical success. Jones is particularly strong in his discussion of Vogel’s self-identified artistic “gods”: John Guare, María Irene Fornés, and Caryl Churchill. These figures serve not merely as influences but as lodestars for Vogel’s dramaturgical ethics: Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation and Fornés’s innovation (“No repeats!”) together illuminate Vogel’s commitment to defamiliarization, formal risk, and her use of negative empathy . This framework becomes central in Chapter 2, which examines Vogel’s developing voice through plays such as Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief , The Oldest Profession , and And Baby Makes Seven . Drawing on Brecht and Shklovsky, Jones persuasively shows how Vogel resists the comforts of positive empathy in favor of unsettling audiences into seeing, rather than merely recognizing, familiar narratives. The book’s third chapter, “Building an International Reputation,” marks a turning point with Vogel’s response to the AIDS crisis and the death of her brother Carl in 1988, with Jones’s analysis of The Baltimore Waltz among the book’s most compelling sections. By transforming AIDS into the fictional ATD (Acquired Toilet Disease), Vogel defamiliarizes both the illness and the cultural panic surrounding it, staging grief through denial, humor and imaginative excess. Jones deftly unpacks Vogel’s use of language as both concealment and revelation, though at times his analysis is diluted by extended references to external literary works—such as Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home”—whose relevance to Vogel’s creative process is tenuous. While these intertexts may reflect critical reception rather than Vogel’s authorial intent, their prominence occasionally distracts from Vogel’s own dramaturgical strategies. Jones continues this chapter with discussions of Hot ‘n Throbbing and How I Learned to Drive , the latter of which earned Vogel the 1998 Pulitzer Prize. His account of Vogel’s willingness to revise Hot ‘n Throbbing —even after publication—underscores her belief that “the play, not the text, is the thing” (59). This philosophy culminates in How I Learned to Drive , which Jones situates as both a personal and cultural reckoning with trauma, memory, and power. The chapter convincingly positions the Pulitzer as a moment of long-delayed recognition while also gesturing to Vogel’s ambivalence about institutional success. Chapter 4, “The House of Paula Vogel,” shifts focus from playwright to pedagogue, arguing that Vogel’s influence is most visible in the extraordinary success of her students. Jones chronicles Vogel’s role in mentoring figures such as Lynn Nottage, Sarah Ruhl, Quiara Alegría Hudes, and Nilo Cruz and in creating initiatives like the 48-hour bake-off, which democratized playwriting and emphasized collective creation. Vogel’s assertion that her life’s work is “not about getting through the door alone; it’s about forming circles” (94) serves as a thesis for this chapter. However, the section suffers from noticeable repetition and uneven editing (including noticeable typos and errors), suggesting that the book would have benefited from more rigorous revision. The final chapters (5 and 6) extend Vogel’s legacy into the twenty-first century, highlighting Indecent , the Ubu Roi Bake-Off in response to the Trump presidency, and her pandemic-era “Bard at the Gate” readings centering marginalized artists. A concluding interview with Nottage reinforces the book’s central claim: that Vogel’s most enduring contribution may be her generosity as a mentor. The penultimate chapter, authored by Amy Muse, offers a comparative analysis of Vogel and Ruhl, productively contrasting Vogel’s sharper, more unsettling endings with Ruhl’s emphasis on enchantment and affect. While this chapter is insightful, its inclusion raises structural questions, as its sudden change in authorship and focus disrupts the book’s cohesion. Overall, Jones’s monograph makes a valuable contribution to theatre studies by offering a detailed, accessible account of Paula Vogel’s plays, pedagogy, and influence. Despite moments of analytical drift and editorial inconsistency, the book succeeds in situating Vogel within—and against—dominant theatrical traditions. I recommend it to scholars of contemporary American theatre, feminist and queer performance, and graduate students seeking to understand both Vogel’s work and her transformative role as a teacher. One might even read the book as a map for mentorship, or as a call to “practice more failure” (Halberstam) by resisting the linear, white, male, heteronormative model so dominant in American theatre—and turning instead to Vogel’s circular approach. References Footnotes About The Author(s) LYNN DEBOECK is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Utah. Her research interests include gender performance, the representation of maternity, advances in pedagogy and feminist directing. Recently (2023) she co-edited an anthology:  (M)Other Perspectives: Staging Motherhood in 21st Century North American Theatre & Performance   with Routledge. 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 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Reflections on Fundamental Principles An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T The Wild Duck Picnic at Hanging Rock Last Call: A Play with Cocktails The Dinosaurs The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Alexander Miller  Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Wild Duck Alexander Miller By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF The Wild Duck By Henrik Ibsen Directed by Simon Godwin Shakespeare Theatre Company, Klein Theatre Washington, D.C. October 29, 2025 Reviewed by Alexander Miller At a post-performance talkback on October 29, 2025, a question was posed to the assembled cast and crew of Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck : “Why is this play not done more?” The question is not without merit. According to the IbsenStage database, there have been ninety-four previous productions recorded in the United States since the play’s premiere in 1885. A paltry number, even before being compared to the 667 productions of A Doll’s House since 1882. STC’s artistic producer Drew Lichtenberg was quick to point out that the last performance of The Wild Duck in Washington D.C. was in 1986 at Arena Stage. In his program note, Lichtenberg suggests that the play is “harder to get right” than Ibsen’s other works, explaining that the play is a complex clash of tones and themes that can challenge directors and designers. This tension ran through STC’s production, and director Simon Godwin used it to drive a picture-perfect modernist performance that wrestled with the dangers of idealism and the flaws of pragmatism. The Wild Duck follows the reconnection of two childhood friends, Gregers Werle and Hjalmar Ekdal. Hjalmar lives a satisfying life with his wife Gina and daughter Hedvig, while the ever-idealistic Gregers lives in self-imposed exile, feuding with his father over accusations of infidelity made by Gregers’s late mother. When Gregers moves into the Ekdal residence, he believes his friend’s happiness is built upon a foundation of falsehoods as he realizes that Gina, in her previous life as the Werle’s housekeeper, was one of the women with whom his father was accused of cheating. In a crusade driven by his “chronic righteousness,” Gregers begins a chain reaction that leaves the Ekdals forever changed. Unseen but always felt throughout these events is the eponymous wild duck, Hedvig’s pet who resides, injured and flightless, in a makeshift lodge in the Ekdals’ attic. Throughout the implosion of the Ekdal family, Ibsen and the STC ask their audience what price must be paid to live a truly happy life. The production casts idealism of all kinds in an unflattering light, whether it be a devotion to radical honesty or delusional happiness. At the same time, the play does not offer a meaningful compromise to idealism; Ibsen leaves no moral to neatly tie up the Ekdals’ tragic collapse. This leaves the audience with the complex work of synthesizing their own conclusions. Lichtenberg highlighted this complexity in his program note, emphasizing that The Wild Duck defies simple metaphor. Sure enough, the cast’s performances challenged audience expectation and refused to be simply defined. The actors committed to crafting deep backstories and inner lives for their characters, a process that paid off in their delivery. Alexander Hurt played the dangerously convicted Gregers Werle as a man certain he is the hero of his own story. fig. 1: Alexander Hurt as Gregers Werle in The Wild Duck . Photo by Hollis King. The desire to root against him is buffeted by Hurt’s impeccable comic delivery of some of the best laughs in the show. He is foiled by Matthew Saldívar’s Doctor Relling, the nihilist who stands as a competing influence on Hjalmar Ekdal. Saldívar created a profoundly sad Relling, who is committed to seeing others live happily no matter what. Standing between them is Nick Westrate’s Hjalmar, who captured the experience of a happy family man and betrayed husband in equal measure. Westrate’s performance demonstrated that despite the surety of both Gregers’s and Relling’s philosophies, the struggle between truth and happiness is far more problematic in practice. The practical cost of this fight is carried by Melanie Field’s Gina and Maaike Laanstra-Corn’s Hedvig, whose devotion to their family and love for their husband/father was tragic. The uplifting humor in the production was punctuated by explosions of conflict, the potential of violence, and desperate sadness, with each incident ringing out like a shot that foreshadowed the play’s tragic ending. The ensemble enacted Ibsen’s drama in a manner that was both authentic to the author’s intentions and immersive to a modern day audience. For all the layers of Ibsen’s characters that defy categorization, The Wild Duck also depended on a straightforward design language that faithfully captured a nineteenth-century modernist aesthetic. Photography sat as a running theme throughout the play; the Ekdals run a photography studio and are seen cleaning and adjusting their work for clients. A metaphor for the way Hjalmar’s life has been “touched up” by others, this theme echoed in the production’s lobby display, which featured daguerreotype style portraits of the cast in full costume. These costumes, designed by Heather C. Freedman, provided a consistent palate that evoked melodramatic archetypes: the conniving Gregers was always in an elegant black coat and suit, the innocent Hedvig in blue and white patterned dresses and sweaters, the nihilistic Relling in a worn grey suit, and the hardworking Ekdals in brown tweed and plaid. fig. 2: Maaike Laanstra-Corn as Hedvig, Melanie Field as Gina Ekdal, Alexander Hurt as Gregers Werle in The Wild Duck . Photo by Hollis King. Scenic designer Andrew Boyce and lighting designer Stacey Derosier crafted the Ekdals’ apartment as a well-lived space of wood and glass windows, complete with a staircase to the attic where the wild duck resides along with a small coterie of other animals. The attic door was decorated with a pastoral backdrop of firs and a bright sun, clearly drawn to capture Hedvig’s love for a natural world she cannot take part in. These design choices brought a clarity of thought to the production that threatened to undercut the profound inner complexities of the characters. It would do a great disservice to Ibsen to either flatten his characters into two-dimensional heroes and villains or to completely write off their actions in a haze of post-modern moral ambiguity. Simon Godwin and the Shakespeare Theatre Company masterfully walk that line, offering their audience a rare opportunity to The Wild Duck in flight. The importance of this production of The Wild Duck lived in the delicate tension between the complex inner turmoil of the actors and the clear imagery of the design. While at first glance Gregers might seem like a devil offering discord, Hurt did not reduce him to the mustachioed villain of a melodrama. But it is also impossible to ignore the real harm that Gregers’s actions do throughout the play, and this harm was emphasized by the clear design framework which gave Gregers a more sinister bend. Just as photography is an art form renowned for showing its subjects as they are, it can also be doctored to create an illusion of what is. Providing both clarity and nuance addressed the potential pitfalls of both approaches and allowed the audience to engage with the moral reckoning of The Wild Duck. To return to the question of why this play is not done more: I agree with Lichtenberg that is a play hard to get right because it asks so much of its audience. But the struggle between happiness and truth must be fought by every generation. In our current political climate, this struggle sits front and center in many people’s minds. So perhaps it is good that The Wild Duck has returned to the stage to remind us that simple idealism can be dangerous, and the best solutions are found through challenge and conversation. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ALEXANDER MILLER (PhD) is an independent theatre and performance scholar. As a dramaturg, he specializes in new play development and has worked with playwrights in Washington, D.C., Seattle, and Pittsburgh. His work has been published by Routledge Press. 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 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Reflections on Fundamental Principles An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T The Wild Duck Picnic at Hanging Rock Last Call: A Play with Cocktails The Dinosaurs The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Benjamin Gillespie Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Benjamin Gillespie By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Playwright Jordan Tannahill. Photo: Hunter Abrams Since the early 2010s, Jordan Tannahill has emerged as one of the most provocative and adventurous queer voices in North America. A Canadian playwright, novelist, and director, Tannahill’s work consistently probes the intersections of sexuality, intimacy, and spectatorship, often asking audiences to confront how desire and authority circulate among bodies and institutions of power. Across his many novels, plays, and performance installations, he has built a body of work that occupies a distinctive position in today’s theatrical and literary landscape. Tannahill is a two-time winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama for Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays (2014) and Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom (2018). His debut novel, Liminal , won France’s 2021 Prix des Jeunes Libraires, and his second novel, The Listeners , was shortlisted for the 2021 Giller Prize. His work has been translated into twelve languages and presented at venues in Toronto, New York City, London, Avignon, Berlin, Vienna, and Montreal. From 2008 to 2016, Tannahill wrote and directed plays through his Toronto-based theatre company Suburban Beast, staging work in theatres, art galleries, and found spaces, often collaborating with non-traditional performers such as night shift workers, frat boys, preteens, and employees of Toronto’s famed Honest Ed’s discount emporium. From 2012 to 2016, in collaboration with William Ellis, he ran the alternative art space Videofag in Kensington Market, an influential incubator for queer and avant-garde work in Toronto Most recently, Tannahill’s play Prince Faggot —his first to have a major production in New York—premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons before transferring to Studio Seaview, running for seven months. Prince Faggot imagines a future in which a queer heir to the British monarchy becomes the object of public fantasy—and suspicion. Since its premiere, the play has sparked significant attention for its unflinching examination of queer sex, class dynamics, and the voyeuristic impulses of theatrical spectatorship and nudity. And, of course, there’s the title. Interrogating the perceived limits of queer visibility, Prince Faggot explores the cost of being made legible within systems of power that claim to celebrate difference while simultaneously erasing or consuming it. At a moment when LGBTQ+ bodies are increasingly politicized, commodified, and legislated against, Tannahill’s work insists on the messiness of queer desire and the ethical stakes of looking. His writing resists narrative closure, foregrounding ambiguity and discomfort as central aesthetic strategies. In doing so, he challenges audiences to consider not only what we are watching but also why and how we watch. This interview was conducted on Nov 3, 2025 via Zoom. It has been edited for clarity and brevity. Benjamin Gillespie : Are you in New York now? Jordan Tannahill : Yes, I’m in the East Village. I’ve been here for a little over a year. Before that I lived in London, and before that, Toronto. BG : I’m also Canadian and have followed your work since I left Toronto more than a decade ago. JT : It’s always exciting to meet people who know Canadian theatre. BG : Do you miss Toronto? JT : It really is a great city. I was very much shaped by the theatre community there, especially the spirit of collaboration and making work for friends. There was never really a sense of a mass or commercial audience. Instead, artists were pushed by their peers and pushed each other to keep going. BG : I know what you mean. I was just in NYC last week to see Prince Faggot again at Studio Seaview. It’s such a beautiful play. Congratulations on another extension. JT : Thank you so much—and thank you for coming back. I really appreciate it. BG : I also just watched your MSNBC interview with Jeremy O. Harris. JT : [ Laughs ] I can barely remember what I said on MSNBC. I was so nervous. My inner monologue was just relieved that Jeremy was talking. I still can’t bring myself to watch it. John McCrea as Prince George; Mihir Kumar as Dev Chatterjee in Prince Faggot . Photo: Marc J. Franklin. BG : Prince Faggot opens with performers sharing childhood photographs and reflecting on queer childhood. Could you talk about how that image of Prince George became the seed for the play? JT : A lot of my thinking around queer childhood comes from Jon Davies, a Canadian curator and writer. In 2012, he hosted an event called “Sissy Boy YouTube Night” at Videofag, a space I ran in Toronto with William Ellis. Jon was interested in the then-emerging genre of YouTube videos made by preteens and young adolescents filming themselves in their bedrooms, often lip-syncing to pop songs or engaging in private rituals of expression that were deeply queer-coded. Watching those videos alongside an adult queer audience was joyful because we recognized ourselves in these kids. Many of us had done similar things in private before YouTube existed. At the same time, I felt protective of these kids. Posting these videos was brave, and the responses ranged from hateful comments to extraordinary outpourings of love and community. It raised the question of how we talk about pre-sexual queer expression and give it language. Looking at childhood photos of ourselves, many of us had that moment of recognition: we were gay kids. I mean, so many of us have stories of dressing up in our mom’s clothes, or dancing to pop music like Aqua or Ace of Base, copying music video choreography, being fabulous in these very private rituals. Suddenly, those kinds of moments became public, and that shift felt both exhilarating and, for me as an adult gay man, slightly alarming. It triggered a kind of protective response as a gay man. When I saw those photographs of Prince George online back around 2017, a lot of the above came to mind. Once again, it was a very public moment in which people experienced recognition and perhaps even self-identification through these images. For me, it raised questions such as: How do we give language to queer childhood? How do we talk about it in a way that is rooted in our own personal experiences of seeing ourselves reflected but that also has some kind of public utility? Seeing those photographs of George produced a powerful moment of self-recognition for me, but it also prompted a kind of thought experiment. If the future heir to the British throne were to be gay, what does that mean for the monarchy as an institution, for the queer community at large, and, more importantly, for this individual child? That question became a vehicle for me, and for this ensemble of performers, to interrogate our own relationships to power, colonization, and queerness, and to examine how these systems of oppression and histories of power play out on our bodies and our sexualities. BG : We see that journey in the play as we move very quickly from that initial image to Prince George as an adult. Were you worried about pushback or controversy by representing the Royals in this way? JT : Absolutely. The play is constantly walking a fine line. We are careful not to assign a sexuality to a real child. The Prince George we depict is entirely fictional and hypothetical, and in many ways a deeply autobiographical foil for me. Much of what happens to him in the play reflects my own experiences. One of the central provocations of the piece is this question: Can I dare to imagine that the future heir to the British throne might have a life that resembles my own, that he might encounter the same challenges I faced growing up as a gay man? BG: And I think you posted about this on social media, right? You shared an image of yourself that was inspired by finding that photograph of Prince George. JT: Yeah, exactly. Mihir [Kumar]’s opening monologue at the top of the show is really me working through my reactions to that photograph through him. It’s a text I wrote for him specifically that encapsulates my own journey with that image and what ultimately grew out of it. I wrote Prince Faggot in the early days of lockdown while I was living in London, and at the time my hope was that it would be produced there. That turned out to be very difficult. There was one theatre company that was genuinely excited about the play—they programmed it as their next production, and the artistic director was fully behind it—but once it moved up to the board and through legal review, it essentially stalled. They wanted me to change all the names, to fictionalize the Royal Family entirely. I had to hold firm. The stakes of what the play is trying to do are fundamentally removed if the Royal Family becomes fictional. Once you’re in a made-up world, the political and historical weight disappears. It becomes meaningless, for example, for a trans woman to be Queen of England if that England no longer carries the histories of race, class, empire, and sexuality that define the real institution. What matters is that someone like Rachel Crowl, a trans woman, is stepping into the role of Kate Middleton and embodying that figure within our actual world. That gesture allows the play to critique and dissect the lived differences between those experiences. Rachel Crowl as Catherine (Kate), Princess of Wales; K. Todd Freeman as William, Prince of Wales in Prince Faggot . Photo: Marc J. Franklin. BG: It takes the teeth out of it if you remove that context. The stakes disappear. JT: Exactly. The play has to exist in our world with all of its histories and political baggage intact. I became very resistant to what I felt was fear-based dramaturgy. I was talking with Jeremy O. Harris about it, and he said, “Send me the play.” He read it, loved it, and said, “Let’s do it in New York.” He saw those risks as attributes rather than liabilities, and that’s proven to be true. The play has really found its audience here, which has been incredibly affirming. BG: I’ve also wondered how the reaction might differ in Canada or the UK as opposed to the US, whether the reception would shift in significant ways as it relates to the monarchy. This production hasn’t been entirely without controversy, of course, but it’s also been clearly embraced, given the extensions and the remount at Studio Seaview. JT: Yeah, I think there are different cultures of sensitivity at play. The thresholds in Canada are different from those in the UK as well, and both are different from the US in that sense. New York really was the ideal city to introduce this piece to the world. Having it received here first helped set the tone for the broader discourse around the play. BG : Did you revise the play much between Playwrights Horizons and the Studio Seaview run? JT : Not significantly. There may have been small trims or wording changes but nothing substantial. We adjusted the staging for the new larger space at Seaview. That was it. BG : How long did it take you to write the play initially? I know you were writing it back in 2020, but then it was a while before its premiere, so did you revisit it a number of times between then and now? JT: The initial draft came fast, and then I spent years revisiting and revising it. Not full-time, of course, but returning to it again and again at different stages and between other projects. BG: It’s like the Tennessee Williams impulse, to keep going back and rewriting plays, that desire to never quite let them settle. JT: For me, though, most of the revisions happen before a play opens. Once it’s out in the world, I’m less inclined to return to it. At some point, the play becomes the play. If you revisit it years later, you’re really just writing a new work. During the development of Prince Faggot , we had workshops supported by Jeremy and his company, BB². From the very first draft, the play had a metatheatrical framework: the ensemble stepped out, broke the fourth wall, and spoke as themselves. What shifted over time was how much space that material occupied within the overall runtime. The play-within-a-play ultimately functions as a vehicle for the ensemble to articulate our relationships to power, colonization, and queerness. The monologues are fictional. I wrote them for these actors, but they are not their personal stories. I’m always reluctant to ask actors to perform that kind of emotional labor, to divulge intimate personal details for my work. That’s the power of fiction and storytelling; they can sometimes get us closer to a truth. That said, the final monologue, performed by N’yomi Allure Stewart, is almost verbatim a story she shared in the rehearsal hall, drawn from a conversation the two of us had there. I removed my own voice from it and shaped her words into a monologue, but it remains her story. She is credited in the text as the author of those words. It’s a singular moment in the piece where nonfiction punctures the fiction. That rupture feels important to me. It’s a very potent moment, one that allows the play to land on something grounded, lived, and undeniable. N’yomi Allure Stewart as Charlotte, Princess of Wales; John McCrea as Prince George in Prince Faggot . Photo: Marc J. Franklin. BG: I love that. It’s such a beautiful connection, tying ballroom culture in New York to ideas of dynasty and the Royal Family. JT: I think the question becomes: What would queer royalty actually look like? And the answer is that it already exists among us. We are our own royalty. It’s about reframing where power resides within our community. That power isn’t inherited; it’s earned. To paraphrase N’yomi, it’s measured by how you show up for your community, how you mother and father, how you care for others, and how you move through the world as a queer person. When that idea emerged in the rehearsal hall, I remember thinking, “Okay, this is it, the dramaturgy is complete. This is how the show culminates.” BG: It really is a beautiful ending, and it wraps up the piece in such a provocative way. I also want to ask about casting. You’ve mentioned the ensemble and the work that developed through those workshops, but the casting itself feels crucial. You have trans actors, queer actors of color, and a wide age range onstage. The representation spans a broad spectrum. Was that an intentional choice from the beginning? JT : The profiles of the ensemble were really baked into the text from the very beginning. There was always a desire to work with an intergenerational, diverse group of queer and trans performers. The idea was that they would both imagine themselves into positions of power they don’t occupy and, at the same time, explore how that power reflects back onto their own lives. Some of the monologues actually emerged quite late in the process. David Greenspan, for example, didn’t have a monologue until about a week before tech. Jeremy and Adam Greenfield, the artistic director at Playwrights Horizons, kept pushing me, saying, “He really does need a monologue.” John McCrea, as Prince George, maybe doesn’t need one in the same way, but the rest of the ensemble really did. David Greenspan as Edward II in Prince Faggot . Photo: Marc J. Franklin. BG : I agree. It was a memorable monologue, and it makes sense dramaturgically too. JT: At first, I understood the dramaturgical logic of adding the monologue, but I couldn’t quite see where it would land or how it wouldn’t interrupt the flow of the piece. Then it finally clicked. It felt essential to bring an intergenerational perspective on AIDS into the play. The absence of AIDS, particularly in relation to the older cast members, had started to feel conspicuous, especially given how central sex and sexual liberation were to our conversations in the room. David had brought this up a few times in relation to his own long-term relationship with his partner, and there was also a story that had been lodged in the back of my mind for years about how lesbians taught gay men how to fist, holding fisting workshops in bars and bathhouses in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. That story always struck me as such a beautiful example of queer kinship, resource sharing, and pleasure as a survival strategy. I had always wanted to write about it. Once I recalled that, it became very clear that this was what David’s monologue needed to be about. It also helps resolve the journey the play takes through fetish. For audience members who don’t have a relationship to fetish, or whose only frame of reference might be shock or titillation, the monologue grounds those moments in a personal, political, and historical context. That grounding helps give the fetish scenes greater emotional stakes. BG : That makes sense. I didn’t experience it as having shock value. It felt fully integrated into the narrative and dramaturgy, especially in what the play is saying about queer culture and queer shame. I also love the scene with the ghosts, when they all appear for Prince George like in Shakespeare’s Richard III . It’s such a powerful image. There are so many striking images in the show, but that one really stuck with me. JT: The show is very much about overcoming queer shame. That’s been a central journey in my own life, really over decades, but especially during the period when I was working on the play. That half-decade leading up to it was a time of reckoning for me in that regard. I was definitely feeling my Caryl Churchill oats in that scene, but it’s also one of the moments that comes closest to autobiography or, maybe more accurately, self-portraiture. There’s that image of Prince George being hooded with my actual latex pup hood. It’s a hood that I’ve worn to raves over many years. That moment felt like a very direct way of placing my own body, history, and desire inside the work. BG: Your hood is the actual prop used in the show? JT: Yes, I was very specific about that. It couldn’t be just any hood—it had to be that exact one from this particular store in Berlin called Blackstyle, which doesn’t even make it anymore. For the few people who know me personally, it’s a hood I’ve worn a lot and been photographed in, so it carries personal significance for me. For me, it embodies this transformative state of abandon that Prince George is reaching for but can never fully attain because of the strictures he lives under. It’s a state I’ve pursued in my own life as well as a sense of freedom and liberation, both sexual and spiritual. But it can also be self-obliterating. In the effort to remake oneself, that pursuit can involve a great deal of destruction. I was writing the play during lockdown, at a time when I had no income from my art because everything was shut down. I was working primarily as a fetish sex worker, focusing on BDSM and extended role play scenarios. Writing the play felt like a personal charge to myself that my lived experiences couldn’t be more radical or interesting than the art I was making. I needed to bring something to the stage that approached what I was actually living at that moment. That’s what I hope audiences, and especially queer audiences, can connect to in the work. BG: You’re really giving something of yourself to the work, and that comes through. JT: Yeah, totally. The struggle with identity that interested me here was one that moves beyond the familiar question of “Am I gay or am I not?” or “Will my parents accept me?” I wanted to push past those more traditional coming out narratives. The coming out struggle still matters. There’s real value in articulating that experience for people for whom it remains urgent. But for me, that hasn’t been the central question for a long time. As a gay man, I’ve had the privilege of spending many years where that wasn’t the primary site of struggle. A more active struggle for me now is trying to navigate the pull between a normative life and one oriented toward radical freedom. That includes grappling with pleasure, desire, and sometimes more difficult terrain like chemsex or dependencies. Those tensions feel much closer to my lived reality than the binary of disclosure or acceptance. BG: So many narratives frame coming out as this moment of transformation or liberation. But often that transformation isn’t really for the person coming out. It’s for others. It functions as a kind of confessional moment, in the Foucauldian sense, where society pressures you to declare yourself. Rather than freeing you, it can actually pull you more deeply into systems of regulation and expectation. Althusser’s idea of hailing comes to mind—it’s less a moment of emancipation than one of being interpellated into a structure that already exists. Coming out is often celebrated as empowerment, but it’s also— JT : —not real. BG : Exactly. It’s not that for a lot of people; it’s sort of forced. John McCrea as Prince George; Mihir Kumar as Dev Chatterjee in Prince Faggot . Photo: Marc J. Franklin. JT: Speaking purely from my own experience, I came out as a teenager, and I was embraced fairly quickly by my family and community. That initial coming out wasn’t the primary rupture for me. But there’s a different journey that follows learning what it means to be sexual for the first time, to have a sexuality at all. For me, there was a second awakening later, a kind of reckoning that arrived in my late twenties, when I realized just how expansive my sexuality actually was. It opened onto dimensions I hadn’t previously imagined—spiritual, narrative, even economic. It involved fetish, the transformative power of sex, and an engagement with the abject. It radically altered how I understood my body and what it could do. That period was marked by expansion, by raving, experimenting with drugs, having sex in different ways and with different kinds of people. It felt like an extraordinary widening of possibility. That second awakening, rather than the initial coming out, is what I was really trying to capture in this play. I wasn’t especially interested in making a work about that initial moment of coming out. I wanted to write something for the adults in the room, for people who have gone through, or are still reckoning with, that second awakening within their sexuality. For me, that reckoning has less to do with shame itself and more to do with shedding expectations imposed by family, by culture, by ideas of what a “healthy” sexuality or a “healthy” life is supposed to look like. BG: And the repressive force of heteronormativity shows up in the play too, especially in the double standards around queer and straight childhoods. There’s this refusal to sexualize the photograph of Prince George, but, at the same time, children are constantly subjected to forced heterosexual narratives. Buying a baby a “Lady Killer” onesie isn’t seen as troubling, but queerness is immediately framed as inappropriate or suspect. JT: Exactly. That double standard is very much one of the discourses the play engages with. Rather than shying away from it, the choice was to lean into it and name it directly. At this particular moment in American politics, queer and trans people talking about childhood feels charged and loaded. Instead of retreating into respectability politics, the play insists on confronting that discomfort head on and saying, “Let’s actually talk about it.” BG: Absolutely. That opening really sets the terms for the audience in a beautiful way. I wanted to ask you about the title of the play, because it’s obviously drawn a lot of attention. When I saw the production at Studio Seaview, I was standing outside waiting for a friend and watching people walk by the marquee billboard. Some of them almost refused to read it. One person started to read it out loud, saying “Prince Fay-go,” like pseudo-French or something—like he didn’t want to believe that was actually the word he was reading. I also noticed a lot of people referring to it as Prince F in the media as well . I’m curious about the tension around the title and the reactions you’ve seen to what’s often treated as a controversial term. JT: Totally. The play was always called Prince Faggot , from the very first moment I opened the Word document to write it. It just felt inevitable. The title captures the two seemingly incompatible identities at the center of the play, and the friction between them is really the engine of the piece. I knew the title had a certain brazen quality, and I hoped that would ultimately work in the play’s favor. What’s been interesting is that many people are surprised by the degree of nuance and humanity in the work, especially if they come in expecting something designed purely for provocation or shock. It’s definitely not a broad satire, which I think some people assume based on the title or what they’ve heard about it. BG: And the people with the strongest negative reactions are probably the ones who haven’t actually seen it. I love that “Prince Faggot” is emblazoned in ten-foot letters at 43rd and 8th. For all the Port Authority commuters. Brilliant. JT : That billboard still amazes me. Jeremy and I genuinely didn’t know whether we’d even be able to print the title on a marquee, or whether publications like The New Yorker or The New York Times would print it. Jeremy actually went back and researched every instance where the Times had used the word, most famously in relation to Larry Kramer, but also in other contexts. There was even a play in 1973 by Al Carmines called The Faggot , unrelated to Kramer’s book, that ran off-off Broadway and was reviewed in the Times . He pulled a review of it as proof that there was precedent. What interests me is that the audience’s relationship to the work begins before they ever see the play. It starts with how they talk about it with friends and colleagues. Many of my straight colleagues, including agents, default to calling it “ Prince F” out of respect, which I don’t mind. I’m honestly not sure I have a firm preference. Context matters, obviously. I don’t personally flinch when straight people use the word in reference to the title, but that’s not universally true. In a way, the title is the first provocation you encounter. I’m really interested in artists like Julius Eastman, whose compositions had deliberately provocative titles using slurs. Who chooses to say those titles, and who doesn’t, becomes part of the work itself. That relationship changes over time. People may have felt more comfortable saying those titles in the 1970s than they do now. That evolution is interesting to me. And honestly, it feels like a testament to New York City that, in this moment, we can have a giant marquee that says Prince Faggot . It’s right across from Chick-fil-A, which feels like a perfect showdown. It’s drama. Also, a lot of queer people have complicated relationships with saying the F word. Even within the cast, there are generational differences. Some of the older gay actors identify strongly as gay men rather than queer, and they fought hard for that word. For them, faggot hasn’t been reclaimed and still carries a lot of pain. So, the title participates in a politics of reclamation, but not one that’s universally shared. That tension, across generations, is very real. BG: Like any good play, it provokes. My last question is about influence. When I was watching the play, I kept thinking about Jean Genet, especially his play The Balcony . I’m curious whether there were specific playwrights or works shaping this piece. You mentioned Caryl Churchill earlier. JT: Definitely Caryl Churchill and Tony Kushner. And yes, Genet has been a huge influence on me. Structurally, one of the most important touchstones while I was writing was Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon . The way that play relates to the audience, how it explodes its own frame, how scenography becomes part of the dramaturgy—all of that had a major impact on me. That was also true for our director, Shayok Misha Chowdhury. We talked a lot about An Octoroon in the early stages of development. It’s funny: years after I wrote the first draft, the play ended up being produced by Soho Rep where An Octoroon premiered. That connection feels less like coincidence and more like destiny. BG: That lineage really makes sense to me. I hadn’t thought about the connection to An Octoroon . JT: It’s in the DNA of the piece. In that sense, it all feels very fortuitous. BG : Thank you, Jordan. References Footnotes About The Author(s) BENJAMIN GILLESPIE is Assistant Professor of Theatre History & Performance Studies at Santa Clara University. He is co-editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre and Performance Review Editor of Theatre Journal . His essays have appeared in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Performance Research , Theatre Research in Canada, and HowlRound . He has also has contributed numerous chapters to scholarly volumes on queer and feminist theatre. He is editor of Split Britches: Fifty Years On (University of Michigan Press, 2027) and co-editor of Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging (University of Michigan Press, 2026) and The Routledge Companion to LGBTQ+ Theatre and Performance in North America (Routledge, 2027). Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jen-Scott Mobley and Maya E. Roth Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Jen-Scott Mobley and Maya E. Roth By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Playwright Jen Silverman. Photo: Joseph O'Malley and R. Masseo Davis. Playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and essayist Jen Silverman (they/them) won the Jane Chambers Prize for Excellence in Feminist Playwriting in 2012. Since then, Silverman has added nearly a dozen full length plays, several novels, and multiple screenwriting credits to their body of work . Before the pandemic, Silverman was pegged as a “downtown playwright” for works such as Phoebe in Winter, Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties , and The Moors, among others . Most recently, Silverman’s play The Roommate ran on Broadway featuring Patti Lupone and Mia Farrow in 2024, and their adaptation of Strindberg’s Creditors ran at the Minetta Lane Theatre this past summer. Silverman’s work has been produced widely across the United States (Steppenwolf, The Goodman, Williamstown Theatre Festival, The Huntington, Writers Theatre, among others) and internationally in Australia, the UK, the Czech Republic, Brazil, Spain, and elsewhere. Their books include: We Play Ourselves, The Island Dwellers , and There’s Going to be Trouble (Random House). Their essays have been published in The New York Times , The Paris Review , and Vogue . Honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim. More information can be found at: https://www.jensilverman.com/ Co-coordinators for ten and twenty years, respectively, of the Jane Chambers Prize, Jen-Scott Mobley (East Carolina University) and Maya E. Roth (Georgetown University) were delighted to connect with Silverman to discuss their trajectory as a writer and collaborator . An avid reader and wicked smart conversationalist, Silverman embraced our invitation to jump into the heart of discussion via two rounds of written questions-and-answers while they worked on a television project in LA. This interview was conducted via email in July and September 2025. It has been edited for brevity and clarity. · Maya E. Roth: We first encountered your work when you won the Jane Chambers Prize for Feminist Playwriting in 2012 for your beautiful, early and unexpected play, S TILL — which centers a distinctive array of complex relationships, ruptures and reinventions after a forty-year-old woman’s homebirth results in stillbirth . The imagery remains with me still: an irreverent single woman who cradles a pumpkin like her dead infant , her winsome still born adult-sized baby who roams for three days in search of his mother, a queer punk teen dominatrix who crushes on the older woman and paints toenails with the unborn son, a masked midwife-turned-dominatrix unleashing her rage at being scapegoated. When my college students read this play at Georgetown, they are simultaneously shocked, moved, and exhilarated. Likewise so when I taught Witch , your 2022 revisioning of the 17th century The Witch of Edmonton . While their subjects are so different, tonally both plays mix heartbreak, dark humor, disparate cultures, eclectic characters and audacity of storytelling. What are the cultural wellsprings that you are drawing from—What inspires any given project for you? Is there something you ask of yourself every time (a representational challenge, for instance) or is it unique from piece to piece? Jen Silverman : In my earlier work, I was drawn to wellsprings that were defiantly absurdist, places of juxtaposition and defamiliarization. My characters were struggling with intimacy and violence—systemic as well as interpersonal—but inside containers that refused what I saw as the well-ordered cleanness of realism. S TILL is a very early play—so much so that I rarely grant production rights to it anymore—but it definitely exemplifies some of those early touchstones. In more recent years, my plays have grown out of questions that I can’t shake, that I live alongside until the intensification of the question finds its way into a narrative structure. Then I try to interrogate that structure, without any preconception about what it should be and how it should move. This past year, Sonia Friedman commissioned me to do a new adaptation of August Strindberg’s Creditors. The play takes place between three people, in a sea-side hotel, across one night. It’s Scandinavian realism: emotionally heightened, lyrical, but realism nonetheless. And yet Creditors was the perfect container for the questions I had been living next to, about how we carry with us legacies of damage, when we choose tenderness in the face of violence, whether we can we rewrite our histories . . . and what happens to us when we can’t. I don’t think Strindberg shared my exact theatrical preoccupations—he thought of Creditors as a revenge play, and he had a particular soon-to-be-ex-wife in mind when he wrote it—but the specificity of that form was the perfect vessel for what I wanted to explore, in a way that it might not have been ten years ago. MER : This was one of the featured first productions of TOGETHER’s collaboration with Audible, right?! JS : Yes! TOGETHER is a new company formed by Sonia Friedman, Hugh Jackman, and Ian Rickson, and The Creditors was part of their first season at the Minetta Lane, along with Hannah Moscovitch’s Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes . MER : So those of us who didn’t see it playing in repertory with Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes can listen to Creditors (or teach or research it) via Audible X Together. How different is the audio version of your play compared to the stage one—or how does it work differently? JS : It’s the same text, but of course the format relies on sound to give what were previously visual cues: a door opening, an object being set down, and so on. Before the recording session, Ian and Jeremy Blocker and I had a really interesting conversation about one scene in which it might be hard to translate a visual cue into an aural one, and whether we might need to supplement with more text. I gave them a few extra words, but I’m not sure we ended up using them. MER : What did you think of that producing model? Chamber theatre, spare production values onstage, big names, dual releases on stage and A udible ? It’s one of those post-pandemic experiments in staging theatre and trying to make it accessible to a wider range of audiences: Beyond the audio releases, TOGETHER also offered a percentage of free tickets to community groups and steeply discounted ones for same-day purchases, right? D id the audiences indeed diversify? H ow so, if so, and what changed about the value and/ or reception from stage to audio, and from full-price tickets to disparate community groups? JS : I really loved being part of that first season. And it did feel a little Wild West-y in a fun way—stripped down, moving fast. Sonia and Ian came to me in December 2024, and we started rehearsals in April 2025. We did get a really diverse audience every night, not just in terms of the most obvious factors like age and race, though there was absolutely that. But it seemed like every audience was comprised of multiple audiences in terms of cultural reference points and their relationship to theatre. It made for an audience reaction that was pretty unpredictable in ways that were largely exciting and occasionally terrifying. Every night during the first week of the show, I would sit in the back row and feel like basically anything could happen, including disaster. And then if, by the end, the entire audience had become one organism, one creature breathing and moving together, it would feel like more of a miracle than ever. Jen-Scott Mobley : More directly, do you think these two experiments are helping theatre to successfully reach more widely? Any other innovative models you are excited by currently? JS : I do. And I’m also excited by the site-specific theatrical experiments that are repopulating the landscape more and more. One of my favorites is Nick Westrate and Lucy Owen’s The Streetcar Project. They built a four-actor version without changing the original text, and they’ve been performing it in different venues. The play changes when you see it in a Rachel Comey store vs someone’s backyard vs a church. They’ll be at ACT San Francisco this winter, and it’s exciting to think what a wide and varied life their production has had before it ever landed in a theatre. JSM : In your essay “My Gender is Masha Green,” you write “I’m hungry to witness queer health & success… & cheeky glamour as well.” Do you identify as a queer writer? How and why does that shape your plays? JS : Without being too fussy about semantics, I would say I identify as a writer, and also, I’m queer. Meaning, a queer lens is inextricable from the way I reflect the world through my experience, and therefore how I think about story and structure. But I am also white, I am also someone who was raised itinerantly and internationally, I am also a younger sibling, and the child of two scientists, among other things. These are all overlapping, equally inextricable lenses that shape my outlook and therefore my plays. I’m not sure that one is more consciously dominant than another. That said, in certain contexts, different parts of my identity become important to the person who is responding to the work. I’ve heard from younger people who feel very attached to the ways in which they see queerness in my work, and that response is deeply, personally meaningful to me. When I was younger, I also encountered work in which the kinds of queerness I saw expanded my sense of possibility and let me feel less alone, and so it is incredibly moving to me when other people have that experience with my writing. JSM : I can attest that your work has been eye-opening and empowering to my students who identify variously as queer or non-binary, female identifying, or feminist. Your work inspires them to read plays! What work(s) expanded your sense of possibility early in your career? JS : Sarah Kane and Caryl Churchill, first. I read their plays in the first few months of freshman year at university—not having grown up going to the theatre, not really having seen any theatre—and I felt like they were talking to me. Paula Vogel and Sarah Ruhl also. Later, in grad school, the playwright Basil Kreimendahl and I went to Chicago to see Sylvan Oswald’s Pony —a genderqueered Woyzeck —and I remember an electric feeling: something was happening on that stage that reminded me that I existed. Or maybe that created a theatrical context in which my existence was part of a shared fabric. MER : Whose art inspires you now ? JS : A very short list (too short!) of playwrights & poets & novelists would include David Adjmi, Kaveh Akbar, Traci Brimhall, Alexander Chee, Helen Garner, Sheila Heti, Lucas Hnath, Donika Kelly, Basil Kreimendahl, Young Jean Lee, Rebecca Lindenberg, Mona Pirnot, Max Posner, and Richard Siken. But there are so many others! JSM : I love to teach The Moors . It never fails to thrill my script analysis students with the strong-willed heroines, the rock ballad, and Mastiff and the Moor Hen. You write a lot of non-human characters (the Mastiff & the Moor Hen, Wink, the PMS-ing Hippos, The Devil) who are at times mysterious, hilarious, charming, and dangerous, but importantly wonderful roles for actors. What does that dramaturgical choice enable you to express? JS : There’s a permission to speak the truth that comes when you’re putting words in the mouth of a dog or a devil. People have done this long before me—it’s not for nothing that the Devil is the most vivid character in the Gounod opera Faustus . Or that Shakespeare did this with his fools. They’re human, of course, but their distance from status makes them phenomenally observant and ruthlessly insightful. It’s been a while since I’ve worked that way theatrically, but I’m still exhilarated by the kind of brutal truth-telling that can happen by letting the least obvious characters speak from the margins. Playwright Jen Silverman. Photo: Zack Canepari. JSM : Among the reasons to celebrate your work is that your plays present remarkable opportunities for women and genderqueer actors, for example T he 5 Betties, and the “women of a certain age” in The Roommate . How deliberate is that for you when conceiving of a play? JS : I’ve never really sat down and thought about who should be in a play, without having first thought long and hard about what the play is, what it is attempting to do, what it requires. The Roommate was inspired by a story my mother-in-law told me, and as I chased down what had haunted me inside that story, I found myself writing a play about two women. Collective Rage was born of an overheated pressure-cooker of a summer in which, everywhere I turned, I encountered gendered expectations about what I should be doing with my body, my voice, my mind. In both cases, I was writing about what felt urgent to me, and it found form with those casts and characters. JSM : We’ve noticed that several of your most recent plays, including Spain , have more men in them. Is that a strategic choice to help get works staged or produced, or is there something else going on here? JS : Ha! No, not at all. I’m drawn to the play I need to write for a myriad of reasons and then I discover which characters need to populate that story. Sometimes when a play is a commission for a particular theatre, I’ll need to keep in mind certain realities like the actual space, or what cast size is even possible for them, but the gender breakdown of my characters has never been a strategic consideration for me. MER: I am struck by the disparate sources you adapt theatrically. Obviously Still , which was inspired by—and radically reimagined — the lived experience of one of your professor’s friends at Iowa during graduate school , and Creditors and Witch , which rework classic dramas in inventive new ways, but also your award-winning adaptation for narrative podcast (during the pandemic?) produced and featuring Rachel Brosnahan . I believe the latter springboard ed from the Vanity Fair article “ Miranda Obsession ” —about a woman who uses the persona “Miranda” to seduce an array of powerful men (industry executives) over the phone in the 1980s. What draws you to a text and inspires you to adapt found material from another time, place or form, in unique ways for performance? Commissions? Collaborators? Your own instincts? A writer’s habit? JS : Sometimes I stumble across a story, and I know right away that it’s saying something to me and that I have something to say back. Generally, that’s the key part—the adaptations around which I’ve had the most immediate certainty are ones where it really feels like I’m being talked to across space and time, and I want to reply. Sometimes a collaborator will bring me something that gives me this immediate spark—most often in the TV or film space—but in theatre and novels, I’m more often just wandering around until I bump into something thrilling. I’m a voracious, nearly pathological reader, though, so there’s also that. JSM : What makes for a good creative collaboration for you? JS : I’ve learned that if there’s a real synchrony in what we think is funny, we’re likely to be strongly aligned in other ways too. There’s something about the way humor and playfulness function that shows our relationship to much deeper core values—how we place ourselves in relation to our community, to history, to absurdity. Even relatively granular things like timing and pace matter deeply to a collaboration and are instantly legible in what someone laughs at and why. When I find that kind of alignment with a collaborator, we usually end up building ongoing bodies of work, often across multiple genres. MER : You have a knack for bending genre, time/space, representation, tone, and in a sense, you are queering form. What does that help you to express or achieve onstage, for storytelling, and/or the world? JS : My experience of time and space is a little warped, I think. I grew up switching countries and continents, moving between time-zones and languages. Cultural rules shifted as quickly as I learned them. The world for me is a fundamentally unstable place with all the gifts of that instability—the thrilling potential for transformation—and all of the dangers of sudden slippage. Surprise lives alongside pleasure lives alongside grief. In addition, I’m a genderqueer person who uses they/them pronouns; my history was shaped by partnerships with people who occupied a series of very different places on the gender spectrum. I believe in the power and pleasure—let’s even say the divine gift—of self-determination. And I guess that can’t help but affect what I make, both its content and its form. My characters are often striving for transformations of all kinds; my theatrical worlds are places where we are taught the rules, and then the rules shift and slip and break open. What we were, what we are, how we are in the process of becoming. Juxtapositions that we might not expect but that speak truth to each other. MER : The power and pleasure of self-determination. Transformation. Insights that arise from paradox and juxtapositions: This is the kind of storytelling and theatre that I love! In recent years you seem to have written more explicitly about cultural politics and ethical currents, too—perhaps reluctantly. We are thinking of works like your play Spain , your novel There’s Going to be Trouble , your op-ed in The New York Times , “Art Isn’t Supposed to Make You Comfortable” (April 2024), where you argued that stories should not serve as “instruction manuals” for morals, but rather conduits for artfully exploring complexities and paradoxes . These seem to respond to our changing times . JSM : W hat is the role of art relative to society in your mind? Has that role, or your vision of it, changed or heightened, given the U.S today? JS : I’m drawn to art that contributes to my sense of possibility. Art that opens previously invisible doors inside my head and sends me toward new ways of understanding myself and my context. Maybe not even new , just ways that trigger the exhilaration of newness because they come at me via unexpected pathways, so I don’t have defenses against them. Clichés are defenses, bulwarks shored up against unexpected thinking. Some of the most destructive political moves that I’m seeing right now are inherently, violently cliché, coming out of threadbare self-consuming ideologies. I value art that pulls down the defense-system and goes: Oh look . In small subtle delicate ways or in larger bolder ones. Art doesn’t have to be “political” in the most blatant forms in order to be conducting these operations. Often it’s more effective if it sort of comes in sideways. Either way, the more it can inject possibility into our thinking, the more we can see ourselves and each other with new capacity. And change occurs where there is capacity. MER : Your body of work is so diverse! Novels, essays, plays. There’s something radical in how you move across genres, borders and formats, shapeshifting as a writer. How does your fiction writing and your TV and film work connect to your work for the stage? Does this connect to what you have called an “aesthetics of fluidity” when we spoke a few years back? JS : What draws me to a story doesn’t necessarily change with the genre or medium. But each form provides a different access point for a reader, or viewer, or audience member. So part of what interests me when I’m turning a new project over in my mind is the question of intimacy. How much do I need a visual language, or duration, or physical proximity, or the ability to read a character’s mind? What are the tools that will best serve the story? And then from there, the form coalesces, and as the story progresses, it tries to make the best use of its form. MER : Oh, that makes so much sense! Creating intimacy and responding to, even exploring, legacies of damage, and paradox through inventive storytelling recurs across your body of work, often landing powerfully in final moments of the narrative and medium in new ways: How do you create intimacy with audiences for performance in particular? JS : That’s a great question. I think it’s an ongoing investigation, for each piece, always. My overall sense is that you do it by inviting an audience into the theatre and making them feel that the invitation is a real one. Humor is an invitation. Rich, compelling characters are an invitation. Pleasure and honesty are different kinds of invitations. There are lots of ways to do it, but I’m not interested in making an audience uncomfortable in a hostile way—pointing a punishing finger at them, or something. If someone has actually left their home to come and sit with us, I want them to feel like the play really wants them there. And from there intimacy can occur—even if the play ends up taking them into places where they’re less comfortable. JSM : What piece from your body of work would you recommend theatre scholars, artists, and educators engage with beyond your works for the stage? JS : My second novel, There’s Going To Be Trouble , engages with the theatrical and the political in the form of two seductions. It tells the story of a young man enmeshed in the Harvard student protests of the late 60s and, fifty years later, his daughter in the roiling street protests of Paris. Both fall in love with radical activists, inside very different frameworks of belief, and find themselves drawn toward the euphoric urgency of radicalization. And eventually, father and daughter are forced to encounter each other in the present, across an ideological divide: a man who’s given up on the world after having committed a horrifying and shameful act in the name of progress, and the daughter who is falling in love with the idea of changing the world, no matter the cost—but who finds herself increasingly proximal to the violence that comes with that phrase, “no matter the cost.” MER : Thank you for your extraordinary writing, your intelligence, your range. It’s been a gift to talk about your work, discover what you’re up to, and how you think about writing for the stage, queer writing, and the value of paradoxes. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JEN-SCOTT MOBLEY is an Associate Professor at East Carolina University. She has co-curated the Jane Chambers Award alongside Maya Roth since 2015, previously serving as a reader and prior to that stewarding the Student Jane Chambers Award for several years. In addition to her work in dramaturgy, play development, and feminist playwriting, Mobley’s scholarship also studies embodiment onstage and screen. Her 2014 monograph Female Bodies on the American Stage: Enter Fat Actress was among the earliest to explore fat bodies in representation through the interdisciplinary lens of performance and fat studies. MAYA E. ROTH is a Professor at Georgetown University. An artist-scholar, she specializes in new work development, plays that fuse psychic and social stakes, contemporary feminist playwrights and cross-cultural adaptations of classics. T ogether with Jen-Scott Mobley she coedited Lesbian and Queer Plays from the Jane Chambers Prize (2019, No Passport Press) . Across her career, she has developed innovative models for pedagogy, curation and collaborative research, weaving creative practice into teaching and scholarship. Her research has appeared in disparate contexts, including academic presses such as Routledge, Bloomsbury, Palgrave and McFarland, and arts venues including Shakespeare Theatre, HowlRound and international festivals. Maya was honored to serve as founding artistic director of the Davis Performing Arts Center. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Isaiah Matthew Wooden Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 2 Visit Journal Homepage “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Isaiah Matthew Wooden By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF In 1927, W. E. B. Du Bois sent a short letter to members of the Krigwa Players Little Theatre he helped launch in the basement of the 135 th Street branch of the New York Public Library in Harlem announcing his resignation. “With deep regret, I am giving up my work for the Little Theatre movement in Harlem. My work is so pressing that I cannot spare time,” Du Bois explained. 1 A fuller report on his decision to depart would be forthcoming in the New York Amsterdam News , he added, before concluding the correspondence by stating, “I shall miss all of you.” 2 Du Bois would make good on his word, outlining for readers of the October 5, 1927 edition of the bi-weekly, Black-owned the New York Amsterdam News his rationale for transitioning away from his leadership position with the company he first began imagining and laying the groundwork for in 1925 and would subsequently detail the “four fundamental principles” guiding its work in the pages of The Crisis Magazine . Included among other “special articles” published in the newspaper that week, Du Bois opened the piece, which ran under the title “In High Harlem: The Krigwa Players’ Little Negro Theatre,” by indicating his departure was mostly a consequence of accomplishing what he and dedicated collaborators like Charles Burroughs had set out to do. 3 “I have finished a little job which I set myself in 1925. It was the job of starting a Little Theatre movement in high Harlem,” he asserted, “The movement has been auspiciously begun. I leave it with fondest benedictions to those better able than I to conduct its growth.” 4 The Krigwa Players had already enjoyed extraordinary success in its short life, including staging new works by the likes of Georgia Douglas Johnson, Willis Richardson, and Eulalie Spence, and enlisting such collaborators as the renowned painter Aaron Douglas, among dozens of other artistically-inclined Harlemites. Du Bois insisted that the challenges confronting the company, including concerns about whether continuing to rely on the generosity of volunteers was sustainable, were not insurmountable. There were, however, several key questions Du Bois felt those supportive of the idea of a Little Negro Theatre in Harlem needed to contend with before a “real” movement could truly flourish: namely, “Is Negro life dramatic and interesting? Do we want profit or art? Will we subordinate ourselves to authority?” 5 While Du Bois was a great believer in the transformative power of drama and theatre for Black people in the United States, he was clear that any aspirations he held for being an impresario had dissipated. “It was a beautiful venture. We loved it even when we despaired of it,” he stated. 6 He notably closed the piece by announcing his intent to retain ownership of the name Krigwa, which served to index the company’s emergence from the Crisis Guild of Writers and Artists he was instrumental in forming, before again declaring that he was leaving the day-to-day work of running the company to others ostensibly more up to the task than he was. While much might be said about the shifting affects suffusing Du Bois’s resignation missive, which range from delight and appreciation to disappointment and regret, I want to linger here briefly on what I view as his very conscious choice to proclaim love for Black drama and theatre amid separating himself from what remains one of the most consequential Black cultural institutions in United States history. I do so, in part, to invite reflection on what this love might help us discern about the ongoing exigencies of these modes of expression in Black life and culture. Du Bois notably invokes the word love one other time in “In High Harlem: The Krigwa Players’ Little Negro Theatre.” Early in the article, he declares, “I am no theatrical man, but I love the theatre.” 7 Du Bois makes clear here that his affection for the art form is unequivocal, even if trying to keep the Krigwa Players in operation ultimately proved too tall of an order for him. Of course, despite his assertions to the contrary, there is no question that Du Bois was , indeed, a theatrical man. The spectacular pageants he mounted in the early decades of the twentieth century and the countless dramas he would go on to write and work to get produced and published well into the Civil Rights era certainly provide rich evidence to support this contention. So too do the multiple manifestos for Black theatre he composed over the course of his extraordinary life. Indeed, as Geoffrey Lokke suggests, the critical essays Du Bois penned to accompany the collection of plays that he endeavored to get printed under the title “Playthings of the Night” beginning in the early 1930s are often as revelatory as pieces like “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement” and “Criteria for Negro Art.” They shed particular light on what Du Bois viewed as some of the distinguishing features and aesthetic ambitions of his dramaturgy. 8 They are also full of searing commentary on what the renowned activist, writer, and visionary leader often diagnosed as the dismal state of the contemporary theatre. Du Bois routinely conveyed disappointment about the wanting engagements with and representations of Blackness littering stages big and small across the nation. Despite his frequent forays into drama and theatre (Lokke, for example, notes that he “was still circulating” the unpublished dramas selected for “Playthings of the Night” well into the 1960s, thereby “showing a commitment to the plays he sustained over five decades”), Du Bois would remain somewhat reticent about identifying himself as a “theatrical man” deep into old age. 9 This likely accounts for why he began the remarks he crafted for a forum focused on “The Negro and the American Theatre” in October 1946, some twenty years after the Krigwa Players launched in Harlem, with “an apology in appearing upon a program devoted to the drama.” 10 Of course, his subsequent comments would affirm why he was in fact the right person to anchor such a conversation. After reflecting on the extraordinary achievement of staging the “pageant of Negro history called The Star of Ethiopia ” in New York to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1913 and the establishment of the Krigwa Players Little Theatre in 1926, Du Bois went on to express the following about the expressive significance of drama and theatre: A group of people no matter what their biological background may be; no matter what their color and race, if they have lived, worked, and striven together as a group; If they share the same memories and experiences, they have something which they ought to express for the benefit of mankind and the drama is one great and fine mode of expression. This then is the wide and fruitful field for the Negro drama in the United States. 11 Notwithstanding any misgivings he might have maintained about naming himself a “theatrical man,” what is clear from these remarks is that Du Bois continued to marvel at what drama and theatre could make possible and do for Black people. His love for Black drama and theatre remained as “wide and fruitful” as he proclaimed the fields themselves to be. It remains somewhat curious, then, that in the years since Du Bois’s death in 1963 at the age of 95 there has been a recurring tendency to promote the idea that Black drama and theatre are amid some sort of “renaissance.” The underlying implication is that these modes of expression are somehow constantly falling out of favor and are thus in need of resuscitation. What Du Bois’s persisting regard for Black drama and theatre over his expansive life begs us to consider are the ways they have in fact continually remained exigent in the cultural, social, and political lives of Black people in the United States. Certainly, many of the institutions formed specifically to take Black theatrical practice and production in fresh and inventive directions have had noticeably short lifespans (much like the Krigwa Players Little Theatre in Harlem, which only lasted for about three years). This lack of longevity should not be mistaken for a decline in appreciation for Black drama and theatre as “great and fine” modes of expression, however. It is meaningful, for example, that Du Bois continued to field queries about the Krigwa Players long after his departure from the group. There was no shortage of interest from Black folks across the country in learning more about some of the plays the company performed or in seeking advice about the steps they might take to establish Little Theatre movements in their own communities. Du Bois would often generously counsel letter writers to contact some of his esteemed peers like the playwright and educator S. Randolph Edmonds, who in addition to founding the Negro Intercollegiate Drama Association (NIDA) during his time teaching at Morgan College (now Morgan State University) in Baltimore, a city where Du Bois would take up residence for significant parts of the 1940s, was also a prolific maker and teacher of drama. His generosity in answering such queries is perhaps best exemplified in a letter he wrote in response to a correspondence sent to him by a graduate student named J. W. J. Lovell in February 1929. 12 Lovell explained in his note that he was working on a graduate paper about “The Negro in American Drama” and wanted to know if Du Bois “would be at liberty in directing me to cumulative records about the Krigwa Players and other Little Theatre Movements among Negroes over the country in general.” 13 In seeking out Du Bois’s assistance, Lovell continued, he hoped “to be able to contribute something of real value to the scholarship on the subject.” 14 It did not take long for Du Bois to send a reply, which he began by detailing that there were Little Negro Theatre movements in a number of cities, including New Haven, Washington, D.C., Dallas, Cleveland, and Boston. He went on to urge Lovell to solicit additional information about these theatres and the dramas that they were commissioning and producing from some of their champions, whose names and addresses Du Bois supplied. Of course, many of the companies Du Bois directed Lovell to investigate further also would not endure. However, much like Du Bois and his collaborators at the Krigwa Players had done for various residents of and visitors to Harlem, these companies created opportunities for their communities to discover and expand their own love for Black drama and theatre. To be sure, the demand for Black drama and theatre has never waned precisely because the love for it is unwavering. Correspondingly, when one takes a closer look at all that was going on in the periods immediately preceding or following one of the so-called “renaissance” moments in Black theatrical practice and production, what inevitably emerges is an abundance of evidence of the ways artists have continued to conceive and produce dramatic works and performances that elicit deeper reflection on the conditions of Black life and, more broadly, the complexities of the human experience. The tremendous care and thoughtfulness with which these artists set out to respond to the calls Du Bois put forward in The Crisis magazine detailing the urgent need for more nuanced and layered representations of Blackness on the page and stage is immediately apparent. A January 1926 write-up encouraging submissions to the publication’s literary contest, which offered “$600 in prizes for stories, plays, essays, poems and covers,” is illustrative on this front. 15 Du Bois counseled p rospective contestants to write “about things as you know them; be honest and sincere,” adding, “Plumb the depths. If you want to paint Crime and Destitution and Evil paint it. Do not try to be simply respectable, smug, conventional. Use propaganda if you want. Discard it and laugh if you will. But be true, be sincere, be thorough and do a beautiful job.” 16 Du Bois’s insistence that contestants ought to write as imaginatively and expansively as possible, while also remaining grounded in the specificity of Black life and experience, is no doubt a charge that has resonated with Black theatremakers and other artists in the hundred years since he first put it in print. This perhaps accounts for why, when asked to contemplate the question, “What is a b lack play?” the celebrated playwright Suzan-Lori Parks offered , among other possibilities, that “A b lack p lay IZ.” 17 With the pithy phrase, Parks, like Du Bois before her, notably reaffirmed the fact that Black drama and theatre can and must contain multitudes and, in so doing, prompted further consideration of the ways that they remain present in the present and, thus, are always already exigent. As Freda Scott Giles observes, “Du Bois viewed the arts as a powerful weapon in combatting oppression, but his appreciation for the arts went much deeper.” 18 While Giles argues that “through his participation in theatre, Du Bois could partially reconcile his mission as a social scientist and civil rights activist with his avocation as a creative artist,” this does not fully capture the extent to which drama and theatre were foundational to his larger objectives of dismantling the oppressive structures constraining Black life in the wake of emancipation. 19 To be sure, Du Bois’s investments in drama and theatre were not merely intellectual or secondary to his political work. His deep love for these forms emerged from a lasting belief in their transformative potential to upend the racist status quo. Thus, his love not only sustains, but it is, indeed, sustaining. References 1 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Note from W. E. B. Du Bois to the Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,” 1927. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b039-i281 . 2 Du Bois, “Note from W. E. B. Du Bois to the Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre.” 3 W. E. B. Du Bois, “In High Harlem: The Krigwa Players’ Little Negro Theatre,” The New York Amsterdam News , October 5, 1927. 4 Du Bois, “In High Harlem.” 5 Du Bois, “In High Harlem.” 6 Du Bois, “In High Harlem.” 7 Du Bois, “In High Harlem.” 8 See Geoffrey Lokke, “Du Bois’s Forgotten Plays,” African American Review , Vol. 50, No. 3 (Fall 2017): 309-319. For a rich discussion of one of the plays Du Bois intended to include in the collection, “Seven-Up,” see Paul Michael Thomson, “‘I Thought I Loved Him,…the Pale Coward’: The Politics of Interracial Love in W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘Seven-Up’,” Theatre History Studies , Volume 43 (2024): 111-128. 9 Lokke, “Du Bois’s Forgotten Plays,” 309. 10 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Stage for Action,” ca. October 1946, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b198-i049 . 11 Du Bois, “Stage for Action.” 12 See W. E. B. Du Bois, “Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to J. W. J. Lovell,” February 26, 1929, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b049-i388 . 13 J. W. J. Lovell, “Letter from J. W. J. Lovell to W. E. B. Du Bois,” February 24, 1929, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b049-i387 . 14 Lovell, “Letter from J. W. J. Lovell to W. E. B. Du Bois.” 15 Lovell, “Letter from J. W. J. Lovell to W. E. B. Du Bois.” 16 Du Bois, “Krigwa, 1926.” 17 See Suzan-Lori Parks, “New Black Math,” Theatre Journal , Volume 57, Number 4 (December 2005): 576-583. Quoted on pp. 578. 18 Freda Scott Giles, “W. E. B. Du Bois, Dramatist,” in The Routledge Companion to African American Theater and Performance , edited by Kathy A. Perkins, Sandra L. Richards, Renee Alexander Craft, and Thomas F. DeFrantz (New York: Routledge, 2018), 217. 19 Giles, “W. E. B. Du Bois, Dramatist,” 217. Footnotes About The Author(s) Isaiah Matthew Wooden  is a scholar-artist, writer, and Associate Professor and Chair of Theater at Swarthmore College. He is the author of  Reclaiming Time: Race, Temporality, and Black Expressive Culture  and co-editor of  August Wilson in Context ,  Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration , and “Manifestos for Black Theatre, Then and Now,” a special section of  Theatre History Studies . Wooden has contributed more than sixty articles, essays, and reviews on contemporary art, drama, and performance to scholarly and popular publications. As a director and dramaturg, he has collaborated on projects in venues ranging from the Uganda National Theatre to the Kennedy Center. Wooden is currently at work on a critical biography that conjoins performance history, cultural analysis, dramatic criticism, and personal reflection to trace the significance of trailblazing Black playwright-director-producer George C. Wolfe to the evolutions of post-1970s American theatre, drama, and expressive culture. 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 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Reflections on Fundamental Principles An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T The Wild Duck Picnic at Hanging Rock Last Call: A Play with Cocktails The Dinosaurs The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

William DeVito, Juanita Mejia Restrepo, M. Nance, Robert Pike, and Rufus ZaeJoDaeus Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage ZAZ William DeVito, Juanita Mejia Restrepo, M. Nance, Robert Pike, and Rufus ZaeJoDaeus By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF ZAZ By Ryan K. Johnson  Directed by Ryan K. Johnson  Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University Columbus, OH September 5th, 2025 Reviewed by William DeVito, Juanita Mejia Restrepo, M. Nance, Robert Pike, and Rufus ZaeJoDaeus On September 5, 2025, the five of us experienced the dance company SOLE Defined’s world premiere of ZAZ at The Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts. According to the company’s website, SOLE Defined’s mission is to create pieces “designed to evoke the senses, creating sonic and kinetic performative archives of Black American History through the lens of African Diasporic Percussive Dance methodologies.” ZAZ powerfully realizes this goal: in ninety minutes the show’s director and playwright Ryan K. Johnson leads an energetic cast of six to manifest an expressive docudrama that performs the lived experience of the Black community of New Orleans and reckons with the devastating legacy of Hurricane Katrina. ZAZ deftly casts the theatrical space as a living palimpsest where oral histories, news reports, diverse dance forms, and mourning rituals materialize and dissipate through the physicality of these dancing storytellers. Nearly to the date, this run marked the twentieth anniversary of the disaster that laid bare the social and racial undercurrents dominating America. SOLE Defined’s immersive work responds to that moment by shepherding the bodies in the space—performers and audience alike—in a theatrical experience of shared kinesthesia. ZAZ (Cast: Claude Alexander III, Duante Fyall, Jada Hicks, Quynn Johnson, Ryan K. Johnson, Shannan E. Johnson, Jodeci Milhouse, Funmi Sofola), photo: Becca Marcela Oviatt. The production’s intentional flow submerged the current of audience’s bodies in its scenography as soon as they entered the space. Throughout four audience banks oriented around and facing each side of the set’s central dance floor, we sat among the fifty-some chairs at hazily lit cocktail tables that transformed the black box space into “ZAZ,” the titular New Orleans jazz club. Audience members were scattered throughout the space; some sat in a corner, while others of us shared tables with our backs facing a projected wall displaying performance information integrated with family photographs, posters, and other trappings found in a French Quarter establishment. The seating arrangement fostered an unexpected theatrical communion, which was continued in ZAZ’ s initial moments: amid jazz-infused hip-hop beats, ZAZ ’s host — played by Shannan E. Johnson — beckoned the audience to join her on the dance floor. Several audience members jumped in and improvised, troubling the boundaries between spectator and spectated. As individual actors dressed in everyday clothing subtly integrated into the crowd, they herded all the moving bodies in a coordinated line dance. The collective energy was effervescent, drawing all — even those who remained sitting — into the joyous community of New Orleans.   The celebration was cut short by the wail of sirens. News clips of the impending hurricane replaced the wall projections, sending us back in time to the weeks preceding August 23rd, 2005. The audience returned to their seats, leaving Johnson onstage to narrate this piece’s origins and his individual connection to the “Big Easy.” Then, this literal calm-before-the-storm shattered, and the audience was engulfed by a frightening simulation of Hurricane Katrina. From an overhead projection, the scuffed dance floor rippled as the water droplets of Katrina’s rain invaded the narrative space. The bright noise of New Orleans horns transformed into a somber-toned spiritual intertwined with the roar of helicopters. The wild abandon of social dance gave way to an athletic pas-du-deux between two embattled survivors struggling for a rescuer’s attention, their movements illuminated by isolated shafts of search lights. This was ZAZ ’s power in action: the protean, visceral design emerged through a combination of audience immersion and integrated sound, projection, and lights. As the past evaporated with each scene, experience accumulated on the performing bodies. In nearly every sense, the body was the chief investment of ZAZ . In lieu of distinct set pieces, ZAZ championed the visual effect of the promenade. Performers ebbed, flowed, and exploded onto the scene through the nooks and crannies of the entire space, causing the audience to constantly reorient themselves toward the next area of focus. The sonic world of the play married the quintessentially Black musical forms of jazz, hip-hop, and spirituals with the polyrhythmic resonances of body percussion . The cast of ZAZ , photo: Becca Marcela Oviatt. Floor mics caught these punctuated flows along with the scrapes of sand dancing and raps of tap shoes. In one sequence, as the ensemble danced ferociously, they lit the darkened stage with headlamps affixed to their foreheads, re-centering the locus of control from the light grid to the individual performers. ZAZ’s narrative structure prioritized corporeality over character as Johnson’s individual arc melded with the collage of collective experience. The performers cycled through a variety of characters, transforming their voices and changing clothing frequently, and the action never lingered on a single story long enough for emotive identification. Hurricane Katrina’s effects on the entire community were impressed upon all the attendees. In a particularly poignant moment, cast members dressed as government officials demanded the audience leave their seats. Dividing us by gender, the rescuers marshaled us throughout the audience banks and declared that we were now “displaced.” This aestheticized imposition harkened to the actual displacement of thousands of New Orleans’ s citizens that were shuttled across the country, never to return to their neighborhoods. In reenacting this harrowing experience, ZAZ highlighted the callousness of the government’s process using the actual bodies in the audience. This unique and effective method of theatrical identification crowned ZAZ ’s comprehensive commitment to the body.   As promised in their company mission, the feast of stimulation is the beating heart of ZAZ . Its use of theatrical space and the bodies within it heralded the lived — and living — resilience of a community assaulted, not only by nature, but by our leaders’ apathy towards their plight . ZAZ offers no prescriptive solutions, only experience. Yet, this vivid piece contends that acknowledging that experience is the first step towards a better future. As a coda, the closing moments of the performance advanced this proposition by returning us to the communal dance floor. Now burdened with knowledge and tempered with soul , the continued rhythms of the bodies joyously echoed forth after the storm.  The audience — pulled into the narrative, moved emotionally and physically — kept dancing even after the actors left the stage. References Footnotes About The Author(s) WILLIAM DEVITO is a theatre director and PhD student in Theatre at The Ohio State University. JUANITA MEJIA RESTREPO is a Master’s student in Theatre at The Ohio State University and recent graduate of the MFA Acting program at Purdue University. M. NANCE (they/them) is a PhD student in the Theatre program at The Ohio State University. As a theatre artist, their praxis centers dramaturgy, playwriting, and directing. ROBERT PIKE (he/him) is a theatre artist and PhD student in the Theatre program at The Ohio State University. RUFUS ZAEJODAEUS is a media design MFA at The Ohio State University with an emphasis on immersive experiences. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Kellen Hoxworth Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 2 Visit Journal Homepage An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision Kellen Hoxworth By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF In theatre and performance studies, W. E. B. Du Bois’s name has become synonymous with his manifesto for “a real Negro theatre” that is “1. About us ... 2. By us ... 3. For us ... 4. Near us .” 1 Interpreted within the context of the essay’s title, “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement,” Du Bois’s vision for Black theatre has often been interpreted to be local, topical, and “little” in the form of community theatre. 2 For instance, David Krasner interprets an extensive array of Black American drama, theatre, pageantry, and performance through the lenses provided by Du Bois’s landmark 1903 The Souls of Black Folk. Within this framework, he interprets even Du Bois’s Afro-diasporic pageant The Star of Ethiopia as an example of an “emerging Black Nationalism” among Black Americans. 3 For Krasner, the theorization of “a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness” experienced by “Black folk”—“this always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity”—frames Du Bois’s political and aesthetic engagements with Black theatre firmly within the “two-ness” of Black American experience: “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.” 4 Similar framings of Du Bois’s contributions to Black theatre and performance as focusing primarily on the “peculiar experience” of Black American identity and subjectivity and its role in the formation of the Little Negro Theatre movement across particular, local Black American communities. 5 Yet, recent scholarship on Du Bois’s pageant The Star of Ethiopia emphasizes Du Bois’s Black internationalist political vision in his artistic contributions to the Black theatrical tradition. 6 There are therefore two warring ideals of Du Bois in contemporary scholarship on Black theatre and performance: Du Bois, the Black nationalist, and Du Bois, the pan-Africanist. These two interpretations of Du Bois, however, may be reconciled through closer attention to the continuities between his writings on Black American experience and pan-Africanist history and politics. Indeed, Du Bois’s theatrical projects and his lasting influence on Black theatre makers outlines a significantly more transnational imagining of the “us” at the heart of Black theatre—an expansive “us” that situates the Black American theatre firmly within a wider Black diasporic project and politics. Through his pageant The Star of Ethiopia and his intellectual mentorship of pan-Africanist playwrights Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry, Du Bois manifested an avowedly internationalist, “pan-Negro” theatrical vision that both anticipated and elaborated upon his artistic and political investments in the Little Negro Theatre movement. Du Bois’s investments in theatre and performance drew primarily from his view that the arts should be used for “propaganda”—that is, public pedagogy dedicated to “education and social uplift.” 7 His most direct involvement with performance arose through his interest in the American pageant movement and its mobilization of mass participation in support of public enactments of history. 8 Du Bois produced his signature historical pageant, The Star of Ethiopia , in four cities across the United States in a series of iterations that involved significant revisions and reimaginings of its characters and its symbolism. The earliest iteration dates to 1911, though there is no clear surviving evidence of this earliest draft. 9 The first publicly performed version was staged in New York City in 1913 as part of the Emancipation Exposition commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation under the title, The People of the Peoples and Their Gifts to Men . 10 Then, in Washington, D.C., in 1915, Du Bois produced a version under the pageant’s final title, The Star of Ethiopia , in which he transformed the figure of the “Veiled Woman” into the role of “Ethiopia.” 11 Following the 1915 production, Du Bois continued revising the pageant, culminating in additional productions in Philadelphia in 1916 and in Los Angeles in 1925. 12 Though Du Bois continually rewrote his pageant, a consistent plot arc served as its narrative spine: The Star of Ethiopia dramatizes the history of Black peoples beginning in prehistorical Africa, through the rise of Pharaonic Egypt, the arrival of Islam to the African continent, the emergence of the slave trade and the consequent enslavement of Africans, the resistance of the enslaved throughout the Americas through revolts and rebellions, and the eventual emancipation of Black Americans during the Civil War. Beginning with the 1915 production, Du Bois added a set of concluding episodes that stage the post-emancipation discrimination of the Jim Crow era and Black resilience in the face of enduring oppression. 13 As the global sweep of his pageants demonstrate, Du Bois’s vision was not simply to dramatize the history of Black people in the United States but rather, as Du Bois himself wrote in his Autobiography , “The pageant was an attempt to put into dramatic form ... a history of the Negro race.” 14 Here, Du Bois crafted The Star of Ethiopia as a dramatic parallel to his contemporaneously published scholarly text The Negro (1915), which he intended to be “a complete history of the Negro peoples.” 15 Du Bois’s conception of the relationship between Black Americans and “the Negro people” writ large had long been defined by his internationalist and pan-Africanist politics. In his 1897 essay “The Conservation of Races,” he identified “the eight million people of Negro blood in the United States of America” as “the advance guard of the Negro people,” who were connected to “Negro people” throughout the world by “pan-Negroism.” 16 Thus, as Soyica Colbert notes, Du Bois crafted the dramaturgy of The Star of Ethiopia to “present[] an international landscape instead of recounting a local history.” 17 As Krasner further observes, “In The Star of Ethiopia , Du Bois sought a cultural representation of the black diaspora, a collective consciousness among black people centered upon a common history and ancestry.” 18 Prehistoric Africans, ancient Egyptians, Muslims, Christians, animists, African enslavers and enslaved Africans, in Africa and across the Americas — all, for Du Bois, shared a common “pan-Negro” history. Moreover, Du Bois viewed “pan-Negroism” as integral to his vision of “the development of Negro genius, of Negro literature and art, [and] of Negro spirit” which only would be made possible by “Negroes bound and welded together, Negroes inspired by one vast ideal, [who] can work out in its fullness the great message we have for humanity.” 19 Therefore, by charting a world-historical arc that spans from prehistoric Africa to the contemporary United States, Du Bois fashioned “an expansive historical narrative” that promulgated an expansive conception of the Black “us” at the center of his “real Negro theatre.” 20 It is no stretch to connect Du Bois’s pageant to his later theorization of a “Little Negro Theatre.” Indeed, in his autobiography, Du Bois placed The Star of Ethiopia directly alongside his discussion of the Krigwa Players: the pageant ‘The Star of Ethiopia’ ... was an attempt to put into dramatic form for the benefit of large masses of people, a history of the Negro race. It was first attempted in the New York celebration of Emancipation in 1913; it was repeated with magnificent and breath-taking success in Washington with 1,200 participants; it was given again in Philadelphia in 1916; and in Los Angeles in 1924. Finally I attempted a little theatre movement which went far enough to secure for our little group second prize in an international competition in New York. 21 As this passage demonstrates, Du Bois saw his pageant and the Little Negro Theatre movement as part of the same project of “trying to develop Negro art and literature,” and he placed them along the same continuum of theatrical practice. 22 This reflection echoed Du Bois’s earlier 1916 writing about The Star of Ethiopia in which he asserted that “pageantry among colored people is not only possible, but in many ways of unsurpassed beauty and can be made a means of uplift and education and the beginning of a folk drama.” 23 In other words, for Du Bois, the roots of a Little Negro Theatre and its “folk drama” lay in his experiments in pageantry “for the benefit of large masses of people.” As remarkably ambitious theatrical experiments, Du Bois’s several stagings of The Star of Ethiopia anticipated his later vision for a “real Negro theatre” that was “ About ... By .... For ... and Near ” Black people. First and foremost, Du Bois wrote his pageants for Black people as correctives to the omission of Black and African history from the emergent US pageant movement. 24 He also wrote his pageants for Black people so that they might become more involved in the theatrical life of their communities. As Du Bois reflected following the 1916 pageant in Philadelphia, “It seemed to me that it might be possible with such a demonstration to get people interested in the development of Negro drama to teach on the one hand the colored people themselves the meaning of their history and their rich emotional life through a new theatre.” 25 Moreover, by enlisting everyday Black people as performers, Du Bois’s pageants were exercises in drama by Black people that, in keeping with his vision for a Little Negro Theatre, “creat[ed] a community through the process of staging.” 26 His pageants also were performed near Black people , as he staged iterations across the country to bring his dramatization of Black history to different Black communities. His vision of bringing Black pageantry to Black people is perhaps most evident in the 1915 staging in Washington, D.C., at the American League Baseball Park down the road from Howard University, where it drew a predominantly Black audience. 27 Taken together with his dramatization of Black history—itself a theatrical work about Black people in an expansive sense—Du Bois’s The Star of Ethiopia anticipated and fulfilled the “four fundamental principles” that he would later outline for “a real Negro theatre.” 28 Importantly, Du Bois’s foundational contributions to a “Pan-Negro” theatrical vision did not end with The Star of Ethiopia nor with his manifesto for a “Little Negro Theatre.” His role as a friend, teacher, and mentor to two of the most significant Black playwrights of the twentieth century—Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry—ensured that his pan-Africanist dramaturgy and politics endured well after he ceased working in the theatre. Indeed, recent scholarship on Childress and Hansberry has noted Du Bois’s significant role in serving as a pedagogue and model for both playwrights insofar as he both instructed and inspired Childress and Hansberry and their “radical visions.” 29 However, scholarship on Du Bois’s theatrical work has not yet considered the implications of his mentorship as part of his broader contributions to Black theatre and performance. The earliest known acquaintance between Du Bois, Childress, and Hansberry almost certainly occurred in the early 1950s at 53 W. 125 th Street in Harlem, where the Council on African Affairs (CAA), led by Du Bois and Paul Robeson, shared office space with Robeson’s newspaper Freedom , for which Childress and Hansberry were both regular contributing writers. Du Bois used the CAA to organize Black Americans in support of pan-Africanist politics, while he continued publishing pan-Africanist scholarship such as The World and Africa (1946). 30 The influence of Du Bois’s pan-Africanism on Hansberry’s and Childress’s dramaturgy was remarkably direct. The program for Childress’s 1952 pan-Africanist dramatic revue Gold Through the Trees —which Mary Helen Washington identifies as “virtually a textbook of 1950s Harlem leftist politics” and their Black internationalist horizons—explicitly cited Du Bois’s The World and Africa . 31 Around the same time, Childress and Hansberry coauthored the script for “A Cultural Festival in Celebration of Negro History Month” for a celebration of the first anniversary of Freedom . The production starred Childress as the emcee alongside performances by Paul Robeson, Sidney Poitier, Beah Richards (Beulah Richardson), and Harry Belafonte. It opened with a “Nigerian Processional” replete with “African song” and characters identifying themselves as belonging to various African ethnic groups who recounted their journey through the crucible of slavery and their ongoing commitment to pan-Africanist liberation. 32 In many ways, Childress’s Gold Through the Trees and the “Cultural Festival” that she coauthored with Hansberry were continuations of the work initiated by Du Bois in The Star of Ethiopia . They were dramatizations of a “pan-Negro” political and theatrical vision that galvanized the development of Black art to engage and educate local Black communities. Moreover, Du Bois’s mentorship of Childress and Hansberry also took place in actual classrooms. Both Childress and Hansberry enrolled in Du Bois’s course on African history at the Jefferson School of Social Science in 1953. Childress wrote a final paper on the Gold Coast, while Hansberry’s final paper was titled “The Belgian Congo: A Preliminary Report on Its Land, Its History, and Its Peoples.” 33 Through this course, Du Bois created a small community of committed pan-Africanist students, a community that Du Bois further fostered by inviting students from the class to dinner at his home. 34 The relationships formed through Du Bois’s mentorship were lasting. Du Bois sought Childress’s perspective about a novel he was developing in 1955, and Childress cherished a cigarette holder Du Bois bequeathed to her. 35 Both Childress and Hansberry also maintained active relationships with Du Bois and his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois. In April 1953, Childress escorted the Du Boises to a cultural reception in honor of Herbert Aptheker, and three years later, Graham Du Bois advocated for Childress’s Trouble in Mind to be produced by a Black theatre company in Los Angeles. 36 As for Hansberry, Graham Du Bois recalled that she was Du Bois’s “favorite pupil” and that he was “exceedingly fond and proud of her.” 37 For her part, Hansberry was a longtime avid reader of Du Bois’s writing (particularly his 1939 Black Folk Then and Now ), and through his tutelage she deepened her investments in pan-Africanist thought and politics. 38 In 1960, following the incredible Broadway success of Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun , Graham Du Bois sent Hansberry a series of letters in which she expressed “how proud” she was of Hansberry’s theatrical achievements and praised her “dignity and outspoken appearances on television.” 39 Attesting to the Du Boises’ great esteem for her, in February 1964, Hansberry was selected to read Shirley Graham Du Bois’s words at a memorial in honor of W. E. B. Du Bois, which Hansberry prefaced with her own reflections on her departed mentor: It is my privilege this evening to read to you the message to this meeting from Mrs. Shirley Graham Dubois [sic]. But I should first like to make a few remarks of my own. I do not remember when I first heard the name Dubois [sic]. For some Negroes it comes into consciousness so early, so persistently that it is like the spirituals or the blues or discussions of oppression; he was a fact of our culture. People spoke of him as they did the church or the nation. He was an institution in our lives, a bulwark of our culture. I believe that his personality and thought have colored generations of Negro intellectuals, far greater, I think than some of those intellectuals know. And, without a doubt, his ideas have influenced a multitude who do not even know his name. 40 Hansberry was one vector by which Du Bois’s influence extended well beyond his own work as a scholar, political organizer, and theatre maker. For her, “to honor Du Bois [...meant] sustaining his Pan-Africanist and socialist vision”—both within and beyond the theatre. 41 As such, Hansberry interwove Du Boisian politics of Black internationalism in A Raisin in the Sun through the figure of Joseph Asagai. 42 Additionally, Hansberry drew from Du Bois’s lessons in African history in crafting her posthumously staged play on African anticolonial movements, Les Blancs , which included direct references to the research paper she submitted to Du Bois on Belgian colonialism in the Congo. 43 Thus, like Childress’s Gold Through the Trees , Hansberry’s Les Blancs is a testament to the endurance of Du Bois’s theatrical vision. Their collective Black internationalist dramatic output attests to the endurance of Du Bois’s expansive, internationalist vision of Black politics. Taken together with Du Bois’s own pageantry, Childres’s and Hansberry’s pan-African dramas exemplify the ways by which Du Bois’s “pan-Negro” theatrical “ideas have influenced a multitude who do not even know his name.” Moreover, they trace how Du Bois’s pan-Africanist and Black internationalist politics have long served as a central pillar of Black American theatre. Indeed, Du Bois’s “pan-Negro” theatrical vision influenced Black artists well beyond Childress and Hansberry. His distinctive Black internationalist aesthetics and politics may be viewed as the bedrock upon which the Black Arts Movement took root—from Amiri Baraka’s vision for an anti-Eurocentric and avant-garde “Revolutionary Theatre” to Barabara Ann Teer’s ritual theatre. 44 It would be hard to imagine a contemporary Black theatre canon without the foundation laid by Du Bois’s Black internationalist political vision. In this sense, the “ritualizing repair” enacted by Aleshea Harris’s What to Send Up When It Goes Down — which notably is subtitled “A play. A pageant. A ritual. A homegoing celebration” — exemplifies Du Bois’s enduring yet hidden influence on contemporary Black theatre. 45 With its deft combinations of propaganda and community-building and its explicit citation of Du Bois’s pageantry, Harris’s play-pageant-ritual-celebration stages a “little” community drama undergirded by an expansive “pan-Negro,” Black internationalist theatrical vision that remains urgently relevant in confronting the social and political realities of the Global Majority. References 1 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement,” The Crisis 32, no. 3 (July 1926): 134-135, at 134. 2 On the Little Theatre movement, see Dorothy Chansky, Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004). 3 David Krasner, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895-1910 (St. Martin’s Press, 1997); David Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 82. 4 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), 3. 5 See, for instance, Ethel Pitts Walker, “Krigwa, a Theatre by, for, and about Black People,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 3 (1988): 347-356; Jonathan Shandell, “The Negro Little Theatre Movement,” in The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre , second edition, ed. Harvey Young (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 103-118. 6 Soyica Diggs Colbert, The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 48-90. Julia A. Walker, Performance and Modernity: Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 123-135. 7 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” The Crisis 32, no. 6 (October 1926): 290-297, at 296; W. E. B. Du Bois, “A Pageant [1915],” in Pamphlets and Leaflets by W. E. B. Du Bois , ed. Herbert Aptheker (Kraus-Thomson, 1986), 151-152, at 151. 8 Walker, Performance and Modernity , 124. 9 Du Bois dates his first draft to 1911, though no version from such an early date is available in his archives. See W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Star of Ethiopia,” The Crisis 11, no. 2 (December 1915): 91. Freda L. Scott argues that an undated version titled The Jewel of Ethiopia: A Masque in—Episodes is this earliest 1911 draft, though there is no clear evidence to substantiate this claim. See Freda L. Scott, “ The Star of Ethiopia : A Contribution Toward the Development of Black Drama and Theater in the Harlem Renaissance,” in The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations , ed. Amritjit Singh, William S. Shiver, and Stanley Brodwin (Garland, 1989), 257-269, at 259. 10 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The National Emancipation Exposition,” The Crisis 7, no. 1 (November 1913): 339-341; W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Drama Among Black Folk,” The Crisis 12, no. 4 (August 1916): 169-173, at 171. Attesting to the importance of local site in Du Bois’s dramaturgy, this version concludes with “the All-Mother, formerly the Veiled Woman, no unveiled in her chariot with her dancing brood, and the bust of Lincoln at her side ” (Du Bois, “The National Emancipation Exposition,” 341; italics mine). Notably, Lincoln disappears from the 1915 version and subsequent iterations. 11 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Star of Ethiopia,” The Crisis 11, no. 2 (December 1915): 90-94; “The Star of Ethiopia,” Washington Bee , October 9, 1915, 1; Andrew F. Hilyer, “The Great Pageant,” Washington Bee , October 23, 1915, 1; Scott 261-265. The 1915 Washington, D.C. production has become the most well-documented and studied iteration. See Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant , 81-94; Susan Gillman, Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (University of Chicago Press, 2003), 148-199; Colbert, The African American Theatrical Body , 48-90. Julia A. Walker focuses on an early draft of the 1915 production; see Performance and Modernity , 123-135. 12 Du Bois, “The Drama Among Black Folk,” 169; W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Pageant of the Angels,” The Crisis 30, no. 5 (September 1925): 217-218. For an outline of the 1925 Los Angeles pageant, see W. E. B. Du Bois, “‘The Star of Ethiopia’: A Pageant of Negro History by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois,” in Pamphlets and Leaflets by W. E. B. Du Bois , 206-209. 13 “The Star of Ethiopia,” Washington Bee , October 9, 1915, 1; Du Bois, “‘The Star of Ethiopia’: A Pageant of Negro History by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois.” 14 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (Oxford University Press, 2007), 172. 15 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro (Henry Holt, 1915), vi. 16 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” in The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader , ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Oxford University Press, 1996), 38-47, at 42-43. 17 Soyica Diggs Colbert, The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 48-49. 18 Krasner 82. Walker offers a similar interpretation that “[w]hat thus begins as a specifically African American pageant becomes an expression of global Blackness more generally” (Walker, Performance and Modernity , 125-126). 19 Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” 42. 20 Colbert, African American Theatrical Body , 60. 21 Du Bois, Autobiography 172. 22 Du Bois, Autobiography , 172. 23 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Drama Among Black Folk,” 173. 24 Walker, Performance and Modernity , 124-125. 25 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Drama Among Black Folk,” 171. 26 Colbert, African American Theatrical Body , 65. 27 Colbert, African American Theatrical Body , 48. Howard University later purchased the land on which the stadium rested to build what is now Howard University Hospital; my thanks to Joshua Wilde for alerting me to this geography . 28 Du Bois, “Krigwa Players,” 134. 29 Imani Perry, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (Beacon Press, 2018); Soyica Diggs Colbert, Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry (Yale University Press, 2021); Mary Helen Washington, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (Columbia University Press, 2014), 123-164. 30 W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa, in The World and Africa | Color and Democracy , ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Oxford University Press, 2007), 1–164. 31 Washington 128; Judith E. Smith, “Finding a New Home in Harlem: Alice Childress and the Committee for the Negro in the Arts,” American Studies Faculty Publication Series 14 (2017): 17n21, https://scholarworks.umb.edu/amst_faculty_pubs/14 . 32 Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry, “Negro History Festival, February 29, 1952”; Alice Childress Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Box 45, File 25). This script lists both Hansberry and Childress as coauthors, although the festival program attributes authorship solely to Childress (cf. Freedom on the Anniversary of Its First Year of Publication Presents a Cultural Festival in Celebration of Negro History Month ; Alice Childress Papers, Box 8, File 8). 33 Alice Childress, “Report on the Gold Coast (n.d.)”; Alice Childress Papers, Box 46, File 4; Lorraine Hansberry, “W. E. B. Du Bois Seminar on Africa, April 20, 1953,” Lorraine Hansberry Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Box 1, File 5. Whereas Hansberry’s essay includes a note on the header stating that it was written “For Dr. Du Bois, African History Seminar, Jefferson School, New York City, 1953,” no such indication of the provenance of Childress’s essay survives; nevertheless, it is highly probable that Childress’s Gold Coast essay was written for Du Bois’s course. 34 “Dr. and Mrs. W. E. B. Du Bois invite...” June 8, 1953; Alice Childress Papers, Box 8, File 8. 35 W. E. B. Du Bois, letter to Alice Childress, March 25, 1955; Alice Childress Papers, Box 9, File 16. Alice Childress, interview with Martin Duberman; Alice Childress Papers, Box 11, File 13. 36 W. E. B. Du Bois, letter to Alice Childress, April 20, 1953; Alice Childress Papers, Box 9, File 16; “‘A Milestone on the Road to Truth’: A Cultural Reception in Honor of Dr. Herbert Aptheker, Historian,” Thursday, April 23, [1953], Alice Childress Papers, Schomburg Center, Box 10, File 1; see also Rev. B. C. Robeson, letter to Alice Childress, April 14, 1953, Alice Childress Papers, Box 10, File 1. Mae Henderson [Negro Actors Associated], letter to Alice Childress, May 2, 1956, Alice Childress Papers, Box 10, File 1. 37 Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York University Press, 2008), 18. 38 Judith E. Smith, Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940-1960 (Columbia University Press, 2004), 292, 295. 39 Shirley Graham Du Bois, letter to Lorraine Hansberry, April 15, 1960, Lorraine Hansberry Papers, Schomburg Center, Box 2, File 16. 40 Lorraine Hansberry, “Remarks by Lorraine Hansberry at Memorial Meeting for W. E. B. Du Bois, Carnegie Hall, New York City,” February 29, 1964; Lorraine Hansberry Papers, Schomburg Center, Box 56, File 21. 41 Perry 179. 42 Colbert, The African American Theatrical Body , 27-33. 43 Robert Nemiroff, “A Critical Background,” in Lorraine Hansberry, Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays (Vintage, 1994), 27-35, at 28-29. 44 Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Theatre,” in LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Home: Social Essays (Akashic Books, 2009 [1965]), 199-203; La Donna L. Forsgren, In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement (Northwestern University Press, 2018), 17-36. 43 Isaiah Matthew Wooden, “At the Nexus of Catharsis and Black Healing: Ritualizing Repair in What to Send Up When It Goes Down ,” Theatre Annual 76 (2023): 30-43; Aleshea Harris, “ What to Send Up When It Goes Down: A play. A pageant. A ritual. A homegoing celebration ,” American Theatre 36, no. 4 (2019): 52-65, at 52. Footnotes About The Author(s) Kellen Hoxworth is an assistant professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University at Buffalo – State University of New York, where he is also affiliated with the Department of Africana and American Studies, the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Department of History. His book Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance received an Honorable Mention for the John W. Frick Book Award from the American Theatre & Drama Society. His research has been published in American Quarterly , the Journal of Dramatic Theory & Criticism , Modern Drama , TDR , Theatre Journal , Theatre Survey , and in several edited volumes, and he recently co-edited a special section of TDR on “Blackface Geographies.” He is also a recipient of the Errol Hill Award from the American Society for Theatre Research for outstanding scholarship in African American theater, drama, and performance studies. 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 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Reflections on Fundamental Principles An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T The Wild Duck Picnic at Hanging Rock Last Call: A Play with Cocktails The Dinosaurs The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. 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