Erica Stevens Abbitt Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 1 Visit Journal Homepage Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theatre Erica Stevens Abbitt By Published on December 11, 2023 Download Article as PDF EMILY MANN: REBEL ARTIST OF THE AMERICAN THEATRE. Alexis Greene. Guilford, CT: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2023; Pp. 391. Alexis Greene has written a timely, accessible biography of one of America’s greatest living theatrical icons, playwright,director and artistic visionary Emily Mann.The creator since the 1970s of a unique brand of documentary theatre featuring the contradictory, impassioned testimony of real people in crisis, Mann is also an award-winning director, and one of a handful of successful female theatre administrators in this country, recognized for her 30-year tenure asartistic director of Princeton’s McCarter Theater. As the title suggests, Greene argues that Mann’s allergy to preconceived assumptions and the status quo (both politically and theatrically) has been the engine of her achievement. For Greene, Mann’s career does not simply represent triumph over personal trauma, chronic illness and a patriarchal theatre establishment: it provides a testament to the power of radical resistance. In Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater , Greene has wisely used an approach akin to Mann’s own “theatre of testimony.” After hours of interviewing family, friends, associates and the artist herself, Greene uncovered a series of compelling (but sometimes contradictory) narratives. These rich conversations, woven into a deceptively simple chronological structure, provide the reader with a nuanced view of a complex artist and activist. Well-illustrated, with an excellent bibliography and index, the text is divided into a series ofshort, readable chapters. The first third of the book moves briskly through Mann’s family history and its Jewish roots, the influence of her activist parents, her coming-of-age in Chicago in the1960s, and her early theatrical experiments as a student at Radcliffe. In the next section, Greene provides a valuable overview of Mann’s evolution as a creative artist,as she developed techniques for representing real people threatened by forces larger than themselves. The arc of Mann’s early work, from Annulla: An Autobiography (regarding a Jewish woman in post-Holocaust Britain) to Still Life (featuring a Vietnam vet, his mistress and his abused wife) and the landmark drama Execution of Justice (exploring the 1978 assassination at San Francisco City Hall of Harvey Milk and George Moscone) reveals two key insights on Mann’s aesthetic and social praxis. The first insight involves the way Mann gradually widened her perspective and added characters to her plays, creating a vast, polyphonic and more explicitly political dramaturgy. The second is how Mann’s youthful experience of violence (as the victim of sexual assault) drove her need to represent both victim and perpetrator, and sharpened her emphasis on the process of reconciliation and recovery. The final third of Greene’s book hones in on Mann’s tenure as Artistic Director at the McCarter Theatre, her development of translations and new works exploring race and social legacies in America (such as Having Our Say and Greensboro: A Requiem ), and her forays as a director to regional and Broadway stages. Here, Greene gives readers a perceptive take on the patterns of failure and success that have marked Mann’s career— bruising challenges, including her struggles with multiple sclerosis and conflicts with her board, juxtaposed with artistic successes and national recognition. Greene reads Mann's career to exemplify ongoing gender inequity in theatre, despite many generations of women’s achievement and advocacy. But persistence is all, and that is what Mann has contributed. As Greene puts it, "Sometimes being a rebel simply means staying the course" (131). Well-documented and engaging, Greene’s Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater will appeal to a wide range of constituencies. Those concerned with identity and performance in an era of cancel-culture will find descriptions of Mann’s techniques reaching across divisions of race, class, gender and ideology to represent difference (including Blackness and queer experience) relevant in ongoing debates on a core issue of contemporary theater practice. In this, the book interacts with several recent publications on race, equity, diversity and performance,such as Casting a Movement (edited by Claire Syler and Daniel Banks), as well as the innovative"calling in” movement developed by educator/activist Loretta J. Ross. Unexpected tidbits in this biography will provide keen theatre-goers with lively insights, including descriptions of Mann’s encounters with Winnie Mandela, and her long-standing friendship with leading performers, activists and advocates, from John Spencer to Nadine Strossen and Gloria Steinem. Themes of advocacy, alliance building and mentorship run through the volume, furnishing the reader with a vivid sense of the generous, collectivist process that may be one of Mann’s least acknowledged, but most important accomplishments. Greene’s exploration of Mann’s experience with chronic illness during some of the most productive years of her career provides an important contribution to a growing scholarship on trauma, disability and theatre, as well. Her treatment of Mann’s work as part of a national conversation on truth and power should prove valuable to"discourse in the public square" (ix) and to those committed to the study of theatre as civic practice. For students and emerging artists, especially, Greene’s text is an excellent resource, providing a detailed critique of Mann’s major works and methodology in clear and accessible prose. The book’s depiction of the travails of a theatre administrator on the shop floor of the industry should prove enlightening to would-be producers and artistic administrators, especially those from under-represented groups. Indeed, this biography serves as both a cautionary tale and a blueprint for success, reminding outsider aspirants to positions of power the strategies they may need to transform a supposedly “liberal” theatre establishment. For theatre scholars in general (and feminist scholars in particular), Greene’s examination of this significant artist fills a gap in the literature, providing a much-needed comprehensive and updated appraisal of Mann’s career and legacy in the 21st century. Greene, author of Lucille Lortel: Queen of Off-Broadway , and a novelist, educator, critic and theatre practitioner in her own right, notes that one of the major goals in her work is to reveal the everyday lives (as well as the extraordinary achievements) of women in the field. In the end, Greene’s approach for this volume, sympathetic but never sycophantic, is resonant with Mann’s own process and vision. It reminds us that keen observation and empathetic representation are at the heart of effective theatrical expression. This volume validates the career of a woman whose focus on theatre as means of advancing social justice has never wavered—and it underscores, for theatre-makers, students and researchers alike, the potential of performance as a radical force for change. References Greene, Alexis. Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater. Guilford: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2023. Footnotes About The Author(s) Dr. Erica Stevens Abbitt is Professor Emerita in the School of Dramatic Art. From 2015-17, she also served FAHSS as director of the Humanities Research Group. A native of Montreal, Erica earned a BA in political science from McGill before training as an actor. Her theatre career in Canada, the US, New Zealand and the UK included the BBC series OPPENHEIMER, stage roles in London and Off-Broadway and directing, writing and producing credits in regional theatre. In 1999, she returned to her studies, receiving an MA in Theatre History from California State University, Northridge and a PhD in Critical Studies from UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television. Joining the University of Windsor in 2004, she focused on revitalizing the theatre studies curriculum to include contemporary thinking on race, nation, gender, power and identity, as well as 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 Community Circles and Love Triangles: Gun Violence and Belonging in Oklahoma! and West Side Story Decommissioning the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field and Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline More than a Props List: Redefining Material Culture as Survival and Pleasure in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined The Politics of Trance: Victoria Woodhull and the Radical Reform of Platform Mediumship Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900 Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theatre Made Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era Performance in the Zócalo: Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Arnab Banerji Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018 Arnab Banerji By Published on May 21, 2020 Download Article as PDF The South Asian Theatre Festival (SATF) is held annually in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The thirteenth edition of the festival was held on August 4th and 5th, 2018 at the George Street Playhouse. The festival featured seven one act plays in four Indian languages beside four short segments of improvised and devised performances. The festival, now an important fixture in the socio-cultural calendar of the Indian diaspora in the New York-New Jersey area, is not only a celebration of South Asian theatre, but also a confident stride made by the community to organize itself as a significant American subculture. The 2018 edition of the festival and the plays that it offered made it abundantly clear that the artists in the diaspora are ready to celebrate their identity distinct from and yet firmly intertwined with their home culture of the United States. This critical take on the festival offers an insight into the various layers of performance that were evident during the 2018 edition. True to the nature of any South Asian event in the diaspora, the SATF was not simply a theatre festival but became an extended community affair. Packed into the George Street Playhouse lobby were several vendors selling jewelry, clothing, and even insurance and finance products. One of the halls in the playhouse was temporarily converted into a cafeteria where patrons took a break between watching plays to sip on tea and feast on deep fried Bengali delicacies like the vegetable chop. [1] The fair-like atmosphere at the George Street Playhouse made one forget, after crossing the threshold of the auditorium, that this was not suburban India, where theatre festivals like SATF are a regular feature of the milder winter months. The SATF opens up room for the South Asian community to claim cultural citizenship in the United States. In doing so, it becomes an act of creative citizenship by the diasporic subject. In 2008 playwright Sudipta Bhawmik observed that, “[i]n parts of the [United States] , the South Asian population has reached the critical mass to be able to sustain a South Asian-only kind of theatre and arts”. [2] With a large concentration of South Asian Americans, the New York-New Jersey area certainly boasts the critical mass that Bhawmik describes in his comment. And the playwright’s prediction seems to have held its ground in the case of the SATF and the popularity that it has enjoyed over the last fourteen years. The festival by virtue of using the more inclusive South Asian in its title rather than Indian or Bengali has also been able to appeal to an audience and a group of performers that do not always and necessarily conform to those geographic, linguistic, and socio-cultural boundaries. In the discussion that follows I examine the SATF as a space for the South Asian diaspora to claim cultural citizenship and how the festival itself is an act of creative citizenship. I argue that each play presented at the festival and the festival itself are creative acts corresponding to various levels of cultural and creative citizenship substantiating the South Asian American claim to achieving cultural citizenship in the adopted homeland. Scholarship on South Asian American theatre is scant. The scholarship that exists is often focused on the more visible and public examples of South Asian theatre. Essays by Aparna Dharwadker (2003) and Sudipto Chatterjee (2008), while taking insightful peeps into South Asian community-based theatres, spend time examining artists who are crossovers in the American mainstream or on the cusp of breaking into it. While an analysis of recognized artistic voices certainly adds to the conversation on South Asian American theatre, it does so at the expense of the everyday creative acts that form the mainstay of the diasporic subject’s confident strides towards asserting cultural citizenship. Theodore Zamenopoulos, Katerina Alexiou, Giota Alevizou, Caroline Chapain, Shawn Sobers, and Andy Williams write in their 2016 article that, “[c]reative acts are […] expressions of originality and meaningfulness within a certain context”. [3] Overall, the South Asian Theatre Festival, as well as each performance within it hold specific meanings for specific sections of the community within the context of their diasporic experiences. Zamenopoulos, et al. continue to elaborate on one of the challenges surrounding any discussion of creative acts: conflating creativity with “an exceptional product, process, or person”. [4] Dharwadker and Chatterjee seem to have stepped into the same trap even as they set out to look at everyday acts of creativity in their analyses. The ensuing discussion, like the festival at its center of inquiry, recognizes that “creativity is also a general human capability”. Taking a cue from Jean Burgess’s “vernacular creativity,” Zamenopoulos et al add to the potential of creative acts, calling them acts “that help to unearth a hidden potential in a given situation”. [6] The SATF appears to be no more than a public event featuring plays on the surface. Yet a closer analysis of audience participation, festival curation, and the overall presentation of the festival reveals that there is significantly more at play than what meets the eye in a surface evaluation. Dharwadker and Chatterjee’s assessment of local community-based South Asian American theatres gets mired in contemporary dramaturgical concerns not addressed by these community-based theatres themselves. Both scholars seem to be searching for an exceptional product, process, or artist at the expense of evaluating the creative acts playing out in the local desi stage. Ashish Sengupta,on the other hand, erroneously conflates mainstream South Asian thespians like Ayad Akhtar with the large number of South Asian community theatres peppered across the United States as part of the same continuum. [7] Sengupta, of course, has the disadvantage of being at a geographical and therefore critical distance from the subject of his inquiry. A professor at the University of North Bengal in India, for Sengupta, the South Asian roots of Ayad Akhtar are no different than those of the anaesthesiologist Manoj Shahane, who dons a playwright and a director’s mantle outside of the operating theatre. In reality though, and as I hope to demonstrate, Shahane’s theatre is a far cry from those of artists like Akhtar. Akhtar and other artists like him (Asif Mandvi, Ranjit Chowdhry, Aditi Brennan Kapil etc.) are representative examples of what Royona Mitra refers to as the “New Interculturalism,” Shahane’s theatre is fueled by a completely different and distinct set of motivations. [8] Mitra studies British choreographer-dancer Akram Khan’s body of work and the ways in which it seamlessly integrates Khan’s astute understanding of the South Asian kathak and his formal training in Western modern dance. The resulting New Interculturalism, Mitra demonstrates, celebrates cultural similarities without discounting differences. [9] Akhtar, Mandvi, Chowdhry, Kapil, and others represent the New Interculturalism in American mainstream theatre. They are definitively moored in their South Asian milieus but taking confident strides to change the ways mainstream American drama represents the subcontinent. Although an intriguing subject unto itself, plays by seasoned and celebrated artists like the roster presented above, are representative of the exceptional that Zamenopoulos, et al. mention. Conflating them, as Sengupta does in his analysis, with everyday creative acts of cultural citizenship is therefore erroneous and misleading. Before delving into the particulars of how this suburban New Jersey festival galvanizes a community together, it is imperative to understand what I mean by cultural citizenship and what constitutes creative acts. Toby Miller writes, “the last two hundred years of modernity have produced three zones of citizenship, with partially overlapping but also distinct historicities”. [10] Miller’s “three zones of citizenship,” political, economic, and cultural, correspond to the history of the South Asian diasporic subject in the United States, which is a history that has its roots in the nineteenth century British system of indenture and immigrant labor, as discussed by Vinay Lal and others. [11] But for the present context, I will look at two pivotal historical episodes from the twentieth century that shifted the ways of South Asian immigration and integration into American society. In its 1923 verdict on the United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind case, the Supreme Court, referring to Section 2169, revised statutes, had opined that the “Naturalization Act ‘shall apply to aliens, being free white persons, and to aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.’” [12] The following Immigration Act of 1924 further specified that, “no alien ineligible to citizenship shall be admitted to the United States”. [13] These two pieces of legislation effectively ended Indian immigration to the United States for nearly four decades. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 significantly altered this by declaring that “No person shall receive any preference or priority or be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of his race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence.” The new legislation re-opened the doors for South Asians to claim legal and uncontentious political citizenship in the United States. Vinay Lal writes, “The vast bulk of Indians arrived in the US following the immigration reforms of 1965, and though they occupy a disproportionately significant and highly visible place in the professions, Indians also ply taxis in New York and dominate the Dunkin Donuts franchises around the country.” [15] In 2017, there were nearly 4.1 million South Asian Indians in the United States with seventy percent of the population above sixteen employed in, “management, business, science, and arts occupations” with a median household income of $114, 261. [16] As is evident from above, in the five decades since South Asians attained political citizenship, they have made significant strides towards economic citizenship too, becoming one of the most successful ethnic minorities in the United States. Yet the third zone of citizenship, cultural, has eluded the community for a long time. Cultural citizenship calls for “flexible citizens” who are able to navigate the transcultural and intercultural worlds that we inhabit today. [17] Miller says, “it does appear as though more and more transnational people and organizations now exist, weaving political, economic, and cultural links between places of origin and domiciles.” [18] Although South Asians are one of the most well-educated ethnic groups in the United States, the community has thus far fit itself smugly into the melting pot metaphor. This means that the community has chosen to not distinguish itself as a subculture, focusing instead on living up to Franklin Roosevelt’s insistence on the “swift assimilation of aliens” through the “language and culture that has come down to us from the builders of the republic.” [19] The SATF challenges the narrative of assimilation and opens up a space where the transnational/transcultural South Asian diasporic subject can counter the mainstream American cultural hegemony. In other words, the festival corroborates Miller’s observation that the United States cannot continue with its cultural nationalism of being a “Monolingual Eden.” [20] The SATF space for claiming cultural citizenship is facilitated through acts of creative citizenship involving the production, creation, and consumption of theatre that is aesthetically similar, yet culturally distinct from the theatre in the country of origin as well as the country of domicile. Before examining the acts of creative citizenship witnessed during the SATF and discussing how each performance in the festival fits into various levels of creative citizenship, it is imperative to understand the many layers of cultural citizenship at play within the South Asian community. In the South Asian context, cultural citizenship is itself multi-layered. Each generation of immigrants has their own version of cultural identity that they want to claim within the same space of the festival. For some, the festival and especially the plays performed in it represent a nostalgic hook, a reminder of the country left behind at the time of the start of the diasporic movement. For others, the festival is the opportunity to relive an idyllic irrecoverable past left behind in India. And yet for others, the festival is an opportunity to find themselves and their culture being valued, nurtured, and adapted to its current environment, that of the adopted homeland. These multiple levels of cultural citizenship are celebrated over the course of the festival through creative acts. These creative acts, as Zamenopoulos, et al. demonstrate happen at four levels: doing, adaptation, making, and creating. The festival itself is of course an example of doing which Zamenopoulos, et al. define as “acts with the purpose of ‘getting something done.’” [21] The various plays individually fit the other criterion of creative acts, making the festival an act towards claiming creative citizenship. In the examples that follow, I map the various levels of creative acts onto the layers of cultural citizenship that I outlined above. I have written elsewhere describing the beginning of the diasporic movement as a crisis that is eventually mitigated by social dramas of community events in the adopted homeland. [22] The older generation of South Asian immigrants, especially the first wave that arrived in 1965 or immediately thereafter, did not seem to have the recourse to resolve the crisis of their diasporic movement. These community members were pioneers of the new wave who created the diasporic version of “South Asian-ness,” themselves existing in what Victor Turner calls “an instan[ce] of pure potentiality,” allowing the generations that followed an avenue to mitigate their crises. [23] Certain performances at the SATF like A King’s Tale: Shiladitya , which draw on a well-known children’s book Rajkahini by Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951), serve as a conduit for the older generation of South Asian immigrants to witness stories that connect them to a distant and yet beloved past left behind in India. A King’s Tale becomes the nostalgic hook from the structure outlined above for this section of the audience. Seeing younger members of the community, children born and raised in the United States, assume the roles of princes, princesses, and sages from the Indian folklore allow older immigrants to not only celebrate their presence in the United States but also the success and resilience of the community for having been able to pass on vital cultural knowledge intergenerationally. For the community, therefore, it does not matter that the performance of this particular play did not rise to a professional caliber or that an operatic piece was forcibly appended to it. All of these dramaturgical concerns, which bothered the critic and the theatre educator in this correspondent, were dwarfed under the celebration of children successfully embracing, albeit temporarily, their South Asian-ness. This play, directed by guest director Parthapratim Deb, from India, became an act of doing with some adaptation (the operatic addition) to cater to the section of the audience for whom the festival is the nostalgic hook to a distant past. For a different section of the audience the festival is itself a social drama, a set of redressive actions that facilitate social reintegration into the diasporic forms of South Asian-ness. This section of the audience, comprising students turned professionals, or professionals seeking a creative outlet, forms the largest spectator subgroup at the festival. Consequently, the material catering to this section of the audience is very often either sourced directly from, or owes serious allegiance to, the homeland. In other words, this is the section of the audience that is seeking to relive the irrecoverable past left behind in the homeland, in this case, South Asia. The homeland continues to hold a position of extreme significance for the South Asian consumers of festivals like the SATF. A large majority of the attendees are first generation immigrants and suffer from what Anita Mannur has described as “the desire to simultaneously embrace what is left of a past from which one is spatially and temporally displaced, and the recognition that nostalgia can overwhelm memories of the past.” [24] Strategies of negotiation with this in-betweenness have resulted in a longing for ethnic authenticity which has propelled diasporic subjects to turn towards the home to provide cultural markers of continued belonging. These take the form of tours by performers from the homeland which “add to the memory archive of the diasporic community and create a new bridge to ‘home.’” [25] Other coping strategies take the form of creating “social dramas.” These take the form of the annual Durga Puja amongst South Asian Bengalis or the Navaratri observation amongst Gujaratis, etc. These celebrations seek to restore the rupture caused in the continuum of performing ethnic identity by the diasporic movement from the homeland to the host country. [26] In SATF 2018, the Spotlight Columbus production of popular Bengali playwright Tirthankar Chanda’s Achin Doshor (The Unknown Partner) catered to this white-collared middle-class audience. Spotlight Columbus, or Spotlight, has been a longtime supporter of the SATF and since 2014 has been hosting their own version of the festival in Columbus, Ohio to cater to the burgeoning South Asian population in the midwestern town, a growing demographic that comprises of the second category of audiences mentioned above. [27] The performers at the 2018 Spotlight offering were all amateurs with a majority holding day jobs as software professionals and graduate students of the Ohio State University. The group invited noted Bengali actor Debshankar Haldar from Kolkata to direct this play. Haldar is a much celebrated and feted stage performer in Kolkata. This performance of Achin Doshor demonstrated Haldar’s astute understanding of Bengali Group Theatre and its characteristic qualities. [28] He directed a flawless albeit ordinary script with finesse and careful attention to specific comic moments. These moments punctuated the narrative at regular but never overbearing intervals, ensuring that the narrative’s forays into everyday middle-class “Bengaliness” and its pitfalls were highlighted, laughed about, and then ultimately glossed over. The play’s frequent jokes landed well with the Bengali-speaking audience while those unfamiliar with the language were invited to follow along with supertitles. It was interesting to observe the ease with which Spotlight has been able to recreate a performance culture in the American Midwest that comes remarkably close to the Bengali Group Theatre in Kolkata. The Bengali Group Theatre makes a virtue of its poverty and amateur status. [29] While Spotlight’s financial health was not available for scrutiny, it was evident that almost the entire group was comprised of amateurs with a passion for the stage. In fact, Haldar, now a successful stage professional, was an amateur himself when he made his first foray into performance nearly three decades back in Kolkata. Haldar’s shepherding of the 2018 Spotlight presentation was a rite of passage for this young performance company, one that mimics the redressive action of the Turnerian model towards mitigating the crisis of the diasporic movement. In this instance, the redressive action took the form of being able to successfully recreate a slice of urban India and its many foibles in America, thus allowing the dominant section of the audience to relieve their idyllic Indian past. Several other plays over the course of the two-day festival also targeted this section of the audience. The highlight of these offerings was the adaptation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding , led by Indian thespian Mahesh Dattani, titled Rakt Phera . The Hindi adaptation of Lorca’s 1932 masterpiece Blood Wedding is a translation of the Spanish classic by Indian playwright Abhinav Grover. The performance was directed by the noted Indian-English playwright Dattani and presented by the Indian Cultural Society of New Jersey (ICS). Dattani, recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award,one of India’s highest literary recognitions, for his anthology Final Solution and Other Plays in 1998, is also an accomplished director. His films Morning Raaga , and Mango Souffle were critical successes. Dattani has been directing for some time with North American performance companies and on North American college campuses and this was the veteran thespian’s third presentation at SATF. Dattani’s directorial vision lived up to his reputation as a master craftsman. The audience trickling into the theatre were greeted with a haunting light scheme bouncing off smoke and haze on a stage space, empty except for a few small stools. Haunting music, part of Vikram Kumar and Aditya Datey’s original score for the piece, pervaded the environment. In this version of the play, the action shifts from the Spanish countryside to North West India, at the borders of the states of Rajasthan and Haryana. The socially conservative and deeply religious content of the play finds a perfect home in its new setting. Rajasthan and Haryana are notoriously conservative and are often the subject of national and international news thanks to their ignominious human rights and women’s rights records. [30] The ensemble excelled under the able guidance of the seasoned director. Rakt Phera revealed an imaginative directorial vision that encompassed every theatrical element, from lighting, to music, to scenic elements, to create a truly excellent if not always engaging theatrical experience. The adaptation of a foreign context to a completely novel one echoed the creative act of adaptation. Zamenopoulos, et al. define this creative act of adaptation as “acts with the purpose of ‘making things my own.’” [31] The ICS adaptation of Blood Wedding succeeded in transporting the Spanish classic to a new South Asian context while not compromising the narrative integrity of the original. Not unlike the Spotlight presentation of Achin Doshor , Rakt Phera was an attempt for South Asian immigrants, otherwise employed, to recreate a cultural space for themselves in their adopted homeland. It was an interesting choice to adapt a foreign text to cater to a South Asian milieu. The adaptation reverses the diasporic processes undergone by South Asians adjusting to life in a foreign land. The Spanish idiosyncrasies of the original are replaced with their Indian counterparts in the same way that the South Asian diasporic subject has to adapt to life in their adopted homeland. And yet the act of adaptation shifts the message of the Lorca original to address gendered violence in South Asia. The shift echoes the ways in which South Asians, or any other diasporic community, alters the adopted homeland ever so slightly with their presence. It was not clear how familiar the audience was to Lorca or his work, but it was evident from their response that Rakt Phera had succeded in transporting the audience to North West India. Lorca was not the only European author lending creative inspiration at the festival. The festival also featured Four Walls , a stage adaptation of novelist Dr. Rajeev Naik’s Manoos Ghar (A Doomed Home). Manoos Ghar is a freewheeling South Asian American adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House . Four Walls , the stage adaptation of Naik’s novel, was done by writer/director Manoj Shahane. Shahane, an anesthesiologist by the day, has been involved with South Asian American theatre in all imaginable capacities for more than a decade. The play, presented by the New Jersey-based Theatrix, took the story of Ibsen’s Torvald and Nora and located it in an upwardly-mobile South Asian diasporic residence in the United States. The content, context, and setting for the play fit well with current hot button issues in the South Asian diaspora community, including domestic abuse. The adaptations of Lorca and Ibsen represent the diaspora’s journey from the creative act of adaptation to that of making. The creative act of adaptation as defined by Zamenopoulos, et al. is akin to improving a ready-to-eat meal, by say, adjusting condiments, or adding a splash of lime. Whereas the making refers to creative acts undertaken “with the purpose of making things ‘with my own hands’ (such as cooking a recipe from scratch).” [32] Lorca and Ibsen’s original narratives serve as the recipes for Grover and Shahane’s theatrical adaptations. The theatrical adaptations (different from the creative act of adaptation) make the original narratives their own by situating them in a South Asian socio-cultural context. The final play that embodied the creative acts of adaptation and making was the finale performance of the festival. Nirastra (Unarmed) was presented by Epic Actors Workshop and directed by Golam Sarwar Harun and Gargi Mukherjee. The story takes its cue from the Magsaysay award-winning Bengali author Mahasweta Devi’s short stories on the denotified tribal communities of India. The play puts a special emphasis on the story “Draupadi,” which first appeared four decades ago in 1978 as part of a set of loosely connected political narratives Agnigarbha (The Womb of Fire). [33] In their freewheeling adaptation of this story along with others by Mahasweta Devi, Harun and Mukherjee took the specificities of the stories and gave them a more universal framework. In their version, the firebrand tribal woman Draupadi, or Dopdi Mejhen as she is colloquially known in the forested hinterlands of tribal India, stands in for a whole community of oppressed people. Dopdi and her husband Dulan, played emotionally by Harun and Mukherjee respectively, fight on behalf of the disenfranchised tribal people even as government forces aided by local money-lenders launch a severely repressive counter-strike to quell any rebellion. Eventually, Dulan is brutally gunned down while Dopdi is arrested. While under arrest, the Senanayak, the unscrupulous chief of the government forces, played admirably by Sajal Mukherjee, leads a gang rape of Dopdi. In a moment of severe retaliation, Dopdi strips her clothes and offers her body to her oppressors while screaming, “Are you a man? There is no man here to be ashamed of. I’ll not let anyone put a cloth on me. What more can you do? Kill me?” [34] Both Mukherjee and Harun are well-known names in the South Asian American theatre community in the New York and New Jersey areas. Both hold daytime jobs as advertising executives and have appeared in critically successful South Asian American films. The producers, Epic Actors’ Workshop, have nurtured South Asian theatre in its diasporic home over the last several decades. Although the group primarily produces work in Bengali, it has made concerted attempts to attract the larger South Asian community as supporters and stakeholders in the work of promoting and upholding South Asian theatre in the United States. Not unlike the performances of Achin Doshor and Rakt Phera discussed above, Nirastra was also aimed at audiences seeking reintegration into the diaspora version of South Asian-ness and reeling under the crisis of the diasporic movement. Mukherjee’s heart-rending disavowal of the hyper-masculinity of the state represented by the oppressive police chief Senanayak at the end of the play therefore takes on several more layers of meaning beyond a fearless heroine’s last act of resistance. At that moment, Dopdi Mejen rejects any and all state machinations, including those of repressive immigration regulations that continue to deny the South Asian diasporic subject unencumbered access to political and economic citizenship. The clarion call that emanates metaphorically from the hearts of the tribal hinterlands of India is also a firm affirmation that in spite of all odds, the South Asian subject is here to firmly celebrate their cultural ubiquity unfettered by the need to assimilate. The title of the play, Nirastra , meaning unarmed, is symbolic perhaps of resolute steps that the community has taken and continues to take to become equal stakeholders in the evolution of America as a modern nation-state. For the older generation of South Asians who use the festival as a nostalgic hook to connect with their South Asian-ness, plays that correspond to the Zamenopoulos, et al. model of adaptations and making (i.e. Achin Doshor , Rakt Phera , Four Walls , and Nirastra ), are opportunities to update their vocabulary on what constitutes the cultural ethos of the homeland since the beginning of their diasporic movement. As an audience, this generation responds to the dramatic ingenuity of the presentations, even if the content does not hold as much significance for them. In a similar vein for the white-collared audiences seeking redressive action through the festival and its contents, and arguably the largest section of the audience, a presentation like A King’s Tale is an indulgence to allow the second and third generation South Asians to regale the older members of the community. Not unlike the response outlined above, this section of the audience is hardly moved by the folklore but rather celebrate being able to offer the community elders the opportunity to celebrate intergenerational knowledge transfer. In addition to the above, the third section of the audience, drawn from a wide heterogenous cross-section of the community, use the entirety of the festival as an act of celebrating creative citizenship. For this section, the redressive action represented by SATF as a whole supersedes the dramatic merits (and demerits) of individual presentations at the festival. The mere act of being able to celebrate their South Asian-ness while soaking in the festive atmosphere of the occasion is a resounding reminder of the community taking confident steps towards cultural citizenship in their country of adoption. Aparna Dharwadker warned and reminded South Asian American theatre enthusiasts that a new theatrical language cannot emerge in the diaspora unless the theatre practice “distances itself from the culture of origin and embraces the experience of residence in the host culture.” [35] I contend that most South Asian American theatre artists have embraced the experience of being resident in the host culture. It is only that they have adopted a more circuitous route to celebrate their presence in the United States. Playwrights like Sudipto Bhawmik, amongst a few others, have tried including the diasporic experience in their vernacular plays. [36] However, the plays have continued to be written with, primarily, a South Asian audience in mind. It is so because, as the discussion above has demonstrated, the community is still grappling with achieving cultural citizenship while negotiating with the crisis of the diasporic movement. For the community, the performances and the festival become critical creative acts towards achieving cultural citizenship in their adapted homeland. To substantiate and complement the claim of creative acts towards cultural citizenship further, I now turn to the Subhasis Das-led “Theatre in Break” team, an experimental breakout performance component that continually accompanied the more traditional performances at the SATF. The team’s work took performances outside of the proscenium’s confines and into one of the banquet halls of the George Street Playhouse. The celebratory nature of this experiment was evident from the way the space had been set up to resemble a cheery children’s party. The performance segment (a total of four segments would be presented over the two days) was based on classic improvisational workshop modules and Augusto Boal exercises. Das drew on his experience of working with Badal Sircar and his company Satabdi in Kolkata to inform these routines and practices. [37] In the first segment, titled “Hamelin – a Musical Path,” Das and his crew of actors demonstrated basic improvisation exercises based on the prompt “Yes, And….” Audiences were encouraged to provide actors with prompts besides asking actors to use props creatively in their improv routines. The whole demonstration seemed to excite the audience, many of whom were perhaps being exposed to this kind of a performance rhetoric for the first time. The final segment of the Theatre in Break, titled, “Jukti Tokko Gaal Goppo – A Debated Path,” however, did inspire significant audience engagement beyond effervescent enthusiasm and evoked some strong inspired reactions from the audience. As opposed to the largely unscripted improvised bits of the previous three segments, this segment was planned more as a traditional play. Das and his team asked audiences to engage in on-the-spot conversations about marijuana legalization. The audience reflected the mood of the larger community, which is sharply divided on whether to support or denounce this legislation. Das beautifully navigated around the troubled waters of the argument to allow parties on both sides to present their cases without talking about which side of the spectrum he identified with. The conversation on marijuana was followed by a heartwarming presentation on transgender issues. Weaving together Tagore songs, contemporary poetry, and a brief but compelling narrative, actors Tandra and Aparna Bhattacharya created a beautiful moment on stage. While there was certainly some room and possibility for dialogue at the conclusion of this piece, Das chose to postpone that, suggesting instead that while the issue of trans rights was as relevant to the South Asian community as it is to any other, he would rather wait than take an immediate plunge. The Theatre in Break segments represented the fourth level of creative acts in the Zamenopoulos, et al. model, “creating.” Breaking through the imaginary mold of traditional South Asian performance and narrative drama, Das and his team showed the possibilities of a distinctly South Asian American theatre aesthetic, an aesthetic that relied as much on the South Asian-ness of the performers as it did on their American experiences. Filmmaker Jayasri Hart had lamentably written, “In our country of adoption, ours has long been an assigned identity,” an identity forcibly assigned by the American civic bureaucracy. [38] Das’ team demonstrated that the everyday regular South Asian American diasporic subject is finally ready to unfetter themselves and assert their own identity rather than accept any monikers arbitrarily assigned to them. The team successfully celebrated this assertion by showcasing improvisation techniques and by sharing stories that are idiosyncratically South Asian American. Over the last thirteen years, the SATF has certainly created a niche for itself. As I hope to have demonstrated, the festival has opened up a space for the South Asian community to engage in creative acts of cultural citizenship. For the 2018 festival, the Middlesex county of New Jersey formally endorsed the festival. This was evidenced by the two county advertisements in the festival brochure and by the attendance of a county representative at the opening ceremony. The presence of the official seal lent further credence to the idea that the festival is not simply a community event, but a formal stride towards cultural citizenship. Incidentally, South Asians are represented fairly strongly in all levels of the New Jersey administration. The formal endorsement and its presence at the festival signified the “osmosis” between first and second generations of South Asian immigrants and “their combined interaction with the U.S. mainstream,” which Chatterjee identifies as the marker of South Asian creative success. [39] At the time of this writing, the 2019 SATF has been held. The 14th edition of the festival, drawing on the critical mass of South Asians who call the New York-New Jersey area their home, continued to make definite and deliberate strides towards guaranteeing cultural recognition through the creative acts of doing, adapting, making, and creating. The SATF has scripted a success story for itself and has created the space for South Asian Americans to practice and hone their theatre skills and stake their claim as a unique American subculture. The 15th edition of the festival, scheduled for summer 2020, promises to be the biggest and the best edition of the festival and is slated to be held at the new facilities of the George Street Playhouse in downtown New Brunswick. The move to this more centrally located and easily accessible location would have signified the metaphorical move of the South Asian diaspora subject from the assimilative goo of the melting pot to a bright, vibrant, and unique presence in the cultural salad bowl of the South Asian experience in the United States. The COVID-19 pandemic has however cast a spell of doubt over the future of the 2020 edition of the festival. In a recent conversation, the founder and the artistic director of the festival Dr. Dipan Ray mentioned, he was hopeful that the festival will be held sometime in the fall. In the meantime, Ray and his team are not sitting idle. In the cards is a virtual theatre platform, launching on May 23, 2020, that will bring together creative voices from India, Bangladesh, and the South Asian American theatre community to discuss the life and legacy of the recently deceased Indian director-manager-actor Usha Ganguly (1945-2020). Incidentally, Ganguly had served as one of the biggest supporters of the festival when it first started in 2005. She mentored both the New Jersey and the Columbus, Ohio festivals in their early years. Irrespective of whether the 2020 edition of the festival happens or not, the yeoman work that the SATF has done to foster a community of dedicated South Asian American thespians will undoubtedly allow it to return with more aplomb. The formidable groundwork that the festival has laid down bears the promise that it will continue to celebrate South Asian America’s confident stride to achieving cultural citizenship in America, their adopted homeland. References [1] A deep fried cutlet made of beets and other vegetables, see “Vegetable Chop,” YouTube video, 08:44, posted by BongEats, December 21, 2017, https://youtu.be/VOKgeZMwrv4 for more. [2] Sudipto Chatterjee, “South Asian American Theatre: (Un/Re-) Painting the Town Brown,” Theatre Survey 49, no. 1 (May 2008): 116. [3] Theodore Zamenopoulos, Katerina Alexiou, Giota Alevizou, Caroline Chapain, Shawn Sobers, and Andy Williams, “Varieties of Creative Citizenship,” in The Creative Citizen Unbound: How Social Media and DIY Culture Contribute to Democracy, Communities and the Creative Economy , eds. Ian Hargreaves and John Hartley (Bristol, UK; Chicago, IL, USA: Bristol University Press, 2016), 106. [4] Zamenopoulos, et al., “Varieties of Creative Citizenship,” 106. [5] Ibid, 106. [6] Ibid, 106. [7] Ashis Sengupta, “Staging Diaspora: South Asian American Theatre Today,” Journal of American Studies 46, no. 4 (November 2012): 831-854. [8] Royona Mitra, Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). [9] Arnab Banerji, “What lies Beyond Hattamala? Badal Sircar and his Third Theatre as an Alternative Trajectory for Intercultural Theatre, “ in The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance , eds. Daphne P. Lei and Charlotte McIvor (London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), 56. [10] Toby Miller, “What is Cultural Citizenship,?” in Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 35. [11] Vinay Lal, 1999. “Establishing Roots, Engendering Awareness: A Political History of Asian Indians in the United States,” in Live Like the Banyan Tree: Images of the Indian American Experience , ed. Leela Prasad (Philadelphia: Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, 1999), 42-48; Brij V Lal, Peter Reeves, and Rajesh Rai, The Encyclopedia of the Indian Diaspora (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006). [12] Jayasri Hart, “Meet the Filmmaker,” Roots in the Sand . Accessed March 10, 2020. https://www.pbs.org/rootsinthesand/filmmaker.html. [13] “The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act),” United States Department of State Archive, accessed on March 8, 2020. https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/id/87718.html. [14] Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, Pub.L. 89-236, 79 Stat. 911 (1968), accessed March 8, 2020. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-79/pdf/STATUTE-79-Pg911.pdf#page=7 [15] Vinay Lal, “Diaspora Purana: The Indic Presence in World Culture,” UCLA South Asian MANAS (n.d.), accessed on May 15, 2020. http://southasia.ucla.edu/diaspora/indic-presence-world-culture/. [16] “Selected Population Profile in the United States: 2017 American Community Survey 1-year Estimates,” United States Census Bureau, accessed on March 10, 2020. https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_17_1YR_S0201&prodType=table. [17] Miller, “What is Cultural Citizenship?,” 50. [18] Ibid, 54. [19] Ibid, 52. [20] Ibid, 53. [21] Zamenopoulos, et al., “Varieties of Creative Citizenship,” 106. [22] Arnab Banerji, “The Social Drama of Durga Puja: Performing Bengali Identity in the Diaspora.” Ecumenica: Performance and Religion 12, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 1-13. [23] Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982), 44. [24] Anita Mannur, “Culinary Nostalgia: Authenticity, Nationalism, and Diaspora,” in Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 28. [25] Chatterjee, “South Asian American Theatre,” 114. [26] Banerji, “The Social Drama of Durga Puja.” [27] “Ohio Asian Americans.” Ohio Development Services Agency, accessed on March 12, 2020. https://development.ohio.gov/files/research/P7004.pdf. [28] Bengali Group Theatre is the dominant form of theatre in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. For a precise definition of this form of theatre and some of its distinguishing characteristics, see Ananda Lal, Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 139. The specific qualities reproduced in this performance were the sparse suggestive staging and the melodramatic tendency in individual performances. [29] Lal, Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre , 139. [30] Nishu Mahajan, “Honour killing continues unabated in Haryana,” The Pioneer , 27 August 2018, https://www.dailypioneer.com/2018/state-editions/honour-killing-continues-unabated-in-haryana.html; Dev Ankur Wadhawan, “Rajasthan’s shame: It’s paying a heavy price for killing the unborn girl,” Daily O , 28 February 2017, https://www.dailyo.in/politics/female-infanticide-rajasthan-sex-ratio/story/1/15896.html. [31] Zamenopoulos, et al., “Varieties of Creative Citizenship,” 106. [32] Ibid, 106. [33] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “‘Draupadi’ by Mahasveta Devi,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 2 (Winter, 1981): 383. [34] “13th South Asian Theater Festival,” (New Brunswick: Epic Actors’ Workshop, 2018). [35] Aparna Dharwadker, “Diaspora and the Theatre of the Nation,” Theatre Research International 28, no. 3 (October 2003): 305. [36] Bhawmik’s plays Ron, Taconic Parkway, Curious Case of a Casual Terrorist , and Nagorik come to mind. [37] Banerji, “What Lies Beyond Hattamala?,”43-59. Badal Sircar (1925-2011) is one of the most celebrated playwrights and directors in modern Indian Theatre. Sircar devised the third theatre borrowing extensively from Western avant-garde theatre practices. [38] Hart, “Meet the Filmmaker.” [39] Chatterjee, “South Asian American Theatre,” 112-113. [31] Dipan Ray, phone conversation with author. May 14, 2020. Dr. Ray became emotional while discussing the selfless guidance offered by Ganguly as a mentor, guest director, and performer to the New Jersey and Columbus, Ohio editions of the festival throughout their fifteen and six year journeys respectively. Footnotes About The Author(s) Arnab Banerji is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History, Literature, and Dramaturgy at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. His first monograph Contemporary Group Theatre in Kolkata, India (Routledge) was recently released. Arnab researches modern Indian theatre, performance by the South Asian American diaspora, Asian-American theatre, and translation of Indian plays into English. His articles and reviews have appeared in Theatre Topics , Studies in Musical Theatre , Ecumenica , Asian Theatre Journal , BOOM California , Sanglap , Theatre Symposium , Virginia Review of Asian Studies , SERAS , Theatre Journal , and TDR . He has also contributed chapters on modern Indian performance to various anthologies. A detailed publication list and information on his teaching and research can be found on https://arnabbanerji.weebly.com/ . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography Introduction: Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship “La conjura de Xinum” and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the “Toxic Mound Tours” Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Interview with James C. Nicola, Tanya Elder, and Diego Daniel Pardo Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Interview with James C. Nicola, Tanya Elder, and Diego Daniel Pardo By Published on June 6, 2024 Download Article as PDF Headshot of Michael Feingold from 1973. Photo: William Baker. Courtesy Feingold Archive. Art is of the artist, and the artist has to find and create it his own way, but art is for the audience, and to refuse to be relevant, to refuse to communicate, to refuse to make the attempt, on any grounds, is to be less of an artist. Art cannot exist for the past, for there is no past; and because we have serious doubts that there will be a future, it dare not exist for the future. To make art fully meaningful for the present is to absorb into it both the past and the future, to make them, in the minds of the audience, the now-serving continuum that they make in reality. —Michael Feingold, “Do We Need Greek Drama?” yale/theatre , Spring 1968 Introduction The 1968 journal precursor to Theater magazine, yale/theatre, asked whether modern audiences needed Greek theatre. Michael Feingold’s fellow editor, Ren Frutkin, wrote that they wanted to gather the “activities of the Yale School of Drama: the theatre, thought, discussion, dream, art, people through essays, plays, poems, reviews and graphics” in this new publication. The canon of Greek plays was relevant to their first issue because Greek theatre “resonates with people in the process of changing their way of thinking about themselves.” These young theatre students—with their provocative lower case journal title—were graduate drama students during the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Bobby Kennedy. A changing world was around them as LBJ gave way to Nixon, and Michael Feingold, literary criticism major, was ready to tell the world that its theatre needed to reflect the past and the present in meaningful ways to impact an unknown future; “ancient civilizations are metaphors,” wrote Feingold, “like works of art, in the image of contemporary civilization.” Michael Feingold (1945-2022) wore a variety of hats in the theatre, though primarily known as a theatre critic for the radical Village Voice from 1971-2013 . Few know that he was an original editor at yale/theatre and the first literary manager (or dramaturg) of the Yale Repertory Theatre, as well as the Guthrie Theater and American Place Theatre. He was the General Editor of a set of groundbreaking experimental theatre publication known as the Winter Repertory . He spent summers nurturing playwrights such as Adrienne Kennedy and August Wilson at O’Neill Playwrighting Conferences. He wrote and published poetry, both original and translated. He translated Romance and Germanic Language plays into English including Brecht/Weill, Copi, Goldoni. His works were performed on Broadway and off-Broadway, in California, Norway, and Singapore. He was a director, a playwright, an adaptor, and while he had a caustic personal style, he knew theatre history, and would make sure everyone knew it. When Michael died in 2022, he left a large rental apartment full of books, albums, DVDS and audio-visual material, 18th through 20th century theatre memorabilia, art, and theatrical posters from Yale to Lincoln Center of shows he was involved in. In total, 109 bankers boxes of papers including correspondence, childhood photographs and actor headshots, scripts sent to him in press packets or authors seeking advice, as well as his own personal work at Columbia and Yale, the Winter Repertory, and his own reviews, which are currently neither digitized nor available to the public. This is the “Feingold Project,” as it is called by the team put together by preliminary estate executor, Daniel Diego Pardo, his husband, playwright Brian Quirk, and project archivist Tanya Elder. Pardo gathered a crew who had worked with or knew Michael, packed his belongings and transferred them to office space in Tin Pan Alley (an appropriate location, Feingold would say) where his collection was inventoried, and Pardo and Quirk began the impossible task of finding homes for what Feingold called, “his accumulations” in a New York Stage Review article from 2012 titled “Of Merch and Memorabilia.” The Feingold Project continues its search to place Michael’s rich collection of personal papers into an archive. In April 2024, Feingold’s long-time friend and collaborator, Jim Nicola—recently retired as beloved Artistic Director of the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW)—spoke with Pardo and Elder regarding Feingold’s papers, his place in theatre history and scholarship (including the rich world of LGBTQ+ artists) in the American theatre for American audiences. They met at the Feingold Project offices, where Nicola was able to view some of the archival materials in the collection and reminisced about their own work together on Two Blind Beggars at the old WPA Theatre. Tanya Elder: When I first looked at Michael Feingold’s vast archive of posters, programs, correspondence, books, and art, one of the things I remember from when I studied experimental theatre at NYU is the journal yale/theatre , which was the precursor to the Theater magazine. yale/theatre had biting material about theatre and politics. And I think Yale is where Michael got a lot of his groundwork for life. It was the height of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Jim Nicola: When was he at Yale? Elder: He graduated with a BA from Columbia [English/Comparative Literature] from 1962-1966. And then he attended Yale from 1966 to 1972 for an MFA. Daniel Diego Pardo: He was there when critic and writer Robert Brustein was in his first year. He met Brustein at Columbia. When Brustein got a job at Yale, he brought Michael there. Elder: There are letters in the archive between Brustein and Michael. Michael writes “Can you get me in?” and Brustein writes back: “Read the newspaper tomorrow and you'll find out your answer.” Pardo: And they inaugurated Yale Rep. Michael was its first literary manager. Nicola: Yes, when it was still a relatively new form. Elder : We have the program and poster from the Yale production of The Frogs (1974). On the third page, you'll see cast members Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, Christopher Durang, and the rest of the cast. Pardo: It is signed by the entire cast, including Stephen Sondheim and Burt Shevelove, and Michael had a bootleg recording of the production as well. Elder: We spoke to the Sondheim Foundation and are waiting to hear back... Pardo: The production took place in a swimming pool! And you can hear the water on the recording. Elder: This began his relationship with actor Alvin Epstein. Pardo: [ Reading names on program.] Alvin. Carmen de Lavallade. Steve Lawson. Jeremy Geidt. Jeremy Dempsey. Jonathan Marks. These are incredible people! Pardo: We are hoping that the archive will find a home soon. But it’s a complicated process. Elder: The second thing I want to point out is that Michael was one of the most pivotal people in experimental theatre in New York. He was there at the beginning. He was the first person to publish Mad Dog Blues by Sam Shephard and other plays for his Winter Repertory series (Feingold, Winter Repertory 1970-1973), which included six other volumes from different playwrights including Tom Eyen, Rochelle Owens, Robert Patrick, María Irene Fornés, Amiri Baraka, Jim Jacobs, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, and Warren Casey. Nicola: Wow. Elder: One of the volumes was supposed to be Jean-Claude van Itallie’s India Journal which didn’t end up happening, but we have the copy that has both van Itallie’s notes and Michael's notes about publishing it. Michael was the first to publish Grease . Pardo: He wrote the foreword for Grease . I believe it might be the off-Broadway version. We have one Grease hardcover version with Jim Jacob’s autograph in it. Elder: One of the most incredible things about Michael is that he kept everything . Pardo: Yes, even if it was a random piece of paper with his production notes, or a program from an Off-Off-Broadway play that he saw. The archive is a little like a time capsule of history from the Off- and Off-Off Broadway Movement. Elder: He kept the flyers of every performance he went to, including obscure downtown theatre. There's a lot of stuff with David Greenspan, for example. Nicola: The Beggar's Opera ! Do you have any of the shows that he and I did together? Pardo: It's probably in here somewhere. Elder: He… Pardo: …saved everything. Nicola: He did a translation of an Offenbach one-act operetta called Two Blind Beggars . Elder: We have it. Nicola: I directed it. He brought it to me. We did it at the old WPA on Bowery on a double bill with Trial by Jury . Elder: We have everything that he ever wrote and everything he ever saw. Nicola: [ Pointing to headshot of Michael taped to wall. ] Oh, look at that wonderful picture! What year would that be? Pardo: 1973. That was just after his time at Yale. Nicola: I remember him then. Pardo: Remember this? It’s the Grove New American Theatre: An Anthology (Feingold, Grove New American Theater 1992) edited by Michael Feingold. It includes Mysteries and What’s So Funny by David Gordon; Sincerity Forever by Mac Wellman; The American Plan by Richard Greenberg; Theory of Total Blame by Karen Finley; Das Vedanya Mamma by Ethyl Eichelberger; and Dead Mother or Shirley Not All In Vain by David Greenspan. It was published in 1993. He was such an advocate of experimental theatre. Elder: He excoriated the theatre and politics, as he felt the theatre should impact the audience and use their collective memory to elevate the audience to react…. and he felt that these plays were necessary as the basis of good theatre that was politically active. Nicola: This is incredible. Elder: Here are the first four volumes of yale/theatre beginning in Spring 1968 with the question, “Do We Need Greek Theatre?”. The second was entitled “Crisis 1968: Politics and Imagination,” the Spring 1969 edition was dedicated to the Living Theatre, who appeared at Yale when they returned to the United States after a self-imposed and tax-related exile in Europe, and the fourth, “New Playwrights.” We have the full run of the journal, which included about eleven issues with two editions containing individual short plays. Michael was on the editorial board, with Ren Frutkin and Joseph Cazelet in the first volume, and David Copelin for the third volume with various editors. The publication ran to 1975. I believe Michael was involved until about 1972. Pardo: In 1972, he was already established in New York as a critic at the Village Voice . Elder: Yes. And he wrote for more than just the Village Voice . He also wrote for Mirabella , Plays and Players Magazine, if you remember that. Nicola: Yes, I have a stack of Plays and Players . Elder: The problem with publications like this is that many libraries already have the publications themselves, the same goes for a stack of Plays and Players . It’s difficult to move some of that stuff in the archive. But we have so much of it. However, Michael retained the source materials for yale/theatre and the Winter Repertory . Original copyedited material, correspondence, photographs for both publications. Nicola: This is incredible. I grew up just outside of Hartford. And I graduated from high school in ‘68. So, I lived the founding with Robert Brustein arriving at Yale. It was something I was excited about. It is my impression that Brustein and Michael created the notion of a dramaturg in American theatre practice. Elder: That is the job of an archive—to figure out where this stuff is going to go and get an overview of the impact it had then and now. Pardo: With this archive, a PhD student in theatre and performance could delve into it. This would be a beginning or a kind of a springboard into where and what was happening back then. Nicola: Was his MFA in Drama Criticism? Elder: It was in Literary Criticism. Nicola: Yes, because they didn’t have a “dramaturgical” focus yet at that time. It ultimately became “Criticism and Dramaturgy,” I believe. Elder: In this volume of essays editor David Copelin mentions at midnight on the day of the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from the second yale/theatre volume on “1968: Crisis and Imagination” that “a group of drama school students was to attend the dress rehearsal of Sam Shepard’s Icarus's Mother at a New Haven playhouse.” And Michael also mentions in his essay in the issue that New Haven was burning. Pardo: What I would want as an outsider to the archive is a frame of entrance. When did Dramaturgy start to officially come into American theatre practice? And when did they start hiring Dramaturgs? There was a while there when it was called “literary manager.” Elder: This is what Michael was called in the early days. Pardo: He was the literary manager at the Guthrie. Nicola: In so many ways, he was a pioneer. Elder: Someone could search out Michael’s Yale-era papers to really think about that development. He did have many opinions, and he wrote about them very strongly, even at Yale. Nicola: He was inspired by the Russian and German theaters. Pardo: That could very well be a PhD thesis. Nicola: It could be a hook to so much to discover about that period. Growing up in Hartford in the 1960s, and being an adolescent then, I witnessed the birth of the Hartford Stage, Yale Rep, of Long Wharf, of the now defunct Stage West in Springfield. Goodspeed. The O’Neill. All of that within ten years. Michael was at the center of it. But he was also one of the observers and articulators of it all. Elder: Here are some of his papers from his undergraduate days at Columbia that kind of formed him. He got A’s on all of them. It’s his first year of college. He’s a sophomore here, or freshman. Pardo: [ Reading a title of one of Michael’s papers. ] “The Development of Tragic Characters in Richard the Third and Richard the Second: Hero and Anti-hero.” He is doing deep thinking at such a young age. Elder: He talks about Richard the Third a lot. I just found another play that he wrote as well. This was at Columbia. It’s called Marie Lafarge , a play in one act. “Good books, good old fashioned movie writing. But can you get Garbo?” That was the teacher’s comment on it. Nicola: ( Laughing. ) He writes all of these in longhand. It’s hard to imagine now. Pardo: Yeah, he was probably a senior at that point and getting ready to go to Yale. Nicola: Oh, there’s comments here. Carbon copy and a typewriter. Oh my God. Yes! Elder: We have materials by other playwrights as well that he worked on. Here is the play More War in Store with Peace as Chief of Police , a play by Lonnie Carter. I think Lonnie Carter also went to Yale. Nicola: Yes. Elder: His Yale graduate professional newsletters included some of his first reviews. Nicola: This reads like he’s speaking to today. Elder: He also has a ton of programs from Yale. There is a series of letters that he wrote about theatre and education which, I think, ended up in one of the yale/theatre issues. Nicola: This brings me back to my youth. Pardo: With your experience, how would you stimulate someone’s imagination that this is valuable for our life today? You know, not just as part of the history, but … Nicola: Just exactly the experience I had right now. This is a metaphor. Historical metaphor for what we are living right now. Pardo: Because he lived through Vietnam. Nicola: He commented on it. He was a part of it. Elder: His introduction to “Crisis 1968: Theatre and Imagination” in yale/theatre basically speaks to us now. How American theatre tries to reinvent itself every twenty years when we go through a political crisis. Pardo: And there's always a political crisis. I mean, historically, during his lifetime, there was the AIDS crisis, which killed a lot of theatre artists and Michael’s friends, but also the whole issue with the National Endowment of the Arts. Nicola: Yeah, that was a huge storm. That we still are feeling the effects of Jesse Helms. Elder: “Death, Or the Theatre” is one of the things that he wrote about, and he argues that when you lose a theatre artist too young, it’s not like losing a regular person or a film or television star. A theatre artist is only really there on the stage. There’s not a lot of video of them. So it feels like more is lost with no way to access what they did. But this archive points to some of that. Pardo: Yes, you also miss out on the growth of the artist if they die young. Michael wrote about this tragic reality. Elder: He also wrote two articles in a series called “Art and Sanity,” where he specifically talks about Jesse Helms, and around the time when Mac Wellman’s play Seven Blowjobs was going on. Pardo: He was also trying to bring attention to actual theatrical works. For example, he would write about the productions to encourage people to go. Nicola: What strikes me about Michael as we are talking is that he was present at, and a participant in, the forging of 20th century American theatre. Elder: People don't really know about the things he did outside of critical reviews. Pardo: He was very much engaged. And the theatre today would not be what it is had he not been around. [ Tanya shows political buttons from the collection .] Look at this button, it’s hilarious! “Vote the Motherfuckers Out.” Nicola: “Take a Playwright to Lunch.” Oh. That's good. “Carol Bellamy”. Wow, Carol Bellamy! Elder: Mind blowing from back in the day, right? She got nowhere near the Mayordom. Pardo: “I Read Banned Books.” Nicola: My god. We’re still having this fight about banned books. What strikes me when you look at the totality of who he is, or was , he was a participant in the creation of the structure and the aesthetics of modern American theatre—art theatre as opposed to commercial theatre. The forging of the not-for-profit theatre. The real theatre, in my opinion. And then he moved along to be more of a spectator and observer and marker or recorder of its progress. Elder: Yes, he was a cultural historian and commentator as well as a critic. Nicola: He was somebody who was engaged, who had a full knowledge of the field. I think his work still speaks to what we are going through now because we’re in a similar period of collapse. Pardo: Especially with funding. I mean, it’s ridiculous that an Off-Broadway theatre production is almost the same ticket price as a Broadway show. And Broadway is always going to win because they do big musicals. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it’s commercial theatre. Nicola: That’s America. That’s who we are. And that’s another element that I’ve always thought was powerful about the not-for-profit theatre: it's going against capitalism. It's rejecting those ideals and proposing an alternative idea. A way of being and being together collectively. But that’s who I think he really was, even if unconsciously. Using his gifts, to speak to another generation or to further generations as they start to contend with what is what, not only what is an art form, but what life is and what it means. Theatre is such a communal event. You can't do it by yourself. Pardo: It's true, it's a community. In drama school, you work together and you rely on each other. The director makes compromises, as does an actor, and a designer. You work together to present something. Elder: But that sometimes it failed, too. Nicola: Of course. Everything has moments of failure. Anything human does. Elder: Instances where he failed in this collection is highlighted when he was supposed to be the translator of Kiss of the Spider Woman . Starting about 1981 to 1986, there are letters from Manuel Puig saying, “Michael, where’s my translation? This movie is hinging on this [Broadway translation].” But that was also at a time when his mother was passing away. Also, there were a couple of years, maybe a decade, where he took on a little too much and couldn’t satisfy everyone, possibly even himself. He never really said why he didn’t do things. Pardo: And what about the gay plays? Elder: When it comes to gay and lesbian material, he wrote some original materials, translated others, nurtured performers. But he’s connected with Caffe Cino, and with tons of playwrights who were gay, straight, and otherwise, particularly Robert Patrick, John-Claude von Itallie, and Joe Chaikin. Michael’s translation of Grand Finale by Copi was published in Gay Plays: An International Anthology in 1989. Pardo: And he also loved the Ridiculous Theatre. Elder: And Robert Patrick, the playwright. He worked a lot with Patrick at the beginning. There’s an autographed copy of Patrick’s Truly Gay News . There is a folder for the Gay American Arts Festival in 1981. Here is Flatbush Tosca . He had a lot of correspondence back and forth with Harvey Fierstein as well. And here’s an interview he did with Sam Shepard on The Chairs in 1985. Pardo: It’s for WBAI radio. Is this Shepard and Joseph Chaikin in this recording? Elder: We should get this digitized. Nicola: Yeah, absolutely. The Gay American Festival was incredible. Everybody from the gay literary world is in here. John Rechy, who wrote the novel City of Night and the non-fiction book The Sexual Outlaw . Jonathan Ned Katz. Harvey Fierstein. “An Evening with Harvey.” A Gay Publishing Roundtable with Felice Picano, Joan Larkin, two major poets. And Michael Denny. And lesbian poets Susan Jordan, Joan Larkin, and Audre Lorde. Incredible. Pardo: He was very well connected. He knew everybody and everybody knew him. Elder: Here are the first or some of the first copies of Christopher Street Magazine. I’m not quite sure if he wrote for these, or if they were sent to him. Pardo: Does Christopher Street still exist as a publication? Nicola: No. Nor does Christopher Street as we knew it either. Pardo: Well-put, Jim. Richard Hauer, a poem. “Superwoman and the Wheelchair.” Elder: He had a lot of correspondence with Stanley Kaufmann as well. And we have Robert Patrick's Truly Gay News. Nicola: A gay humor magazine from 1967. And signed! Renee Richards autobiography, remember? “Renee Richards autobiography would definitely be titled ‘Better Off.’” “Rex Reed has a crack in his ass from sitting on the fence.” That’s hilarious. Elder: Here is Robert Patrick's Cheep Theatricks published in the Winter Repertory . The Winter Repertory was a series of seven published books of plays with Michael as general editor of the series, starting in 1971 with Kenneth Bernard’s Night Club and Other Plays. And here’s Maria Irene Fornes. Promenade , written with Al Carmines. So much of the New York experimental theatre is represented in this archive. He's got a few things in the archive from Al Carmines. Nicola: This is the history of American playwriting. Elder: The last thing I'll show you from the Winter Repertory is Mad Dog Blues and Other Plays by Sam Shepard. Here are photographs that were used in the publication taken by Gerard Malanga. Malanga was a Warhol photographer as well. And there's O-Lan Jones in here someplace, too, Shepherd's wife. O-Lan and Patti Smith in the same volume. One thing that blew me away is that Patti Smith, for this volume, wrote in her own way a history of her friendship with Sam Shepard. And she signed it, and she said “don’t edit it,” and then they edited it, since it needed a comma. So don’t tell Patti! Pardo: It’s here somewhere as part of the archive. Elder: When I was going through his stuff, I was shocked about the depth and range of his life. Everything I learned in the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU came rushing back. Nicola: Quite a journey that Michael took that parallels the American theatre journey from 1960 to 2022 when he died. Elder: He was a nerdy theatre kid. So he’s got programs in here dating back to the 50s. Nicola: It's a generational perspective. Really informed. And I keep going back to it that he was both a participant and an observer/commentator. And not many people are that. It was part of what made him special, in my opinion, when he was working at the New York Theatre Workshop. Because other cultures that I’ve visited and got to visit, it was a surprise to me that people who were critics were also working artists or dramaturgs employed by theatrical institutions. He was both the critic at the Village Voice observing the work of Off- and Off-Off Broadway, and he was also part of that world as a playwright. And the rest of American culture is separated, like the people who are critical are often not “in” the community. They’re separated. But in German and French theatre, they’re part of the community. And it’s much healthier. I think he really displayed that dual role in his life, and his work and sets a good example for the future. Nicola: There is a paper from college where he quotes from Shaw... Pardo: It's a paper that he wrote when he was an undergraduate. Nicola: Yes [ Reading from paper .] “I stand for the future and the past. For the posterity that has no vote and the tradition that never had any. I stand for the great abstractions for conscience and virtue, for the eternal against the expedient, for the revolutionary appetite, against the day’s gluttony, for intellectual integrity, for humanity, for the rescue of industry from commercialism and of science, from professionalism. For everything that you desire as sincerely as I am.” That’s from The Apple Cart by George Bernard Shaw. Pardo: And this is early on, 1962. He’s so young, a new kid on the block. And he puts this quote from Shaw on the cover of this report. It tells you a lot of who he is at 18 or 19 years old. Nicola: And that didn't change. Elder: Around 1998, he wrote “Death, or the Theatre” for the Village Voice . I think this encapsulates his entire vision of what the theatre could be. The introduction is biting. But it’s not something that he hasn't written before. He’s very pessimistic, too. Pardo: At this point in time, we were dealing with AIDS and with the NEA mess. Elder: He didn’t really talk a lot about Judaism. He had a bar mitzvah. He grew up in the conservative tradition that he turned his back on, but I think a lot of it informed his politics and life. I work at the American Jewish Historical Society, so I don’t want to forget that he also grew up in that Judaic idea of fairness. Pardo: In his 1991 Miss Saigon review, he says something about blowing up the New York Times . “Every generation gets the theatre they deserve. And we get Miss Saigon .” Elder: His dad emigrated from Lithuania. His mom was born in Philadelphia. I don't know exactly when he emigrated, but I read somewhere that some of his family did perish in the Holocaust. He doesn’t really talk about it in his work to my knowledge, though he did write an unpublished script called The Hitler Play . Nicola: You know, I glanced at the Obie Awards in the collection. And that seems to me that he had a huge influence on what it became then. And it's not anything like that anymore. Elder: Yes, there is a connection between home grown theatres in New York City. HERE Arts Center is represented in the archive. So is New York Theatre Workshop, Theatre for the New Audience, and La MaMa. People who went in and out of downtown theatre flowed in and out, and it's incredible because you never really think of a critic talking to theatre people about actually crafting their work. Pardo: That's what a dramaturg does, isn’t it? I think this is why, every year, he went as the dramaturg at the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Center. It’s how you learn to craft a play. Nicola: This is breaking down those walls. Pardo: When they accepted August Wilson, he had sent in a play that was hundreds of pages long. But when Michael read it, he said something like, “this is an incredible thing. This guy has such an imagination. We must accept this guy and we'll cut it down. We'll turn it and make it into a presentable play.” Nicola: Was that Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom ? I think it was. And then O’Neill developed three or four plays of his. Elder: It seems like people don’t really understand that Michael was more than a critic. I was surprised to learn that he was also a translator and an adapter. He was also a lyricist. He was a dramaturg, a literary manager. He had his hand in so many different aspects of crafting theatre. Pardo: One example of this is his work with The Kurt Weill Foundation. They found a song that had never been translated into English. And they had Michael do it. He also worked with the Cole Porter Foundation, and so many others. He also worked with the Cole Porter Foundation to re-write the book of Porter's Aladdin musical. Michael went through the lengthy process of creating a brand new Aladdin musical just before Disney released their version, not by Cole Porter. Alas, bad timing. Nicola: He did Happy End , right? Pardo: Yes. That was his first Brecht/Weill translation. It had Meryl Streep and Christopher Lloyd. It started at Yale and then it moved to Broadway. Elder: He also had like 10,000 albums and 8000 books. Pardo: He has a Threepenny Opera t-shirt autographed by Sting. Nicola: This archive, while the remnants of one person’s life, is actually the story of the American theatre of half a century, or more. This overlaps with my own rumination on the time, the life, that I’ve had in the theatre in America. The big, underlying thought that I wasn’t able to hold on to until now, now that I’m finished. Only now can I see a clear beginning, middle, and end to my professional life. What Michael’s accumulation is revealing to me is that this thing we have all been engaged in on the deepest possible foundational level has been trying to persuade this culture that the role of the artist has value. And you can see in those early years and the materials from Yale with people like Christopher Durang, Meryl Streep, Robert Brustein—you can see they were pushing this. The role, the value of the artist, not just their output. It’s the process of making art. It’s the thing. It's the enterprise, the commitment. Pardo: The remnants of a brilliant mind.... This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) James C. Nicola was the Artistic Director of New York Theatre Workshop from 1988 to 2022. Prior to that, he was first a National Endowment for the Arts Directing Fellow and then Producing Associate at Arena Stage (with Zelda Fichandler). He was a Casting Coordinator at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. He worked as a director or assistant Off-Off Broadway, and in London at the Royal Court Theatre and The Young Vic Theatre. He is a graduate of Tufts University, and was awarded a Special Tony Award and a Lifetime Achievement Obie Award. Tanya Elder is the Senior Archivist of the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS). She studied theater and archival management at New York University and helped organize the records of the HERE Arts Center, the Mark Amitin papers, and worked with the American Theater Archive Project (ATAP). At the AJHS, she re-processed and wrote on the Raphael Lemkin papers. She has also published essays in In Our Own Voices: The Changing Face of Librarianship . Diego Daniel Pardo is an actor who has worked in professional theatre, film, and television. He is also a professional dialect coach. He holds a Master’s Degree in Speech Pathology from CUNY (Lehman) and is an alumni of the Juilliard School Drama Division. He is the preliminary executor for the estate of Michael Feingold. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Teya Juarez 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 Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale Teya Juarez By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF In 2023, The Whale won the Academy Award for Best Makeup and Hairstyling: one of three films nominated for the category that year that featured performers wearing fat suits. (1) The 2022 film is an adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s 2012 play of the same name, both of which tell the story of Charlie, a 600-lb gay English professor, as he struggles to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter, Ellie. The plot takes place over the course of one week from Monday through Friday. As the ending suggests, this is ultimately the last week of Charlie’s life. Considered his triumphant return to acting, Brendan Fraser starred as Charlie in the film adaptation, earning the 2023 Academy Award for Best Actor. (2) Since Fraser was not himself 600 pounds, the film utilized a fat suit, additional prosthetics, and computer-generated imagery (CGI) to build Charlie’s body, creating a fabricated representation of what most Americans would likely be conditioned to consider “morbid ob*sity.” (3) While the use of fat suits in lieu of casting fat actors can be theorized as “fat drag” (4) —slender bodies dressing up as fat ones for the sake of performance—I argue that The Whale is a unique case of “ob*sity drag,” a term introduced by Royce Best. (5) “Ob*se” (rather than “fat”) carries a specific pathologization and medicalization of fat bodies in U.S. society and has continually been the target of the so-called “War on Ob*sity.” (6) The Whale ’s story of fatness reveals how the theatre and film industries perpetuate the War on Ob*sity mentality that pursues the end of fat. With the future of fat in question, it is essential for the theatre and film industries to confront the fact that fat bodies are often not permitted to represent themselves in performance, especially in the production history of The Whale . In its journey from the stage to the screen, The Whale represents a doubling-down on the use of fat suits as a valid performance of fat embodiment, cruelly suggesting in its context and content that even as stories about fatness continue to be told, real fat bodies need not exist. For decades, the U.S. has been in an endless War on Ob*sity. Warning against the dangers of fatness, public health and government officials have declared an ongoing “ob*sity epidemic” in the U.S. (7) Through the lens of the War on Ob*sity, fatness is viewed as a disease that inherently comprises overall health, or a problem that needs to be cured. Paul Campos calls this the “ob*sity myth,” which relies on three primary assumptions: “that ‘excess’ weight causes illness and early death; that losing weight improves health and extends life; and that we know how to make fat people thin.” (8) Campos points out that the War on Ob*sity labels a significant portion of the U.S. population as targets, pathologizing their fatness as ob*sity. (9) Marilyn Wann describes that fat studies scholars and fat activists have denounced the use of “O-words” such as ob*se and “overweight” that “medicaliz[e] human diversity” and “inspir[e] a misplaced search for a ‘cure’ for naturally occurring difference.” (10) Because fatness has been repeatedly pathologized as an undesirable embodiment under the guise of ob*sity, U.S. society continually orients itself around slenderness as the ideal, obedient, and inherently healthy body type. Americans resort to fad diets, exercise trends, surgical interventions, and weight-loss medications in the pursuit of slenderness. Most recently, GLP-1 medications, such as Ozempic, have become an increasingly popular method of weight loss. The rapid adoption of GLP-1s, before extensive research on the long-term effects of using these medications for weight loss, suggests that the pursuit of slenderness is often about body size, not about lasting internal health. (11) The connotation of the word “war” implies that the end goal of the War on Ob*sity is the eradication of fatness, which inherently means the elimination of fat people . With this ongoing War on Ob*sity, what does the future of fat entail? As I will detail throughout the following essay, theatre and film industries subscribe to this War on Ob*sity mentality, particularly in the case of The Whale , which demonstrates the use of ob*sity drag described above. While theatre and film continue to depict stories about fatness, these industries have often deemed fat people unnecessary to include in doing so. In their introduction to the 2018 Fat Studies special issue on fatness and temporality, Tracy Tidgwell, May Friedman, Jen Rinaldi, Crystal Kotow, and Emily R.M. Lind explore the concept of “fat time.” (12) They describe fat time as “abundant and spacious,” identifying that it “moves bigger” and “resists containment.” (13) Notably, the authors suggest that the opposite of “fat time” is “no time,” which is “capitalist and lean in character.” (14) While no time “shrinks” and “compresses,” fat time “offers more” and “makes fatness more knowable.” (15) I suggest that this relationship between “fat time” and “no time” is significant for performances of fatness like The Whale and what these performances mean for the future of fat. Whereas fat time liberates fat bodies, allowing them to take up time and space, “no time” takes on the War on Ob*sity mentality that seeks the end of fat. No time is at the heart of The Whale . As a performance of fatness, and more specifically a performance of ob*sity, The Whale reinforces the societal belief that fat people are running out of time and that fatness must come to an end. The primary source of urgency that pushes the story forward appears to be Charlie’s inevitable death at the end of the play; Charlie is out of time. By pathologizing Charlie’s body as ob*se, rather than liberating it as fat, Charlie loses access to fat time and is instead given no time on stage or on screen. This distinction between the pathologizing nature of the word ob*se and the liberatory potentials of the word fat is critical to my argument that The Whale utilizes ob*sity drag rather than fat drag. Fat is one of many marginalized identities that has been fabricated and performed by normative bodies throughout the history of performance on stage and screen. (16) Royce Best’s term “ob*sity drag” is based on Tobin Siebers’ theory of “disability drag,” wherein able-bodied actors portray characters with disabilities in performance. Siebers explains that the “modern cinema often puts the stigma of disability on display,” but said disability is represented by those who are not themselves disabled, performing for an audience that is potentially unaware of this important distinction. (17) However, audiences that are privy to the performer’s underlying able-bodiedness are assured that the performer “will return to an able-bodied state as soon as the film ends.” (18) I suggest that ob*sity drag functions similarly in The Whale as the representation of another non-normative identity by normative bodies, with the added connotations of further pathologizing fatness as ob*sity for American audiences. For stage productions of The Whale , fat suits assure the audience that the actor playing Charlie will return to a slender (or otherwise smaller) body after the performance. Fatness is thus represented by a fabricated prosthetic that is removed when the performance is complete. Especially in the film adaptation, since Brendan Fraser is a well-known actor, audiences can rely on their knowledge that the fat body they are seeing is not Fraser’s actual body and that it will return to “normal” when the movie is over. Much like Siebers’ theory of disability drag, The Whale provides representation of a nonnormative embodiment, but it does so through a fabricated depiction of ob*sity. An actual fat body would not collapse into a normative state the moment the curtain drops or the credits roll. Perhaps putting a real fat person on stage/screen is to admit that the fat body will have more time, continuing to live in fat time past the context and confines of the performance. Fatness as Ob*sity & The Ob*sity Action Coalition Fat suits can refer to varying levels of prosthetics and makeup (and in the film version of The Whale , CGI) that have been used to make slender, normative bodies appear fat in performance. Amy Gullage states that fat suits are typically “full-body costumes” worn on their own or in combination with “latex pieces or full face masks and make-up in order to fatten up [performers’] faces, chins and necks.” (19) The use of fat suits to represent fat bodies in performance suggests that “fatness itself is merely a suit to be worn and changed at will,” as well as that “fatness can be represented removed from the realities and complexities of real life.” (20) Fat suits are used to tell stories about fatness without necessarily including actual fat people in the performance. The use of fat suits implies that even when fatness is part of a story being told on the stage or screen, these roles are not intended for fat performers. Instead, slender performers perform fat embodiment with the support of prosthetics. (21) Ryan Donovan explains in his 2023 book Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity that “[t]he fat suit itself reinforces stigma because it can be put on and taken off at will, an act unavailable to the fat person perceived as morally suspect for their inability to lose weight.” (22) In this way, fat suits can be used to tell fat stories without including socially transgressive fat bodies in the process. The Whale takes the fat suit to a new level, specifically depicting folks that, in the fat liberation community, might identify as “superfat” or “infinifat.” Some fat activists have identified a “fategories” spectrum of fat identity, ranging across “small fat,” “mid-fat,” “large fat,” and superfat/infinifat, reclaiming fat identity away from pathologizing terms like overweight, ob*se, or morbidly ob*se. (23) The fategories spectrum is used to acknowledge smaller fat bodies’ proximity to societal privilege, as well as to emphasize the increasing lack of access to clothing, healthcare, and fair treatment for fat folks at the higher end of the size spectrum. Fat activists who use these fategories typically use superfat/infinifat to refer to the largest members of the fat community; this category has no size cap. Bodies in this category might be considered ob*se or morbidly ob*se by those who medicalize fat identity. The difference in size between Charlie and the performers playing him is likely much greater than the usual discrepancy between a slender performer and their fat suit. (24) Charlie’s size, combined with the health conditions attributed to his weight, reflects the U.S.’s reductive and medicalized stereotype of what a morbidly ob*se body is. To my knowledge, every stage production of The Whale since its world premiere has included its own version of a fat suit, which suggests that the theatre industry has not seriously considered casting a superfat/infinifat person for this role. (25) A Google Image search for photos from past stage productions reveals a substantial collection of fabricated fat bodies. (26) The casting history of The Whale represents persistent ob*sity drag with bodies donning a fabricated fatness in order to perform conceptions of ob*sity. The Whale also perpetuates reductive and harmful understandings of fatness by adhering to this concept of ob*sity in its story. Overall, the plot relies on stereotypes that American society tout as intrinsic characteristics of fat people: the larger someone is, the closer they are to a premature death. Not only is Charlie fat, but he has compounding health issues that he refuses to seek medical treatment for, including difficulty breathing and a potential heart condition. Liz, Charlie’s only friend (and sister to his late partner Alan), is a nurse who uses her medical expertise and access to medical equipment to care for Charlie. Charlie is, of course, also represented as having a binge-eating disorder, playing into another stereotype that all fat people have become fat because of a lack of self-control with food. (27) Charlie’s ex-wife and Ellie’s mother, Mary, tells Charlie that he has “been eating [himself] to death for fifteen years,” reinforcing his troubled relationship with food, while also implying that his weight gain is akin to death by suicide. (28) The insinuation is that Charlie’s proximity to sickness and death is an inevitable part of his fatness, rather than a separate concern of other intersecting, compounding factors. As Campos identifies, the assumption that fatness is inherently linked to disease and death is a facet of the ob*sity myth, the driving force of the War on Ob*sity. These fears for Charlie’s proximity to death are confirmed when both the play and the film heavily imply that Charlie dies at the end. In her first scene with Charlie, Ellie cruelly demands that Charlie stand up and walk to her. When Charlie reaches for his walker to support himself, Ellie says, “Without that thing. Just stand up, and come over here.” Without his mobility aid, Charlie is unable to stand up. He lies back on the couch “ wincing from the pain ” and “ wheezing loudly .” (29) At the end of the story, Charlie stands up to walk across the room to Ellie, answering her request from before. He rips the oxygen tube out of his nose and “ with a huge amount of effort and pain, [ he ] manages to stand up. ” (30) The final stage directions of the playscript describe: “ Charlie looks up. The waves [sound effect of waves] cut off. A sharp intake of breath. The lights snap to black. ” (31) In the film’s depiction of this moment, the camera focuses on Charlie’s feet as they levitate off the floor. Charlie floats towards a white, heavenly light. After a brief flashback to Charlie and Ellie on the beach years earlier, long before Charlie gained the majority of his weight, the credits roll. (32) Both versions of the story imply that Charlie dies from ob*sity and its supposed inherently related health conditions. By refusing to seek medical treatment and refusing to pursue weight loss, Charlie’s story becomes a cautionary tale for what might happen if ob*sity goes untreated, supporting the American ob*sity myth. Another facet of the script that evokes a strong association with ob*sity rather than fat is Hunter’s specification that Charlie is “around six hundred pounds.” (33) First airing during the world premiere run of The Whale , the TLC (The Learning Channel) reality show My 600-lb Life has become a significant source for the medicalization and pathologization of superfat/infinifatness as morbid ob*sity. The show, now thirteen seasons strong, features people who weigh around 600 pounds as they pursue weight loss via bariatric weight-loss surgery. My 600-lb Life makes a spectacle of superfat/infinifat bodies. As fat studies scholar May Friedman describes, the show invites the audience to “gawk at super sized people, to see them as inherently abject and impossible.” (34) Prominent fat activist Aubrey Gordon explains that My 600-lb Life treats its subjects “as freakshows, displaying their bodies and medical struggles to fuel audiences’ disgust, revulsion, and sense of superiority,” reassuring those who are not superfat/infinifat: “ At least I’m not that fat .” (35) My 600-lb Life explicitly perpetuates the War on Ob*sity mentality. Melissa Zimdars says in her 2019 book Watching our Weights: Contradictions of Televising Fatness in the “Ob*sity Epidemic” that My 600-lb Life determines its subjects to be “medically ob*se” and “in need of help beyond the health and lifestyle recommendations of diet and exercise.” (36) Zimdars also points out that while many individuals featured on the show “do not yet have—and maybe never will have—most of the ‘ob*sity-related diseases’ discussed by doctors,” they are automatically depicted as “diseased” or “at risk for disease” simply for their size alone. (37) Weight loss and weight-loss surgery are deemed the only hope in the face of such a deadly disease. In her blog post titled “Our 600 Pound Lives,” Ash Nischuk of The Fat Lip recounts receiving an email from the My 600-lb Life casting office, despite being “vocally fat positive on the internet for over 15 years.” (38) The casting agent explains to Nischuk that the show “follows the lives of real people as they embark on a road to better health” and that, “[i]f approved by the show’s physician,” she could be one of the lucky “selected individuals” who also “receive Gastric Bypass Surgery.” (39) Nischuk asserts that the producers and doctors of My 600-lb Life insist to the fat subjects on the show that if they do not take this opportunity to change their lives, they will die: “Unequivocally. This is your only option to stay alive.” (40) In order for their lives to be saved, participants must “reveal [their] most vulnerable moments—[their] greatest emotional and physical struggles—to a national audience.” (41) This televised spectacle serves the War on Ob*sity mentality, “profit[ing] off of its audience’s fear of fatness and disability.” (42) Furthermore, as Zimdars puts it, the show “borrows more heavily from the documentary tradition and frames itself as more observational than reality shows.” (43) Gordon also comments on how the show “seems to consider itself an objective and tender documentary [emphasis added].” (44) In taking this documentary-style approach, My 600-lb Life tries to convince the viewer that the show provides an authentic and objective look at the lives of those in larger bodies rather than admit to manufacturing spectacle. This feigned objectivity normalizes and downplays the way the show treats its participants, implying that My 600-lb Life is simply reporting on the lives of real fat people (just as the casting agent who tried to recruit Nischuk posed it). Because the specific weight of 600 pounds is included in the title of the show, My 600-lb Life is often referenced, either intentionally or unintentionally, when discussing this category of size in other contexts or other media. By establishing Charlie as 600 pounds, The Whale inherently cites My 600-lb Life ’s depiction of this size as a fatal disease that needs extreme intervention, especially in more contemporary productions of The Whale . Any parallels between My 600-lb Life and The Whale act to legitimize Charlie’s representation of superfat/infinifatness as an extension of this “objective documentation” of the lives of real fat people. The Whale treats Charlie quite similarly to how My 600-lb Life treats its subjects, making a point to emphasize the parts of him that are supposedly disgusting and to show him eating large amounts of food throughout the play/film. Charlie is treated as a spectacle. Charlie taunts Elder Thomas (a Mormon missionary who visits Charlie throughout the story) with details about his body, including mentions of “mold,” “sores,” and “ulcers.” (45) One of the several times Liz brings him food, Charlie starts to choke while eating and Liz uses her entire body to dislodge the food and save him. The film also features a particularly upsetting scene of Charlie, in an emotional breakdown, forcing himself to eat most of the contents of his kitchen. (46) These scenes evoke the same voyeuristic dynamic as much of My 600-lb Life , treating these real bodies as spectacle in order to reinforce the notion that ob*sity is an undesirable and fatal condition. In fact, these moments are not essential to The Whale ’s core narrative but rather crucial to concocting what the playwright and creative team imagine real ob*sity to be. When The Whale ’s creative team considered their lack of personal knowledge of fat embodiment and expressed a desire to hear from lived experience, they established an exclusive relationship with the Ob*sity Action Coalition. The OAC is an ob*sity advocacy group that seeks to “create needed change for those who are living with and/or are affected by the disease of ob*sity.” (47) Brendan Fraser, director Darren Aronofsky, and playwright/screenwriter Hunter all “worked closely” with the OAC, speaking with people through the organization who were themselves “affected by ob*sity.” (48) A feature on the OAC’s website claims that the organization consulted with The Whale ’s team to ensure that the film achieved a “realistic and respectful” representation of “living with severe ob*sity,” rationalizing that these good intentions potentially justify the use of a fat suit instead of casting a fat actor. (49) Throughout the written feature and the two additional videos the OAC published on the collaboration, OAC members praise the film for its accurate portrayal of ob*sity and express their appreciation for the team’s willingness to learn from the organization. (50) For example, in the first of the OAC’s videos on The Whale , an OAC member describes how The Whale ’s team adopted people-first language for advertising the film, at the OAC’s recommendation. (51) Using people-first language means that fat people are referred to as “people living with ob*sity” rather than “ob*se people.” As the OAC explains, people-first language has been used in mental health and disability communities to avoid “labeling an individual with their disease.” (52) The OAC advocates for people-first language to support their goal of humanizing people affected by the disease of ob*sity. The OAC member in the video says: “[Brendan Fraser] is out there talking about people living with ob*sity. That we are not ‘ob*se people,’ that we are not ‘fat people,’ that we are actually ‘people living with the disease of ob*sity.’” (53) In celebrating the results of the collaboration between the OAC and The Whale , the OAC establishes that The Whale affirms the organization’s beliefs on fat. As Tigress Osborn, Executive Director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), puts it in her essay on the film, “[t]he OAC legitimizes this movie while this movie legitimizes the OAC.” (54) NAAFA is “the world’s first documented fat acceptance organization” that is “dedicated to protecting the rights and improving the quality of life for fat people.” (55) NAAFA represents those who have become liberated and empowered by their fatness while the OAC’s advocacy is based on the premise of fatness as a disease. Osborn explains that the fat liberation community believes the concept of ob*sity “has created tremendous harm to fat people in the name of ‘helping’ [them].” (56) By choosing to conduct research solely through an organization that treats fatness as a disease, The Whale ’s team assured that their understanding of superfat/infinifat identity would only be known through the lens of ob*sity. Osborn observes that in the ten years that Aronofsky and Hunter worked on developing the stage play into a film, there has been “no mention of ever consulting with any fat people other than those at the OAC.” (57) Notably, she asserts that to ignore NAAFA and the work of the fat liberation community in those ten years is to selectively engage with fat people “who wouldn’t protest [the film’s] fat suit and who wouldn’t interrupt [the film’s] plan to make the kind of tragedy the [Oscar’s] Academy loves to award.” (58) Osborn’s essay criticizes The Whale ’s unwillingness to engage with fatness on the terms of the fat liberation community. While the film adaptation of The Whale did not exclude all fat bodies, the team made a deliberate choice in working with an organization that would support a narrative of ob*sity. And though (specific) fat bodies were deemed important enough to consult with, they were not ultimately put on the screen. Ob*sity Drag as Fat Embodiment Fat suits have traditionally been used for comedy, making The Whale unique in its use of fabricated fatness for a drama. Fat suits in television and cinema history have often been used for comedic effect, making fat people the target of endless ridicule, including: Courtney Cox as “Fat Monica” in the 90s sitcom Friends ; Gwyneth Paltrow in Shallow Hal (2001); and Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor (1996). (59) Hunter and the additional members of The Whale ’s creative team sought to create a representation of fatness that did not rely on anti-fat comedy, a primary reason for their collaboration with the OAC. Hunter recognizes the past use of fat suits in film wherein “thin actors are put into entirely unrealistic bodysuits in order to be the subject of derision or the butt of a joke.” (60) The OAC’s feature on The Whale acknowledges the history of fat prosthetics used to “demean or ridicule people with ob*sity,” indicating that the OAC “would not have participated” in The Whale if the film was using prosthetics for the sake of anti-fat comedy. (61) However, despite the dramatic nature of its story—and perhaps even because of the dramatic nature of its story— The Whale still plays into anti-fat societal norms about how fat people are to be treated according to the War on Ob*sity mentality. Susan Bordo describes in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (2003) that society does not permit fat people to inhabit a non-normative body size and be happy in their fat bodies. Only fat people “who are willing to present themselves as pitiable, in pain, and conscious of their own unattractiveness” are able to earn “sympathy and concern.” (62) Bordo adds that fat people’s pain is often demonstrated by sharing details about “intimate physical difficulties, orgies of self-hate, or descriptions of gross consumption of food.” (63) The Whale serves this function. In their dramatic tone, both the play and film establish the conditions in which audiences can pity Charlie and feel sympathy for his circumstances as a fat person. They include scenarios of Charlie struggling to move around his home on his own, expressing deep self-hatred, and multiple instances of eating large amounts of food, enacting each facet of Bordo’s argument. In this way, The Whale still affirms anti-fat societal beliefs even though it is not using a fat suit for comedic effect. Charlie is in great physical and emotional pain throughout the entire narrative, just how the American audience needs him to be to earn their attention and sympathy. Even though Charlie is not made the butt of fat jokes, his tragic narrative ensures that he is an acceptable, appropriately pitiable fat subject. This dynamic of sympathy is made more disturbing with the use of a fat suit to represent fatness; Charlie is a fabricated construction of the perfect fat subject for audiences to practice sympathy on. The way individuals from the film and theatre industries speak about these prosthetics in The Whale reveal further anti-fat sentiments, particularly from The Whale ’s playwright and performers. Throughout several interviews on the film, as well as his guest column for The Hollywood Reporter , playwright/screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter touches on his own relationship to fatness (and to Charlie). Hunter recalls growing up as an “ob*se child” and “self-medicat[ing]” his depression with food as an adult. (64) He describes that his “weight range is in a more acceptable place now”; he wears a size “Large Tal[l]” whereas he used to wear a size “XXL.” (65) Hunter explains that when he first began writing The Whale , he “didn’t think [he] was writing a story about a man who was, among other things, living with ob*sity.” (66) But, Hunter says, “somehow making the main character hugely ob*se allowed [him] to drop in emotionally as [he] wrote [Charlie],” calling Charlie “sort of the fun-house mirror version of [himself].” (67) Hunter implies that the larger Charlie’s character became, the more he was able to feel an emotional connection to him. While Hunter has probably dealt with anti-fat stigma in his life, referring to the fategories spectrum reveals that his own experience is undoubtedly different in many ways from someone in a superfat/infinifat body. Furthermore, Hunter’s experience adheres to the anti-fat dynamic that Bordo details. Hunter’s sense of empathy grew when he decided that Charlie was ob*se and the tragedy of Charlie’s life became attributed to his fatness. Hunter established a dynamic in which he could feel empathy and concern for his character through the picture of ob*sity he was creating. Hunter’s joke that Charlie’s body is a fun-house mirror version of his own, a comical distortion because of its size, does not reflect an empathy for larger bodies. Hunter uses Charlie’s superfat/infinifat body as a vessel for exploring his own emotions connected to fatness. He created a narrative of fat that has likely never been performed by a superfat/infinifat person and that conforms to harmful conceptions of fatness as ob*sity. In an interview, Hunter states that “this is not a story about everybody who grapples with ob*sity” and that it represents “how it presented in [himself].” (68) But for some, especially for the OAC members who consulted on the film, The Whale quickly became a representation of more than Hunter’s relationship to fatness. By gaining authority from the OAC, the film became responsible for representing the supposed lives of many fat people. From the beginning of The Whale ’s production history, fat suits were used to perform this story. The fat suit created for the 2012 Playwrights Horizons production of The Whale was built with “foam, padding, weighted beads and spandex” and weighed around fifty pounds. (69) In his New York Times review, Charles Isherwood called the suit “one of the biggest fat suits ever constructed for the theater.” (70) Shuler Hensley, who played Charlie in this production, describes thinking about how “unbelievably gross” he felt he looked in the fat suit. (71) He adds that in order to better connect with his character, he then had to ask himself, “What if I was in that situation? How much guilt would I have that I’m putting not only myself through this, but my family?” (72) In other words, Hensley admitted to his own internalized anti-fatness while playing this fat character and was able to connect with Charlie through pitying him and imagining him in pain, just as Bordo explains. He was disgusted by seeing his body as larger than it really is, even though the additional weight was not real flesh. Hensley also claims that because it was so labor-intensive to wear the fat suit for the role he “lost a good 15 pounds” playing Charlie, jokingly recommending wearing a fat suit as a “weight-loss strategy.” (73) While the statement was meant to be humorous, Hensley indicates that his normative body actually became more slender through portraying fatness, paradoxically describing how his body better conformed to societal body norms through performing a fabricated fatness. The production was well-regarded and was nominated for several awards, winning the 2013 Drama Desk Special Award for Significant Contribution to Theatre and the 2013 Lortel for Outstanding Play, among others. Hensley in particular was recognized for his portrayal of Charlie, winning the 2013 Lortel Award for Outstanding Lead Actor and the 2013 Obie Award in Performance. The production was also awarded the 2013 Lortel for Outstanding Costume design: another award for a fat suit in The Whale ’s production history. (74) The film went through even greater lengths to turn Brendan Fraser into Charlie, aiming to be as real as possible without actually putting a superfat/infinifat person on the big screen. It took upwards of seven hours to get Fraser into full costume, makeup, and prosthetics, complete with skin airbrushing and hand-punched hair. (75) Due to the extremity of this transformation, an air conditioning system within the costume had to be fashioned to keep Fraser cool enough to perform through long days on the film set. (76) Fraser describes the fat suit as feeling like a “straight jacket” while also claiming that the suit was so “beautiful” and “arresting” that it belonged in a museum. 77 In addition to these extensive efforts, the film also relied on CGI, expanding the limits of how ob*sity drag can operate. Fraser explains that the final ensemble was meant to “obey the laws of physics and gravity, because we don’t see that in films.” 78 Fraser both admits that the film industry has been unwilling to put real fat bodies in movies and suggests that digitally enhanced representations of ob*sity are a valid answer to that lack of representation. The fat suits used over the course of the production history of The Whale , and especially in the film adaptation, have been treated by The Whale ’s creators and the OAC as a legitimate substitute for fat bodies. The actors who wear the fat suits appear to feel as though they have achieved some level of genuine understanding about what it is like to be superfat/infinifat, and, in the case of both the film adaption and the 2012 Off-Broadway production, are celebrated with awards for their innovation and dedication. While Fraser is not superfat/infinifat, much attention has been paid to his body throughout his career. In the 1990s, Fraser was considered a “heartthrob,” starring in films such as George of the Jungle (1997) where he showed off his hyperfit physique. (79) On an episode of the Variety talk show Actors on Actors , Fraser discusses his career with fellow actor Adam Sandler. Having worked together on the 1994 film Airheads , Sandler recounts watching Fraser go on to “get very jacked for George of the Jungle .” (80) “I was disappointed how good you looked in that,” Sandler jests, “You made us feel bad about ourselves.” (81) Here, Sandler expresses (though in a humorous tone) that he felt betrayed by Fraser’s body transformation and new heartthrob status. Fraser was celebrated for achieving a particularly conventionally attractive and muscular body, entering a new realm of celebrity. Though, this achievement did not come without sacrifice. Fraser describes being “starved of carbohydrates” to the point of experiencing memory loss while working on George of the Jungle in order to maintain his physique. (82) Fraser would eventually undergo several surgeries to address injuries he sustained while performing stunts for films such as The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001), pushing his body beyond its limits for the sake of his acting career. Fraser’s heartthrob status ultimately came at the cost of overworking and harming his body, negatively impacting his well-being for years after the fact. Despite continuing to act in film and television consistently through the 2000s and 2010s, Fraser seemed to fall into the periphery of the public eye. A 2018 GQ feature by Zach Baron titled “What Ever Happened to Brendan Fraser?” acknowledged Fraser’s retreat from mainstream fame and reignited public interest in Fraser and his career. (83) Guy Webster, in a 2021 Kill Your Darlings article, notes that the new attention Fraser was receiving also reignited a “weird, though wholly unsurprising, preoccupation with [Fraser’s] body.” (84) In the GQ feature, Baron describes Fraser’s appearance, detailing the stubble on his “once mighty chin” and how his shirt “draped indifferently over the once mighty body.” (85) Webster was struck by Baron’s word choice, claiming Baron “focus[ed] this shared memory on Fraser’s body in a way that emphasises what has been lost.” (86) Fraser’s failure to conform to the Hollywood body ideals he once exemplified inevitably became a talking point around his “comeback.” Webster reports social media posts comparing images of Fraser’s current body with images from George of the Jungle “with unoriginal captions like ‘oh god, what happened?’” (87) Fraser’s body has inevitably and understandably changed since the 90s, due to (among other factors) his injuries, aging, and no longer starving himself to maintain his hyperfit figure. And this change—much like his first transformation—could not go without comment from the media. Moreover, Fraser intentionally gained weight in preparation for The Whale , a further bodily transgression as he entered proximity to Charlie’s fatness. While Fraser explains that his “weight has been all over the map,” he is still significantly smaller than Charlie is intended to be, even after gaining weight for the role. (88) In her essay on the film, Tigress Osborn calls Fraser “Hollywood fat,” recognizing that while he is “larger now than he was in his 1990s heartthrob heyday,” he is still “several hundred pounds smaller” than Charlie. (89) Fraser admitted that his weight gain did not result in him becoming Charlie’s size and, thus, he wore a fat suit; his body and the fat suit “worked together” to become Charlie, Fraser describes. (90) Fraser has faced anti-fatness for his “Hollywood fat” body, but he does not have the embodied experience of the anti-fatness that superfat/infinifat people face. If Fraser’s weight gain was part of his attempt to gain a better understanding of fat embodiment, earning some sense of authority to represent fat people, this blatantly disregards the nuance of experiences across different sizes that the fategories spectrum signifies. This conflation mirrors Hunter’s failure to acknowledge important differences along the fategories spectrum. Yet, Fraser’s performance as Charlie has been treated as a genuine and respectful representation of superfat/infinifat lives, and Fraser has been rewarded for his dedication. (91) While Osborn admits that Frazer “ooze[d] good intention” throughout his press tour, conveying that he “felt totally committed to getting this right,” his performance as Charlie did not challenge harmful, normative ideas about fatness. (92) This was still a performance of ob*sity drag. Queer/ed Fat Timelines In the article “Tempo-rarily Fat: A Queer Exploration of Fat Time,” authors Jami McFarland, Vanessa Slothouber, and Allison Taylor consider how fat bodies are “queer/ed” by their failure to conform to heteronormative timelines. (93) Fat bodies are rendered queer in their relationship to heteronormative time. The authors focus on the heteronormative milestones of “marriage, reproduction/childrearing, and death” to determine how fat bodies are “‘out of time’ in societies governed by heteronormative temporal arrangements.” (94) The authors also explore the “productive potential of positing fat subjects as chrononormative failures.” (95) In The Whale , Charlie’s queer sexual orientation intersects with the queerness of his fat body, specifically as it relates to achievements of successful heteronormativity. His relationship to heteronormative family is further complicated by his fatness. Thinking through fat as a chrononormative failure, Charlie’s fatness becomes the site of further transgressions of the heteronormative majoritarian sphere. The representation of Charlie’s transgressions through ob*sity drag demonstrates for U.S. audiences how queer/ed fatness fails to achieve a normatively successful family life, again adopting the War on Ob*sity mentality to further pathologize fatness. In the play/film, Charlie was initially married to Mary and together they had their daughter Ellie. But then Charlie met Alan, a student in one of Charlie’s classes (though he is described as “only a couple years younger” than Charlie). Alan was “the engaged son of a Mormon bishop” and Charlie “had a wife and kid at home,” but the two “couldn’t stand to be apart.” (96) Alan left his fiancé and Charlie left his family so they could pursue a relationship together. But Alan was unable to cope with his religious trauma while also being in a queer relationship and he ultimately committed suicide. Charlie indicates that his grief over Alan’s death caused him to gain weight. He tells Ellie, “Someone very close to me passed away, and it—had an effect on me.” (97) The last time Ellie saw Charlie was when she was two years old. Though Charlie claims that he “was always big,” Ellie’s response to seeing Charlie again emphasizes how much larger he is now. (98) In their second scene together, Charlie tries to learn more about Ellie’s current life, asking her, “Is your mother—with anyone now?” Ellie replies, “No. Why, you interested?” As Charlie stumbles over his words to respond (“Oh, no, I was just—”), Ellie says, “I’m kidding, Jesus. How could you be with anyone?” (99) While it was the queerness of Charlie’s sexuality that led to the end of his marriage with Mary, breaking up his heteronormative family unit, this exchange with Ellie demonstrates how Charlie’s queer/ed fatness has become a barrier to any potential romantic relationship on a heteronormative timeline. McFarland, Slothouber, and Taylor describe that in contemporary society “fatness and marriage are positioned” as “mutually exclusive”; they write, “In other words, fatties do not marry.” (100) Charlie is now fat, meaning that he does not have the proper slender embodiment required to successfully enter into a new relationship. Even if a potential partnership was not a queer one, it would still violate this societal belief that fat people are not meant to find long-term romantic partnerships. Society also dictates that obedient bodies are to “lose weight for each ‘straight’ time ‘achievement.’” (101) After said achievement, bodies are permitted to “indulge” but “not to the point of getting fat.” (102) The Whale ’s narrative adheres to these societal rules, punishing Charlie for leaving his heteronormative family life and determining that he is not worthy of another relationship in his current body. Furthermore, McFarland, Slothouber, and Taylor cite Francis Ray White to establish that fat people, specifically through the lens of ob*sity, are determined to be “sexual and reproductive failures, or ‘fucking failures.’” (103) In addition to a lack of romantic love, Charlie is not permitted to have a successful sexual life. Early in the plot, the stage directions indicate that Charlie is seen “ masturbating to gay porn .” (104) But he feels a pain in his chest and starts to hyperventilate, unable to continue. This scene insinuates that Charlie’s health conditions related to his fatness make him unable to fulfill his own sexual needs. Later, further establishing Charlie as a “fucking failure,” Ellie says to Elder Thomas, “What’s more surprising? That a gay guy has a daughter, or that someone found his penis?” (105) Charlie’s fatness is also implicated as a reason for his failure as a parent. First, the authors of “Tempo-rarily Fat” state that because ob*sity is “figured within a ‘personal responsibility frame’ as ‘a behavioral problem,’” fat parents are “understood as making the ‘wrong’ choices for both themselves and their children by being fat while parenting.” (106) Second, and of particular concern to the War on Ob*sity mentality, the authors explain that “fat parents are also charged with potentially (in the future) depriving their children of parents” because ob*sity is associated with “premature death.” (107) When Mary comes to Charlie’s apartment to confront him, Charlie expresses that he wants to know Ellie will have a good life after he is gone, especially because he has not been involved in most of her life. Charlie says that Mary “fought [him] pretty hard for full custody,” indicating that Mary (and the court) did not find Charlie to be a fit parent after breaking his heteronormative family unit. (108) Charlie pleads for Mary to not give up on Ellie, for her to be there for Ellie after he dies. Mary responds, “You’ve been eating yourself to death for fifteen years and you’re saying that I gave up on her?” (109) Mary explicitly addresses Charlie’s fatness as the reason he has failed as a father to Ellie. Mary also alludes to Charlie’s impending death which ultimately adheres to the prognosis that fat parents will leave their children in a premature death. The authors of “Tempo-rarily Fat” make clear that they offer this analysis of fat people as chrononormative failures not to “positio[n] these limitations as wholly oppressive” but in order to “conclude that queer/ed fat temporalities offer opportunities for reimagining ways of life and time.” (110) In other words, even as they point out how queer/ed fat bodies do not conform to “straight” temporalities, the authors desire to show the liberatory potentials of fat bodies existing and thriving in their own fat temporality/time. However, The Whale does not allow for Charlie to exist outside of the confines of heteronormative temporalities, or beyond the limits of “no time.” Charlie remains out of time : both out of sync with heteronormative temporality and with no time left in his life. The Whale denies the possibility of fat time by excluding fat bodies in performance and ensuring that Charlie’s character upholds the War on Ob*sity mentality. The Future of Fat From the first production of The Whale , superfat/infinifat performers have never been cast to play Charlie . For the Denver premiere, playwright Hunter expressed that it would not be possible to cast an actual person of Charlie’s size in the show. “Someone in that condition,” he said, “they were not doing eight shows a week.” (111) For the film adaptation, Aronofsky claims that the film’s team briefly considered casting a fat actor. However, Aronofsky also concluded that it would be “impossible” to cast a “real person dealing with [the] issues” that Charlie lives with. (112) Aronofsky was concerned that “an actor with severe ob*sity would struggle with the demands of a grueling production schedule.” (113) “From a health perspective,” he says, “it’s prohibitive.” (114) Aronofsky says both that most superfat/infinifat bodies will inevitably be plagued with fatal health concerns like Charlie and that they would not be able to endure or survive performing the role. Because of both Aronofsky’s and Hunter’s unwillingness to entertain the capabilities of fat performers, The Whale further cemented its legacy of ob*sity drag in the film adaptation. Though, the consideration of a fat performer in the role of Charlie presents an issue for further (and future) consideration: would the anti-fatness of The Whale be mitigated by casting a fat performer? In other words, even with a fat body in the leading role, does this story need to be told at all? In their 2020 HowlRound essay “Towards a Fat Theatre: Reimagining Bodies Onstage,” Jeff Bouthiette describes taking on the role of Charlie in a reading of The Whale on Zoom. Not knowing the play very well before the reading, Bouthiette recounts feeling “hopeful, since it contains one of the few theatrical depictions of someone living in a very large body.” (115) But when they engaged more deeply with the play they “became discouraged,” finding a fat character who was “a relentlessly sad individual in a relentlessly sad story.” (116) Bouthiette concludes: “The fact that this is one of the few examples of characters of this size is heartbreaking.” (117) Bouthiette’s experience with The Whale suggests that the theatre and film industries should be asking not if fat performers can survive the grueling conditions of playing Charlie but if fat performers can endure the conditions of a tragic script like The Whale . Asking fat people to tell this particular story of fatness is to ask fat bodies to perform a narrative of ob*sity. And the War on Ob*sity mentality consistently feeds on the premise of their fat bodies no longer existing at all. In order to support the future of fat in the face of a war against it, and to ensure the survival of fat bodies, both theatre and film industries must give more attention to the fat stories told by fat people. A fat future is one where fat bodies can exist on their own terms, abundantly expanding in fat time beyond the conceptions of no time. Fat futures are not to be determined entirely by bodies that are not fat or bodies that perform fabricated, dehumanizing fatness. The cycle of normalizing and celebrating slender bodies for their temporary proximity to fatness is what must ultimately come to an end. References The other two films nominated for the 2023 Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling that used fat suits were Elvis (Tom Hanks) and The Batman (Colin Farrel). Kelsey Castanon, “The Problem With 3 Oscar-Nominated Films Using Fat Suits,” PopSugar , last modified 13 March 2023, https://www.popsugar.com/beauty/prosthetics-makeup-fat-suits-hollywood-49111321 . “Brendan Fraser & Adam Sandler: Actors on Actors,” posted 6 December 2022, by Variety, YouTube, 29 min., 23 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XpAb11hqy4&t=1092s . Following the lead of fat activists like Tigress Osborn, the current Executive Director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), I use an asterisk in the word ob*se/ob*sity throughout to mark the word as an anti-fat slur that the fat liberation community and fat studies field generally denounce. All additions of asterisks are my own, save any reference to Tigress Osborn’s essay on The Whale . Ob*sity as a concept is antithetical to the efforts of all fat liberation activists and fat studies scholars. Fat is not a bad word. For more on this see: Marilyn Wann, “Foreword: Fat Studies: An Invitation to Revolution,” in The Fat Studies Reader , ed. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York University Press, 2009), ix-xxv. Paul Campos, The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health (Gotham Books, 2004), 83-86. Royce Best, “Making Obesity Fat: Crip Estrangement in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 ,” Disability Studies Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2019), https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v39i4.7149 . Tracy Tidgwell, May Friedman, Jen Rinaldi, Crystal Kotow, and Emily R.M. Lind, “Introduction to the Special Issue: Fatness and Temporality,” Fat Studies 7, no. 2 (2018): 118, https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2017.1375262 . The previous use of “Amercians” and all future references to “America” throughout refer to the United States. Campos, The Obesity Myth , xv-xvi. Campos, xxv. Campos, xvii. Wann, “Foreword: Fat Studies,” xii, xiii. Emma Beckett, “Drugs Like Ozempic Won’t ‘Cure’ Obesity But They Might Make Us More Fatphobic,” The Conversation , last modified 9 April 2024, https://theconversation.com/drugs-like-ozempic-wont-cure-obesity-but-they-might-make-us-more-fat-phobic-219309#:~:text=The%20Ozempic%20buzz%20isn't,who%20live%20in%20larger%20bodies .; Elizabeth Daube, “Are the New Weight Loss Drugs Too Good to Be True?” UCSF Magazine 13, no. 1 (2024), https://magazine.ucsf.edu/weight-loss-drugs-too-good-to-be-true .; Flora Oswald, “Anti-fatness in the Ozempic Era: State of the Landscape and Considerations for Future Research,” Fat Studies 13, no. 2 (2024): 128-134, https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2024.2307674 . Tidgwell et al., “Fatness and Temporality,” 115. Tidgwell et al., 115. Tidgwell et al., 115. Tidgwell et al., 115-116. For more on the history of fat suits and prosthetics, as well as the portrayal of disability, in theatre history (in this case, on Broadway) see: Ryan Donovan, Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity (Oxford University Press, 2023). Tobin Siebers, “Disability as Masquerade,” Disability Theory (University of Michigan Press, 2008), 115. Siebers, “Disability as Masquerade,” 116. Amy Gullage, “Fat Monica, Fat Suits, and Friends : Exploring Narratives of Fatness,” Feminist Media Studies 14, no. 2 (2014): 179, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2012.724026 . Gullage, “Fat Monica, Fat Suits, and Friends ” 186. I want to note that even when the performer pre-fat suit would not be considered particularly slender, their own body is still smaller than their body in a fat suit. The fat suit is used to portray a fabricated fatness. Additionally, even small(er) fat people can express anti-fatness towards other fat bodies, especially towards those larger than their own. Donovan, Broadway Bodies , 81. I identify as small fat. Ash Nischuk is credited with the coining of the term “infinifat” and identifies as such. Ash Nischuk, “Beyond Superfat: Rethinking the Farthest End of the Fat Spectrum,” The Fat Lip , last modified 20 December 2016, http://thefatlip.com/2016/12/20/beyond-superfat-rethinking-the-farthest-end-of-the-fat-spectrum/ .; Linda Gerhardt, “Fategories: Understanding the Fat Spectrum,” Fluffy Kitten Party, last modified 1 June 2021, https://fluffykittenparty.com/2021/06/01/fategories-understanding-smallfat-fragility-the-fat-spectrum/ .; Cherry Midnight and Max Airborne, “Community Origins of the Term ‘Superfat,’” Medium , last modified 2 December 2020, https://cherrymax.medium.com/community-origins-of-the-term-superfat-9e98e1b0f201 . Though, it is important to note that weight is used to determine Charlie’s size, and the same weight can look extremely different from body to body. The world premiere production of The Whale was presented by the Denver Center Theatre Company at the Ricketson Theater in Denver, Colorado, in early 2012. Tom Alan Robbins played the role of Charlie and, though he was described as “a bit overweight” himself, he wore a fat suit. Michael Mulhern, “BWW Reviews: Denver Center’s The Whale—A Heavy, Superb Drama,” Broadway World , last modified 26 January 2012, https://www.broadwayworld.com/denver/article/BWW-Reviews-Denver-Centers-THE-WHALE-a-Heavy-Superb-Drama-20120126 .; Ray Mark Rinaldi, “Theater Review: ‘The Whale’ a Drama of Gigantic Proportions,” The Denver Post , last modified 3 May 2016, https://www.denverpost.com/2012/01/23/theater-review-the-whale-a-drama-of-gigantic-proportions-2/ .; Ray Mark Rinaldi, “‘Whale’ Promises to be a Whopper of a Family Drama,” The Denver Post , last modified 1 May 2016, https://www.denverpost.com/2012/01/05/whale-promises-to-be-a-whopper-of-a-family-drama/ . “The Whale Charlie Stage Play,” Google Image Search, accessed 26 October 2025, https://www.google.com/search?q=the+whale+charlie+stage+play&sca_esv=8e61a810906f0d86&rlz=1C1UEAD_enUS1113US1113&udm=2&biw=1440&bih=731&sxsrf=AE3TifN_h16QQMJ1UU9kzRTqtHZVJw1fpA%3A1761529337469&ei=-c3-aJavHMukiLMPu6jW-QE&ved=0ahUKEwjWj6-ToMOQAxVLEmIAHTuUNR8Q4dUDCBI&uact=5&oq=the+whale+charlie+stage+play&gs_lp=Egtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZyIcdGhlIHdoYWxlIGNoYXJsaWUgc3RhZ2UgcGxheUifI1AAWMUhcAV4AJABAZgBuAGgAYIZqgEFMjEuMTG4AQPIAQD4AQGYAhagAooQqAIKwgIKECMYJxjJAhjqAsICBxAjGCcYyQLCAgoQABiABBhDGIoFwgILEAAYgAQYsQMYgwHCAg4QABiABBixAxiDARiKBcICCBAAGIAEGLEDwgINEAAYgAQYsQMYQxiKBcICBRAAGIAEwgIEEAAYHsICBhAAGAgYHpgDCpIHBTExLjExoAftcrIHBDguMTG4B_APwgcIMC4xLjE3LjTIB4MB&sclient=gws-wiz-img . This is not intended to discount or invalidate the experience of those who are fat and do have a binge eating disorder, but the stereotype is often used as a way to discriminate against fat people rather than sympathize with their experience. Samuel D. Hunter, The Whale and A Bright New Boise (Theatre Communications Group, 2014), 85. All of the quotes from The Whale throughout are from the playscript; though, the playscript and film script are quite similar. Hunter, The Whale , 29. Hunter, The Whale , 99. Hunter, The Whale , 100. Darren Aronofsky, director, The Whale , A24, 2022, 1 hr., 57 min., https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.fcfefde7-0072-43a7-90ca-6f14e50fcfd7?autoplay=0&ref_=atv_cf_strg_wb , 1:50:00. Hunter, The Whale , 6. May Friedman, Fat Studies: The Basics (Routledge, 2025), 89. “Super sized” is another term that can be used to describe superfat or infinifat bodies; though, Midnight and Airborne explain that those who created the term “superfat” were replacing the use of “supersized” for themselves. See: Midnight and Airborne, “Community Origins of the Term ‘Superfat.’” Aubrey Gordon, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat (Beacon Press, 2020), 124. Melissa Zimdars, “Spectacle, Sympathy, and the Medicalized Disease of ‘Obesity,’” Watching Our Weights: Contradictions of Televising Fatness in the “Obesity Epidemic” (Rutgers University Press, 2019), 111. Zimdars, “Spectacle, Sympathy, and the Medicalized Disease of ‘Obesity,’” 115. Nischuk has both a blog and a podcast titled “The Fat Lip.” Ash Nischuk, “Our 600 Pound Lives,” The Fat Lip , last modified 21 March 2020, http://thefatlip.com/2020/03/21/our-600-pound-lives/ . Nischuk, “Our 600 Pound Lives.” Nischuk, “Our 600 Pound Lives.” Nischuk, “Our 600 Pound Lives.” Nischuk, “Our 600 Pound Lives.” Zimdars, 103-104. Gordon, What We Don’t Talk About , 123-124. Hunter, The Whale , 90. Aronofsky, The Whale , 1:32:53. “Why the OAC Exists,” Obesity Action Coalition, accessed 30 October 2025, https://www.obesityaction.org/about/purpose/who-we-are/ . Beatrice Verhoeven, “‘The Whale’ Producer on Criticism of the Film: ‘We Just Want to Be Honest and Truthful,’” The Hollywood Reporter , last modified 10 February 2023, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/the-whale-producer-film-criticism-brendan-fraser-1235319749/ . “Obesity Action Coalition and ‘The Whale,’” Obesity Action Coalition, last modified 8 December 2022, https://www.obesityaction.org/the-whale/ . “An Honest Conversation About ‘The Whale’: Fresh Perspectives,” video, posted 11 January 2023, by Obesity Action Coalition, YouTube, 17 min., 43 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXcik2xfPOM .; “The Whale: Brendan Fraser Talks with OAC,” video, posted 17 February 2023, by Obesity Action Coalition, YouTube, 12 min., 16 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ka4jLFrWVc . Obesity Action Coalition,“An Honest Conversation,” 12:18. “People-First Language,” Obesity Action Coalition, last accessed 30 October 2025, https://www.obesityaction.org/action-through-advocacy/weight-bias/people-first-language/ . Obesity Action Coalition, “An Honest Conversation,” 12:28. It is worth acknowledging here that “fat” is not a comfortable word for all people with larger bodies; the word fat can still also be used to cause harm. Tigress Osborn, “Hollywood’s Anti-Fatness Extends Beyond The Whale,” NAAFA, last modified 20 March 2023, https://naafa.org/newsletter-articles/hollywoods-anti-fatness-extends-beyond-the-whale . “About Us,” NAAFA, accessed 30 October 2025, https://naafa.org/aboutus . Osborn, “Hollywood’s Anti-Fatness.” Osborn, “Hollywood’s Anti-Fatness.” Osborn, “Hollywood’s Anti-Fatness.” Gullage, “Fat Monica, Fat Suits, and Friends .”; Niall Richardson, “‘But It’s Only a Fat Suit!’: Representing ‘Fake’ Fat in Popular Culture,” Transgressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2010).; Katharina R. Mendoza, “Seeing Through the Layers: Fat Suits and Thin Bodies in The Nutty Professor and Shallow Hal ,” in The Fat Studies Reader, ed. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York University Press, 2009). Samuel D. Hunter, “Guest Column: ‘The Whale’ Writer Samuel D. Hunter Says the Film is an Invitation to Experience Humanity,” The Hollywood Reporter , last modified 7 December 2022, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/the-whale-writer-guest-column-samuel-d-hunter-1235276194/ . Obesity Action Coalition, “Obesity Action Coalition and ‘The Whale.’” Susan Bordo, “Reading the Slender Body,” Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body , 10th Anniversary Edition (University of California Press, 2003), 204. Bordo, “Reading the Slender Body,” 204. Scott Heller, “Characters Who Take Up More Than Their Share of Room in the Family,” New York Times , last modified 12 December 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/books/obesity-with-jami-attenberg-and-samuel-d-hunter.html .; Hunter, “Guest Column.” Heller, “Characters Who Take Up.” Hunter, “Guest Column.” Note the use of people-first language here. Heller, “Characters Who Take Up.” Brent Lang, “Brendan Fraser’s Triumphant Comeback: How Playing a 600-Pound Gay Man in ‘The Whale’ Resurrected His Career,” Variety , last modified 12 October 2022, https://variety.com/2022/film/features/brendan-fraser-the-whale-career-1235399057/ . Barbara Hoffman, “Broadway Goes Big,” New York Post , last modified 4 November 2012, https://nypost.com/2012/11/04/broadway-goes-big/ . Charles Isherwood, “The Enormity of a Man’s Problems, and Vice Versa,” New York Times , last modified 5 November 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/theater/reviews/shuler-hensley-in-the-whale-by-samuel-d-hunter.html . Rosalind Bentley, “Looking Past Heft, Finding Humanity: In ‘The Whale,’ Local Actor and Director Explore the Shrinking Orbit of a Large Man,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution , 24 November 2012, Gale General OneFile. Bentley, “Looking Past Heft.” Hoffman, “Broadway Goes Big.” American Theatre Editors, “20 Questions for Shuler Hensley,” American Theatre Magazine 30, no. 6 (2013): 88.; Gordon Cox, “Off Broadway’s Lortel Awards Like ‘Piano Lesson,’ ‘Whale,’” Variety , last modified 6 May 2013, https://variety.com/2013/legit/news/off-broadways-lortel-awards-like-piano-lesson-whale-1200464475/ .; “The Whale,” Concord Theatricals, accessed 28 October 2025, https://www.concordtheatricals.com/p/12562/the-whale .; Andrew Gans, “Nominees Announced for 79th Annual Drama League Awards,” Playbill , last modified 23 April 2013, https://playbill.com/article/nominees-announced-for-79th-annual-drama-league-awards-com-204687 . Liam Kelly, “Brendan Fraser’s Seven-Hour Transformation for The Whale,” The Times , last modified 5 March 2023, https://www.thetimes.com/culture/film/article/brendan-frasers-seven-hour-transformation-for-the-whale-7wtx7t20c . David Canfield, “Inside Brendan Fraser’s The Whale Transformation: ‘I Wanted to Disappear,’” Vanity Fair , last modified 31 August 2022, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/08/awards-insider-the-whale-brendan-fraser-darren-aronofsky-exclusive . Kelly, “Brendan Fraser’s Seven-Hour Transformation.” Canfield, “Inside Brendan Fraser’s The Whale Transformation.” Variety, “Brendan Fraser & Adam Sandler: Actors on Actors,” 16:07. Kelly, “Brendan Fraser’s Seven-Hour Transformation.” Variety, “Brendan Fraser & Adam Sandler: Actors on Actors,” 7:15. Variety, “Brendan Fraser & Adam Sandler: Actors on Actors,” 7:20, 7:37. Variety, “Brendan Fraser & Adam Sandler: Actors on Actors,” 7:47. Zach Baron, “What Ever Happened to Brendan Fraser?” GQ , last modified 22 February 2018, https://www.gq.com/story/what-ever-happened-to-brendan-fraser . This feature was also the first time Fraser had spoken publicly about his sexual assault allegations against former Hollywood Foreign Press Association president Philip Berk, another factor of Fraser’s career that most likely impacted his relevancy in the industry between the 1990s and the 2020s. Guy Webster, “An Ode to Brendan Fraser and Body Neutrality,” Kill Your Darlings, last modified 8 November 2021, https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/an-ode-to-brendan-fraser-and-body-neutrality/ . Baron, “What Ever Happened.” Webster, “An Ode to Brendan Fraser.” Webster, “An Ode to Brendan Fraser.” Variety, “Brendan Fraser & Adam Sandler: Actors on Actors,” 17:13. Osborn, “Hollywood’s Anti-Fatness.” Variety, “Brendan Fraser & Adam Sandler: Actors on Actors,” 17:26. It was predicted that Fraser was bound to win the Oscar for Best Actor after receiving a six-minute standing ovation at the world-premiere screening of The Whale . Ramin Setoodeh, Zack Sharf, and Elsa Keslassy, “Brendan Fraser Breaks Down in Tears as ‘The Whale’ Gets Huge 6-Minute Standing Ovation in Venice,” Variety , last modified 4 September 2022, https://variety.com/2022/film/news/brendan-fraser-cries-the-whale-venice-standing-ovation-1235337836/ . Osborn, “Hollywood’s Anti-Fatness.” Jami McFarland, Vanessa Slothouber, and Allison Taylor, “Tempo-rarily Fat: A Queer Exploration of Fat Time,” Fat Studies 7, no. 2 (2017): 2, https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2017.1376275 . McFarland et al., 2, 3. McFarland et al., 9. Hunter, The Whale , 48-49. Hunter, The Whale , 40. Reality shows centered on weight loss (such as My 600-lb Life and The Biggest Loser ) often exploit this trope of fatness being connected to grief or past trauma, requiring participants to divulge their pain for the audience. See: Friedman, Fat Studies , 88. Hunter, The Whale , 25. Hunter, The Whale , 40. McFarland et al., 3. McFarland et al., 2. McFarland et al., 2. McFarland et al., 6. Hunter, The Whale , 11. Hunter, The Whale , 42. McFarland et al., 6-7. McFarland et al., 7. Hunter, The Whale , 80. Hunter, The Whale , 85. McFarland et al., 3. Rinaldi, “Whopper of a Family Drama.” Lang, “Brendan Fraser’s Triumphant Comeback.” Lang, “Brendan Fraser’s Triumphant Comeback.” Lang, “Brendan Fraser’s Triumphant Comeback.” Jeff Bouthiette, “Towards a Fat Theatre: Reimaging Bodies Onstage,” HowlRound Theatre Commons, last modified 26 October 2020, https://howlround.com/towards-fat-theatre . Bouthiette, “Towards a Fat Theatre.” Bouthiette, “Towards a Fat Theatre.” Works Cited “About Us.” NAAFA. Accessed 30 October 2025. https://naafa.org/aboutus . American Theatre Editors. “20 Questions for Shuler Hensley.” American Theatre Magazine 30, no. 6 (2013): 88. “An Honest Conversation About ‘The Whale’: Fresh Perspectives.” Video. Posted 11 January 2023, by Obesity Action Coalition. YouTube. 17 min., 43 sec. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXcik2xfPOM . Aronofsky, Darren, director. The Whale . A24. 2022. 1 hr., 57 min. https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.fcfefde7-0072-43a7-90ca-6f14e50fcfd7?autoplay=0&ref_=atv_cf_strg_wb . Baron, Zach. “What Ever Happened to Brendan Fraser?” GQ . Last modified 22 February 2018. https://www.gq.com/story/what-ever-happened-to-brendan-fraser . Beckett, Emma. “Drugs Like Ozempic Won’t ‘Cure’ Obesity But They Might Make Us More Fatphobic.” The Conversation . Last modified 9 April 2024. https://theconversation.com/drugs-like-ozempic-wont-cure-obesity-but-they-might-make-us-more-fat-phobic-219309#:~:text=The%20Ozempic%20buzz%20isn't,who%20live%20in%20larger%20bodies . Bentley, Rosalind. “Looking Past Heft, Finding Humanity: In ‘The Whale,’ Local Actor and Director Explore the Shrinking Orbit of a Large Man.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution . 24 November 2012. Gale General OneFile. Best, Royce. “Making Obesity Fat: Crip Estrangement in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 .” Disability Studies Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2019). https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v39i4.7149 . Bordo, Susan. “Reading the Slender Body.” Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body , 10th Anniversary Edition. University of California Press, 2003. Bouthiette, Jeff. “Towards a Fat Theatre: Reimaging Bodies Onstage.” HowlRound Theatre Commons. Last modified 26 October 2020. https://howlround.com/towards-fat-theatre . “Brendan Fraser & Adam Sandler: “Actors on Actors.” Posted 6 December 2022. By Variety, YouTube. 29 min., 23 sec. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XpAb11hqy4&t=1092s . Campos, Paul. The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health . Gotham Books, 2004. Canfield, David. “Inside Brendan Fraser’s The Whale Transformation: ‘I Wanted to Disappear.’” Vanity Fair . Last modified 31 August 2022. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/08/awards-insider-the-whale-brendan-fraser-darren-aronofsky-exclusive . Castanon, Kelsey. “The Problem With 3 Oscar-Nominated Films Using Fat Suits.” PopSugar . Last modified 13 March 2023. https://www.popsugar.com/beauty/prosthetics-makeup-fat-suits-hollywood-49111321 . Cox, Gordon. “Off Broadway’s Lortel Awards Like ‘Piano Lesson,’ ‘Whale.’” Variety. Last modified 6 May 2013. https://variety.com/2013/legit/news/off-broadways-lortel-awards-like-piano-lesson-whale-1200464475/ . Daube, Elizabeth. “Are the New Weight Loss Drugs Too Good to Be True?” UCSF Magazine 13, no. 1 (2024). https://magazine.ucsf.edu/weight-loss-drugs-too-good-to-be-true . Donovan, Ryan. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity . Oxford University Press, 2023. Friedman, May. Fat Studies: The Basics . Routledge, 2025. Gans, Andrew. “Nominees Announced for 79th Annual Drama League Awards.” Playbill . Last modified 23 April 2013. https://playbill.com/article/nominees-announced-for-79th-annual-drama-league-awards-com-204687 . Gerhardt, Linda. “Fategories: Understanding the Fat Spectrum.” Fluffy Kitten Party . Last modified 1 June 2021. https://fluffykittenparty.com/2021/06/01/fategories-understanding-smallfat-fragility-the-fat-spectrum/ . Gordon, Aubrey. What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat. Beacon Press, 2020. Gullage, Amy. “Fat Monica, Fat Suits, and Friends : Exploring Narratives of Fatness.” Feminist Media Studies 14, no. 2 (2014): 178-189. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2012.724026 . Heller, Scott. “Characters Who Take Up More Than Their Share of Room in the Family.” New York Times . Last modified 12 December 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/books/obesity-with-jami-attenberg-and-samuel-d-hunter.html . Hoffman, Barbara. “Broadway Goes Big.” New York Post . Last modified 4 November 2012. https://nypost.com/2012/11/04/broadway-goes-big/ . Hunter, Samuel D. “Guest Column: ‘The Whale’ Writer Samuel D. Hunter Says the Film is an Invitation to Experience Humanity. The Hollywood Reporter . Last modified 7 December 2022. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/the-whale-writer-guest-column-samuel-d-hunter-1235276194/ . Hunter, Samuel D. The Whale and A Bright New Boise. Theatre Communications Group, 2014. Isherwood, Charles. “The Enormity of a Man’s Problems, and Vice Versa.” New York Times . Last modified 5 November 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/theater/reviews/shuler-hensley-in-the-whale-by-samuel-d-hunter.html . Kelly, Liam. “Brendan Fraser’s Seven-Hour Transformation for The Whale.” The Times . Last modified 5 March 2023. https://www.thetimes.com/culture/film/article/brendan-frasers-seven-hour-transformation-for-the-whale-7wtx7t20c . Lang, Brent. “Brendan Fraser’s Triumphant Comeback: How Playing a 600-Pound Gay Man in ‘The Whale’ Resurrected His Career.” Variety . Last modified 12 October 2022. https://variety.com/2022/film/features/brendan-fraser-the-whale-career-1235399057/ . McFarland, Jami, Vanessa Slothouber, and Allison Taylor. “Tempo-rarily Fat: A Queer Exploration of Fat Time.” Fat Studies 7, no. 2 (2017): 135-146. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2017.1376275 . Midnight, Cherry, and Max Airborne. “Community Origins of the Term ‘Superfat.’” Medium . Last modified 2 December 2020. http://thefatlip.com/2016/12/20/beyond-superfat-rethinking-the-farthest-end-of-the-fat-spectrum/ . Mendoza, Katharina R. “Seeing Through the Layers: Fat Suits and Thin Bodies in The Nutty Professor and Shallow Hal.” In The Fat Studies Reader , edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. New York University Press, 2009. Mulhern, Michael. “BWW Reviews: Denver Center’s The Whale —A Heavy, Superb Drama.” Broadway World. Last modified 26 January 2012. https://www.broadwayworld.com/denver/article/BWW-Reviews-Denver-Centers-THE-WHALE-a-Heavy-Superb-Drama-20120126 . Nischuk, Ash. “Beyond Superfat: Rethinking the Farthest End of the Fat Spectrum.” The Fat Lip . Last modified 20 December 2016. http://thefatlip.com/2016/12/20/beyond-superfat-rethinking-the-farthest-end-of-the-fat-spectrum/ . Nischuk, Ash. “Our 600 Pound Lives.” The Fat Lip . Last modified 21 March 2020. http://thefatlip.com/2020/03/21/our-600-pound-lives/ . Obesity Action Coalition. “Obesity Action Coalition and ‘The Whale.’” Last modified 8 December 2022. https://www.obesityaction.org/the-whale/ . Obesity Action Coalition. “People-First Language.” Accessed 30 October 2025. https://www.obesityaction.org/action-through-advocacy/weight-bias/people-first-language/ . Obesity Action Coalition. “Why the OAC Exists.” Accessed 30 October 2025. https://www.obesityaction.org/about/purpose/who-we-are/ . Osborn, Tigress. “Hollywood’s Anti-Fatness Extends Beyond The Whale.” NAAFA. Last modified 20 March 2023. https://naafa.org/newsletter-articles/hollywoods-anti-fatness-extends-beyond-the-whale . Oswald, Flora. “Anti-fatness in the Ozempic Era: State of the Landscape and Considerations for Future Research.” Fat Studies 13, no. 2 (2024): 128-134. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2024.2307674 . Richardson, Niall. “‘But It’s Only a Fat Suit!’: Representing ‘Fake’ Fat in Popular Culture.” Transgressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture. Routledge, 2010. Rinaldi, Ray Mark. “Theater Review: ‘The Whale’ a Drama of Gigantic Proportions.” The Denver Post . Last modified 3 May 2016. https://www.denverpost.com/2012/01/23/theater-review-the-whale-a-drama-of-gigantic-proportions-2/ . Rinaldi, Ray Mark. “‘Whale’ Promises to be a Whopper of a Family Drama.” The Denver Post . Last modified 1 May 2016. https://www.denverpost.com/2012/01/05/whale-promises-to-be-a-whopper-of-a-family-drama/ . Setoodeh, Ramin, Zack Sharf, and Elsa Keslassy. “Brendan Fraser Breaks Down in Tears as ‘The Whale’ Gets Huge 6-Minute Standing Ovation in Venice.” Variety Last modified 4 September 2022. https://variety.com/2022/film/news/brendan-fraser-cries-the-whale-venice-standing-ovation-1235337836/ . Siebers, Tobin. “Disability as Masquerade.” Disability Theory . University of Michigan Press, 2008. “The Whale.” Concord Theatricals. Accessed 28 October 2025. https://www.concordtheatricals.com/p/12562/the-whale . “The Whale: Brendan Fraser Talks with OAC.” Video. Posted 17 February 2023, by Obesity Action Coalition. YouTube. 12 min., 16 sec. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ka4jLFrWVc . “The Whale Charlie Stage Play.” Google Image Search. Accessed 26 October 2025. https://www.google.com/search?q=the+whale+charlie+stage+play&sca_esv=8e61a810906f0d86&rlz=1C1UEAD_enUS1113US1113&udm=2&biw=1440&bih=731&sxsrf=AE3TifN_h16QQMJ1UU9kzRTqtHZVJw1fpA%3A1761529337469&ei=-c3-aJavHMukiLMPu6jW-QE&ved=0ahUKEwjWj6-ToMOQAxVLEmIAHTuUNR8Q4dUDCBI&uact=5&oq=the+whale+charlie+stage+play&gs_lp=Egtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZyIcdGhlIHdoYWxlIGNoYXJsaWUgc3RhZ2UgcGxheUifI1AAWMUhcAV4AJABAZgBuAGgAYIZqgEFMjEuMTG4AQPIAQD4AQGYAhagAooQqAIKwgIKECMYJxjJAhjqAsICBxAjGCcYyQLCAgoQABiABBhDGIoFwgILEAAYgAQYsQMYgwHCAg4QABiABBixAxiDARiKBcICCBAAGIAEGLEDwgINEAAYgAQYsQMYQxiKBcICBRAAGIAEwgIEEAAYHsICBhAAGAgYHpgDCpIHBTExLjExoAftcrIHBDguMTG4B_APwgcIMC4xLjE3LjTIB4MB&sclient=gws-wiz-img . Tidgwell, Tracy, May Friedman, Jen Rinaldi, Crystal Kotow, and Emily R.M. Lind. “Introduction to the Special Issue: Fatness and Temporality.” Fat Studies 7, no. 2 (2018): 115-123. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2017.1375262 . Verhoeven, Beatrice. “‘The Whale’ Producer on Criticism of the Film: ‘We Just Want to Be Honest and Truthful.” The Hollywood Reporter . Last modified 10 February 2023. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/the-whale-producer-film-criticism-brendan-fraser-1235319749/ . Wann, Marilyn. “Foreword: Fat Studies: An Invitation to Revolution.” In The Fat Studies Reader , edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. New York University Press, 2009. Webster, Guy. “An Ode to Brendan Fraser and Body Neutrality.” Kill Your Darlings Last modified 8 November 2021. https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/an-ode-to-brendan-fraser-and-body-neutrality/ . Zimdars, Melissa. “Spectacle, Sympathy, and the Medicalized Disease of ‘Obesity.’” Watching Our Weights: Contradictions of Televising Fatness in the “Obesity Epidemic.” Rutgers University Press, 2019. Footnotes About The Author(s) TEYA JUAREZ (she/her) is a scholar, dramaturg, educator, and current student in the Theatre and Performance PhD program at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) where her research focuses on fat studies and fat embodiment. As a small fat person, she is dedicated to critiquing and dismantling anti-fatness in theatre for all fat bodies, as well as highlighting the liberatory potentials for fat bodies in performance. She was the recipient of the 2024 American Theatre and Drama Society Emerging Scholars Award for her paper “‘How Dare You Presume I’d Rather Be Thin’: Origins/Iterations of Fat Activism & Performances of Fatness” featured in the 2025 volume of Theatre Annual . 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.

Watch WATERMILL 1993 + WATERMILL CENTER BYRD HOFFMAN SUMMER PROGRAM 2009 by Stefan Kurt / Tomek Jeziorski at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. A double program of short documentaries on The Watermill Center, the institution Robert Wilson founded on Long Island in 1991. WATERMILL 1993 (1993, 20 min) — directed by Stefan Kurt Shot in the Center's earliest years, this film documents The Watermill Center in its founding period, capturing the spirit and working methods of the institution as it established itself. Wilson founded the Center in a former Western Union research facility on the edge of the Shinnecock Reservation, and from the beginning conceived of it as a space distinct from conventional theater institutions — a "laboratory for creative experimentation, where artists can work at the intersection of disciplines, drawing inspiration from nature and Wilson's extensive collection of art and artifacts." This film preserves a record of the Center in its first phase, before it grew into the year-round residency space it would become. WATERMILL CENTER BYRD HOFFMAN SUMMER PROGRAM 2009 (2010, 38 min) — directed by Tomek Jeziorski Filmed during the 2009 summer program, this documentary captures the Center at a later stage of its development — by which point it had in 2006 become a year-round space for artists-in-residence. The summer program, named for the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds (Wilson's original performance collective), brings together students and established artists from across disciplines in a collaborative, multi-disciplinary environment. The film documents the work and energy of this gathering, conveying the ethos of exchange and experimentation that Wilson intended the Center to embody. Total running time: approximately 65 minutes. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents WATERMILL 1993 + WATERMILL CENTER BYRD HOFFMAN SUMMER PROGRAM 2009 Stefan Kurt / Tomek Jeziorski At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This program will be screened on June 3 at 8:45 PM, at Anthology Film Archives. RSVP Please note that these screenings are ticketed and require prior registration at the Anthology Film Archives website. Country United States Language English Running Time 65 minutes Year of Release 1993 / 2010 About The Film A double program of short documentaries on The Watermill Center, the institution Robert Wilson founded on Long Island in 1991. WATERMILL 1993 (1993, 20 min) — directed by Stefan Kurt Shot in the Center's earliest years, this film documents The Watermill Center in its founding period, capturing the spirit and working methods of the institution as it established itself. Wilson founded the Center in a former Western Union research facility on the edge of the Shinnecock Reservation, and from the beginning conceived of it as a space distinct from conventional theater institutions — a "laboratory for creative experimentation, where artists can work at the intersection of disciplines, drawing inspiration from nature and Wilson's extensive collection of art and artifacts." This film preserves a record of the Center in its first phase, before it grew into the year-round residency space it would become. WATERMILL CENTER BYRD HOFFMAN SUMMER PROGRAM 2009 (2010, 38 min) — directed by Tomek Jeziorski Filmed during the 2009 summer program, this documentary captures the Center at a later stage of its development — by which point it had in 2006 become a year-round space for artists-in-residence. The summer program, named for the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds (Wilson's original performance collective), brings together students and established artists from across disciplines in a collaborative, multi-disciplinary environment. The film documents the work and energy of this gathering, conveying the ethos of exchange and experimentation that Wilson intended the Center to embody. Total running time: approximately 65 minutes. WATERMILL 1993 directed by Stefan Kurt WATERMILL CENTER BYRD HOFFMAN SUMMER PROGRAM 2009 directed by Tomek Jeziorski About The Artist(s) Stefan Kurt is a Swiss actor and filmmaker who has worked extensively in theater and cinema, including as a performer in Wilson's productions. His short film Watermill 1993 documents The Watermill Center in its founding years. Tomek Jeziorski is a Polish filmmaker and photographer who has documented The Watermill Center's summer programs. His 2010 film capturing the 2009 Byrd Hoffman Summer Program provides a record of one of the Center's core annual events. Get in touch with the artist(s) and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Mohamadreza Babaee Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Mohamadreza Babaee By Published on May 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF fig. 1: The installation room for Global (re)Entry. 2D game and multimedia installation. “Unforgetting” exhibition, University of California, Santa Cruz, Apr. 2022. Photo by author. "Have you ever held a grenade in your hands?” The participants read on a monitor screen in a room with a view of the Pacific Ocean (fig. 1). A projector screen obstructs the view and displays the live footage of the participants from a bird’s-eye angle. With white walls, a desk, a chair, and a desktop computer and monitor, the room seems desolate. An ambient soundtrack is playing in the background, projecting various sounds that travelers usually hear in any US airport: the occasional announcements, suitcases being dragged on smooth floors, the beeping sound of various scanning machines, and the occasional roarings of airplanes taking off. If the participants sit behind the computer long enough, they could hear the ambient soundtrack of the airport fading into distant notes of a piano playing in an empty alley, birds chirping in a dim forest, and raindrops falling onto thirsty leaves. The question on the screen remains visible until the participants decide to use a “Cosmic” tool to change it. If they click on the cosmic tool icon on the right side of the screen, hover the mouse over the question, and hold down left-click, the question visually morphs into the same text, with one important difference (fig. 2): “Have you ever held a kitten in your hands?” fig. 2: The redesigned immigration form question. Global (re)Entry, 2D game and multimedia installation. And such is the core mechanic in Global (re)Entry , a video game-multimedia installation that gives the participants an opportunity to rewrite the racially presumptuous questions that immigrants need to answer in their change-of-status petition forms and in-person interviews. [1] Made in collaboration with recent University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) alumni, [2] the project was first on display as a part of “Unforgetting,” an MFA exhibition of digital arts and new media projects on display at UCSC from Apr. 22 nd to May 1 st , 2022. The different projects—ranging from video games to multimedia performances—seek to address the common themes of lost histories, hidden realities, and haunting. “The artists,” writes Yolande Harris, an artist-scholar and the exhibition’s curator, “are questioning and actively participating in the destruction of old systems of oppression by imagining new systems in their place.” [3] The system in question in Global (re)Entry is the US immigration system, particularly the process through which an immigrant can petition for residency in the US. While the legal pathway to becoming a permanent resident remains a privileged route to which many undocumented immigrants have no access, Global (re)Entry aims to point out the deficiency and impracticality of legal procedures in the US immigration system built upon historical prejudice and racial bias. In Global (re)Entry , I take a critical and parodic look at the Global Entry program designed by the US Customs and Border Protection agency. Similar to other Trusted Traveler programs, Global Entry allows “low-risk” US citizens and permanent residents to use an automated machine to receive their clearance for crossing international borders. The conditions through which Global Entry considers a traveler as low risk are not disclosed publicly and are open to interpretation and bias. My project borrows textual and visual assets from the US Department of Homeland Security’s (and the associated agencies’) online documents to simulate and repurpose the traveler screening program. The player needs to answer several questions in the game to receive their travel clearance card. However, their resistance to participating in state-sponsored security theatres unlocks a new gameplay branch that leads the player to a utopian way of reimagining the US immigration system. While players can play the game to learn more about unfair border control strategies and oppressive state policies targeting immigrants, they can also creatively redesign discriminatory US immigration forms and generate pro-immigrant, antiracist manifestos. Before discussing the conceptual development of Global (re)Entry in relation to my performance background, I need to elaborate on why I am discussing this project in the special issue of a theatre and performance studies journal. This issue invites reflections on new work development with attention to how theatre artists respond to the realities of the ongoing global pandemic. I designed Global (re)Entry as a playful digital intervention into discriminatory US border politics. Although the project represents my training as an artist in experimental game design, my current work is in continuation of my years-long practice as a theatre director. I started my journey as an artist by designing, directing, and supporting experimental theatre and performance pieces about the memories that immigrants leave behind, the human impact of financial sanctions on Iran, diasporic experiences of queer people of color, and fearmongering and Islamaphobia that ensued after the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11 th , 2001. Over time, I moved away from traditional understandings of theatre to embrace postdramatic and multimedia ways of staging diverse immigrant experiences. Digital mediums and technologies play a central role in my recent projects, but I need to clarify that this digital turn in my practice is not an inevitable assimilation into the techno-utopian rhetorics hailed by megacorporate amalgamations around the country (and the world). Instead, I embraced digital methods of representation and creative intervention as I became increasingly weary of the limited access a live performance space offers to the audience. How could I make more performances about/for immigrants and refugees while many of them did not have the privilege of being in the performance space? The shortcomings of designing a performance around the physical notion of space led me to adapt digital forms of communication, representation, and intervention. Without a doubt, going through a global pandemic, which severely reduced social gatherings, contributed an additional layer to my rationale for opting for a digital sense of performance space as a site of potentials apt for facilitating human-computer interactions. [4] Global (re)Entry represents my investment in interactive digital art as a conditionally more accessible medium [5] while remaining strongly tethered to my experience as a performance maker and scholar. [6] In the following pages, I offer a brief description of Global (re)Entry as a collaborative work of art inspired by my learnings in performance theory. That is not to say that I consider the project a performance piece. Rather, I want to delineate my conceptual itinerary to clarify the significance of performance discourses in my current new work development in digital arts and new media. I am less concerned with disciplinary demarcations and more with the value of interdisciplinary creative production. The initial idea for Global (re)Entry arose from a simple question: What is a utopian vision of the US immigration system? José Esteban Muñoz’s foundational study of utopias informs my investment in utopian art making. Writing on the contemporary politics of queer of color identity formation, Muñoz believes that minoritarian individuals should imagine their lives beyond what he calls the “quagmire of the present.” It is the present-focused thinking that, according to Muñoz, stops the oppressed from imagining a better future outside the contemporary tyranny of systems. Muñoz proposes a “utopian modality” in which feelings, thoughts, and actions follow a utopian function for “fragmenting darkness” and illuminating a “world that should be, that could be, and that will be.” [7] Muñoz dismisses abstract ideas of utopia as they remain dormant in the realm of fantasy. Instead, he calls for concrete conditions of utopia that can invoke a “not-yet-conscious” potentiality, presenting the collective wish of a group that looks back at the “no-longer-conscious” past and renders hopeful “potential blueprints of a world not quite here, a horizon of possibility.” [8] Inspired by such ideas, I approached several immigrants of color that I knew personally and asked them about their utopian visions of the US immigration system. They all expressed a wish to replace the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) with a network of support that facilitates border crossing, not border policing. Concomitant to their utopian thinking was a wish for educating more US citizens about the gross flaws in the legal pathway to becoming a resident and the mental, emotional, and material toll the process could take. Global (re)Entry gives the participants an opportunity to take a critical look at the US immigration system and creatively redesign it in utopian ways. Therefore, the project represents what Claudia Costa Pederson calls “utopian ludology,” a critical-creative perspective that considers games as “places of the radical imagination,” sites that take playfulness as “enabling interactions that afford the necessary freedom to generate new kinds of thinking, feeling, and empowerment to concretize a future that dominant culture renders unthinkable.” [9] Games imbued by concrete ideas of utopia, Pederson asserts, can be “tools of persuasion,” which “open up the question of alternatives” and “reject the mimetic ideals… and commodity models of the video game industry.” [10] While I hesitate to label Global (re)Entry as merely a “persuasive game,” I am inspired by persuasive game designers who use video games for “cultural and social change” and “do so in recognition of the persuasive power of the medium, which is based on its appeal to fantasy and imagination.” [11] Utopian survival strategies of the queer of color, as theorized by Muñoz, shaped how I approached making the game. I could certainly try to make a live performance piece about border crossing (something that I had done in the past), but I could not comfortably make art for immigrants, fully knowing that many of them could not cross the myriad of borders to partake in the privilege of live physical co-presence. I remain cognizant of the ongoing debates in the field as to what constitutes liveness, namely Philip Auslander’s provocative assertion that live experiences are culturally and historically codified in relation to technological changes. [12] But if we allow ourselves to decenter our scholarly polemics in favor of making room for lived experiences of those with less transnational mobility, the question at hand might become as simple as who is in the room and who is not. As I mentioned before, digital liveness and digital spaces continue to be subject to the same question, as not everyone has equal access to entering a digital room, but I take the odds of more people worldwide having access to the internet to download a small-size, low-tech video game over US government easing up on admitting more immigrants to the country. fig. 3: Screenshot from a cutscene inside the game. Global (re)Entry. 2D game and multimedia installation. In addition to queer of color critique, I also used critical discussions of border surveillance to design Global (re)Entry . While I borrowed from scholars in different humanities fields, performance theory continued to play an essential role in my development process. Trusted traveler programs such as Global Entry are ostensibly designed to facilitate easier border crossing experiences, but in fact, they are just a ruse for easy screening of travelers and separating them into potential suspects and trustworthy users. [13] Since Homeland Security agencies are exempt from racial profiling rules, [14] race plays a vital role in designing and implementing border surveillance strategies. Writing on the surveillance of Blackness in the US, Simon Browne uses “racializing surveillance” as a term to describe systematic moments “when enactments of surveillance reify boundaries along racial lines, thereby reifying race, and where the outcome of this is often discriminatory and violent treatment.” [15] Browne contends that racializing surveillance is a “technology of social control” and suggests “how things get ordered racially by way of surveillance depends on space and time and is subject to change, but most often upholds negating strategies that first accompanied European colonial expansion and transatlantic slavery that sought to structure social relations and institutions in ways that privilege whiteness.” [16] Expanding her analysis into the racialized practices of surveillance at US airports, Browne uses the concept of “racial baggage” to identify situations in which certain acts and certain looks at the airport weigh down some travelers, while others travel lightly.” [17] Trusted traveler programs, Browne continues, are clear evidence of how racializing surveillance is practiced at airports to identify, separate, pat down, and investigate the racial baggage some travelers carry across borders. [18] In the racializing matrix of airports, questions of privacy become contested. The state watches travelers, but in that watching, not all travelers are equally suspect. As Jasbir Puar delineates, “the right to privacy is not even on the radar screen for many sectors of society, unfathomable for whom being surveilled is a way of life…the private is a racialized and nationalized construct, insofar as it is granted not only to heterosexuals but to certain citizens and withheld from many others and from noncitizens.” [19] Furthermore, Puar uses the Foucauldian notion of panopticon to suggest that the ever present surveillance technologies throughout borderlands forcefully encourage self-regulation of a sort that is “less an internalization of norms and more about constant monitoring of oneself and others, watching, waiting, listening, ordering, positioning, calculating.” [20] Performance, communication, and feminist studies scholar Rachel Hall similarly focuses on the notion of self-regulation at airports to frame airport security as a “collaborative cultural performance” that requires some passengers to continuously perform “voluntary transparency.” [21] Transparency, in Hall’s critical opinion, is a privilege, the “new white,” that if performed successfully, will grant the traveler with a moment of innocence. [22] However, Hall continues, not all travelers are given equal access to such privilege; within the post-9/11 context, military and security experts design “mediated spectacles of diabolical opacity” to produce “the stubbornly noncompliant, noncitizen suspects in the war on terror.” [23] In sum, there is a clear connection between how the state surveils populations and creates racial categories. Surveillance at airports is a racializing act that seeks to produce transparent travelers and suspect figures of the national adversary. The ubiquitous implementation of surveillance technologies at airports regulates self-monitoring practices requiring travelers to disclose their information voluntarily. Those who successfully perform their transparency might achieve a temporary moment of innocence, but travelers with racial baggage need to struggle against a racist state that considers them likely perpetrators of violence. Global (re)Entry fictionally simulates and repurposes the Global Entry trusted traveling program to (on top of encouraging utopian thinking) draw attention to intrusive methodologies that the Homeland Security agencies incorporate to produce prejudiced surveillance data, specifically about immigrants of color. The game starts as an invitation for voluntary performances of transparency, as theorized by Hall. The participants are asked to submit to an intrusive screening process requiring their biometric data. However, in line with the utopian performance-making rhetorics that undergird the projects, participants can refuse to perform transparency and, as such, unlock an alternative gameplay path that leads to creatively redesigning discriminatory US immigration forms. I use digital technologies and mediums to create interactive art about marginalized experiences. I cautiously navigate this path and remain vigilant about digital accessibility limitations, particularly in the global south. The new projects I develop represent my increasing interest in digital arts and new media. I, however, continue to also identify as a performance maker, an artist of color whose creative journey demonstrates an intertwined and growing web of performance and game design skills. As long as the adapted medium and methodology can empower me in my commitment to increasing representations of immigrants of color, the new work development process personally remains a dynamic terminology applicable to all artmaking practices. In Global (re)Entry , I follow an artistic mission that draws from the power of representation to enable utopian thinking as a necessary first step toward creating change in society. The utopian thinking that Global (re)Entry encourages is my intervention in the ongoing ostracization, surveillance, deportation, incarceration, and murdering of immigrants that state forces commit at US borders. In the face of such destructive realities, my project does not call for neoliberal reformations of the US immigration system. Instead, Global (re)Entry dares to ask the participants to muster the radical audacity, subversive creativity, and insurgent hopes necessary for entirely disabling a killing machine cloaked as the US immigration system. References [1] You can play Global (re)Entry at https://www.mbabaee.com/global-re-entry . [2] Music and sound by Madeline Doss, 2D art and UI by Fion Kwok, and Unity programming by Avery Weibel. [3] “Digital Arts and New Media | MFA Program at University of California, Santa Cruz,” accessed January 9, 2023, https://danmmfa.ucsc.edu/ . [4] Nadja Masura, Digital Theatre: The Making and Meaning of Live Mediated Performance, US & UK 1990-2020 , Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology (Springer International Publishing, 2020), 42. [5] I acknowledge that access to digital technology remains unequal, particularly in Global South. Steven Dixon, for example, writes that even though new digital technology and internet revolutionized performance forms across the US in the 90s, such revolution was absent or less tangible in other parts of the world with less to no resources for building the digital infrastructure that the new digital age demanded. For more, look at Steve Dixon, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015). [6] Although the project was originally presented as a multimedia installation, it is available online to players around the world. [7] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (New York University Press, 2009), 1. [8] Muñoz, Cruising Utopia , 22, 25, 97. [9] Claudia Costa Pederson, Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021), 6. [10] Pederson, Gaming Utopia, 184. [11] Pederson, 222. [12] While Auslander initially made this comment in Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (1999), he later revisited his argument to clarify that he does not believe technologies (vs. the people) to be the determining agent in what is live. For more, look at Auslander, Philip. “Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 34, no. 3 (2012): 3–11. [13] See Matthew Longo, The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). [14] See Nicole Nguyen, Suspect Communities: Anti-Muslim Racism and the Domestic War on Terror (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). [15] Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 8. [16] Browne, Dark Matters , 16, 17. [17] Browne, 132. [18] Browne, 135. [19] Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times , 10th ed. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 125. [20] Puar, Terrorist Assemblages , 156. [21] Rachel Hall, The Transparent Traveler: The Performance and Culture of Airport Security (Duke University Press, 2015), 12. [22] Hall, The Transparent Traveler , 14. [23] Hall, 46. Footnotes About The Author(s) MOHAMADREZA BABAEE is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance at Indiana University, Bloomington. Their interdisciplinary scholarship and transmedia practice primarily focus on issues of migration and surveillance, particularly in connection to the Middle Eastern and Iranian diasporas in the US. Their first manuscript project, tentatively titled Modded Diasporas: Performing Iranian Identity , combines performance studies and critical game theory to explore how Iranian immigrants modify the circumstances of their systematic oppression to turn them into empowering opportunities, tools, and mediums. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 21, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF By Steve Earnest Image Credits: Article It was not known that Moby Dick would be Bob Wilson’s final realized production as his death in June 2025 happened before numerous future productions already in rehearsal were fully realized. Originally conceived in 2017 and proposed for a Norwegian production a few years later, the show was put on hold for years before finally being developed at the Watermill Summer Institute and finally presented at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf in 2024. The massive work was conceived by Wilson and Ann-Christin Rommen, with scenic design by Serge Von Arx, costumes by Julia von Leliwa, music by Anna Calvi, Dom Bouffard and Chris Wheeler, video by Tomasz Jeziorski and additional lighting by Marcello Lumaca. Moby Dick revealed an important evolution in Wilsonian production style with its heavy reliance on video sequences to enhance the work’s massive scale. Previously Faust 1 & 2 at Berliner Ensemble (2016) had included several video sequences but Moby Dick greatly surpassed that with numerous incredible background video sequences, many featuring powerful scenes from the ocean as a major part of the production. Unlike many of Wilson’s previous works, often known for their long running times, Moby Dick was presented with no intermission and a running time of only ninety minutes. Herman Melville’s novel is a staple of American Literature and considers the universal issue of mankind versus nature (represented by the whale, Moby Dick) also dealing with issues of human control, the killing of animals, the nature of those who fish the oceans, the nature of killing itself as well as mankind’s eternal fight against impending doom. The text for Moby Dick was created by Wilson, Ann-Christin Rommen, Robert Koall and Lily Mertens and was characterized by its reductive nature – the spoken text was somewhat limited, and many words and sequences were repeated throughout the work with a great deal of the works focus landing on musical numbers. Anna Calvi’s extraordinary cinematic musical score included around eight musical numbers, and, like many of Wilson’s recent works, could be considered a musical theatre work to some degree given the staging, choreography and singing in the pieces. Wilson’s characteristic repetitive movement patterns and character poses aided the story’s development as each character had their own distinctive movement and gestural language – similar to mie poses used in aragoto Kabuki performances. Christopher Nell and Jürgen Sarkiss in Moby Dick . Photo credit: Lucie Jansch The framing of the work was the telling of the story of Moby Dick by an old man (possibly representing Melville himself) to a young boy, played by the popular German actor Christopher Nell. Nell is one of Germany’s most impressive current actors. Having received his training at the Hochschlule für Musik und Theater Rostock, he has played in numerous previous Wilson productions including Faust 1 & 2 at the Berliner Ensemble in 2016 as well as the leading role in Pferd Frisst Hut at the Komische Oper Berlin in 2025. Nell’s incredible physical work as one of the leading figures in Moby Dick highlighted Wilson’s physical style of performance. Nell’s uncanny physical abilities were put on full display as the character of The Boy, moved through the scenes with reckless abandon, all the while utilizing the Wilsonian soundscape to achieve many of the previously mentioned character poses. Throughout the work this technique defined many of the characters and has been a part of Wilson’s work for quite a long time. Christopher Nell and Rosa Enskat in Moby Dick. Photo Credit: Lucie Jansch Rosa Enskat as Captain Ahab in Moby Dick. Photo Credit: Lucie Jansch Melville’s text centered around the story of Ahab, designated as “Peg Leg” in Wilson’s text, who sought, above all else, to risk the life of the entire crew to exact revenge on the whale who had taken away a part of his leg several years previously. Played by Rosa Enskat, the role of Ahab was a highly physical, yet complicated role as the characteristic poses (mies) were extremely specific to motion and involved interaction with not only the other characters but with the incredible scenes of oceanic and wind movement as well as with the ship itself. Another particular element of the design included wigs that implied a particular sense of movement that was enhanced and influenced by Wilson’s staging. Perhaps the greatest examples were seen in the role of Ahab played to perfection by Rosa Enskat. The characteristic limp and leg disorder (symbolized in the Wilson production by a long black leather boot) keyed the audience into the story of the legless captain intent on revenge against the mammoth whale. Additionally, Ahab’s hair style included the directional movement that became a large part of the character’s movement repertoire. Wilson’s specificity with character placement and body alignment became even more specific in his later years with hair pieces and other elements like props (Ahab’s walking cane for example) aligned in extremely particular and exact positions. This accuracy of precise positioning has challenged many actors involved in Wilson’s works over the years but many – such as Willem Dafoe and Mikhail Baryishnikov in The Old Woman (2013 ) - found this type of specificity extremely liberating and actually gave them less to think about within the context of the work. Several of the major musical scenes of the work were extremely compelling. The gathering of the sailors for the conquest scene included an extended choral sequence as the church blessed the hunters as well as the evil hunted whale. Video sequences established the seaport while the actors engaged in a complicated musical work that blessed the ship on its important journey to destroy the monstrous creature. The inclusion of religion into the equation (also present in the Melville novel) added yet another element into the “human versus nature” them by adding the element of God on the side of humanity. The mounting of the ship was characterized by an extended and visually repetitive scene beautifully realized and involving numerous, often violent images of a seaport city. Some of the images seemed reminiscent of Hitchcock’s The Birds as angry birds seemed to be arriving to the scene as a potential angry chorus of supporters for the important killing mission that would be achieved by Ahab and his group of sailors. Clearly embracing a non-chronological narrative, the work often shifted back to scenes between The Boy and the Old Man as they discussed the evolving story. In a curious Wilson turn, The Boy began to take on the role of a conductor and waved a conductor’s baton in numerous scenes while talking to the Old Man as well as his strong presence in numerous scenes. Several scenes featured The Boy conducting musical sequences that were a part of the works precise soundscape. Without superior internal knowledge it is impossible to know the motivation for these scenes as one of the most compelling and interesting aspects of Wilson’s works throughout his career has been the use of arbitrary and unexplained elements. In fact, that is one of the truly beautiful elements of his work and even delving into those moments are a waste of time. The main consideration should always be: “Did they work and did they make the work more interesting?” In the case of The Boy’s evolution into the world of musical conducting the answer was a resounding “yes,” and the scenes somehow recognized his maturation as well as adding numerous possibilities for comic physical action. Nell’s work was incredibly similar to the famous American comedy star Danny Kaye. Their physical resemblance was unmistakable, but Nell’s physical and vocal abilities placed him in a category equal to that great American movie actor. One of the most memorable scenes in the work occurred in the latter half as the crew was preparing to harpoon the whale. Set to Calvi’s powerful music, the musical number “We’re Gonna Reel Him In” would certainly qualify to be the pieces “Eleven O’clock Number” (in the sense of musical theatre works) and was a powerful and stirring piece that both vocally and physically embraced Wilson’s powerful aesthetic. Numerous powerful images from the scene shifted from the imaginary vessel to imaginary landscapes that displayed numerous relationships among the crew members that suggested a variety of activities and interpersonal connections. Many of the tableau created were open to individual interpretation but all were beautifully realized in classic Wilson style. The company of Moby Dick by Robert Wilson. Photo Credit: Lucie Jansch The absence of Bob Wilson in the world’s performance landscape is one of the biggest losses imaginable. The fact that Wilson brought this production of Moby Dick to the stage and realized it as a very audience friendly, time friendly and visually stunning as well as technically advanced work (to the highest levels of contemporary technology) cemented his role as one of the most important innovators (certainly as an American) in the history of theatre. Wilson was a singular artist, whose style is still just being discovered, realized and copied by artists in theatre, musical theatre, film, dance, opera and other areas like installation art where he also had a strong presence as a creator and presenter. At the time of this writing Moby Dick will be shown in Brooklyn, New York at BAM in April 2026, which will give American audiences an opportunity to see his final work by the (mostly) original Dusseldorf cast. However, Wilson’s work will not cease, as his numerous associates, such as Ann-Christin Rommen and Daryl Pinckney among others will likely work to keep the Wilson performance tradition alive to whatever degree is possible. References References About the author(s) Steve Earnest is a Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University . He was a Fulbright Scholar in Nanjing, China during the 2019 – 2020 academic year where he taught and directed works in Shakespeare and Musical Theatre. A member of SAG-AFTRA and AEA, he has worked professionally as an actor with Performance Riverside, The Burt Reynolds Theatre, The Jupiter Theatre, Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre, The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Birmingham Summerfest and the Riverside Theatre of Vero Beach, among others. Film credits include Bloody Homecoming , Suicide Note and Miami Vice . His professional directing credits include Big River , Singin’ in the Rain and Meet Me in St. Louis at the Palm Canyon Theatre in Palm Springs, Musicale at Whitehall 06 at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach and Much Ado About Nothing with the Mountain Brook Shakespeare Festival. Numer ous publications include a book, The State Acting Academy of East Berlin , published in 1999 by Mellen Press, a book chapter in Performer Training, published by Harwood Press, and a number of articles and reviews in academic journals and periodicals including Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Western European Stages, The Journal of Beckett Studies and Backstage West . He has taught Acting, Movement, Dance, and Theatre History/Literature at California State University, San Bernardino, the University of West Georgia , the University of Montevallo and Palm Beach Atlantic University. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an M.F.A. in Musical Theatre from the University of Miami, FL. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Summer 2025 in London, England The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Report from Berlin Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Christen Mandracchia Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 1 Visit Journal Homepage More than a Props List: Redefining Material Culture as Survival and Pleasure in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined Christen Mandracchia By Published on November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF A small mining town. The sounds of the tropical Ituri rain forest. The DemocraticRepublic of Congo. A bar, makeshift furnitureand a rundown pool table. A lot of effort has gone into making the worn bar cheerful. A stack of plastic washtubs rests in the corner. An old carbattery powers the lights and audio system, a covered birdcage sits conspicuously in the cornerof the room. ([1]) How might you approach these opening stage directions from Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Ruined ? Would you start by picturing specific pieces of furniture? Does the quality and type of sound come to mind first? How does your own positionality inform these choices? As a theatre and performance scholar who also serves as a production manager, designer, and professor, I am rarely able to separate a scholarly reading from the material conditions of production. Thus, I approach these stage directions through many different lenses. For example, as a sound designer, I notice that the first specific thing Nottage mentions is the “sounds of the tropical Ituri rain forest” followed by a reference to an audio system that is plugged into “an old car battery.” These details would impact technical and artistic choices I might make. Similarly, as a lighting designer, I notice that the same battery powers the lights, which means that a production would likely need practical lighting instruments to be hung around the set, in addition to the stage lights. A props-centered approach is particularly compelling because Nottage lists “makeshift furniture” – a phrase which sparks a larger conversation, not just about the logistics of acquiring or building these objects for the stage, but one which hails the production team into the world of the play and into the minds of the characters. Therein lies the challenge. Ruined is a 2011 drama which tells the story of Mama Nadi, a Mother Courage-like figure who owns and operates the described bar in the Congolese rain forest. Her patrons are often miners of the mineral coltan, used in cellular phones, and soldiers on both sides of a bloody civil war. What does “makeshift furniture” look like in the world of this play? What objects are available to these characters, and where do these objects come from? What were these objects originally intended for and what does their second life as “makeshift furniture” reveal about the objectives, survival, innovation, and pleasure of the characters? When members of a production team must put themselves in the place of the characters to make artistic decisions, other aspects of our positionalities manifest themselves as assets or limits in this theatrical process. For example, how would my experiences as a white-ethnic, middle-class, and queer theatre scholar/practitioner in the United States help or hinder my ability to access the world of the play and the lived experiences of the characters to make well-informed, ethical, and dramaturgically accurate production decisions? I begin with this discussion of props because I contend that delving into the specific material histories of objects in the text provides new avenues of nuance and complexity that can help bridge the gap between Western scholarly, practical, and personal lived experiences and those of the characters. An article like “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” by Chandra Talpade Mohanty establishes what is at stake when Western knowledge production relies on archetypes instead of the material realities of the “third world” — especially women. She describes this archetype of the “average third world woman” as falling into gendered stereotypes such as sexual constraint, and “third world” stereotypes of “ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.” ( [2] ) She then argues that the victim narrative, in particular, reduces the complexities of the lives of “third world” women to socioeconomic or sexual terms, reinforcing the sexist stereotype of women as weak. ( [3] ) In focusing on the material objects listed in a play like Ruined , through an application of material culture theory as a methodology, this article outlines how Western theatre makers and scholars can approach plays set in the “third world” in a way that Mohanty argues would be more grounded in the “material and ideological power structures” which shape these women’s lives. ( [4] ) Toward this end, Ruined is a useful vehicle for the application of a material culture reading precisely because the play was created with the intent to “sustain the complexity” of the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, knowing that her Western “first-world” audience would only know about the conflict through fragmented news clips. ( [5] ) Nottage wrote the play based on ethnographic testimony of real women who survived the war, but she also uses specifically-named material objects in the text to ground the character’s larger given circumstances in material reality. In the play’s first descriptive paragraphs, referenced above, Nottage paints a picture of a place that is “ worn ” but “ cheerful ,” “ rundown ” but “ tropical ”—evoking a comfortable place more than a war zone. As a play about what Mohanty terms the “third world” written for a “first world” audience, Nottage does not fully immerse the audience in the horrors of war immediately. I use the phrase “third world” in this context throughout this paper because it is the word that Mohanty uses to describe the groups of women who fall under this Western label. “Third world,” in its immediate context, refers to the Cold War language which identified the “first world” as the capitalist nations, who were in opposition to the Soviet Union and the expansion of communism. As Mohanty details, this term has taken on more cultural meanings than its technical use from the Cold War era—so that even words like “Western” are tied to the division between “first” and “third” world. I use the term, knowing that it is outdated and problematic in many ways, but also knowing that many of the perceptions associated with this word still exist. I use it with the knowledge that it is a cultural touchstone, conjuring a specific iconography which I hope to complicate. Hence, I will keep it in quotations to highlight the fact that it is a construction. The first allusion to violence happens five lines into the first scene, where Mama Nadi exclaims to her stock supplier Christian, a “ perpetually cheerful traveling salesman ” that she has been expecting him for three weeks. Christian explains that “Every two kilometers a boy with a Kalashnikov and pockets that need filling.” ( [6] ) Nottage begins to reveal the larger given circumstances of the play through specific mentions of an object: the Russian-made and distributed Kalashnikov, often referred to in American lexicon as an “AK.” ( [7] ) In his book on gun history aptly titled The Gun , CJ Chivers informs readers that More than six decades after its design and initial distribution, more than fifty national armies carry the automatic Kalashnikov, as do an array of police, intelligence, and security agencies. But its fuller terrain lies outside the sphere of conventional force. The Kalashnikov [culturally] marks the guerilla, the terrorist, the child soldier, the dictator, and the thug — all of whom have found it to be a ready equalizer against morally or materially superior foes. ( [8] ) Because the AK, especially the infamous AK-47, is often wielded by the NATO members’ military opponents, it is often viewed, in the American cultural archive, as a “bad guy” weapon. Conversely, it is often seen by those who wield them as a symbol of defiance against colonial powers and Western, capitalist values. For the characters in the first scene of Ruined , it represents their position as both citizens of a post-colonial, “third world” country and their vulnerability to violence at the hands of their own countrymen — thus complicating the “bad guy/good guy” or “Western/Anti-Western” binaries. Nottage’s specific mention of the Kalashnikov and other objects in the script serves as what the Combahee River Collective calls “the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” ( [9] ) Nottage’s ability to “sustain the complexity” of many topics has earned her much critical acclaim and scholarly attention. According to data from American Theatre , Nottage was the most produced playwright for the 2022-2023 theatre season in the United States. ( [10] ) Her play Clyde’s earned the top spot as the most produced play, with her Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat at number five. Intimate Apparel was the most produced play of the 2005-2006 season and the fifth most-produced play of the 2006-2007 season. ( [11] ) Ruined held the fourth spot in the 2010-2011 season. Poignantly, Intimate Apparel returned to the top-ten list in 2016-2017, and Sweat was second in the 2018-2019 season before returning to the list for 2022-2023. The data suggests that Nottage’s plays have enjoyed many “lives” beyond their initial premiere dates. As Nottage’s work continues to weave in and out of America’s top ten lists, it is necessary for scholarship to reexamine her work and the body of scholarly and dramaturgical literature dedicated to her plays. Each new “life” evidences a relevance or usefulness to public discourse in the United States on political issues of national interest including immigration, deindustrialization, globalization, and incarceration. Likewise, as national discourses now include robust discussions of the environmental and moral ethics of mining minerals in “third world” countries for electric vehicle batteries, Ruined offers readers and spectators a material methodology that can help to circumvent many of the traps of homogenization, reduction, or “Othering” that can too-often arise in public discourses on the “third world” and its women. Third World Feminism and Material Culture Theory Cultural theorist Celia Lury defines material culture as “ a culture of the use or appropriation of objects or things. ” ( [12] ) She continues: “The first half of the term — ‘material’ — points to the significance of stuff, of things in everyday practices, while the second half —‘ culture’ — indicates that this attention to the materials of everyday life is combined with a concern with the cultural, with norms, values and practices.” ( [13] ) A material culture theory reading of Nottage’s script follows what Mohanty insists that Western beholders should do every time we encounter stories of women in the “third world.” Material culture theory is an interdisciplinary way of analyzing the various ways that objects are connected to larger given circumstances and power dynamics. For marginalized groups who might be absent from the written archive, material culture theory is a way to give voice to the voiceless, or to highlight the everyday lives of people who never wrote about themselves. Material culture theory, however, is not to be confused with materialism or the Marxist tradition of historic materialism, which often only regards material objects in terms of their means of production, consumption, and the role they play in exploitation. In centering the systems of oppression in a discussion on “third world” Black women, there is a danger of falling into the “archetypal victim” that Mohanty warns against. Material culture theory considers the role that objects play in these negotiations: its production — particularly the unseen labor that goes into making it and maintaining it — but also its intended function, the ways that it participates in the creation of self-identity, its special relationships to people and other objects, and how these meanings change over time. ( [14] ) A study of objects in the script reveals the interlocking oppressions which affect the characters’ everyday lives, but also how these objects can be used as sites of agency, survival, resistance, or other negotiations of power within that structure. The play’s original director, Kate Whoriskey, states, “As a director committed to staging complexity, my task is to counter the drama with humor, spirit and wit, and to treat the stories collected in Central Africa with the understanding that at every moment the Congolese are determined to survive.” ( [15] ) I am interested in the way that role that objects play in the leveraging of these dramatic moments in favor of survival, as reflective of the way that real women in the Congo, such as the ones that this play is based on, do the same. Furthermore, material culture theory resists the anti-materialism (victim/passive) narrative that suggests that consumers are manipulated or subordinated into purchasing or gathering things. The production and consumption of material objects can just as much oppress an individual as it can empower one. Like “third world” feminism, material culture theory demands that a methodology be used to consider the individual circumstances of an object’s relationship to a person, time, and place to “sustain the complexity,” as Nottage would say. I’d like to push the conversation beyond mere survival into one of joy and pleasure. Mohanty warns that confining the “third world” woman to a survival narrative can perpetuate their image as “archetypal victims,” and “freezes” them into “objects-who-defend themselves.” ( [16] ) This essay thus considers how material objects can be used as both a means of survival and pleasure. This positioning comes in direct response to critics who have chosen to praise the play’s portrayal of sexual violence but decry the fact that Nottage wrote a romantic ending for her principle leads. Other scholars, such as Jeff Paden, have defended the play’s romantic ending in the name of its political potency. ( [17] ) Is the ending of a Black/postcolonial play predetermined to be sad or ambiguous? If so, who determines this? It is possible that this ending disturbed critics because it challenged preconceived Western notions of what the “third world” is supposed to be. And perhaps the justification of “third world” characters’ pleasure determined by its political efficacy. In the context of this paper, “third world” feminism manifests itself as both Black feminism and postcolonial feminism with an emphasis on self-definition, and how material objects are used to that end. A material culture theory reading of the text that considers how these objects contribute to the world-making that Nottage employs insists that the objects in the script are more than a props list. They are a means understanding the complex world contexts that a production has taken on the responsibility to portray. Fanta, Don’t You Wanna? The field of material culture theory has a plethora of methods for analyzing these relationships. Many are in the form of a series of questions which can be applied to an object. This section will use the questions developed by Igor Kopytoff to go through the objects in the script for Ruined to identify the characters’ material circumstances, which reveal their position in larger systems and “interlocking oppressions.” While detailing the material circumstances and synthesis of oppression is only a first step, it is a vital one. Kopytoff approaches the above considerations of a material object as a “cultural biography” of a thing. “In doing the biography of a thing,” he says, “one would ask questions similar to those one asks about people: What sociologically, are the biographical possibilities inherent in its ‘status’ and in the period and culture, and how are these possibilities realized?” ( [18] ) Kopytoff is working within an anthropological framework, however, this paper is not an anthropological treatment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While the characters and events of the play are based on ethnographic testimony from real women from the DRC, Ruined is ultimately a theatrical script, and the material objects in this play exist within the larger given circumstances that Nottage has created for the stage. In this material culture reading, anthropology is replaced with script analysis and dramaturgical research, although the same questions that Kopytoff asks are used. Consider the opening stage directions of the play: “ A small mining town. The sounds of the tropical Ituri rain forest. The Democratic Republic of Congo. A bar, makeshift furniture and a rundown pool table. A lot of effort has gone into making the worn bar cheerful. A stack of plastic washtubs rests in the corner. An old car battery powers the audio system, a covered birdcage sits conspicuously in the corner of the room .” ( [19] ) These stage directions establish the immediate location of the play: a small mining town in the Ituri rain forest. But they also emphasize that the owner of the bar/brothel, who is about to be introduced as “ Mama Nadi, early forties, an attractive woman with an arrogant stride and majestic air ,” has recycled and repurposed items beyond their original functions. ( [20] ) She has put “a lot of effort” into curating these objects in a way that produces pleasure for her and her customers. The cultural biographies of the “ makeshift furniture ,” “ washtubs ,” and “ car battery ” have changed with time and with a new owner, and their positioning in this space speaks to Mama Nadi’s larger given circumstances as well as the ways that she uses objects to create her own space within those circumstances. Before Nottage mentions the Kalashnikov, she notes that Christian is drinking a Fanta soda. ( [21] ) Like the Kalashnikov, Fanta has a collective cultural meaning in “first world” material culture. While it would be difficult to impossible to track each individual audience member’s knowledge, recognition, and response to these objects in the script, Fanta’s massive American marketing campaign in the early 2000s offers clues to the audience’s possible associations. The 2001 Fanta television commercial, featuring the tropically themed female group of four, the Fantanas, and their catchy, Latinx-inspired, double-entendre jingle “Fanta, Don’t You Wanna” branded the soda as a fun and sexy party drink, associated with the Global South, where it was already incredibly popular. ( [22] ) At first glance, Christian’s choice to order a soda in a bar, specifically a Fanta, may evoke such cultural associations with fun and pleasure. The cultural biography of Fanta can serve to connect the image of the smiling African salesman character to the “first world” audience and help us understand the relationship between our material culture and the characters’. Because Fanta is specific, its biography is easier to trace as a first example. ( [23] ) The first question that Kopytoff would ask about a bottle of Fanta is, “Where does the thing come from and who made it?” A quick Google search can tell me that “Fanta is a brand of fruit-flavored carbonated drinks created by The Coca-Cola Company and marketed globally.” ( [24] ) However, Kopytoff’s question forces one to search deeper for the unseen labor and processes which created the beverage and brought it to Christian’s hands in Mama Nadi’s bar. Fanta’s presence in this space is evidence of globalization. The Coca-Cola Company is an American corporation, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, which works with local bottling partners all over the world. ( [25] ) In Africa, at the time that the play was written, the largest partner was SABMiller, a British brewing company based in London. ( [26] ) The bottling and brewing plants would be in African countries such as South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, Namibia, Comoros, Mayotte, Swaziland, Botswana and Zambia — but not the Democratic Republic of Congo. ( [27] ) In the DRC, the Coca-Cola bottling company is the Barlima Brewery, founded by Belgian businessmen during colonial occupation and owned, since 1986, by the Dutch Heineken Corporation. ( [28] ) The list of Coca-Cola products bottled at Barlima does not include Fanta, nor is it listed as being distributed in the DRC. Thus, the Fanta was made by African workers in plants owned by the Dutch, in partnership with an American company, and brought to Mama Nadi’s bar by the black market. ( [29] ) Like the exchange of the Kalashnikov rifles outside of conventional forces, Mama Nadi’s business exists outside of the standard market. She is simultaneously an avid capitalist and a disruptor of capitalist markets, defying simple or clean categories. By asking one simple question of a stage direction on the first page of the script, this methodology has yielded valuable information on the given circumstances of the play and the post-colonial, racial, and capitalist power dynamics of which the characters find themselves. Material Culture as Survival A strictly materialist reading of these circumstances related to Fanta would highlight the role that these systems play in oppressing characters like Mama Nadi. For example, the dialogue of the first scene explains that the movement of goods such as Fanta is difficult due to rebel checkpoints and taxes. A few lines after discussing the joys of his soda, Christian exclaims the quote from earlier about the Kalashnikov and pockets that need filling: “Toll, tax, tariff. They invent reasons to lighten your load.” ([30]) The material objects cannot be separated from the larger given circumstances of the piece. For example, Mama pours herself a Primus beer while Christian drinks his Fanta. Primus beer is brewed in the same Barlima Brewry which partners with Coca-Cola and is owned by the Dutch Heineken Group. Unlike Fanta, which does not distribute in the DRC, Primus has exclusivity deals with bars all over the country, and Heineken pays roughly one million dollars to the rebels to pass their checkpoints so that the beer can be distributed. ([31]) The connections between Heineken and the armed conflict in the DRC has yet to be explored in its entirety. Olivier van Beemen’s explosive book Heineken in Africa: A Multinational Unleashed exposes the company’s ties to corruption, sexual violence, human rights violations, and even genocide in the 1990s. ([32]) A material culture reading acknowledges these systems of oppression, but also asks what the object means for the characters themselves, thus centering them in the narrative, and not the multinational corporations. Here, for example, Primus beer is a significant portion of Mama’s revenue. When Mr. Harari discusses the interlocking oppressions of coltan mining and armed “two-bit militias battling for the keys to hell,” Mama responds to these factors by declaring, “True, chérie, but someone must provide them with beer and distractions.” ( [33] ) Primus is such a large part of Mama’s business that the parrot she keeps in the bar ends the play by squawking, “Mama! Primus! Mama! Primus!” ( [34] ) For Mama, her bar is more than a business, it is survival for her and the girls in her employment as prostitutes. Mama’s bar is established as a safe zone in the first scene when Christian brings his niece Sophie to work there: “I told my family I’d find a place for her . . . And here at least I know she’ll be safe. Fed.” ( [35] ) This fact is stated again in the second act when Mama asserts, “My girls, Emilene, Mazima, Josephine, ask them, they’d rather be here, than back out there in their villages where they are taken without regard. They’re safer with me than in their own homes.” ( [36] ) She describes how the interlocking oppressions which connect natural resources, multinational corporations, beer, and armed conflict also protect her: beer makes the soldiers happy and they protect her business. “Who would protect my business if [the Commander] turned on me?” she says. ( [37] ) This is emphasized when Mr. Harari exclaims to Mama, “Just, be careful, where will I drink if anything happens to you?” ( [38] ) The line emphasizes the fact that her bar is the only one in the area. By selling beer in the rainforest, she meets supply and demand for pleasure in their bleak circumstances. In this way, her business is useful to forces that would otherwise destroy her and the women she protects. Her usefulness, and therefore her financial and physical security, is symbiotically tied to Primus beer. A reading which only focuses on the means by which Primus is produced, distributed, and tied to rebel groups misses the complex material circumstances which tie it to the characters’ survival. Kopytoff asserts that a “cultural biography” of an object must consider the perspective by which one assesses an object. ( [39] ) Does one read the value of Primus beer based on how much Heineken profits from it, how much rebels profit from it, or how much Mama profits from it? The answer is to consider all of them, but to center Mama’s perspective to determine how the object is culturally marked within the world of Nottage’s script. What does her world look like without Fanta or Primus? Thanks to a report by The Economist in 2018, there is little need for speculation. In between 2009 — when Ruined was researched and written — and 2018, Heineken was forced to close two of its breweries in the DRC due to international pressures over their ties to Barlima Brewing Co. and business practices in those regions. The article explains that since 2016, “In western Congo, Angolan beer in cans—less tasty but cheaper than Primus or Tembo—has flooded the market. It is not sold at cost since the smugglers’ main aim is to acquire dollars to trade on the black market in Angola.” ( [40] ) The article also reports that “violence is worsening.” Imagining that this happened while Mama is trying to run her business, she would have to pay more money for beer, which is described as being lower quality. Furthermore, the commercial branding of Primus within the script, and in reality, is of the upmost importance. Kopytoff’s final question asks, “What has been [the object’s] career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things? What are the recognized ‘ages’ or periods in the thing’s ‘life,’ and what are the cultural markers for them?” ( [41] ) Both The Economist and Olivier van Beeman discuss how Primus is ingrained in Congolese culture as large sponsors of the music industry, and how Heineken sponsors campus fashion shows at universities, free nights in dance clubs, and music and sporting events. ( [42] ) This gendered meaning of the beer, and its connection to the music industry, is evident in Mama Nadi’s bar where she and Sophie sing songs about beer and about warriors. ( [43] ) In the script, when soldiers enter her bar, they immediately ask for one or two bottles of Primus, and at other times refer to themselves as “warriors” or perform hyper-masculinity. ( [44] ) What would happen if Mama told them that she does not have Primus beer in her stock? Because so much of her survival depends on the happiness of her customers, a negation of the culturally significant pleasure of drinking Primus beer could potentially result in the bar’s value decreasing. Again, the connection between Primus beer, the countries commercial and cultural institutions, and cultural markers for masculinity “sustains the complexity” of the material conditions of the characters’ lives as it also raises the stakes for what would happen if Primus were unavailable to Mama’s bar. The same can be said for mentions of the mineral coltan in the script, which is the one material object that has dominated many discourses in dramaturgy packets. From the first scene, Nottage establishes the importance of this object when Christian says, “All along the road people are talking about how this red dirt is rich with coltan.” ( [45] ) As the scenes progress, the audience is informed of the impact that coltan mining has had on the Congo, and the human rights violations which are connected to the mining and selling of this mineral for electronic devices. In fact, much of the first two scenes is dedicated to explaining this exposition, signaling that this material object is the lynchpin which connects the local economy, the armed conflict, and the sexual violence perpetrated against women. Nottage has positioned the action of the play a few months after coltan had been discovered in the rainforest. Mama says, “Six months ago it was just more black dirt,” ( [46] ) Mr. Harari informs Mama that, “in this damnable age of the mobile phone it's become quite the precious ore...” ( [47] ) Christian establishes that there are large groups of miners coming to the area: “Suddenly everyone has a shovel, and wants to stake a claim since that boastful pygmy dug up his fortune in the reserve. I guarantee there will be twice as many miners here by September.” ( [48] ) This makes Mama Nadi happy, because it means that she will have more customers, however, the character Salima connects the coltan mining to the armed conflict and atrocities, recounting how “fifteen Hema men were shot dead and buried in their own mining pit, in mud so thick it swallow them right into the ground without mercy. He say one man stuff the coltan into his mouth to keep the soldiers from stealing his hard work, and they split his belly open with a machete. ‘It’ll show him for stealing,’ he say, bragging like I should be congratulating him.” ( [49] ) Like Primus, the interlocking oppressions of coltan mining are clear, but so is the fact that Mama’s business depends on it. “Me, I thank God for deep dirty holes like Yaka-yaka,” Mama says of the local mine. ( [50] ) Since Ruined premiered in 2009, dramaturgy packets, study guides, and program notes have addressed the issue of conflict minerals, as they appear in the play, but most fail to address their importance to the characters’ survival. In a way, these dramaturgs have performed the first part of Kopytoff’s methodology on cell phones and other electronic devices that the audience might own, but do not complete the “cultural biography.” For example, Charlie Payne of the Almeida Theatre in London suggests a practical exercise for teachers and students titled “There’s no blood on my mobile!” He instructs his audience to read the context articles he has provided and “Brainstorm the supply chain, or ‘conveyor belt’, of coltan — how does it reach the consumer and what are the consequences of mobile phone consumerism in the West? Now think about this physically. Create six, eightbeat phrases — three relating to the use of coltan and three highlighting its impact in the DRC. Now try playing these all together — a literal conveyer belt from the mines to the consumer.” ( [51] ) Connected to a 2011 production, Berkely Rep Magazine featured a section entitled, “Coltan: From the Congo to you,” reporting that “In the 1990s and early 2000s, coltan emerged as a globally significant commodity essential to the production of digital technology. As world demand for mobile phones, laptops, PlayStations, and digital cameras exploded, tech industries came to increasingly rely on coltan from the Congo, which has an estimated 80% of the world’s reserves.” ( [52] ) A 2011 study guide from Arena Stage cites a United Nations study which reports that, “all parties involved in the conflict have been involved in the mining and sale of coltan. The money rebels and militias receive from these sales helps them buy more weapons and supplies for the war.” ( [53] ) These studies position the audience in relation to the events in the play, but in focusing on making the interlocking oppressions of coltan, cell phones, rebel militias, and sexual violence the sole narrative of the dramaturgy, it centers the victim narrative without adding the nuances of how coltan mining has become a means of survival for women in the DRC. As with Primus beer, the importance of coltan to survival in the DRC was highlighted in the real-world aftermath of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, section 1502, which requited “companies trading on U.S. securities exchanges to determine through supply-chain due diligence whether or not their products contain conflict minerals from DRC or neighboring countries, and report their findings annually to the SEC [Securities Exchange Commission].” ( [54] ) The Washington Post reported that, “In the fall of 2010, two months after the law’s signing, Congo’s government halted mining for six months — even at facilities not controlled by armed groups. The move had tremendous repercussions in a country where, by some estimates, a sixth of the 70 million inhabitants depend on artisanal mining.” ( [55] ) By 2014, the negative effects were felt in the Congo, where out of the nation’s hundreds of mines, only a handful were “tagged” as “conflict free.” ( [56] ) While the law was passed in an effort to curtail the stimulant role of the mining in armed conflicts, a follow up article from 2018 reports that “militias in eastern Congo have only proliferated. Miners are still working in pitiful conditions with little investment into tools and infrastructure. Much evidence points to the reality that minerals coming from mines controlled by militias are still making their way into the global market.” ( [57] ) While Ruined and the aforementioned dramaturgical packets were written without the hindsight of post-Dodd-Frank legislation, Mama Nadi’s lines suggest the immediate importance of the mine to her own survival. When Christian informs her that the violence is intensifying with the disappearance of a white pastor, her first instinctual response is to ask, “What about Yaka-yaka mine? Has the fighting scared off the miners?” ( [58] ) She is more worried about the mine closing than she is about the missing pastor. This is an example of how knowing the material circumstances, and having the hindsight of what happens when those circumstances are changed by external forces, can help contextualize and inform character objectives and value systems. Mama is putting her survival and the survival of the women in her care first in her priorities by caring about the mine’s closure. In “sustaining the complexity” of these objects in the characters’ lives, Nottage withholds the catharsis of an easy solution to the interplay of multinational corporations and violence in “third world” countries. Instead, she chooses to focus on the way that her characters not only survive, but find joy in their circumstances, and this endeavor is closely tied to material objects. Material Culture as Pleasure The importance of objects like Primus and coltan to the immediate survival of the women in the play informs the way that the characters interact with these objects and others which are listed like cigarettes and soap. ( [59] ) However, character interactions with objects are also informed by pleasure as well, and it is important to note that the beer drinking soldiers are not the only characters who derive pleasure from material objects in the script. While the men in the script enjoy a large amount of dominance and power over female pleasure in the context of this play, they do not have a monopoly on it, and they are not able to have full control over it. Unlike the archetypal victims that Mohanty describes, Nottage’s characters share joy and pleasure with male characters and enjoy pleasures of their own. The play’s opening line chooses to focus on Christian’s pleasure as he drinks his soda: “Ah. Cold. The only cold Fanta in twenty-five kilometers. You don’t know how good this tastes.” ( [60] ) The stage directions follow with, “Mama flashes a warm flirtatious smile, then pours herself a Primus beer.” ( [61] ) Knowing the complex relationship between their circumstances, the Fanta, and the Primus, it is worth noting that these characters not only profit from the sale of these objects, but they share in the pleasure of them as well. If a bottle of Fanta, for example, has made its way to Mama Nadi’s bar through a more complicated route, due to the fact that it is not distributed in the DRC, it might be considered something rare or special for the characters – signifying moments that are worth noting to the reader, viewer, in a character analysis by an actor, or in direction of the play. Christian’s line emphasizes the scarcity of Fanta, Mama’s own innovation in finding a way to refrigerate the soda in the middle of the rainforest, and Christian’s sensory enjoyment of the object. Her flirtatiousness is a recognition of Christian’s satisfaction with the Fanta before she pours herself a beverage so that she can share in the same kind of joy. “You sure you don’t want a beer?” Mama asks. “You know me better than that, chérie, I haven’t had a drop of liquor in four years,” Christian replies. The stage directions emphasize that Mama’s next line “It’s cold” is delivered “teasing.” ( [62] ) The objects become part of an improvised language of pleasure, desire, seduction, and satisfaction. This dynamic manifests itself with lipstick a few pages later: MAMA And my lipstick? CHRISTIAN Your lipstick? Aye! Did you ask me for lipstick? MAMA Of course, I did, you idiot!... Leave me alone, you’re too predictable. ( Turns away, dismissive ) CHRISTIAN Where are you going? Hey, hey what are you doing? ( Teasingly ) Chérie, I know you wanted me to forget, so you could yell at me, but you won’t get the pleasure this time. ( Christian taunts her with the lipstick. Mama resists the urge to smile .) MAMA Oh shut up and give it to me. ( He passes her the lipstick.) ( [63] ) Not only do Christian and Mama enjoy the objects individually, but the Fanta, the beer, and the lipstick are incorporated into their dynamic of pleasure. Harkening back to Kopytoff’s final questions, (“What has been [the object’s] career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things? What are the recognized ‘ages’ or periods in the thing’s ‘life,’ and what are the cultural markers for them?”), Fanta’s ideal career is to provide such sensory joy. The connection between beverages and flirtation is a common theme in Fanta marketing, when considering the way that the object’s career is culturally marked — or mark eted . ( [64] ) Therefore, its erotic meaning in the encounter between Christian and Mama Nadi is not necessarily contrary to its original meaning; but the raised stakes of the object’s presence in Mama Nadi’s bar signals that this encounter with the two characters is more than a reproduction of a Coca-Cola commercial. Their shared moment over two drinks indicates an early connection between the two, which will ultimately culminate in the controversial romantic ending where the two characters agree to a courtship. This ending was met with distain from critics who believed that the romantic ending undercut the tragedy of sexual violence and war present in the rest of the play, or worse, disrupted its realism. Ben Brantley of The New York Times called the ending “well shaped” and “sentimental,” ultimately deciding that “because of its artistic caution, ‘Ruined’ is likely to reach audiences averse to more adventurous, confrontational theater.” ( [65] ) Brantley’s back-handed compliment implies that Nottage’s ending is not risky enough for the subject of “third world” war. He says, “The play isn’t a form-shattering, soul-jolting shocker like Sarah Kane’s ‘Blasted,’ another and more innovative study in wartime atrocities.” His strong implication is that sentimentality appeals to the lowest common denominator of audiences, who appreciate conventional happy endings. Robert Feldberg of The Herald News asserts that “Nottage succumbs to a desire to project hope and happiness both of which she’s established as extremely unlikely by having Christian playfully woo the reluctant Mama Nadi in a scene set out of an old-fashioned romantic comedy. It’s too trivial, a cuddly ending to an otherwise resonant, deeply felt evening of theatre.” ( [66] ) Jill Dolan, on her blog The Feminist Spectator , critiques the ending similarly by stating “Suddenly, the play becomes a heterosexual romance, in which Mama and her girls are redeemed by the love of a good man.” For Dolan, the heteronormativity of their relationship and the “reintegrating the nuclear family…compromises the rigorous, clear-eyed story Ruined otherwise tells.” ( [67] ) However, something that may seem “conventional” in the context of Western drama (i.e. a romantic ending) takes on new meaning in the circumstances of the play: a Fanta isn’t just a regular soda, and flirting over it is more than a reproduction of commercial images. What does a romantic ending mean in the material context of the characters? To speak directly to Dolan’s point, the circumstances of the play complicate the sexual component of the “heterosexual romance” between Mama Nadi and Christian. Mama reveals in the final scene that she is “ruined,” which means that she has been sexually abused to the point where she can no longer have children. ( [68] ) The specific details of this are left out of the play. It is unclear as to whether this factor limits her ability to have children or her ability to have penetrative sex entirely. The other “ruined” character, Sophie, has been raped with a bayonet — another stark reference to the Kalashnikov — leaving her unable to walk without pain, let alone have intercourse. ( [69] ) Despite the vague implications for Mama’s status as “ruined”, at the very least, it disrupts the “conventional” correlation between heterosexuality and procreation. Mama Nadi and Christian may be a male/female couple, but there is very little that is “normative” about their relationship. The happiness of this ending does not erase the circumstances which complicate it. Nor is it out of place, as these reviews imply. The connection between these two characters has been established since their first page encounter with the Fanta. A reading that centers what the objects mean to the characters suggests that Mama Nadi and Christian’s relationship is “erotic,” but not necessarily sexual — drawing from Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” which cites the erotic as “providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.” ( [70] ) From the beginning of the play, Mama Nadi and Christian are joined by their love of material objects. Christian sells objects, Mama buys them, and this shared passion for things provides them with an improvised language of pleasure, desire, seduction, and satisfaction. As Lorde says, “Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.” ( [71] ) Throughout the play, Mama Nadi carefully weighs each situation in favor of her own joy and pleasure. For Mama, material objects are extensions of herself. She says, “There must always be a part of you this war can’t touch.” ( [72] ) In this moment, she is talking about a raw diamond that a miner traded to her for four beers and one of her sex workers. Although the audience does not yet know that Mama Nadi is “ruined,” the fact that she equates a material object with the one part of herself that the war cannot touch is significant given the fact that her body has been violated. For Mama, the objects are extensions of her “self” as described by psychologist and material culture theorist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s essay “Why We Need Things.” According to him, the human psyche and sense of identity is vague, and material things help ground people by acting as touchstones. For Csikszentmihalyi, the objects perform: “They do so first by demonstrating the owner’s power, vital erotic energy and place in the social hierarchy.” ( [73] ) For Mama Nadi, the material objects around her represent the power that she has gained within the “interlocking” systems of oppression. She exclaims, “I didn’t come here as Mama Nadi, I found her the same way miners find their wealth in the muck. I stumbled off of that road without two twigs to start a fire. I turned a basket of sweets and soggy biscuits into a business. I don’t give a damn what any of you think. This is my place, Mama Nadi’s.” ( [74] ) Thus, everything in the bar is an extension of herself and plays a role in her self-definition — or re-definition. Therefore, the stage direction in the beginning that says that “a lot of effort” has gone into making the bar look cheerful suggests that pleasure is important for the character as well, and that these objects that she surrounds herself with speak to more than survival. Lorde describes the “erotic” in a similar way; that it is something internal [read: psychological and spiritual] and not physical. Although she and Csikszentmihalyi are writing from different disciplines, and are separated by age, gender, race, and nationality, both write about the erotic, and Lorde uses material objects to describe what happens inside her “self”: During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncolored margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag, releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. . . I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience. ( [75] ) Thus, she, like Mama Nadi equates a material object with her own internal vital energy. Mama’s raw diamond can be taken away, but no one can take away what it represents: the fact that she has not only survived being “ruined” but has also prospered, thrived, and found joy. Decolonizing Efforts in American Theatre As American theatre, in both academia and the industry, commits itself to anti-racism and decolonization practices, let us not forget Patricia Hill Collins’s foundational text “The Politics of Black Feminist Thought,” in which she pays homage to the long tradition of resisting negative images of Black women and moving towards self-definition as independence, self-determination, self-reliance, and survival. ( [76] ) A material culture theory reading of Ruined yields significant information on the character’s material circumstances, interlocking oppressions, survival tactics, and pleasures. Each of these forces is connected to the other, and material objects are deeply interwoven into these dynamics. However, discussions of survival and pleasure are often left out of Western assessments of “third world” women, including those surrounding works of theatre like Ruined , as shown by dramaturgical and critical academic archives. In doing so, these conversations run the risk of reinforcing victim archetypes as discussed by Mohanty’s work, which can be potentially counter-productive to anti-racist and anti-colonial efforts. Material culture theory is a methodology that can be applied to both scholarly and practical theatrical projects and evidences the ways that scholarly methods are useful and relevant to the production process. In this case, material culture theory can be used not only for the props list, but also for the places where material objects intersect with scenic dressing, costuming, practical lighting instruments, sound effect and music choices, and, of course, directing and acting choices. What kind of objects decorate the set described in the opening stage directions? Where do they come from and who made them? What do they mean to the characters? What are the characters wearing and how did those clothes come into their possession? What kind of lights did Mama Nadi use to make her bar look “cheerful”? What would be available to her? How would sound be distorted if the equipment was powered by a car battery that was also powering the lights? These are many questions that designers already ask themselves based on the design processes. These are already the kinds of conversations that take place at production meetings. Material culture theory can help ensure that the answers to these questions are culturally specific, accurate, and precise. This is especially true when engaging with marginalized groups who are often omitted from or misrepresented written archives. What story do the objects tell? How do people in these groups use objects in everyday life towards self-definition? The importance of self-definition is also articulated by Mohanty’s work on decolonizing images of the “third world” woman in white, Western feminist hegemonies, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, which critiques the role of the Western imagination in the formation of the Other. Smith says, “I say that because like many other writers I would argue that 'we', indigenous peoples, people 'of color', the Other, however we are named, have a presence in the Western imagination, in its fiber and texture, in its sense of itself, in its language, in its silences and shadows, its margins and intersections.” ( [77] ) While Mohanty’s work is primarily a critique against academic constructions of the “third world,” Smith’s is an indictment of Western imagination for the role that it played in justifying the imperial exploitation of the “third world,” indigenous people, and people of the African diaspora for centuries. In the case of Ruined , and other theatrical representations of Black women, particularly those who live in what is considered the “third world,” material culture theory avoids the assumptions that are made in the Western imagination — and the historical baggage that comes with it – and allows one to study how the characters use material objects to define themselves. Both are vital decolonizing processes for the portrayal, or “re-presentation”, as Mohanty calls it, of Black, “third world” women on the American stage. References 1. Lynn Nottage, Ruined (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2009), 5. 2. Nottage, Ruined , 5. 3. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 200), 338. 4. Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 345. 5. Nottage, Ruined , xi. 6. Nottage, Ruined , xi. 7. The Kalashnikov, like the designation between the “first”, “second,” and “third world”, is a product of the Cold War, and most-often culturally associated, by Americans, with conflicts that arose as results of those international tensions and their global aftermath. 8. C. J.,Chivers, The Gun . (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 9. 9. The Combahee River Collective, "A Black Feminist Statement."Women's Studies Quarterly 42, no. 3/4 (2014): 271-80, 271. 10. Nicole Rosky, “Lynn Nottage's CLYDE'S Tops List of Most-Produced Play of the Season,” Broadwayworld.com , September 23, 2022. https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Lynn-Nottage-CLYDES-Tops-List-of-Most-Produced-Play-of-the-Season-20220923. 11. American Theatre Editors, “Offscript: Most-Produced WithLynn Nottage & Lauren Gunderson,” American Theatre, September 27, 2022. https://www.americantheatre.org/2022/09/27/offscript-most-produced-with-lynn-nottage-lauren-gunderson/. 12. Celia Lury, Consumer Culture . 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 9. 13. Lury, Consumer Culture, 9. 14. Lury, Consumer Culture, 21-22. 15. Nottage, Ruined, xi. 16. Mohanty, 339. 17. Jeff Paden, “Hybridity of form and political potentiality in Ruined,” in A Critical Companion to Lynn Nottage (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2016),145-159. 18. Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 66. 19. Nottage, Ruined, 5. 20. Nottage, Ruined, 5. 21. Nottage, Ruined , 5. 22. Fanta was marketed globally before it was marketed in the US due to fears that it would compete too heavily with Coca-Cola. After enjoying some popularity in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Fanta—along with other sodas—lost popularity to its sister orange soda brand Minute Maid as consumers became more interested in heathy foods and drinks. Fanta had been a bigger market item globally, especially in Africa and South America. Because of the orange soda’s popularity in Latin America,The Journal Record reported in 2001 that Fanta was being reintroduced in American markets through “Hispanic-heavy test markets in Texas, Arizona and Southern California. Sales jumped from 24.4 million cases in 2000 to 42.2 million last year, according to Beverage Digest. The jump was due to the rollout in test markets.” In 2002, the iconic Fantanas commercial was released nationally in a huge campaign,which was revived in 2004, 2006, and so on. The Fantanas became very culturally recognizable in the US, and were even featured in satires on MadTV and Family Guy. It is possible that collective memory of this marketing campaign would be accessible to “first world” audiences of Ruined in the 2010s. Admin, “Remember Fanta?: Business World,”The Journal Record, March 6, 2002, Accessed October 26, 2023,https://journalrecord.com/2002/03/06/remember-fanta-business-world/. 23. Washtubs and batteries are a bit vague. If this happens while doing a material culture reading of a play, especiallyone which takes place in a “third world” country, I recommend doing as much research as possible. In the event thatresearch fails, and a“first world” theatre maker must fill in the “gaps”, so-to-speak with their imaginations, it isimportant to remember the aforementioned “baggage” regarding Western imaginations of “third world” locationsand peoples. 24. “Fanta,” Wikipedia.org . Accessed October 30, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanta. 25. "The Coca-Cola System,” Coca-Cola Journey, “Our Company,” Accessed October 30, 2018.https://www.coca-colacompany.com/our-company/the-coca-cola-system. 26. “Coca-Cola Beverages Africa Begins Operations,” Coca-Cola Journey, “Press Releases,” Accessed October 30,2018. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/press-center/press-releases/coca-cola-beverages-africa-begins-operations. 27. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/press-center/press-releases/coca-cola-beverages-africa-begins-operations. 28. Maik Dünnbier, “Big Alcohol and The War In Congo,” in Alcohol Industry, Corporate Consumption Complex, Obstacle To Development, Sustainable Development , November 2013. Accessed October 30, 2018. http://iogt.org/blog/2013/11/09/heineken-and-the-war-in-congo/. 29. One aspect of the play, which is interesting considering the fact that Nottage writes for a first-world audience, isthe fact that there are no representatives of the first-world that ever appear onstage. Mama and Christian mention a white pastor missionary, a Belgian shopkeeper in Bunia, and Mama talks about “blue helmets”, UN peacekeeping forces in the final scene. The only physical presence of the first-world comes in the form of imported goods or the cultural remnants of the Belgian colonization, in the form of the French language and racial divide between blacks and whites. There are several possible reasons as to why Nottage has made the choice to keep the more fortunate first-world population out of her story, but the most powerful statement that arises from their absence is, of course, their absence. Nottage makes a point that there is little to no intervention from the outside world, and there is a sense of abandonment throughout the play. 30. Nottage, Ruined, 10. 31.“How Heineken beer survives in Congo Brewers are rare colonial-era holdouts in a notorious trouble spot.” The Economist. April 21, 2018. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.economist.com/business/2018/04/21/how-heineken-beer-survives-in-congo. 32. Olivier van Beemen, Heineken in Africa: A Multinational Unleashed, (United Kingdom: C Hurst & Company Publishers Limited, 2021). 33. Nottage, Ruined, 28. 34. Nottage, Ruined, 102. 35. Nottage, Ruined , 15. 36. Nottage, Ruined, 86. 37. Nottage, Ruined , 85. 38. Nottage, Ruined, 28. 39. Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,”68. 40. https://www.economist.com/business/2018/04/21/how-heineken-beer-survives-in-congo . 41. Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” 67. 42. Van Beeman, 59. 43. Nottage, Ruined, 181-124. 44. Nottage, Ruined, 28, 42, 81. 45. Nottage, Ruined, 13. 46. Nottage, Ruined , 25. 47. Nottage, Ruined, 25. 48. Nottage, Ruined , 13. 49. Nottage, Ruined , 31. 50. Nottage, Ruined, 41. 51. Charlie Payne, “Ruined Study Guide.” London: Almeida Projects, 2010. Accessed October 2018, https://www.nightwoodtheatre.net/uploads/RUINED,_STUDY_GUIDE.pdf. 52. Rachel Steinburg, “Web of Violence Untangling ‘Africa’s World War,’” The Berkeley Rep Magazine 5, no. 1 (2010-2011), 23. Accessed October 2018, https://www.berkeleyrep.org/season/1011/pdf/program-ru.pdf. 53. Julia DePalma, “Arena’s Page Study Guide.” Arena Stage. 2011, 4. Accessed October 2018. https://www.arenastage.org/globalassets/education/school-programs/study-guide--ruined.pdf. 54. Mvemba Phezo Dizolele, “Dodd-Frank 1502 and the Congo Crisis,” Center for Strategic and InternationalStudies, August 22, 2017. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.csis.org/analysis/dodd-frank-1502-and-congo-crisis. 55. Sudarsan Raghavan, “How a well-intentioned U.S. law left Congolese miners jobless,”The Washington Post, November 30, 2014. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/how-a-well-intentioned-us-law-left-congolese-miners-jobless/2014/11/30/14b5924e-69d3-11e4-9fb4-a622dae742a2_story.html?utm_term=.edaa0dfda37e. 56. Adalbert Murhi Mubalama, one of the ministers of mines, told The Washington Post, “As of October [2014], there were only 11 mines out of more than 900 here in South Kivu where minerals were “tagged” as conflict-free.”Raghavan, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/how-a-well-intentioned-us-law-left-congolese-miners-jobless/2014/11/30/14b5924e-69d3-11e4-9fb4-a622dae742a2_story.html?utm_term=.edaa0dfda37e. 57. Laura Kasinof, “An ugly truth behind ‘ethical consumerism’”The Washington Post. April 19, 2018. AccessedDecember 13, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/04/19/conflict-free/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6ea84da645e7. 58. Nottage, Ruined, 40. 59. Nottage, Ruined, 5. 60. Nottage, Ruined, 5-6. 61. The interconnectedness of Fanta, Primus, the armed conflict, the movement of goods intensifies Mama and Christian’s brief moment of flirtation over the cold soda, followed by the pouring of beer. Dünnbier, http://iogt.org/blog/2013/11/09/heineken-and-the-war-in-congo/and 62. Nottage, Ruined, 6. 63. Nottage, Ruined , 6-7. 64. Fanta’s advertising campaign in the early 2000s featured a group of flirtatious women called the Fantanas who would sing a song called “Wanta Fanta” and seduce men into drinking the soda in various tropical scenarios. 65. Ben Brantley, “War’s Terrors, Through a Brothel Window,”The New York Times, February 11, 2009. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/theater/reviews/11bran.html. 66. Paden, 145. 67. Jill Dolan, “Ruined, by Lynn Nottage.” The Feminist Spectator, March 13, 2009. Nov 4, 2018. http://feministspectator.princeton.edu/2009/03/16/ruined-by-lynn-nottage/. 68. Nottage, Ruined , 12. 69. Nottage, Ruined , 13. 70. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic” in Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984), 56. 71. Nottage, Ruined, 57. 72. Nottage, Ruined , 53. 73. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Why We Need Things,” In History from Things: Essays on Material Culture . Ed. Lubar, Steven D, and W. D Kingery, (SmithsonianInstitution Press, 1993), 23. 74. Nottage, Ruined , 86. 75. Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 57. 76. She cites Maria Stewart writing in 1833. Patricia Hill Collins, “The Politics of Black Feminist Thought” and “Distinguishing Features of Black Feminist Thought,” in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd editions (New York: Routledge, 2000 [1990]), 1. 77. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 2012), 14. Footnotes [1] Lynn Nottage, Ruined (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2009), 5. [2] Nottage, Ruined , 5. [3] Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 200) , 338. [4] Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 345. [5] Nottage, Ruined , xi. [6] Nottage, Ruined, xi. [7] The Kalashnikov, like the designation between the “first”, “second,” and “third world”, is a product of the Cold War, and most-often culturally associated, by Americans, with conflicts that arose as results of those international tensions and their global aftermath. [8] C. J., Chivers, The Gun . (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 9. [9] The Combahee River Collective, "A Black Feminist Statement." Women's Studies Quarterly 42, no. 3/4 (2014): 271-80, 271. [10] Nicole Rosky, “Lynn Nottage's CLYDE'S Tops List of Most-Produced Play of the Season,” Broadwayworld.com , September 23, 2022. https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Lynn-Nottage-CLYDES-Tops-List-of-Most-Produced-Play-of-the-Season-20220923 . [11] American Theatre Editors, “Offscript: Most-Produced With Lynn Nottage & Lauren Gunderson,” American Theatre, September 27, 2022. https://www.americantheatre.org/2022/09/27/offscript-most-produced-with-lynn-nottage-lauren-gunderson/ . [12] Celia Lury, Consumer Culture . 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 9. [13] Lury, Consumer Culture , 9. [14] Lury, Consumer Culture , 21-22. [15] Nottage, Ruined , xi. [16] Mohanty, 339. [17] Jeff Paden, “Hybridity of form and political potentiality in Ruined,” in A Critical Companion to Lynn Nottage (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2016), 145-159. [18] Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 66. [19] Nottage, Ruined , 5. [20] Nottage, Ruined , 5. [21] Nottage, Ruined , 5. [22] Fanta was marketed globally before it was marketed in the US due to fears that it would compete too heavily with Coca-Cola. After enjoying some popularity in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Fanta—along with other sodas—lost popularity to its sister orange soda brand Minute Maid as consumers became more interested in heathy foods and drinks. Fanta had been a bigger market item globally, especially in Africa and South America. Because of the orange soda’s popularity in Latin America, The Journal Record reported in 2001 that Fanta was being reintroduced in American markets through “Hispanic-heavy test markets in Texas, Arizona and Southern California. Sales jumped from 24.4 million cases in 2000 to 42.2 million last year, according to Beverage Digest. The jump was due to the rollout in test markets.” In 2002, the iconic Fantanas commercial was released nationally in a huge campaign, which was revived in 2004, 2006, and so on. The Fantanas became very culturally recognizable in the US, and were even featured in satires on MadTV and Family Guy . It is possible that collective memory of this marketing campaign would be accessible to “first world” audiences of Ruined in the 2010s. Admin, “Remember Fanta?: Business World ,” The Journal Record , March 6, 2002, Accessed October 26, 2023, https://journalrecord.com/2002/03/06/remember-fanta-business-world/ . [23] Washtubs and batteries are a bit vague. If this happens while doing a material culture reading of a play, especially one which takes place in a “third world” country, I recommend doing as much research as possible. In the event that research fails, and a “first world” theatre maker must fill in the “gaps”, so-to-speak with their imaginations, it is important to remember the aforementioned “baggage” regarding Western imaginations of “third world” locations and peoples. [24] “Fanta,” Wikipedia.org . Accessed October 30, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanta . [25] “The Coca-Cola System,” Coca-Cola Journey, “Our Company,” Accessed October 30, 2018. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/our-company/the-coca-cola-system . [26] “Coca-Cola Beverages Africa Begins Operations,” Coca-Cola Journey, “Press Releases,” Accessed October 30, 2018. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/press-center/press-releases/coca-cola-beverages-africa-begins-operations . [27] https://www.coca-colacompany.com/press-center/press-releases/coca-cola-beverages-africa-begins-operations . [28] Maik Dünnbier, “Big Alcohol and The War In Congo,” in Alcohol Industry, Corporate Consumption Complex, Obstacle To Development, Sustainable Development , November 2013. Accessed October 30, 2018. http://iogt.org/blog/2013/11/09/heineken-and-the-war-in-congo/ . [29] One aspect of the play, which is interesting considering the fact that Nottage writes for a first-world audience, is the fact that there are no representatives of the first-world that ever appear onstage. Mama and Christian mention a white pastor missionary, a Belgian shopkeeper in Bunia, and Mama talks about “blue helmets”, UN peacekeeping forces in the final scene. The only physical presence of the first-world comes in the form of imported goods or the cultural remnants of the Belgian colonization, in the form of the French language and racial divide between blacks and whites. There are several possible reasons as to why Nottage has made the choice to keep the more fortunate first-world population out of her story, but the most powerful statement that arises from their absence is, of course, their absence. Nottage makes a point that there is little to no intervention from the outside world, and there is a sense of abandonment throughout the play. [30] Nottage, Ruined , 10. [31] “How Heineken beer survives in Congo Brewers are rare colonial-era holdouts in a notorious trouble spot.” The Economist . April 21, 2018. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.economist.com/business/2018/04/21/how-heineken-beer-survives-in-congo . [32] Olivier van Beemen, Heineken in Africa: A Multinational Unleashed, (United Kingdom: C Hurst & Company Publishers Limited, 2021). [33] Nottage, Ruined , 28. [34] Nottage, Ruined , 102. [35] Nottage, Ruined , 15. [36] Nottage, Ruined , 86. [37] Nottage, Ruined , 85. [38] Nottage, Ruined , 28. [39] Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” 68. [40] https://www.economist.com/business/2018/04/21/how-heineken-beer-survives-in-congo . [41] Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” 67. [42] Van Beeman, 59. [43] Nottage, Ruined , 181-124. [44] Nottage, Ruined , 28, 42, 81. [45] Nottage, Ruined , 13. [46] Nottage, Ruined , 25. [47] Nottage, Ruined , 25. [48] Nottage, Ruined , 13. [49] Nottage, Ruined , 31. [50] Nottage, Ruined , 41. [51] Charlie Payne, “ Ruined Study Guide.” London: Almeida Projects, 2010. Accessed October 2018, https://www.nightwoodtheatre.net/uploads/RUINED,_STUDY_GUIDE.pdf . [52] Rachel Steinburg, “Web of Violence Untangling ‘Africa’s World War,’” The Berkeley Rep Magazine 5, no. 1 (2010-2011), 23. Accessed October 2018, https://www.berkeleyrep.org/season/1011/pdf/program-ru.pdf . [53] Julia DePalma, “Arena’s Page Study Guide.” Arena Stage. 2011, 4. Accessed October 2018. https://www.arenastage.org/globalassets/education/school-programs/study-guide--ruined.pdf . [54] Mvemba Phezo Dizolele, “Dodd-Frank 1502 and the Congo Crisis,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, August 22, 2017. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.csis.org/analysis/dodd-frank-1502-and-congo-crisis . [55] Sudarsan Raghavan, “How a well-intentioned U.S. law left Congolese miners jobless,” The Washington Post , November 30, 2014. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/how-a-well-intentioned-us-law-left-congolese-miners-jobless/2014/11/30/14b5924e-69d3-11e4-9fb4-a622dae742a2_story.html?utm_term=.edaa0dfda37e . [56] Adalbert Murhi Mubalama, one of the ministers of mines, told The Washington Post , “As of October [2014], there were only 11 mines out of more than 900 here in South Kivu where minerals were “tagged” as conflict-free.” Raghavan, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/how-a-well-intentioned-us-law-left-congolese-miners-jobless/2014/11/30/14b5924e-69d3-11e4-9fb4-a622dae742a2_story.html?utm_term=.edaa0dfda37e . [57] Laura Kasinof, “An ugly truth behind ‘ethical consumerism’” The Washington Post . April 19, 2018. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/04/19/conflict-free/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6ea84da645e7 . [58] Nottage, Ruined , 40. [59] Nottage, Ruined , 5. [60] Nottage, Ruined , 5-6. [61] The interconnectedness of Fanta, Primus, the armed conflict, the movement of goods intensifies Mama and Christian’s brief moment of flirtation over the cold soda, followed by the pouring of beer. Dünnbier, http://iogt.org/blog/2013/11/09/heineken-and-the-war-in-congo/ and Nottage, Ruined, 6. [62] Nottage, Ruined , 6. [63] Nottage, Ruined , 6-7. [64] Fanta’s advertising campaign in the early 2000s featured a group of flirtatious women called the Fantanas who would sing a song called “Wanta Fanta” and seduce men into drinking the soda in various tropical scenarios. [65] Ben Brantley, “War’s Terrors, Through a Brothel Window,” The New York Times , February 11, 2009. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/theater/reviews/11bran.html . [66] Paden, 145. [67] Jill Dolan, “Ruined, by Lynn Nottage.” The Feminist Spectator , March 13, 2009. Nov 4, 2018. http://feministspectator.princeton.edu/2009/03/16/ruined-by-lynn-nottage/ . [68] Nottage, Ruined , 12. [69] Nottage, Ruined , 13. [70] Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic” in Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984), 56. [71] Nottage, Ruined , 57 [72] Nottage, Ruined , 53. [73] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Why We Need Things,” In History from Things: Essays on Material Culture . Ed. Lubar, Steven D, and W. D Kingery, ( Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 23. [74] Nottage, Ruined , 86. [75] Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 57. [76] She cites Maria Stewart writing in 1833. Patricia Hill Collins, “The Politics of Black Feminist Thought” and “Distinguishing Features of Black Feminist Thought,” Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment , 2nd editions (New York: Routledge, 2000 [1990]), 1. [77] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 2012), 14. About The Author(s) Christen Mandracchia is an Assistant Professor and Production Manager in West Chester University’s Department of Theatre and Dance. She earned her doctorate in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research emphasizes material histories of theatrical labor, with a special emphasis on theatre professionals who venture into non-theatrical fields. Areas of research also include theatre architecture, queer theatre history, and musical 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. 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Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 17 Spring 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage LEILI & MAJNUN. Written and directed by Torange Yeghiazarian By Namrata Verghese Published: May 12, 2025 Download Article as PDF REVIEW: LEILI & MAJNUN. Written and directed by Torange Yeghiazarian. Central Stage, Richmond. December 7, 2024. By Namrata Verghese “For this being is yours, my love, it is no longer me / In giving myself to you, my love, I am at last free.” — Majnun, Leili & Majnun Torange Yeghiazarian’s lush reimagining of Leili & Majnun injects the ancient Persian epic with new life. From the soundscape that marries the rhythms of Iranian, Arabic, Kurdish, and western music to the visual language of graffiti art and Persian miniature painting, the production celebrates the hybridity of Iranian diasporic storytelling. Produced by Central Stage, the Bay Area’s only production company founded and operated by Iranian artists, Yeghiazarian’s Leili & Majnun updates the twelfth-century epic for a globalized audience. It also spotlights its enduring resonance: although separated from Nizami by many millennia and miles, those temporal and spatial coordinates collapse when Leili & Majnun opens, and we are simply another audience, like the thousands that came before us, listening to Nizami’s poetry with bated breath. Like many people of Middle Eastern and South Asian heritage, I grew up with the story of Leila [1] and Majnun. It is, as Yeghiazarian notes in her program note, “the most popular love story in the Middle East and the many cultures influenced by the region’s literary treasures.” It is even rumored to have inspired Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet , a similarly tragic tale of star-crossed lovers. Yeghiazarian’s adaptation is based on Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi’s epic, which itself is based on the fabled love story between seventh century Arabic poet Qays ibn al-Mulawwah and his lover, Layla bint Mahdi. Still, even within the parameters of the well-known story, Yeghiazarian’s voice shines through in the play’s balancing of old and new, tradition and innovation. As an audience member, part of the thrill of the genre of the adaptation is tracking the director’s negotiation between familiar and novel elements. Yeghiazarian keeps us guessing as to which elements of the story remain the same and which she tweaks, delivering both nostalgia and freshness in equal measure. Leili & Majnun opens with the naqqal , or narrator, reciting Persian poetry, while a taut drumroll thrums in the background. In keeping with the play’s overarching theme of blending the old with the new, Yeghiazarian casts a woman in the role of naqqal , which is traditionally performed by a man, putting a fresh, feminist twist on an ancient tradition. The directorial decision to begin with Persian, without English translation, is striking. The play does not cater to a western audience; rather, we sit with the Persian, transported to another world. Soon, the ensemble chimes in, moving us into English with the lines: “We open our story in your name, the greatest name of all, never would I begin, without your name in my call / Your name is the key to all that’s locked, the solution to whatever is blocked / O maker of our thoughts and origin of our soul, being and nothingness are equally in your control.” The choice to blend Persian poetry with an English invocation is emblematic of Yeghiazarian’s embrace of diasporic hybridity. It did not seem to alienate the audience; rather, I watched many audience members, some of whom may be familiar with Nizami’s poetry and some who certainly were not, sit up, lean forward and catch their breath. The poem’s affective power transcended language. Image 1: The Naghal (Dina Zarif); photograph by Diaspora Arts Connection In a cheeky tribute to the original epic, once again demonstrating her deftness in drawing together the ancient and the contemporary, Yeghiazarian casts Nizami as a character in his own epic. The poet walks onstage, brandishing a comically large feather pen, sparking hoots and hollers from the crowd. At the behest of his son and the king, Nizami begins to recite the “cherished Arab love poem,” that “tasty Arab tale … made even more delicious when you tell it,” as his son tells him. The following tale melds the naqqal tradition of Persian storytelling with the contemporary form of musical theater. The first song, “It Is a Celebration,” which spotlights the community’s exuberance at Qays’s birth, beautifully captures the hybridity of this reimagining. “It is a celebration / a joyful congregation / The nobleman of the Aumerian clan / has a son,” the ensemble sings, palpable delight in their voices. “At last, at last, at last!” Each “at last” is accompanied by a clap, lending the song a folksy sound. The piece brings together Arabic rhythms and English lyrics in a way that does not require translation. Even the costuming feels like a nod to this hybridity—the actor who plays Leili, for instance, wore shalvar trousers with white tennis shoes. Image 2: The ensemble (right to left: Ameen Safi, Roeen Nooran, Dina Zarif, Behzad Golemohammadi, Yasaman Asgari, Adrienne Shamszad, and Brandon DiPaula) celebrating the birth of Qays; photograph by Diaspora Arts Connection Yeghiazarian’s adaptation hits many of the canonical notes: the staging is set in the “ancient Najd Desert of Arabia,” where Leili, the “moon-faced beauty,” and Qays, pride of his father’s Bedouin clan and poet whose “ruby lips … spread pearls,” meet in school. They’re immediately smitten with each other: “Do you ever feel like your heart is about to burst?” Qays asks Leila, to which she responds, “Like a pomegranate?” The actors do a wonderful job of portraying the shy glances and nervous smiles of a burgeoning crush. The two soon fall in love— “With one sweet smile from Qays,” the ensemble narrates, “Leili was lost”—but are forcibly separated. The separation is staged poignantly: Leili tells Qays, “They’re going to take me out of school.” The light, romantic music turns darker, more dissonant. The two protest; Qays cries out, “She has a thousand curls in her hair; how could I not get tangled up?” Leili responds, “His eyes are full of poetry; I need a thousand more days to read them.” [2] As the two recite poetry professing their love, the other cast members circle the pair, stomping their feet, hissing, “Shame. Shame. Shame.” Sharp staccato notes accompany the words, filling the atmosphere with dread. Unable to bear their separation, Qays unravels. The staging of this moment adds to its affective intensity: Qays, clad in a plain white tunic, pulls the cloth from his chest. The entire garment falls apart into tattered rags that represent the character’s unraveling mental state. Qays runs into the audience, wandering up and down the stairs, searching for his lover—a particularly effective directorial choice, as audience members get to witness, up close, his visceral devastation. Eventually, Qays flees to the desert. “He wandered the dusty pathways among the tribal tents,” the ensemble laments, “Longing for Leili. Searching for Leili. Every day. Everywhere.” Because Central Stage is a volunteer-run theater, the set design is sparse, but extremely thoughtful: we transition from the community into the desert through the simple addition of a large tree in the corner of the stage, under which Qays rests during his self-imposed exile. The tree’s long, wispy tendrils simultaneously shade him and obscure him from our gaze. Here, in the desert, Qays becomes “Majnun,” the eponymous “mad” lover of the original epic. The ensemble narrates, “The clan folk were unkind … To them, he was but a cad / And so, they declared him mad: Majnun! Majnun!” He spends his days writing love poetry on scraps of paper that he throws into the wind. When travelers encounter them, they are so moved by the beautiful verse that they spread the tale of Leili and Qays far and wide. From here, the play progresses to its canonical end: the lovers, separated for decades, reunite just once more before they die, heartbroken and alone. The play ends on a bittersweet note of hope: “This earthy world is ephemeral, the other eternal and pure,” the ensemble recites, “Leili and Majnun were unified in heaven, we are assured / Their love story immortalized and spread across the world.” Image 3: Majnoon (Roeen Nooran) praying to the starry night; photograph by Diaspora Arts Connection Despite its adherence to the narrative contours of the epic, Yeghiazarian’s reimagining nevertheless bears her authorial stamp. The play is distinctive in its diasporic hybridity, both in form, as the discussion of language and music above indicates, and its content. With wry humor, Yeghiazarian often references contemporary events and locations. For instance, when describing Leili’s beauty, a cast member translates: “In the Bay Area, one might say ‘her Middle Eastern good looks swooned American hearts.’” During an intense battle scene, the stage glowing with ominous red light, a cast member pauses, stands up, and says, in the highfalutin style of a BBC reporter, “The death toll was unexpectedly high,” parodying media approaches to conflicts in the Middle East. When the battle ends, the ensemble describes it as a “triumph,” and then quips, “Although, given the description of the massive death and destruction, one wonders if Master Nizami is being facetious in describing this as a triumph.” These surprising bursts of humor are striking in their playfulness. Because the poem is, famously, a tragic love story, most of its adaptations come off somber and heavy. But the lighter moments of levity in Yeghiazarian’s adaptation distinguishes the play’s tone from other tellings and break up the gravity of the narrative. Such choices allow the audience to catch their breath and eventually make the more difficult moments hit even harder. They also underscore the play’s relevance to a contemporary audience, as these direct ties to ongoing events make the romantic epic feel current and urgent. Connecting the past and present was part of Yeghiazarian’s goal for the play; she writes in a press release that celebrating “one of the most beloved Middle Eastern love stories” felt particularly prescient “as we face heightened political volatility in the Middle East.” Ultimately, Leili & Majnun is a luminous tribute to the Nizami epic. The care invested into the production from every angle, from the cast to the creative team, feels tangible. It is a true celebration of centuries of Iranian storytelling, from the ancient to the modern. At the same time, Yeghiazarian reimagines the epic for a globalized audience, attending, in particular, to the generative creative possibilities of hybridity. In its deft braiding of traditional and unconventional elements, Leili & Majnun accomplishes what the form of the adaptation can do, at its best: make the old feel new again. [1] I use “Leili” to refer to the protagonist of Yeghiazarian’s play, entitled Leili & Majnun , and “Leila” to refer to the character in the epic. [2] As anchored in the tradition of orality as this play is, the repetition of the word “thousand” in these lines reads as an intertextual gesture to another folktale from the region that began as an oral story cycle: One Thousand and One Nights . Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Namrata Verghese is a PhD candidate in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University, and a JD candidate at Stanford Law School. Her research spans postcolonial studies, queer and trans theory, and the legal humanities; her dissertation project, Litigating Desire: Queer Literature on Trial in Twentieth Century India , locates encounters between British colonial law and queer literary production in the decades bookending Indian Independence. She was the winner of the Postcolonial Studies Association’s Postgraduate Essay Competition , and the Jeffrey S. Haber Award Prize for Student Scholarship . Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Law & Literature ; the Journal of Postcolonial Writing ; Law, Culture, and the Humanities ; the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities ; the Dukeminier Awards Journal of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law ; and the Routledge Companion to Cultural Text and the Nation . Her public scholarship has appeared in Teen Vogue , The Los Angeles Review of Books , The Millions , and elsewhere. Her work is supported by the Ric Weiland Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities and Sciences, the Stanford Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis Digital Humanities Fellowship, the McCoy Center for Ethics Fellowship, the Stanford Center for South Asia Graduate Student Research Fellowship, and the Mellon Centering Race Consortium Graduate Fellowship. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents O Lord! By Ali Abdel-Nabi Al-Zaidi Mothers Challenging the Divine: Ali Al-Zaidi’s Ya Rab! The 31st Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre. September 1-11, 2024. ARTIFICIAL HEART. By Mohammad Basha and Firas Farrah. LEILI & MAJNUN. Written and directed by Torange Yeghiazarian SHAHADAT (THE TESTIMONIES) Adapted by Fouad Teymour Review: TO THE GOOD PEOPLE OF GAZA: THEATRE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Daphne P. Lei Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Daphne P. Lei By Published on May 22, 2022 Download Article as PDF “China boys, you be legendary obeyers of the law, legendary humble, legendary passive…. I curse ya honorary white!”—Frank Chin, Chickencoop Chinaman (1972) [1] “You are not White and that is what matters to some men.”—Philip Kan Gotanda, I Dream of Chang and Eng (2016) [2] The oscillation and negotiation between “honorary white” and “not white” reflect the Asian American experience on stage and in society. The first Chinese student Yung Wing graduated from Yale University in 1854; however, AAPI students continued to struggle against injustice and discrimination in the education system and finally, in 2009 President Obama signed the Executive Order 13515 to establish Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISI) programs on university campuses. [3] The slow recognition of AAPI students in higher education reveals a fundamental problem of negotiating a minoritarian time with the majoritarian space, which I address by interrogating similar issues in university theatre and by proposing a new dramaturgical paradigm and theatre pedagogy. I challenge contemporary diversity rhetoric, which focuses on an off-white spatial inclusivity, and I advocate for a unique minoritarian time: the off-yellow time. My brief analysis of the production of Philip Kan Gotanda’s I Dream of Chang and Eng (University of California, Irvine, 2017) illustrates the intervention of activist Asian American dramaturgy. Diversity is not just a keyword in a university’s value statement; it has an intricate and intrinsic relationship with materiality, affect, and learning. [4] California, where I reside and work, is facing unique challenges: The 2020 US Census reports that about 7.2% of the US population and 17% of California’s population is AAPI. My institution, University of California, Irvine, is both an AANAPISI and HSI (Hispanic Serving Institution); 37% of the domestic student population is AAPI, and 75% of international students are from Asian countries as of 2020. The shifting majority-minority population ratio and increasing transpacific influx [5] directly confront the familiar American “racial formation,” which relies on the sociopolitical representation of “different types of human bodies.” [6] Fortunately, Asian Americans come to the rescue with what I call utility ethnicity because they both fall within and exceed frames of racial diversity: Asian faculty often bear the extra burden of serving as token representatives or mentors for underrepresented groups; when necessary, Asians are included under the umbrella of BIPOC to boost a bigger diversity number for the institution; AAPI students are usually excluded from URM (underrepresented minority) fellowships because of the misconception of universal Asian wealth. Being “utile,” AAPI are presented as minorities, people of color, or honorary whites. Utility ethnicity , or an ethnicity with racial value contingent on institutional need, is an empty signifier because the significance of the specific racial group can be re/determined based on the context. It is also a diversity placeholder because the degrees of colorization can be re/defined to balance the ethnic diversity of the whole . Utility ethnicity allows the institutionalized diversity rhetoric to stay in flux and à la mode, so a perfect diversity snapshot of the institution is available at any given moment. Race and ethnicity are often approached in spatial terms. George Lipsitz analyzes how racism takes place through segregation, exclusion, commodification, and other means. [7] Diversity rhetoric—inclusivity, visibility, mobility, intersectionality—implies that diversity takes up space , concretely or metaphorically, two or three-dimensionally, in a majoritarian place. To include people who “look different” in a traditionally white space is a simple way to imagine diversity. [8] Just look at the multicolor recruitment brochures or diversity pie charts of any American university, which is often described as “a site of colonization and US imperialism” [9] where “white cultural identifiers are the default.” [10] Race and ethnicity in US history are always tied with citizenship. The process of naturalization/neutralization inevitably happens when minority students enter the colonial space of the university. They need to be off-white. What is off-white? “Off-white” is “a yellowish or grayish white” [11] ; to make off-white paint, one needs “stock white” mixed with a tint of “yellow oxide.” [12] To enter the space of higher education, many AAPI students try to maximize the “stock white”; however, unlike different kinds of whiteness with historically contingent mobility, [13] yellowness remains a tint that cannot be eliminated completely. Off-white, the subdued background color that every institution needs, is the best entry ticket for Asian Americans. Off-white is the new yellow in higher education; the most diversity-conscientious institution might best be an off-white institution. Although there is more awareness about “conscientious” training (vs. conventional training) [14] and color “conscious” casting (vs. color-blind casting) [15] today, for Asian American actors, progress is painfully slow. In the theatre conservatory setting, the dynamics of traditional master-disciple are similar to what Homi Bhabha calls “colonial mimicry”: “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.” [16] The Asian American mimicry— almost the same, but not quite; not quite, not white, only off-white —also has the implication of neutralization, naturalization, and legitimization. In general, a conservatory wishes to maximize students’ marketability with the efficient machinery running on a well-tested colonial formula at the institutional tempo. Any slippage, ambivalence, curiosity, risk-taking, or experimentation would interrupt the flow and cause deviation. AAPI theatre students go with the flow, staying low in their off-white minor or ensemble roles, which are the best roles AAPIs can hope for in a conventional season. While the off-white ensemble contributes to the look of diversity without causing a ruckus, denying actors of color their cultural identifiers is doubly failing them in education, as ethnicity-specific roles are still needed in the industry. [17] I approach Asian American dramaturgy in higher education by prioritizing temporality, which is inevitably connected to spatiality. There are different ways of considering AAPI time. Historically, vying for spatial coexistence, the East often needed to exist behind Western time. Such “temporal disjunction” deprived Asians of contemporaneity. [18] The progression/regression in immigration policies determined the spatial inclusion/exclusion of AAPIs at any historical moment. For theatre education, my emphasis is on tempo —the flow, speed, rhythm, interruption, and flexibility of time. A polyphonic tune incorporated with various tempi — andante, allegro, ritardando, staccato, legato , and rubato— describes a successful diversity theatre pedagogy. [19] Time defines space, space alters time. It is through flexible tempi that an off-yellow time can be cultivated, and equity and humanity can be imagined. I Dream of Chang and Eng (2017), the first mainstage production at the University of California, Irvine with AAPI actors in leading roles since the department’s inception in 1956, was a temporary rupture of the well-established theatre conservatory paradigm. I first proposed the play for the season of 2015–2016, understanding my chance of success would be slim, but I also knew that without an Asian American play in the season, there would be no progress for Asian theatrical visibility. The story about the famous Siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker (1811-1874), depicts Asian immigrants’ struggles against xenophobia and their ultimate success—a perfect story to address the changing campus demographics and climate. Practicality was on my mind: with racial anomaly as the theme, the script required only four Asian actors and one Black actor, which seemed a manageable challenge. The director ended up casting seven white actors and one Latinx actor, besides the aforementioned five. Strategically, instead of vouching for Asian actors’ perfect colonial mimicry (almost white), I stressed their yellowness as a unique asset for authentically portraying immigrants. After long and sincere conversations, the department promised to reconsider the play if qualified Asian actors could be identified the next year. The extended deadline motivated me to found “Theatre Woks” in late 2015 to identify and cultivate Asian talent; if I can’t find qualified Asian actors, I will make them! AAPI students responded overwhelmingly and our goal was crystal clear—to prove that we are here and we are good enough . I enlisted help to train actors, emphasizing diction and audition skills, dismantling the myth that Asians do not speak good (American midwestern) English. [20] After a few months’ work, we presented a staged reading to showcase Asian American actors, and we received the green light from the department. The mainstage season, which usually consists of six productions, is decided collectively by faculty after a laborious, months-long process. As a non-practice faculty member crossing the practice/scholarship divide obtaining a major slot for minoritized students, I understood that the unique opportunity for Chang and Eng might also create some discomfort. I volunteered to be the dramaturg. A dramaturg always needs to negotiate their inside/outside/tangential positionality. On the one hand, a faculty dramaturg in an all-student production requires even more mindfulness of the power dynamics. On the other hand, a knowledgeable Asian American dramaturg needs to take an activist role to steer the production and avoid the nightmarish embarrassment of yellowface or inauthentic Asian mise en scène . I needed to be there but not get in the way. I built a website to house my extensive research as a knowledge bank for the creative and production teams. I shared my collection of Chinese opera costumes with the MFA student designers to help them properly build the costumes, including the shoes for Afong Moy’s bound feet. I organized a two-day scholarly symposium, approaching the theme from such disciplines as disability studies, linguistics, and anthropology. I had clear communication and great rapport with the director. However, cracking institutionalized conventions such as strict protocols for staging certain types of scenes required patience and creativity. I was simultaneously a coach of language and Chinese opera movements, a consultant for the director and designers, a peer ethnographer in the mode of “deep hanging out,” [21] and a friend listening to students’ concerns (Fig. 1). Figure 1. Soon after Chang and Eng’s arrival in Boston, America was busy transforming them into Oriental commodity for the white entertainment industry. In the center, Edmund Truong (left) and Kevin Lin (right) play the famous Siamese Twins. I Dream of Chang and Eng by Philip Kan Gotanda, directed by Ricardo Rocha, at University of California, Irvine (spring, 2017). Photo by Paul R. Kennedy. To truly convey the hardships Chang and Eng faced as new immigrants in a hostile environment and to maximize the educational opportunity for students, the director set up an “off-yellow” laboratory: with the playwright’s approval, each actor would speak some of their lines in Mandarin Chinese. Among the thirteen actors, only two were native Mandarin speakers, whose yellowness became a resource for their peers, reversing the yellow/white hierarchy. [22] I translated the lines and marked them with pinyin romanization and gave individual tutorials. The equal awkwardness that all non-Mandarin speakers—both those who were AAPI and those who were not—experienced built a surprising camaraderie. Students greeted each other with their Chinese lines, including the line by the only Black character: “You are not White ( ni bushi bairen ).” This reversed colonial mimicry made the non-Asian students understand their arduous work could best make them feel “off-yellow,” whereas their fellow AAPI students constantly needed to strive for feeling “off-white.” [23] The similar awkwardness shared across racial lines offered a rare educational opportunity as the linguistically unfit challenged the conventional notion of racial misfits. The play itself engages with these critical questions of racialization. On their voyage to Boston, Chang and Eng befriend Learned Jack, a free Black sailor, who warns them of their true color: “You are not White and that is what matters to some men” (12). Thriving on displaying their freakish yellowness, Chan and Eng never understand their yellow existence in real-life horror. In a scene set in 1835, on their way to the city of Jackson, they are mistaken as “poor Indians savages” (26) (“Chocktaw. Seminoles maybe…” [43]) and nearly lynched. “Are we colored or abominations?” they ask desperately after having escaped the near-death violence. They are reminded again: “You are not white.” (45) The yellowness that spills off stage almost costs them their real lives; their color is the true abomination (Fig. 2). Figure 2. Chang and Eng are mistaken for “poor Indians savages” and nearly lynched. They ask: “Are we colored or abominations?” Learned Jack (Chris Menza, left) clarifies: “You are not white.” I Dream of Chang and Eng by Philip Kan Gotanda, directed by Ricardo Rocha, at University of California, Irvine (spring, 2017). Photo by Paul R. Kennedy. My pedagogical intervention was to alter the institutional tempo. An experienced graduate student actor of color from the cast described the institutional time/space: when opening their mouths, students of color always need to be well-informed and articulate because they don’t have the privilege of making mistakes or asking questions, unlike white students whose curiosity is encouraged. Minority students need to proceed with the speed of andante (walking) and the attitude of allegro (happy), or, as he explained to me, they are made to feel that “they do not deserve to be there.” This is exactly when time means space: allowing doubts or errors means privileged time— ritardando (slowing down) and staccato (interruption)—which translates into privileged space—“deserving to be there.” A graduate designer of color noted that faculty tended to talk to her in a slow manner as if she did not have the intellectual capacity to comprehend instructions. The change of tempo when addressing a native English speaker of color from andante to an uninvited ritardando perhaps “meant well” but backfired because of the racialized and gendered implications. Despite my activism, the systemic racialized aura and residue were still very prevalent in the overall production structure, and most minority students (both actors and crew) felt frustrated. The MFA actor of color noticed that AAPI students were belittled, often not in public: “It is privately beating them down, breaking them, making them feel worthless and lose confidence.” All AAPI students expressed similar sentiments but made a conscious choice not to speak up for fear that the first Asian American production would be the last if Asian American students were proven to be troublemakers. They felt that they had already taken up very precious space on stage, so asking for extra time would have been too much. They were extremely proud to be involved in the historic production and saddened by the difficult experience. [24] The sold-out performances were beautifully moving; many audience members came to me with sincere appreciation, often in tears. Unfortunately, the animosity toward minority students and the lack of enthusiasm for another AAPI production afterward beg the question: did the production aiming to celebrate AAPI lives become an institutional mechanism to deem Asian American students unfit? Nevertheless, there was a profound, personal impact on AAPI students and audiences, and Theatre Woks continued to thrive. My hope is that students will stage their own dramaturgical interventions and little by little, show by show, eventually change the climate of theatre at the university and beyond. Here, finally, I want to introduce another concept of time: tempo rubato, stolen time. Tempo rubato offers the flexibility to alter the tempo for learning. Tempo rubato is responsible borrowing, not outright stealing; the time borrowed needs to be paid back. Off-white is achieved through elimination, but off-yellow through deliberate cultivation. If the institutional time would allow tempo rubato , students could have the luxury to learn about ethnic and cultural complexities, such as taking the time to learn a line of Chinese or a proper movement, such as letting oneself experience embarrassment and awkwardness and creating an off-yellow time and space for all. If the institution allows activist Asian American dramaturgy to implement ritardando in the early process to inspire deep learning, andante and allegro might happen organically in the future. Instead of celebrating AAPI’s off-whiteness, Asian American activist dramatury advocates an off-yellow tempo to help imagine a space for truly diverse thinking, equitable learning, and compassionate being. References [1] Frank Chin, Chickencoop Chinaman/The Year of Dragon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), 37. [2] Philip Kan Gotanda, “I Dream of Chang and Eng” (unpublished manuscript, 28 July 2016), doc file. Subsequent quotations from the play will come from this unpublished manuscript. I wish to express my gratitude to Philip Kan Gotanda, renowned pioneer Asian American playwright, filmmaker, and educator. Gotanda first introduced me to an earlier version of the play in 2012 and was very supportive throughout the production process. He was the keynote speaker in the symposium I organized for the production and saw the performance. [3] For a university to qualify for AANAPISI status, the enrollment of AAPI undergraduate students has to be at least 10%. [4] Sara Ahmed defines diversity work (programs to promote diversity), diversity practitioners (people who design and implement diversity programs and policies), and diversity world (meetings, workshops, and conference on diversity) in her book On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2012). [5] Loan Anh Pham, “Campus UC Irvine ranked No. 2 in diversity among colleges,” AsAmNews , 21 September 2020, https://asamnews.com/2020/09/21/wall-street-journal-ranks-uc-irvine-second-in-diversity-among-nations-colleges-both-an-asian-american-pacific-islander-and-hispanic-serving-institution/. [6] Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formations in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994), 55-56. [7] George Lipsitz. How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). [8] Nirwar Puwar, Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies out of Place (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 1. [9] Claire Zhuang, “A Parting Letter to My MFA Program,” Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics, 6 June 2017, https://www.ethosreview.org/intellectual-spaces/a-parting-letter-to-my-mfa-program. Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20180730052129/https://www.ethosreview.org/intellectual-spaces/a-parting-letter-to-my-mfa-program (accessed 7 April 2021). Frustrated with the imperialistic approach and white supremacist value in theatre education, she read the letter during her portfolio review and withdrew from the program at the University of Virginia. [10] Nicole Brewer, “Training with a Difference.” American Theatre (January 2018), 54-58. [11] Merriam-Webster , s.v. “off-white ( n. ),” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/off-white (accessed 28 May 2022). [12] Dean Stickler, The Keys to Color: A Decorator’s Handbook for Coloring Paints, Plasters and Glazes (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2010), 55. According to color theory, off-white is within the shade of white, which includes cream, ivory, eggshell, vanilla, and others. [13] According to Matthew Frye Jacobson, one can be “both white and racially distinct from other whites.” Different kinds of whites (Celts, Slavs, Anglos) can “become” Caucasians (vs. non-white) at different historical moments. See Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1998), 6. In Southern California today, the large population of Armenian and Iranian Americans, which might be seen as socially and culturally “less white” than the Irish in early American history, is nevertheless “white” according to the US Census. [14] Nicole Brewer writes, “Conscientious training believes that the background and knowledge each student brings must be acknowledged as relevant and pertinent to their development in theatre.” It develops a “cross-cultural collaborative curriculum.” Brewer, “Training with a Difference,” American Theatre (January 2018), 54-58. [15] August Wilson, “The Ground on Which I Stand, a Speech on Black Theatre and Performance.” Callaloo 20, no. 3 (1998): 493-503. [16] Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 85-92. [17] Brewer, 54-58. [18] Daphne P. Lei, Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity across the Pacific (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 73-75. [19] Andante, allegro, ritardando, staccato, legato , and rubato are common musical terms to mark time. Andante ( lit. walking) is moderate speed; allegro ( lit. happy) indicates fast and bright tempo; and staccato ( lit. detached) means playing notes separately while legato ( lit. tied together) means connecting the notes while playing; ritardando is slowing down; rubato ( lit. stolen) indicates that strict tempo can be modified to allow for expressive freedom. [20] Ricardo Rocha, a PhD student with professional acting and directing experience helped me train actors. He was later chosen to be the director of Chang and Eng by the department chair. [21] Dorinne Kondo identifies Renato Rosaldo’s “deep hanging out” as an ethnographical style of dramaturgy in her World-Making: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 7. [22] I also recruited two community members, eleven-year-old twins who are native Chinese speakers to play the young twins. Their scenes were separately rehearsed, so I do not include them in the language learning experience. [23] I am obviously paying homage to José Estaban Muñoz’s theorization of “feeling brown” and Donatella Galella’s “feeling yellow.” See Muñoz, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s ‘The Sweetest Hangover (And Other STDs),’” Theatre Journal 52, no. 1, Latino Performance (March 2000): 67-79, and Galella, “Feeling Yellow: Responding to Contemporary Yellowface in Musical Performance,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 32, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 67-77. [24] To avoid any faculty/student conflict, no students signed up for class credits with me. I interviewed them only after the production was over so they could speak frankly about their experience. Footnotes About The Author(s) Daphne P. Lei is Professor of Drama, at the University of California, Irvine. She is internationally known for her scholarship on Chinese opera, Asian American theatre, intercultural, transnational, and transpacific performance. She is the author of three monographs: Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity across the Pacific (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), Alternative Chinese Opera in the Age of Globalization: Performing Zero (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Uncrossing the Borders: Performing Chinese in Gendered (Trans)Nationalism (University of Michigan Press, 2019). Daphne P. Lei is also the co-editor of The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance (Bloomsbury, 2020, with Charlotte McIvor) and is currently co-authoring Theatre Histories: An Introduction (Routledge, 4th edition) with Tobin Nellhaus, Tamara Underiner, and Patricia Ybarra. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 18 Winter 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Practicing Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Reinscription of Memory in Palestine By Marina Johnson Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF In Palestine, a landscape fractured by checkpoints, walls, and forced displacement, site-specific performance becomes a radical act of world-making. To stage art in public space under conditions of occupation is not merely to perform. It is to assert a material presence, to refuse erasure, and to mobilize bodies and spaces as archives of contested histories. [1] There can be a clear danger in Palestinians asserting their identity across the constraints of the land. This article examines how site-specific performance in Palestine functions as a spatial practice that writes and rewrites dominant narratives of place, identity, and history. El Hakawati Theatre’s Salah and Basma and Nur Garabli and Studio Collective’s “Moving Visual and Performance Exhibition” transform everyday spaces into theatrical sites of remembrance by inviting audiences to navigate layered landscapes, challenge dominant narratives, and cultivate new relationships between memory and quotidian life. These performances do not simply aim to put the past on stage. Instead, they actively engage in the making of memory. By analyzing these performances, I argue that Palestinian site-specific theatre does more than commemorate the past. It activates a radical memory practice that confronts colonial spatial regimes. These works exemplify how performance can inhabit and remake space by asserting presence and resisting erasure. Salah and Basma I followed the audience down the gray stone stairs in Jerusalem’s Old City, but it became hard to differentiate between those at the site to watch the performance and those going about their lives. My heart raced, partially from excitement at finally seeing a play associated with the Palestinian National Theatre El Hakawati and partially because I was unsure what to expect in a city that feels as fraught as Jerusalem. Children ran around, adults occasionally stopped to listen to the performers, and the occasional motorcycle or cart passed by us, a disruption that made me jump while others more familiar with the sights and sounds of the Old City seemed to barely notice. In the Old City, all of the layers of Jerusalem seem to converge–religious sites, historical locales, popular cafes and bars, merchants selling spices and religious souvenirs. Would this Palestinian theatre troupe experience any problems talking about the specific Palestinian history in this play? El Hakawati’s Salah and Basma is a landmark site-specific, promenade-style performance that transforms the Old City of Jerusalem into a living archive of Palestinian memory and presence. Set in 1966, just before the Six-Day War and Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, the play follows the love story of Salah, a young man returning home from university in Beirut, played by Mohammad Basha, and Basma, a spirited local nurse played by Fatima Abu Alul. They meet, fall in love, and prepare for marriage amidst a bustling, interwoven community full of humor and nostalgia. Audiences traverse the alleyways, courtyards, and springs of neighborhoods such as Harat al-Sa‘adiyya, Bab al-Hutta, and Bab al-Asbat, guided by two narrators who weave together historical commentary, personal anecdotes, and interactions with local characters. Drawing on Doreen Massey’s conceptualization of space as relational, always under construction, and constituted through material and social practices, Salah and Basma can be read as an intervention in the spatial politics of Jerusalem. Massey reminds us that space is not a neutral container but “the product of interrelations” and “always in the process of being made”. [2] In the Palestinian context, these interrelations include everyday acts of navigating fragmented geographies, telling stories, and performing identity. Through its site-specific form, Salah and Basma participates in what Massey describes as “practices of quotidian negotiation and contestation,” re-inscribing Palestinian presence in a landscape increasingly structured by surveillance, gentrification, and settler colonial displacement. [3] The final scene, marked by panic and poetic reflection, culminates in a collective recitation of a line from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “In Jerusalem,” inviting the audience to reflect on memories of Jerusalem and endurance. Yet, Salah and Basma is more than a nostalgic narrative or a historical reenactment–it is a performative act of spatial reclamation. The production does not simply occur in the Old City; it is of the Old City. It activates space as a co-author, layering personal and historical narratives onto the built environment, and insisting on the presence of memory within contested geographies. As we walked with the performers through the streets of Jerusalem, passing signs in Arabic, English, and Hebrew, the fictional love story unfolded against the backdrop of lived Palestinian histories, some visible, others rendered nearly invisible by ongoing processes of erasure. The quotidian rhythms of the city, motorcycles honking, children returning home for dinner, an Israeli tour guide cutting through the scene with Hebrew narration, did not disrupt the performance but heightened its insistence that history is neither static nor past. It is layered, contested by different groups, and persistently present. Hosam Abu Esheh (far right), as the character Hosam, leading the audience through the Old City of Jerusalem. Photo courtesy of El-Hakawati Theatre The narrative is framed as a guided walking tour, with characters Shaden and Hosam (played by Shaden Saleem and Hosam Abu Esheh) and blends archival memory and dramatic storytelling, with moments that blur time, space, and identity, asking the audience to “close your eyes and come back with us to a beautiful summer day in 1966.” [4] This is especially meaningful as Hosam is a lifetime resident of Jerusalem’s Old City and a keeper of much of the oral history that was part of this piece; while I did not know Hosam personally when I participated in this site-specific experience, I knew his reputation and was aware that many in the audience attended because of this famed storyteller. Salah's journey takes him through familiar places infused with local color and personal memory: his old Qur’an school led by Sheikha Sanad; the bakery where ka‘k (sesame bread) is revered; and the ironer’s shop, where he first lays eyes on Basma. Their connection grows when they reunite at the Austrian Hospice Hospital, where Basma is working. Their flirtation is sweet and shy: Salah: You’re kind. Basma: No, [I’m] Basma. They laugh. And you’re respectful. Salah: No, Salah. I’m Salah. Basma: And I’m Basma… break time is over. I have to go. Salah: Can I see you? Basma: Every day during break. [5] As their relationship deepens, Salah faces pressure from his mother to marry someone within their social class. “Are we in the spice market?” he protests when she offers him a stack of women’s photos. Despite the social gap, Basma is the daughter of Abu Khaled, a wealthy livestock trader, and Salah’s father ultimately agrees to approach the mukhtar to arrange the engagement. A formal proposal follows, culminating in a traditional engagement scene. The wedding plans are laid with communal joy and contributions, someone brings the carpet, someone the tea cups, reflecting the spirit of solidarity: “It was mutual support in building, celebrations, and sorrows.” But just as the wedding zaffe begins, the joy is shattered as gunfire interrupts the celebration. “They bombed the city, folks! They bombed Harat al-Saadiyya—they bombed Bab Hutta!” cries Abu Salah. [6] The war of 1967 has begun. The final moments of the piece are solemn and poetic, ending with a stirring recital of Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “In Jerusalem,” highlighting the beauty and historical burden of the city: “I walk. I fly. I become other than me in the epiphany.” In the end, the narrators thank the audience, having taken them “just a little” into the lived past of Jerusalem’s Old City. [7] The cast of Salah and Basma in the Old City of Jerusalem in the final moments of the performance, 2023. Cast from L to R: Nidal Jubeh, Shaden Saleem, Mohammad Basha, Fatima Abu Alul, and Hosam Abu Esheh. Photo courtesy of El-Hakawati Theatre Salah and Basma enacts performative repetition through the very act of walking, narrating, and remembering. By guiding audiences through spaces both familiar and transformed, the production inscribes their bodies into a shared narrative, affirming collective claims to space and memory. In doing so, it foregrounds Arabic language, everyday Palestinian life, and the pluralistic character of Jerusalem prior to 1967. The site-specificity of the play is foundational as each location becomes both stage and character, saturated with meaning and history. Many sites served a different function in the history of the Old City than they did when we watched the piece, allowing the audience to piece together the layers of the city. As the narrators reflect on the past, the city itself bears witness, rendering visible the intimacy, plurality, and cultural continuity of Palestinian Jerusalem. The tour ends with the 1967 war beginning, a history that most watching the piece knew all too well. The closing invocation of Darwish’s poetry links this local story to a broader cultural consciousness, framing the city as both physical and metaphysical, a place where memory, identity, and resistance converge. Ultimately, Salah and Basma exemplifies how Palestinian site-specific theatre does more than commemorate the past; it asserts presence in the present, and transforms urban space into a performative act of cultural survival and belonging, where memory is not simply a record of loss, but a generative force shaping what endures. In a landscape marked by erasure, such performances are acts of defiance and hope. Nur Garabli and Studio Collective On Friday, May 9, 2025, I arrived at Queen Cafe in Yafa at 10:00 AM for the “Moving Visual and Performance Exhibition,” an event I had heard about the night before at Saraya Theatre during other Yafa Week Festival programs. Though the website promised a “visual performance art tour that moves between Yafa cafes,” the details were sparse. While my expectations were limited, I was excited for a new performance experience. As we approached Queen Cafe, the Palestinian-American friend I was with pointed out a dark blue sign bearing the double name of the street, an intervention by local Palestinians seeking to reclaim the original Arabic street names that have been replaced by official Hebrew designations. Inside the cafe, the owner, herself a Palestinian, began to speak to us about her experience in Yafa. To my surprise, she spoke in Hebrew, which the audience, seemingly composed entirely of Palestinians who lived within the 1948 borders, understood. Nur Garabli, one of the performers whose work we would be seeing that day, created performances that were also shaped by affective and linguistic tensions. Outside the café, the use of Hebrew evoked personal and intergenerational trauma. Raised in Arabic but needing to speak Hebrew as her primary language outside of the home, Garabli undertook a process of linguistic decolonization at age sixteen, choosing to speak Arabic as much as possible despite the internal and external resistance. “It’s really hard doing this decolonization shift… you have to face your demons.” [8] Her grandmother, nearing ninety, still speaks partial Hebrew, a sign of how deeply linguistic assimilation has shaped Palestinians across generations. After leaving the cafe, our group began walking. We stopped on a platform flanked by roads and located near the light rail and a bike path. There, dancer Nur Garabli began a solo performance, emerging from stillness to claim the space with powerful movement, as her arms opened wide. Her opening shouts in Arabic felt like a direct response to the Hebrew we had just heard, a connection she later confirmed in an interview. Knowing the history of the dual street names helped me attune more fully to how Garabli’s performance reclaimed the Palestinian narrative of the area. This performative walking tour exemplified the ways performers in Palestine are deeply attuned to the specifics of the places where they create performances. This performance tour exemplifies Lefebvre's concept of the “production of space,” a social process shaped by ideology, memory, and materiality. [9] It also aligns with Edward Said’s “counterpointed geographies,” where suppressed histories press against official narratives. [10] Through their movement, the performers disrupted dominant spatial orders of quotidian spaces, where all things Palestinian are usually kept figuratively out of the streets. Garabli, drawing on the Studio collective’s method of improvisation, rooted her performance in a deeply personal and political presence: “We are still here. We are still in the streets, and we do art, and we want people to know more about the city.” Her work drew from and into the city’s multiple histories, personal and collective, through an embodied vocabulary developed over years of collaborative improvisation with the site as a co-author. “We just felt the moment, the connections there,” she told me. “We focused on specific feelings… and let the space guide us.” The second solo by Garabli was performed in a sunlit, open plaza near the sea, framed by Yafa’s cityscape. Her movement–precise, expansive, and deliberate–was deeply grounded. Dressed in black with her hair in a loose braid, she began in stillness, arms slowly rising as if conjuring the invisible. She turned gently in place like a compass, then traveled through the space with soft, decisive steps. At moments, she folded inward, then rose again, echoing the rhythm of waves. Her gestures felt like they were for the land, and not the audience. When she placed her hand on her chest and then the ground, the meaning was clear: “I am here.” Nur Garabli performing in Moving Visual and Performance Exhibition in Yafa, 2025. Photo taken by author. In this same piece, Garabli balanced a woven basket on her head, an evocative gesture of harvest. Eventually, she reached a line of oranges arranged across the performance space. Glowing under the Palestinian sun, the oranges symbolized not just Jaffa’s famed citrus groves, but a history of erasure and resilience. As she threw them one by one, not violently, but with resolve, the act took on symbolic power that grew with repetition. Garabli inscribed an alternative archive into public space. “This is reclaiming the streets,” she said. “I wanted to use [the oranges] as something else… to give them different layers and hues.” [11] By expanding the idea of the orange beyond just a fruit to eat or a symbol of Yafa that people take for granted, Garabli raised the stakes. The stakes of throwing oranges may seem low, but in that the gesture mimics that of stone throwing, this act felt like defiance in a city that requires its Palestinian citizens to navigate a multiplicity of identities. Garabli’s performance was shaped as much by the city as by her body. “The space has the upper hand on the dance,” she reflected. [12] This responsiveness to space–architectural, social, political–echoes Massey’s notion of space as a relational construct. Her actions also created a repertoire of their own: a live, embodied transmission of memory that stands in contrast to written archives. In a context where Palestinian archival material is often inaccessible or destroyed, these performances become repositories of knowledge. Yafa is relatively open to public performance. Unlike Jerusalem, where “people are less ready to see these things happen in the street,” Yafa allowed for a degree of artistic visibility, though never without risk. “We understand how each city works,” Garabli explained. “But also, you can never fully predict how people will react.” [13] Performing in Arabic in public remains politically charged, and Garabli’s gesture of shouting in her native tongue was both intimate and defiant. The tour’s third movement brought us through an ancient corridor of Yafa, past stairs, facades, and sea-facing courtyards, led by three dancers from Studio Collective. I had seen them perform before, but was surprised to encounter them here, moving deliberately through a landscape I had never entered. This unfamiliar pathway ran alongside Israeli residential and museum buildings, places I would not have approached on my own. Yet the dancers moved through it as deliberate presences, claiming the space with repetition and grace. There was no music, no speech, just movement. Dressed simply, the dancers did not dramatize themselves but let their gestures activate the space. Oranges were placed on the ground, but this time, none were thrown. They existed as quiet reminders of suppressed narratives. The stone steps, blue-painted doors, and layered architecture bore the traces of colonialism and survival. The performers led us upward, ultimately arriving at Hilweh, a Palestinian café and market in the Old City. I had not realized this path even led to Hilweh, a cafe I frequent when in Yafa. Had the dancers not led me there, I may never have found an alternate path to the cafe that many Palestinians consider a refuge, and certainly one of the few Palestinian leisure sites in the city. The tour culminated near Saraya Theatre, where Studio Collective once again danced, this time on a grassy patch near trees. In an interview, dancer Rand Taha explained how their improvisation developed in real time. [14] While not all performers were from Yafa, they carried a shared awareness of its affective topography, particularly for those with ancestral ties. The dancers’ improvisational approach, honed over years of trust, enabled them to co-create a site-responsive work with minimal rehearsal. They used simple compositional tools, lines, touch, attunement, to develop a choreographic structure driven not by spectacle but by embodied presence. In the end, “Moving Visual and Performance Exhibition” was not just an aesthetic experience but a political and pedagogical one. Through their bodies, these dancers made visible what has been erased and made felt the Palestinian presence in a city that had been home to their families for generations. Conclusion Site-specific performance in Palestine emerges as a generative mode of cultural resistance, one that mobilizes space, memory, and embodiment to challenge the spatial logics of occupation. By drawing on feminist, postcolonial, and spatial theory, this article demonstrates how performances such as Salah and Basma and “Moving Visual and Performance Exhibition” reconfigure place not as a static backdrop but as a living palimpsest of histories and relationships. These performances animate space as both archive and repertoire, staging memory not only as a recollection of the past but as a practice of presence. In doing so, they contest the settler colonial impulse to fix, erase, or dominate space, and instead assert Palestinian geography as plural, affective, and alive. This work matters because it insists that performance is not ancillary to political struggle but central to how people live through, make sense of, and resist the spatial violence of occupation. The ephemeral nature of these performances, often overlooked by traditional modes of documentation or analysis, does not diminish their impact. Rather, their very impermanence underscores their urgency. They appear in fleeting moments, in everyday streets and homes, asking audiences to look again, to remember differently, to stay with the trouble of place. In a landscape fractured by checkpoints, walls, and forced displacement, site-specific performance becomes a radical act of world-making. These performances remind us that space is never neutral, and that in the Palestinian context, to perform in space is to perform the right to exist, to remember, and to return. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Al-Harah Theatre. I Was There. Written and directed by Motasem Abu Hasan. Site-specific performance at Bethlehem Site-Specific Theatre Festival, Bethlehem, Palestine, 2023. Darwish, Mahmoud. “In Jerusalem.” In The Butterfly’s Burden , translated by Fady Joudah, 211. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2007. El Hakawati (Palestinian National Theatre). Salah and Basma. Site-specific promenade performance in the Old City of Jerusalem, 2023. El-Hakawati Theatre. Salah and Basma Unpublished Script . Jerusalem: El-Hakawati Theatre, 2023 Féral, Josette. “Performance and Theatricality: The Subject Demystified.” Modern Drama 25, no. 1 (1982): 170–181. Garabli, Nur. Interview by the author. Zoom, May 2025. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: SAGE Publications, 2005. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Studio Collective (Nur Garabli et al.). Moving Visual and Performance Exhibition. Site-specific performance tour, Yafa Week Festival, Yafa, May 9, 2025. Taha, Rand. Interview by the author. Ramallah, May 2025. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. [1] Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.; Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. [2] Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: SAGE Publications, 2005, pp. 9, 130 [3] Ibid., pp. 154 [4] El-Hakawati Theatre. Salah and Basma Unpublished Script . Jerusalem: El-Hakawati Theatre, 2023 [5] El-Hakawati Theatre. Salah and Basma Unpublished Script . Jerusalem: El-Hakawati Theatre, 2023 [6] El-Hakawati Theatre. Salah and Basma Unpublished Script . Jerusalem: El-Hakawati Theatre, 2023 [7] Mahmoud Darwish, “In Jerusalem,” in The Butterfly’s Burden , trans. Fady Joudah (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2007), 211. [8] Garabli, Nur. Interview by the author. Zoom, May 2025. [9] Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. [10] Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. [11] Garabli, Nur. Interview by the author. Zoom, May 2025. [12] Garabli, Nur. Interview by the author. Zoom, May 2025. [13] Garabli, Nur. Interview by the author. Zoom, May 2025. [14] Taha, Rand. Interview by the author. Ramallah, May 2025. References About The Author(s) Marina Johnson is a PhD candidate at Stanford University in Theatre and Performance Studies. Prior to Stanford, Johnson received her MFA in Directing and taught at Beloit College. In Palestine she has directed at Al Harah and El Hakawati Theatres and taught directing workshops at ASHTAR Theatre. Johnson’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in The Jerusalem Quarterly, Theatre/Practice , TDR , Theatre Topics , Arab Stages , Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders and Sexualities , Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance, Volume I. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Practicing Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Reinscription of Memory in Palestine Resisting the Unleashed Evils of the US- Invasion of Iraq in Amir Al-Azraki’s The Widow (2017) Dina Mousawi’s RETURN: a Compelling site of representing Women’s Status of Agency Under Occupation Renewed Awareness Toward Salvation: The Journey of The Story of Zahra from Page to Stage Site-Specific Performance and Theatrical Memorialization of the Nakba Performance Review: WAILING SONGS OF THE PAST, MIGHT THEY GROW OUR RESILIENCE. By Maya al-Khaldi. Performance Review: DUMMY IN DIASPORA. By Esho Rasho. Performance Review: ENGLISH. Written by Sanaz Toossi Performance Review: THE CAVE. By Sadieh Rifai Performance Review: IRAQ, BUT FUNNY by Atra Asdou Performance Review: COSMOS/AWALEM by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba. 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Alisa Zhulina Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov Alisa Zhulina By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Figure 1: Catherine Slade as Lolita in Lolita in the Garden. Courtesy of The Cuban Theater Digital Archive. “She is temperamental, changeable and unpredictable, and though she retains the limpidity of childhood, she has also preserved its mystery.” —Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome. “It’s not my fault.” — Alizée, “Moi…Lolita.” (1) Introduction On Halloween night in 1958, Vladimir Nabokov opened his front door to discover a schoolgirl trick-or-treating as Lolita.(2) Costumed by her parents, the nine-year-old was holding a tennis racket and a sign that read L-O-L-I-T-A.(3) Nabokov was horrified. Prior to granting Stanley Kubrick the rights to a film adaptation, Nabokov insisted: “It was perfectly all right for me to imagine a twelve-year-old Lolita. She existed only in my head. But to make a real twelve-year-old play such a part would be sinful and immoral, and I would never consent to it.”(4) Cast in the titular role at fourteen, Sue Lyon was fifteen when the film premiered in New York in 1962—still too young to be admitted to the theatre to watch herself on screen. Age was not Nabokov’s only concern. He also worried about how an actor would represent his heroine in performance. After all, popular culture had rendered his Lolita unrecognizable. The figure of the underage siren did not originate with the controversial novel.(5) Yet Lolita gave that myth its most enchanting and enduring name, inspiring several plays, a musical, a ballet, an opera, two films, and countless fashion trends that have little in common with the girl at the heart of the book— “beloved, irretrievable Dolly."(6) Despite Nabokov’s “antitheatrical prejudice,” it is in the theatre that some of the most incisive and moving responses to Nabokov’s novel can be found.(7) This article explores María Irene Fornés’s Lolita in the Garden (1977) and Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive (1997) as dramatic works that challenge the Lolita myth of popular culture and represent girlhood as a tumultuous process of becoming an autonomous agent who embraces youthful desire and resists capitalist and patriarchal objectification. First, I will examine the cultural stereotype of Lolita, which is an amalgam of the fantasies of Humbert Humbert—the seductive narrator of Nabokov’s Lolita —and the distortions of popular culture. Then, I will show why Fornés and Vogel were fascinated by Nabokov’s novel, particularly its theatricality, and how they respond to Lolita and its afterlife by creating adolescent protagonists who are independent, courageous, with minds of their own. To fully appreciate Fornés’s and Vogel’s achievements in this area, it is important to spend some time with Nabokov’s novel and its ideas about theatre and acting. In a way, Fornés and Vogel were able to create their feminist versions of the teenage girl because they were attentive readers of Nabokov’s Lolita . While borrowing many elements of the novel, they amplified the voice that Nabokov silenced. The Challenges of Adapting Lolita to the Stage Nabokov distrusted theatre and embodied performance. Having written several plays, he preferred drama to a “performance-centered” model of theatre, which he associated with the loss of authorial control.(8) Lolita, My Love (1971)—the ill-fated musical by John Barry and Alan Jay Lerner—and Edward Albee’s Lolita (1981) were both excruciating flops. These stage versions attempt to adapt a novel that purposefully silences its heroine, so they end up with a two-dimensional Lolita, whose main dramatic purpose is to be the object of Humbert’s aesthetic appreciation and “foul lust.”(9) Even Nabokov’s own screenplay, which Kubrick could not use because it was “much too unwieldy” and would have taken “seven hours to run,” does not give us a deeper look into the young girl’s mind or character, though it does lift up some of her sass and wit, which the novel only hints at.(10) It is tempting to conclude then that Lolita is simply a book that resists theatrical adaptation. Nabokov has almost nothing positive to say about the art of theatre in Lolita , lumping it together with cinema and associating both with deceit, vulgar commercialism, and sexual exploitation. Clare Quilty, the “clearly guilty” character, for example, is both a hack playwright and pornographer. He first lures Dolly by casting her in his play The Enchanted Hunters and then tries to persuade her to perform in his blue films at Duk Duk Ranch. Despite Nabokov’s mistrust of mimetic theatre, theatre also figures as a space for self-determination and embodied knowledge in Lolita —his adolescent protagonist begins to develop her agency, voice, and defiance of Humbert while performing in theatre at school. Representing Girlhood in the Theatre While girlhood studies have evolved rapidly since the early 1990s, especially through their intersection with performance studies, little attention has been paid to the role that the Lolita myth has played in how girls perform their identities.(11) Fornés’s Lolita in the Garden and Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive are two salient examples of plays inspired by Lolita that spotlight the political and social agency of their female protagonists. While Nabokov’s concern about a real child embodying his female protagonist led him to draw a line between his novel and any kind of adaptation or riff on it in other media, Fornés and Vogel addressed their relationship with visual media head-on by carefully thinking through settings and stagings. In contrast to film, where the camera’s unforgiving demand for realism and close-ups motivates directors to cast underage actors in the role of Lolita, theatre can make do with actors of legal age who can play young. (12) Blanche Baker was twenty-five when Albee’s Lolita opened in New York in 1981, and Caitlin Cohn in her early twenties, when the York Theatre Company debuted a reworked version of the musical Lolita, My Love in New York in 2019.(13) Both performers appeared teen-like on stage. Neither of these conventional adaptations, however, made use of the recent trend that J. Ellen Gainor identifies in her incisive reassessment of Clare Barron’s Dance Nation (2018), namely of adult actors representing adolescence “even as they never try to mask their adulthood.”(14) According to Gainor, this “(re-)enactment of, yet also a distanced perspective on, adolescence may indicate that some broader cultural forces are at play—that we are in a moment of both retrospection and interrogation around girlhood, womanhood, and the relation between them."(15) Indeed, this cultural investigation into the relationship between girlhood and womanhood began during the postwar years (more on this later). Because Nabokov was attached to the idea of medium specificity and saw both theatrical and film adaptations of Lolita in the same light (namely, that they were art works in their own rights, far removed from his novel), he did not recognize the specific temporal potential of theatre to explore female adolescence. In the theatre, we can experience what Matthew Wagner calls “the weighting of the present with the past and the future.”(16) For example, Vogel created the role of Li’l Bit “as a character who is forty-something” who goes back in time to make sense of everything that has happened to her.(17) Fornés’s Lolita in the Garden is a children’s play and the titular role can be performed either by an adult or a child. Catherine Slade and Judy Vargas were double cast. In the production photos, Slade, who was in her twenties, appears more adultlike, while Vargas looks like a child (fig. 1 and fig. 2). If, as Adele Senior argues, “the appearance of children” in performance as “natal, biological and relational beings…demand ethical attention,” then this double-casting reveals Fornés’s awareness of the conditions of a child actor’s labor.(18) The burden of the play’s run does not fall on the shoulders of one child actor. By the time Fornés and Vogel sat down to write their plays, hurricane Lolita had already passed through the globe. Parents had stopped naming their daughters Lolita, so notorious had the novel become, and, in 1959, the citizens of Lolita, Texas, even floated the idea of changing their town’s name. Fornés and Vogel understood that they were dealing not just with Nabokov’s Lolita but with heavily mediatized versions of it (including abysmal attempts at putting the story onto the stage), and so they critically engaged with those transformations. Fornés had started to direct all of the premieres of her plays after 1973, and we can gather a lot of information about the production of Lolita in the Garden from its photos and unpublished script, even though a video recording is not available in the public domain. And, while there have been numerous productions of How I Learned to Drive , including a Broadway premiere in 2022, few directors have followed Vogel’s crucial stage directions that explore the relationship between theatre and other media. In fact, the central scene of How I Learned to Drive presents Vogel’s incisive commentary on the relationship between theatre and photography. It is important to note that Lolita in the Garden and How I Learned to Drive are not adaptations of Lolita in Linda Hutcheon’s definition of the term, namely they do not engage in “an extended intertextual engagement” with Nabokov’s novel.(19) Rather, featuring their own distinct characters and plots, these works respond to Lolita on a deeper level than more conventional adaptations precisely because they do not have to worry about fidelity to the original’s storyline. Each of these plays can be compared to a contrafact , a jazz composition consisting of an original melody superimposed on a recognizable harmonic structure or standard tune.(20) Suzan-Lori Parks once described her Red Letter plays ( In the Blood and Fucking A ) as contrafacts of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter : “Like a contrafact, if you know jazz. You take the chords, and you write your own melody.”(21) While Dolly’s voice is nearly absent from Nabokov’s Lolita , in the plays of Fornés and Vogel, the voice and agency of a young girl take center stage. Both dramatic works contrast the Lolita myth to a different vision of what it means to be a girl—idiosyncratic, defiant, self-determining. Fornés’s Lolita in the Garden is a theatrical attempt to give Nabokov’s heroine back her childhood. Vogel was in part inspired to write How I Learned to Drive as a response to Nabokov, calling her Pulitzer Prize-winning play “ Lolita from Lolita’s point of view.”(22) Both rely on their audiences being “haunted” by the preexisting text of Nabokov’s Lolita and by the cultural script of the Lolita myth.(23) “The Lolita Syndrome” The cultural stereotype of Lolita owes its iconography more to Bert Stern’s notorious poster for Kubrick’s film than to Nabokov’s novel. Stern’s photograph features a blonde fourteen-year-old Sue Lyon peeking over red heart-shaped sunglasses (found nowhere in the novel), with a cherry red lollipop between lips of the same hue. The provocative nature of the poster lies not only in its taunting tagline— “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita ?”—but also in the visual interplay between the signifiers for child and adult, a division that James Kincaid notes “has been at least for the past two hundred years heavily eroticized.”(24) This Lolita dominates visual media today as seen in the performances of pop stars like Katy Perry, Lana Del Rey, and Taylor Swift. Yet this cultural icon is far removed from Nabokov’s Dolly— an auburn-haired, freckled, sooty-lashed tomboy, who is a victim of abuse and rape, but who is also, in Kathryn Bond Stockton’s words, “an agent with sexual motives and motions of her own.”(25) The popularity of the Lolita myth was in part a response to the sweeping socioeconomic changes in the situation of men and women after the Second World War. According to Simone de Beauvoir, there is a historical reason for the “Lolita syndrome,” a term she uses for the invention of the “erotic hoyden” through the gamine charm of “Audrey Hepburn, Françoise Arnoul, Marina Vlady, Leslie Caron and Brigitte Bardot,” as well as dramatic characters such as the almost-eighteen-year-old Catherine from Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (1955). Beauvoir argues that this “Lolita syndrome” emerged at a time when “social differences between the two sexes diminished” and consequently so did eroticism. (26) As Beauvoir notes, because the “adult woman now inhabits the same world as the man,” the attention of filmmakers, who were predominantly men, turn to the “child woman” who “moves in a universe which he cannot enter.”(27) The “age difference re-establishes between them the distance that seems necessary to desire,” so that “a new Eve” is created by fusing the “green fruit” with the “ femme fatale .”(28) In other words, while the growing economic empowerment of women dampens male desire, the girl-child possesses two interconnected features that attract male filmmakers and consumers. Her underaged status makes her an enticing taboo, while her economic dependency makes her accessible and vulnerable. In Lolita , Humbert is Dolly’s legal guardian and pays for her sexual favors. In How I Learned to Drive , Uncle Peck offers Li’l Bit free driving lessons during which he molests her. The mythmaking of Lolita also involves a fantasy of control and dominance: while the Lolita-figure of the popular imagination is “dangerous so long as she remains untamed,” she is open to “the male to domesticate her.”(29) Thus, she is, in many ways, a figure of conventional femininity. In Beauvoir’s reading, while aesthetically Brigitte Bardot might display many features of the “erotic hoyden,” her behavior on and off screen challenges that stereotype through her spontaneity, her freedom, her frank and earthy sexuality, and, most importantly, her refusal to be cast in one definitive type— “nothing can be read in Bardot’s face.”(30) Thus, the phenomenon of Bardot proves, as Tom Maguire argues in reference to HETPALEIS’s Hamilton Complex, that performance can “have efficacy in disrupting a heteronormative adult male gaze."(31) Even as Nabokov’s Lolita appeared during the postwar boom of the mischievous woman-child, its heroine resists the script of heteropatriarchy. Similarly, both Fornés and Vogel explore and ultimately reject the dominant culture’s desire for a compliant young girl molded by the demands of white heteropatriarchy when they give us their stage versions of Lolita—autonomous, queer, and—in Fornés’s case—also non-white. Before delving into my argument ( why these playwrights respond to Lolita and its influence on popular culture and why embodied performance is central to their responses), it is helpful to keep in mind two interconnected facts: the complex way that Nabokov constructs his adolescent protagonist in Lolita and the contradictory role that theatre plays in this construction. Dolly versus Lolita In American Sweethearts , Ilana Nash explains the popularity of the adolescent girl in terms of her being “a non-person constructed as a foil for adult men…who predominately controlled the production and circulation of popular culture during the twentieth century.”(32) This description of twentieth-century American culture at large also captures the oppressive and transactional relationship between Humbert and his stepdaughter. Nabokov’s Lolita poignantly captures the process of the marginalization and coercion of the adolescent girl, while the Lolita myth becomes an example of what Nash calls an “iconic abstraction representing dominant culture’s desires or nightmares.”(33) Both Beauvoir and Nash discuss this “Lolita” of the public imagination as a kind of abstraction. Indeed, the novel itself presents Lolita as such, when Humbert speaks of her as a figment of his imagination— his “own creation, another fanciful Lolita—perhaps, more real than Lolita.”(34) In this way, the novelistic character Lolita and the pop-cultural figure Lolita can be analyzed as commodities in the Marxian sense of the term. A commodity, as Marx argues, is “an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind” and has “value only because abstract human labor is objectified or materialized in it.”(35) While Lolita is the commodity that satisfies the desires of adult men with significant capital in the novel, there also exists a “real girl” in the book who is performing all the sexual and emotional labor. It speaks to the unfortunate success of Humbert’s sly narrative voice that the name that stuck to his stepdaughter is not the one that she calls herself (Dolly) but rather the romantic moniker he chooses for her (“But in my arms she was always Lolita”).(36) In fact, Humbert is the only character in the novel who refers to her as Lolita, namely the figure of his poetic and erotic imagination. Dolly, by contrast, stands for the “real girl” who appears in the novel through glimpses and traces. Thus, when I refer to the main character of Lolita as Dolly, I join critics and scholars who use this name to describe the girl-child that exists outside of Humbert’s fantasies.(37) As Michael Wood suggests, this Dolly “is what a reading finds.”(38) In other words, the reader of Nabokov’s novel must resist Humbert’s seductive voice and solipsistic visions and search for signs of Dolly. “Only Words to Play With” T he combination of exposing the oppression of the adolescent girl while simultaneously revealing glimpses of her vibrant personality is one reason that, despite its disturbing content (“a pedophile’s playbook,” as one commentator dubbed it ), Lolita has found its main defenders among female readers, including Fornés and Vogel.(39) Indeed, girls and women have always been Lolita ’s most devoted readers, often identifying with its female protagonist, even as some worry that their enjoyment of the novel “makes them complicit” in its representation of coercion and violence.(40) To name a few recent examples, Kate Elizabeth Russell, author of the novel My Dark Vanessa (2020), in which an English teacher preys on his underage student by giving her a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita , spent her adolescence on an online message board dedicated to all things Lolita. In this early Internet community, Russell talked to girls of her age obsessed with the book and to older men who lurked in the comments. In Reading Lolita in Tehran , Azar Nafisi relates how her Iranian female students draw parallels between Dolly’s loss of freedom under Humbert’s abusive guardianship and their own lives under a repressive regime. Stockton reads Dolly as a queer, “quintessential not-yet-straight child,” who resists the heteronormative cultural script that Humbert tries to impose on her.(41) And Lena Dunham, the creator and star of the HBO hit show Girls (2012-2017), calls Lolita one of her favorite novels because of “how fully realized a character Lolita is, despite the fact that we are seeing her through the lens of her stalker.”(42) As many defenders of the novel have pointed out, Lolita ’s narrative architecture and moral puzzle reveal “the true nature of sexual crimes by men against girls and women: in patriarchy, they are silenced.”(43) The good reader should notice this silencing of Dolly’s voice, become appalled at Humbert’s actions (even if taken by his rhetoric at the beginning), and—as the fictional editor John Ray implores—hear “a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita” that Humbert’s “singing violin can conjure up.”(44) What all these moralistic readings of Lolita miss is the novel’s critique of the commodification of young girls in the sexual marketplace. It is not just a matter of condemning one fictional character named Humbert Humbert and becoming a better reader with a heightened capacity for empathy and a burning curiosity about the minds of others. When Nabokov writes that, when it comes to the book cover, there is “one subject” which he is “emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl,” he reveals that he understands that his novel exists in a marketplace where sex sells.(45) Thus, Nabokov’s Lolita focuses on Humbert’s crime of abusing and silencing Dolly. If Humbert stands for the figure of the artist, Lolita asks us: what should we do with the art of creators who have done horrific, unspeakable acts? A timely question. In order to pose this question, Nabokov shapes his novel around the glimpses and traces of Dolly, who struggles to be heard through Humbert’s domineering voice. It is not Nabokov’s intention to give us a nuanced portrayal of a teenage girl. Rather, we are meant to see through Humbert’s manipulation and miss Dolly in her absence. Given the novel’s focus on the absence of its young heroine, it becomes evident why adapting Lolita has been problematic and why Nabokov worried about the afterlife of his book. Since so little is known about Dolly, works that attempt a standard adaptation of the story, such as Albee’s play and Barry and Lerner’s musical, present a superficial Lolita, who is a cross between the fantasies of Humbert and the distortions of popular culture. If, while reading Nabokov’s novel, we can picture the kind of strong woman Dolly might have become had she survived, stage and film adaptations leave little to the imagination. Moreover, the embodied performance of an actor in the role of Lolita, whether on stage or on screen, risks falling into precisely the kind of commercial objectification and sexualization of the adolescent girl, even if played by an actor of legal age, that Nabokov’s novel explicitly denounces. One need only remember the many provocative magazine covers featuring fifteen-year-old Dominique Swain, promoting the release of Adrian Lyne’s controversial Lolita (1997). Throughout Lolita , Nabokov stresses that its story should only be represented in the textual universe of literature and through the novel’s specific reorganization of events, echoing the Russian Formalist notion of the inseparability of form and content.(46) “Idiot, triple idiot! I could have filmed her! I would have had her now with me, before my eyes, in the projection room of my pain and despair!” Humbert laments at one point.(47) His missed opportunity echoes the warning at the heart of Lolita —to transpose its story into visual media and/or embodied performance is to risk slipping into child pornography. Lolita thus depends on “dismediation,” a fruitful term that Martin Harries has coined to signify the “remediation through negation of another medium . ”(48) Nabokov constructs his novel through the dismediation of cinema, photography, theatre (which he often lumps with cinema), and other media that make possible the visual representation and exploitation of young girls. While attempting to control Lolita from spilling into other media, Nabokov explores the dangerous power of language to seduce his audience and the antidotal potential of language to unveil that rhetorical coercion. Literary scholars are thus more likely to argue that the girl-child in Lolita is just a figment of Nabokov’s imagination and that what the reader is engaged with is not real, but just a text,(49) or as Humbert puts it: “Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!”(50) By contrast, theatre and performance studies scholars view texts (even closet dramas and impossible stage directions) as inherently virtual.(51) However problematic or dangerous a text is, it has the potential to be performed and corporealized in the theatre. A text, as John Muse puts it, has the “capacity to generate virtual violence.”(52) Figure 2: Judy Vargas as Lolita in Lolita in the Garden . Courtesy of The Fales Library & Special Collections. “The Theatre Had Taught Her That Trick” Nabokov maintained a lifelong interest in theatre and was aware of its virtuality. In fact, Lolita predicts the rise of virtual reality and the latter medium’s deep ties to theatre.(53) At its core, Lolita is a theatrical novel that interrogates the relationship between imagination, representation, and action. The reader witnesses Humbert go from daydreaming about Dolly to writing down his fantasy to finally enacting it, and this transition from thought to action is rendered in the novel through theatrical and cinematic metaphors. When Humbert reflects on how he managed to masturbate in Dolly’s presence, “with her legs across [his] lap” on the sofa, but without her (in his view) awareness of his onanistic endeavor, he compares the act to the theatrical performance of a magician, a comparison that moves from theatre to virtual reality to cinema: Absolutely no harm done. The conjurer had poured milk, molasses, foaming champagne into a young lady’s new white purse; and lo, the purse was intact. Thus had I delicately constructed my ignoble, ardent, sinful dream; and still Lolita was safe—and I was safe; What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another fanciful Lolita—perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no consciousness—indeed, no life of her own.(54) By the end of this attempt at justification, Humbert envisions his stepdaughter as a kind of free-floating, virtual avatar (what today we would call a hologram) that presumably has nothing to do with the girl-child Dolly. He goes on to mix theatrical and cinematic metaphors: “The child knew nothing. I had done nothing to her. And nothing prevented me from repeating a performance that affected her as little as if she were a photographic image rippling upon a screen and I a humble hunchback abusing myself in the dark.”(55) Initially, the pairing of the words “repeating” and “performance” point to a theatrical performance, in which Humbert is an actor who “repeats” the same gestures in the presence of an untouched and unaware Dolly-the-spectator, who does not understand what she is seeing. But as the sentence continues and Humbert describes an adult movie theatre, in which he is watching Dolly on screen, it becomes clear that he has a very different kind of “performance” in mind and that Dolly cannot, in fact, be as unaffected by the proceedings as he wants the reader to believe. For whatever cinematic image to appear on a screen, a real person, in this case—a real child—would have to be filmed. Nabokov’s distrust of theatre and cinema is thus connected to his protective view of child and young adolescent actors. As Nicholas Ridout points out (following the work of Bert O. States), child actors pose a particular problem onstage because the audience often worries whether children can give “properly informed consent” and whether they will be “damaged by their appearance on stage.”(56) Such concerns presume childhood innocence— a social and historical construct that has played a significant role in the preservation of white heteropatriarchy, as Robin Bernstein has argued—and are fairly recent in theatre history.(57) As Kristen Hatch has shown in her study of Shirley Temple, from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, audiences took “pleasure in children’s performances” because they accepted childhood innocence as “inviolable.”(58) By the mid-twentieth century, this “inviolable innocence” of children gave way to Freud’s theory of sexuality and to the fear that children were “in danger of being corrupted through contact with the world of adults."(59) Indeed, Nabokov himself once admitted: “If I had a little girl I might want to ban the book, too. Certainly I wouldn’t let her read it.”(60) Despite Nabokov’s public pronouncements, his own novel, published during the mid-century cultural shift in views on childhood, challenges the many myths surrounding the abstract concept of childhood, including innocence, ignorance, and lack of agency. Dolly, as we find out, has explored her sexuality before Humbert and, as Stockton notes, is “queer herself, [s]exually schooled by ‘little Lesbians.’”(61) Nabokov’s paternal attitude toward child actors echoes his prohibitive position in regard to transposing his novel to the stage and to the screen. Although he eventually did allow other artists to adapt Lolita into other media, he considered those works to be artistic creations in their own rights, far removed from his novel. Thus, Nabokov thought Kubrick’s Lolita was excellent but “only a blurred skimpy glimpse of the marvelous picture [he] imagined.”(62) And just like the novel’s depictions of childhood are more complex than Nabokov’s public statements on the matter, so are the novel’s representations of popular culture more astute and realistic than Nabokov’s own expectations. In Lolita , popular culture has already invaded almost every aspect of the characters’ lives in post-war America. There is no going back. Visual media dominate. Humbert is not only an artist but also an adman who earns his living writing perfume advertisements.(63) Dolly is “to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster.”(64) Humbert reminds her of “some crooner or actor chap” on whom she “has a crush.”(65) He describes himself at one point as “a great big handsome hunk of movieland manhood” and Charlotte, Dolly’s mother, as “a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich.”(66) Hollywood’s reach is everywhere in the novel as is its underbelly—the pornographic industry. The characters exist in a world of commodity fetishism where the “definite social relation between” people “assumes, here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”(67) Theatre is not immune to this type of commercialization and alienation. Upon closer examination, however, Nabokov’s attitude toward embodied performance in Lolita turns out to be deeply ambivalent. It is Dolly’s foray into acting, while rehearsing for Quilty’s play The Enchanted Hunters , that eventually leads to her escape. During one of her early attempts to stand up for herself, Humbert remarks: “It was the first time, I think, she spoke spontaneously of her pre-Humbertian childhood; perhaps, the theatre had taught her that trick.”(68) “M imetic imagination,” as Maria Tatar notes, “is less about copying and representing than about making contact and participating”—exactly the kinds of activities a student would embrace in the theatre.(69) The theatre, as I have suggested earlier, has also provided fertile ground for feminist responses to Nabokov’s Lolita. Fornés and Vogel represent different visions of girlhood on stage by contrasting it to the Lolita myth of popular culture, the heteropatriarchal fantasy of the adolescent girl, which is influenced by Humbert’s solipsistic view of Dolly. And the tensions between imagination and action explored in Lolita are amplified on the stage. Fornés Gives Lolita Back Her Voice In the late spring and early summer of 1977, Fornés directed her “ theatre piece with music for children and adults,” Lolita in the Garden , with music by Richard Weinstock and with Catherine Slade and Judy Vargas in the title role at Intar 53 Theatre in New York.(70) This unpublished play features no Humbert character, spotlighting instead Lolita as a little girl. Fornés would represent child abuse in her later play The Conduct of Life (1985), in which a thirty-three-year-old lieutenant kidnaps, terrorizes, and repeatedly rapes a twelve-year-old girl named Nena. In Lolita in the Garden , the focus is on a girl-child before anything bad happens to her. Significantly, she is described as being eleven years old in Fornés’s script (Humbert meets Dolly when she is twelve). Fornés must have read Nabokov’s Lolita with great attention, as she borrows many elements from Lolita —the lyrical name, the fairytale leitmotifs, and the garden imagery—but repurposes them, like in a contrafact, for her own melody, one that reclaims her heroine’s autonomy.(71) The production toured New York in two versions, an English and Spanish one, thereby disposing of Humbert’s exoticizing tendency to call Dolly his “Carmencita”(72) and making Fornés’s fairytale accessible to Spanish-speaking children.(73) Moreover, by casting a young Brown and a young Black girl (Vargas and Slade respectively) in the title role, Fornés challenged the cultural myth of Lolita as “an expression of whiteness.”(74) As the Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic Robin Givhan explains, “Lolita” has always meant a very specific kind of femininity— “nubile” and white.(75) According to Givhan, Lolita “was not written within the context of what it meant to be a young black girl” because the “culture does not see black girls as having a fragile, dangerously irresistible beauty.”(76) Instead, the culture marginalizes and “oversexualize[s] black bodies.”(77) By contrast, Fornés centers the young girl of color as the main heroine of her fairytale as both vulnerable and learning to stand up for herself. The garden of the play’s title refers not only to the Garden of Eden, where innocence and temptation co-exist, but also to Charlotte’s garden where Humbert first lays eyes on Dolly. Moreover, the garden is an important metaphor for Dolly’s inner world, which Humbert admits remains inaccessible to him: “I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate—dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions.”(78) It is this inner world of the child that Fornés’s theatre piece explores. And it is appropriate that music plays a crucial role in recovering the young girl’s voice. Toward the end of the novel, Humbert recalls an earlier episode, “soon after her disappearance,” when he looked down from a mountain and heard the “musical vibration” of children at play.(79) He realizes there and then that “the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from [his] side, but the absence of her voice from the concord.”(80) In Lolita in the Garden , the songs of children can now be heard loud and clear. Fornés not only gives Lolita back her childhood by writing a children’s piece in which she is the main speaking character, but also teaches her young spectators the importance of self-determinacy at a time when their parents and pedagogues are telling them what to do. The submission to parental authority is, of course, a necessary part of a child’s development, but it is also the same mechanism by which an abuser might manipulate a child (as Humbert does his stepdaughter). Fornés’s Lolita in the Garden is thus a lesson in how to think for oneself. And theatrical mimesis is a crucial step in this lesson. Set in a magical forest, populated by a talking tree, a flexible flower, and a poet-bear, the play begins with a fairy godmother named Hard granting three wishes to an eleven-year-old girl named Lolita, telling her that she can do whatever she wants and that she does not have to follow anyone’s orders. As Lolita puts it, “I want to do what I want. And I want no one to tell me what to do. And I don’t want to have to do what other people want.”(81) She also tries to stretch the definition of “three wishes,” asking Hard for “a magic prince in silver with rubies and diamonds,” “a white wedding dress so [she] can marry the prince,” and “three girlfriends who are very nice to [her] and don’t take [her] boyfriends away.”(82) But Hard reminds her that she has already used up all her three wishes when she asked for complete autonomy and rejects her desires for romantic clichés. Doing whatever she wants and not listening to anyone’s advice turns out to be a more difficult task than Fornés’s Lolita initially imagined. She learns many things the hard way—that gorging on an unlimited supply of candies, for example, makes her “feel sick and fat.”(83) And as Lolita continues to roam and play in the forest, she begins to want for someone to tell her what to do. In this way, according to Norma Ford, Lolita in the Garden is “an allegory for the responsibility that true freedom demands of us.”(84) It is difficult to gauge how aware the children in the audience were of Nabokov’s Lolita , but the adults in attendance would have picked up on the allusion. As Fornés’s Lolita learns the lesson about how to be a self-determining agent, she does so in a world marked by violence toward women. Echoes of Nabokov’s Lolita can still be heard and conjure up a sense of menace in Fornés’s contrafact, giving it a Brothers Grimm aesthetic. While Nabokov’s Lolita borrows fairytale elements from Alice in Wonderland , The Little Mermaid , and Sleeping Beauty among many others, to hint at how enchantment takes place on the level of language (the inattentive reader might fall under Humbert’s spell), Fornés restores all these magical elements in a fairytale written for children with a female adolescent at its center. When Bear asks Fornés’s Lolita “what” she is, she responds: “A child. I’m a girl.” “Ahhhh. What’s that?” asks the scared Bear. “A human being,” says Lolita.(85) This is a simple exchange but one that reminds us how invisible the humanity of young girls has been throughout the twentieth century. As Nash elucidates, the teen girl suffers a “double enforcement of oppressive representation:” “her femininity makes her more sexually objectified than teen boys in the same narratives, while her youth makes her more ignorant and diminished than grown women.”(86) By contrast, Fornés’s inclusive musical fairytale for the theatre represents the autonomy of the female adolescent by giving her back her voice and her childhood and by reminding the audience of the diversity of girls who can be the main character. Vogel’s Lolita Drives Away from the Dead-End Road Given that Vogel has mentioned on several occasions that How I Learned to Drive was in part inspired by Lolita , it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the connections between the two works aside from the occasional nod to Vogel’s interest in Nabokov’s novel. Vogel develops her own storyline and characters, so the relationship between the novel and the play may seem at first superficial. From Lolita Vogel borrows the car setting, the road motif, the subjects of pedophilia and incest, and the mixture of comedy and pathos. How I Learned to Drive follows the relationship between Li’l Bit and her aunt’s husband, Uncle Peck, from her pre-adolescent years all the way through adulthood. “I hope people are seeing the resonances,” Vogel stated in an interview with Charlie Rose, referring to the echoes between How I Learned to Drive and Lolita .(87) Vogel first read Lolita in high school and kept revisiting it during her student days at Cornell, where there had always been “a huge Nabokov presence,” as “he’d been on the faculty.”(88) While How I Learned to Drive stands on its own, there is another level to this play as a response to Nabokov’s Lolita and to the popular culture that has usurped Lolita into its apparatus of sexualizing children. First, How I Learned to Drive adopts a similar moral and temporal framework. Like Nabokov, Vogel seduces her audience by giving them a charming pedophile, one who might initially gain some of their sympathy, and by manipulating the chronology of the events in order to reveal the problem of succumbing to her seduction. Contrary to Nabokov’s modernist attachment to medium specificity, Vogel’s meticulous stage directions offer directors a roadmap for taking on the contemporary mediatized environment and for exploring theatre’s power in it. As a feminist, Vogel was unnerved by the fact that she felt sympathy for Humbert. Indeed, Vogel’s “relatively benign depiction” of Peck has garnered much attention.(89) Like Nabokov’s Lolita, How I Learned to Drive , in Vogel’s words, “dramatizes the gifts we receive from the people who hurt us.”(90) Like Humbert, Peck falls in love, and that love makes a moral demand on him. If Humbert’s gift to Dolly is “to make her live in the minds of later generations” by writing the manuscript that the reader allegedly holds, then Peck’s gift to Li’l Bit, while less artistic, is more life affirming.(91) By teaching Li’l Bit how to drive like a man (“with confidence—with aggression”(92), Peck not only saves her life, but also empowers her to “reject him and destroy him.”(93) Whether you feel (negative) empathy for Peck or not is ultimately a subjective experience. When How I Learned to Drive premiered in 1997 at the Vineyard Theatre, some critics praised its moral complexity, while others criticized Vogel for not villainizing Peck (David Morse).(94) But How I Learned to Drive is no melodrama. As Joanna Mansbridge has ably argued, Vogel’s play explores “the culture that created Peck.”(95) Significantly, Vogel makes Lil’ Bit the main narrator of How I Learned to Drive , explaining in an interview that, while she “wanted to explore the sadness of her Humbert Humbert in Peck, she didn’t want her Lolita to go down the same dead-end road.”(96) While Nabokov’s “pale, pregnant, beloved, irretrievable Dolly” dies in Gray Star, Alaska, Vogel’s Li’l Bit drives off toward an uncertain but hopeful future.(97) Referencing Cathy Caruth’s work on the delayed temporality of trauma, Ann Pellegrini argues that Vogel’s memory play reenacts “the belatedness of trauma” and the “revision” of memory through Li’l Bit’s use of “piecemeal” narration.(98) Li’l Bit goes back in time and revises the events of the past in order to gain control of them, transcend victimhood, and allow herself to heal. Graley Herren reads these “dramaturgical manipulations” of Li’l Bit as her “coping mechanism.”(99) But Li’l Bit’s narration has another function, beyond that of therapy, which align her with Humbert’s sly handling of words and his use of “retrospective verisimilitude.”(100) The play’s use of nonchronological narration forces the audience to consider at what point the relationship between the two characters becomes uncomfortable and painful for them to watch. As Vogel explains: If you look at the structure of my play, all I’m doing is asking how do you feel about this? We see a girl of seventeen and an older man in a car seat. You think you know how you feel about this relationship? Alright, fine. Now, let’s go back a year earlier. Do you still think you know what you feel about this situation? … The play is a reverse syllogism. It constantly pulls the rug out from under our emotional responses by going back earlier and earlier in time. [101] In this way, How I Learned to Drive is not simply “a drama about an individual family,” but “a way of looking on a microscopic level at how this culture sexualizes children.”(102) When How I Learned to Drive premiered in 1997, the sexualization of children in the media was at the forefront of legal and moral debates. The early nineties saw the scandal of Amy Elizabeth Fisher, branded by the media as “Long Island Lolita,” who, at the age of seventeen, shot and wounded her secret lover’s wife. The murder of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey took over the news cycle in late December of 1996. Beauty contest photos and videos of the little girl with bleached blonde hair and in full makeup, striking provocative poses, dominated TV screens. As Vogel reminds us, “JonBenét Ramsey was not a fluke.”(103) American consumer culture had been profiting from the sexualization of young girls for a long time, as the Calvin Klein jean ads, featuring fifteen-year-old Brooke Shields from the early 1980s, attest to. It is this mediatized environment (which had also co-opted Nabokov’s Lolita ) that Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive takes on. Vogel’s original script suggests “the notion of slides and projections, which were not used in the New York production of the play.”(104) Nor were any slides or projections employed in the Broadway premiere in the spring of 2022, which featured the original leads—Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse—and where changes in mood and in action were evoked through lighting and the reassembling of set pieces. In my discussion of the play, I look carefully at Vogel’s stage directions, arguing that her version engages in a critical intervention with visual media and that directors miss an important opportunity when they disregard them.(105) In what follows, I analyze Vogel’s stage directions by imagining what a potential production that heeded them could accomplish aesthetically and ethically. Vogel employs dismediation in the theatre—through the negation of pin-up photography—to confront mass culture’s sexualization of young girls. In a culture still dominated by gender violence, misogyny, and mass-produced images of stereotypical femininity, Vogel carves out a space of subversion, resistance, and escape (however temporary) where Li’l Bit can come into her own and write her story. It bears stressing that the role of Li’l Bit “was originally written as a character who is forty-something.”(106) Mary-Louise Parker was thirty-three when she debuted the role at the Vineyard Theatre. Thus, instead of a child actor posing for erotic photos, we witness an adult woman revisiting her past, as she looks back at the girl that she once was. If, as Paul Auslander suggests, “mediatization is a vehicle of the general code in a way that live performance is not (or is no longer),” then How I Learned to Drive acknowledges that both Li’l Bit’s coming of age and its own ontology as a theatrical work take place in a culture where mediatized representations predominate.(107) For example, during the driving lesson, when Peck instills in Li’l Bit the importance of driving aggressively, Vogel’s stage directions indicate that “ it would be nice to have slides of erotic photographs of women and cars ,” including one of “ Li’l Bit with a Bel Air .”(108) Accustomed to screens, the audience’s attention might be split between the images on the slides and the two actors onstage. Yet this set-up aptly reflects the mediatized culture in which young girls grow up. During the photo shoot, which is the central scene of the play, the Playboy aesthetic predominates at the start. Peck takes pictures of the “ nervous but curious thirteen-year-old ” Li’l Bit with a Leica camera, while “ something like Roy Orbison ” plays in the background.(109) Yet even as Peck objectifies Li’l Bit, she pushes back and he, along with the audience, begins to see her in a different light, as a unique, irreplaceable, singular human being. In other words, she resists becoming a commodity. As Peck instructs his niece on how to move her body and what poses to strike, Vogel’s directions recommend that there “ be a slide montage of actual shots of the actor playing Li’l Bit—interspersed with other models à la Playboy, Calvin Klein and Victoriana/ Lewis Carroll’s Alice Liddell .”(110) Unlike Nabokov’s Lolita , How I Learned to Drive does not posit that it is “immune from contamination by, and ontologically different from mediatized forms.”(111) Rather, by recognizing that theatre is a medium among other media and by privileging some mediatized forms over others, Vogel can influence which images of Li’l Bit are aesthetically and ethically effective and which ones are not. When Peck asks Li’l Bit to “arch [her] back” and “throw [her] head back,” the audience sees a “Playboy model in this pose,” and not the actor playing Li’l Bit. Likewise, when Peck asks Li’l Bit to put her hand on her cheek and move her hair back, “[ a ] nother classic Playboy or Vargas ” appears.(112) Evidently, Playboy and Vargas have shaped Peck’s imagination and how he views Li’l Bit. But Li’l Bit does not remain an object of this mass-produced fantasy: she resists it, becoming, to borrow Pellegrini’s turn of phrase, an “active, unruly subject of desire.”(113) When Peck calls Li’l Bit “beautiful,” she looks back at him “ a bit defiantly ” and reminds him that “Aunt Mary is beautiful.”(114) And Li’l Bit rejects Peck’s idea of creating a portfolio of her photos and sending them to Playboy when she turns eighteen. She refuses to become another commodity on the sexual marketplace. Most importantly, interspersed among all the pin-ups are the aleatory photos of Li’l Bit that Peck takes during the shoot in real time. For example, after Peck says “I love you” to Li’l Bit, the directions read: “ Li’l Bit opens her eyes; she is startled. Peck captures the shot. On the screen we see right through her .”(115) There are thus two kinds of images being contrasted in this pivotal scene. There are the sexualized pin-up photos of “aesthetic consumerism,” to which Susan Sontag claims “everyone is now addicted,” and the photos of Li’l Bit that reveal what Roland Barthes calls in Camera Lucida , “ the impossible science of the unique being .”(116) By giving space and time to both kinds of images onstage and by projecting them alongside two unique human beings as they navigate their transgressive relationship, Vogel paradoxically achieves more artistic control over the representations of her characters and the meaning of her play than Nabokov did when he tried to prohibit any visual representation and embodiment of his heroine. And while Vogel dismediates pin-up photography, she allows for photos, in which we see the mature actor playing a teenage Li’l Bit, to supplement the performance of her two actors. Not only is thirteen-year-old Li’l Bit’s wish that her erotic photos never see the light of day respected, but also the photos that we do see projected onstage—that of an older actor performing the memory of the teenage version of her character—serve as a reminder of the passage of time. In this scene, theatre and photography are engaged not so much in competition as in a symbiotic relationship that shines light on Li’l Bit’s mortality. Indeed, as Barthes points out, photography and theatre have much in common, “by way of a singular intermediary”— “by way of Death.”(117) The “first actors,” Barthes reminds us, “separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead.”(118) According to Barthes, there are, thus, two kinds of punctums . There is the “unexpected flash” of detail that “sometimes crosses” the field of a photograph.(119) And then there is “Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (‘that-has-been’), its pure representation.”(120) It is this punctum , as a trace of time and a reminder of mortality, that is amplified in the palimpsest photo shoot scene. In a way, these projected photos of the older actor posing as a teenager also function as “surrogation,” which Joseph Roach describes as the “three-sided relationship of memory, performance, and substitution.”(121) Although there are no roles for child actors in Drive , Vogel “strongly recommend[s] casting a young woman who is ‘of legal age,’ that is, twenty-one to twenty-five years old who can look as close to eleven as possible” for the role of the Teenage Greek Chorus.(122) “If the actor is too young,” Vogel explains, “the audience may feel uncomfortable.”(123) The youthful appearance and the young-sounding voice of the Teenage Greek Chorus are necessary for the scene in which the first episode of molestation occurs. In 1962, when Peck holds eleven-year-old Li’l Bit in his lap and shows her how to drive for the first time, the thirty- or forty-something-year-old actor playing Li’l Bit performs the physical actions, while the Teenage Greek Chorus speaks all the lines, standing “apart on stage.”(124) After Peck and the Teenage Greek Chorus exit, Li’l Bit faces the audience and says: “That day was the last day I lived in my body.”(125) This separation of body and voice represents, in David Savran’s words, “the radical alienation from self that results from having been molested.”(126) In this way, Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive creatively employs exactly what Nabokov’s Lolita displays anxiety about—embodied performance—in order to both stage Li’l Bit’s sexual trauma and help her transcend it. Conclusion In the fall of 1959, almost a year after the infamous Halloween episode, Nabokov visited Paris where he witnessed yet another Lolita cosplay. This time it was the twenty-nine-year-old wife of French author Alain Robbe-Grillet—Catherine—who “had dressed herself à la gamine.”(127)Nabokov was not horrified. He was delighted by the “petite, pretty wife, a young actress” who “continued [her] performance the next day” when the two writers met again for lunch.(128) Both men found it hilarious when, after serving everyone else alcohol, the waiter asked Catherine if she would like a Coca-Cola.(129) Reminiscing about this “very funny” episode, Nabokov assumed that the young woman was “pretending to be Lolita” in his “honor.”(130) Perhaps. Or, there might have been something else at play. The Robbe-Grillets were in a consensual sadomasochistic relationship, in which Catherine was the submissive. She enjoyed being “mistaken for a teenager” and being “refused admission to a film for 18.”(131) In any event, Nabokov clearly did not have a problem with age play between consenting adults, even if it involved elements borrowed and repurposed from his novel. On some level, he must have known that, just as Dolly runs away from Humbert and Quilty, so too would his Lolita escape his authorial control. What he opposed was that Lolita contribute to the kind of commodification of young girls that his novel both documents and resists. Despite Nabokov’s admonition, throughout the years, book covers for Lolita have gotten more risqué. And the name of his beloved nymphet has become associated with exactly the kind of exploitation his novel condemns, such as Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous Lolita Express plane. Amid all the misreadings and misappropriations of Nabokov’s Lolita , Fornés and Vogel have stood out as the novel’s most conscientious readers. Their theatrical responses challenge the pervasive Lolita myth of popular culture, explore the relationship between girlhood and womanhood, and present their audiences with alternative versions of the adolescent girl. Fornés’s non-white Lolita is curious, brave, and autonomous. Vogel’s Li’l Bit is witty, resilient, and not defined by her sexual trauma. Many of these characteristics can already be detected in Nabokov’s Dolly, whose fictional fate is that of the deceased muse who will “live in the minds of later generations” in the manuscript written by “HH.”(132) The artist in Nabokov’s literary universe is almost exclusively male.(133) Unless, of course, she is Vivian Darkbloom— the anagram of the author’s own name. By contrast, the protagonists of Fornés and Vogel are unmistakably artistic, writing and making sense of their pasts, presents, and futures. They give us an unforgettable portrait of the artist as a young girl. Still, Fornés and Vogel share Nabokov’s anxiety about representing youthful desire on stage. Although both playwrights show adolescence to be a time of chaos and confusion instead of “an idyll of childhood,” they are aware of the danger of their female protagonists becoming mere “objects of male desire” and capitalist consumption.(134) Reception, after all, is challenging to control. Fornés circumvents the issue by placing her heroine (who can be played by an adult or a child) into the protective environment of a theatre play for children, from which Humbert Humbert has been expelled. The erotic awakening of her Lolita is relatively tame. Vogel assigns an adult to play Li’l Bit at different stages of her life and relies on a childlike voice of another adult to communicate her protagonist’s youngest age. In the twenty-first century, however, there has been “a growing interest in children as both performers and performance makers of experimental work.”(135) Many of these performances are meant to make audiences deeply unconformable and to encourage them to think about the adult-child dynamic (136) The performance of girlhood in the theatre will always be ridden with anxieties and risks. Silencing girls, however, is no longer an ethically viable option. In their Lolita -inspired plays, Fornés and Vogel found several ways that embodied performance could channel the agency of girls during the messy, painful, exhilarating experience of growing up. There are still more to discover. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome (1959), trans. Bernard Fretchman (London: First Four Square Edition, 1962), 20. Alizée, “Moi…Lolita” [“Me… Lolita”], Gourmandises (2000). Produced by Polydor. I’d like to thank Gwendolyn Alker for bringing my attention to Fornés’s unpublished script for Lolita in the Garden and for helping me locate a copy. Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 373-74. Quoted in Graham Vickers, Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov’s Little Girl All Over Again (Chicago: Chicago Review Press , 2008), 131. Take, for example, Frank Wedekind’s Lulu, who is about fifteen years of age. See S. E. Jackson, “Whose Lulu Is It Anyway? Performing through Dramaturgies of Excess,” Theatre Journal 72, no. 1 (2020): 21-7. Vladimir Nabokov, “On a Book Entitled Lolita ,” in The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated , edited with preface, introduction, and notes by Alfred Appel, Jr. (New York: Vintage, 1991), 311-16, quote on 316. For more on Gothic Lolita fashion, see Michelle Liu Carriger, “‘Maiden’s Armor’: Global Gothic Lolita Fashion Communities and Technologies of Girly Counteridentity,” Theatre Survey 60, no. 1 (2019): 122-46. The article points out that, while the Japanese “lolita practitioners eschew all connections to Lolita , Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel,” it is possible to “consider the coincidence of the name as an example of what Anan calls ‘imaginative reconfiguration’” (131). Jonas A. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Siggy Frank, Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination (New York: Cambridge University, 2012), 47. See also Vladimir Nabokov, “Playwriting,” in The Man from the USSR and Other Plays with Two Essays on the Drama , introductions and translations by Dmitri Nabokov (San Diego: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1984), 315-22. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 283. Vladimir Nabokov, Foreword to Lolita: A Screenplay (New York: Vintage, 1997), x-xi. For a survey on the recent scholarship exploring the intersections of girlhood studies and performance studies, see the special issue of Theatre Survey edited by Marlis Schweitzer. Marlis Schweitzer, “From the Editor,” Theatre Survey 60, no. 1 (2019): 1-5. Kubrick cast Sue Lyon when she was fourteen. And Dominique Swain was fifteen at the start of filming for Adrian Lyne’s Lolita (1997). Both films had to change many elements of the novel. As Louis Menand puts it, “you cannot film this story accurately and stay out of prison.” See Louis Menand, “Just Like a Woman: Adrian Lyne’s Lolita Stops Way Short of Pedophilic Perversity,” Slate , August 5, 1998, available at https://slate.com/culture/1998/08/just-like-a-woman.html . For more on the York Theatre Company’s production, see Alisa Zhulina “Teaching Lolita in the Department of Drama,” in Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita in the #MeToo Era , ed. Elena Rakhimova-Sommers (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021), 73-91, at 80-81. When the musical was first tried out in Philadelphia in 1971, Annette Ferra was fifteen. When it was tried out again in Boston, she was replaced by thirteen-year-old Denise Nickerson. Both failed to gain audiences and were heavily criticized by the public and the critics. The age of the performers might have had something to do with the commercial failure. The seventies, after all, witnessed second-wave feminism, which brought attention to issues of sexuality and legal equality. J. Ellen Gainor, “ Dance Nation and Its Representational Challenges,” Modern Drama 63, no. 2 (2020): 173-96, quote on 178. Gainor, “ Dance Nation ,” 178. Matthew Wagner, Shakespeare, Theatre, and Time (New York: Routledge, 2012), 13. Paula Vogel, How I Learned Drive (1997), in The Mammary Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1998), 1-92, quote on 6. Adele Senior, “Beginners On Stage: Arendt, Natality and the Appearance of Children in Contemporary Performance,” Theatre Research International 41, no. 1 (2016): 70-84, quote on 81. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 8. Barry Kernfeld, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz , 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Suzan-Lori Parks, “On What Inspired the Red Letter Plays,” available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdaEk3FMRxI . Paula Vogel, interview by Charlie Rose, Charlie Rose , June 19, 1997, available at https://charlierose.com/videos/5709 . Here I am thinking of Marvin Carlson’s definition of “haunting” as it relates to the text: “Indeed, in the relationship between the preexisting dramatic text and its enactment onstage we can already speak of one kind of ‘haunting’ that lies close to the structure of the theatrical experience, in which the physical embodiment of an action that is witnessed in the theatre is an important sense haunted by a preexisting text…” Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 16. James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 6. Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C.: 2009), 120. Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot , 8. “Love can resist familiarity; eroticism cannot.” Ibid., 14. Beauvoir elaborates: “In an age when woman drives a car and speculates on the stock exchange, an age in which she unceremoniously displays her nudity on public beaches, any attempt to revive the vamp and her mystery was out of the question” (10). Ibid. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 8 and 34. According to Beauvoir, Bardot’s performance on screen “assert[s] that one is man’s fellow and equal” and “recognize[s] that between the woman and him there is mutual desire and pleasure” (30). Thus, there is an important difference between the reception of Bardot in France and America. Beauvoir elaborates: “In France, there is still a great deal of emphasis, officially, on women’s dependence upon men. The Americans, who are actually far from having achieved sexual equality in all spheres, but who grant it theoretically, have seen nothing scandalous in the emancipation symbolized by BB. But it is, more than anything else, her frankness that disturbs most of the public and that delights the Americans” (58). Tom Maguire, “Watching Girls Watching: HETPALEIS’s Hamilton Complex ,” Diversity, Representation, and Culture in TYA (ASSITEJ: Cape Town, South Africa, 2021), 46-57. Online. Ilana Nash, American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 3. This collective imagination has been challenged in the twenty-first century with the emergence of plays centered around girlhood by dramatists like Clare Barron, Sarah DeLappe, Julia Jarcho, Ruby Rae Spiegel, and others. See Zhulina, “Teaching Lolita ,” 84. Nash, American Sweethearts , 2. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 62. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy , vol.1 (1867), trans. Ben Fowkes, with introduction by Ernest Mandel (New York: Penguin, 1990), 125 and 129. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 9. This is even true of the author of Lolita himself. Both Nabokov and his wife, Véra, referred to the female protagonist as Lolita no doubt because of how famous that name had become. See, for example, Julian W. Connolly, “Who Was Dolly Haze?” A Reader’s Guide to Nabokov’s Lolita (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009), 53-66 and Elizabeth Sweeney, “Lolita I Presume; On a Character Entitled ‘Lolita.’” Miranda 3 (2010): 1-12. Interestingly, in Nabokov’s screenplay, the female protagonist is called exclusively “Lolita” by everyone. This could be because, in an audiovisual genre like film, referring to the character by different names would be confusing for the audience. I prefer to use the name “Dolly” because this is how the heroine signs her first name (first in a letter from camp and then in her last letter to Humbert). Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), 117. Laura Lippman, “Watching the Detective,” Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , ed. Jenny Minton Quigley (New York: Vintage, 2021), 69-81, quote on 80. Sarah Herbold, “‘Dolorès Disparue’: Reading Misogyny in Lolita ,” Approaches to Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita , ed. Zoran Kuzmanovich and Galya Diment (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008), 134-40, quote on 134. Stockton, The Queer Child , 121. Lena Dunham, “My 10 Favorite Books: Lena Dunham,” New York Times , January 8, 2016, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/08/t-magazine/lena-dunham-book-list.html . Andre Dubus III, “ Lolita , Chamonix, France, 2018,” in Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , ed. Jenny Minton Quigley (New York: Vintage, 2021), 119-34, quote on 132. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 5. Vladimir Nabokov , Selected Letters, 1940-1977 , ed. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew Joseph Bruccoli (New York: Harcourt, 1989), 250. For more on Russian Formalism, see Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, eds., Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays , 2nd ed., trans. and intro Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, with a new intro Gary Saul Morson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2012). Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 231. Martin Harries, “Theater After Film, or Dismediation,” ELH 83, no. 2 (2016): 345-62, quote on 351. Harries discusses dismediation in the context of postwar theatre, which he argues shaped itself through “the dismediation of cinema” by scrutinizing the cinematic spectator, critiquing “mass culture as an unprecedented tool for the production of docile subjects,” and exposing the interpellation of the cinematic apparatus (351) and (354-58). “ Lolita is an incantation, but its conjuring never moves from word to flesh; the brilliance and tragedy of language is that it is only language and therefore useless.” Eric Naiman, Nabokov, Perversely (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 44. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 32. The tension between text and its corporealization through performance is “at the center of contemporary theatre theory.” See Gerald Rabkin, “Is There a Text on This Stage?: Theatre/Authorship/Interpretation,” Performing Arts Journal 9, no. 2/3 (1985): 142-59, quote on 143. See also Daniel Sack, Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage (New York: Routledge, 2017). John H. Muse, “Virtual Theatre, Virtual Spectatorship: On Jonathan Ball’s Clockfire ,” Theater 48, no. 1 (2018): 79-90, quote on 85. The earliest use of the phrase “virtual reality” can be found in Antonin Artaud’s The Theater and Its Double , trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 49. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 62. Ibid. Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 100. For example, as Robin Bernstein has argued, in the context of American racial projects, the performance of childhood innocence became a “crucial but naturalized element of contests over race and rights.” Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University, 2011), 2. Kristen Hatch, Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 16. Compare this to the position of colonial Calvinists who thought that children were “ inherently sinful and sexual” and that they had to be taught to reign in their “damnable impulses.” Bernstein, Racial Innocence , 4. Hatch, Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood , 16 and 9. Stacy Schiff, “Véra and Lo,” in Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , ed. Jenny Minton Quigley (New York: Vintage, 2021), 15-31, quote on 28. Schiff is careful to point out, however, that Nabokov said this during a book party in London when he and his publisher feared prosecution. In addition, throughout his life, Nabokov said many contradictory things about the novel and whether children should read it. Stockton, The Queer Child , 121. For the quoted material, see Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita , 133. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions [1973] (New York: Vintage, 1990), 140. When speculating about how Kubrick’s film would turn out, Nabokov said: “It may turn out to be a lovely morning mist as perceived through mosquito netting, or it may turn out to be the swerves of a scenic drive as felt by the horizontal passenger of an ambulance” (14). Nabokov did not expect Kubrick’s adaptation to be faithful to his original. For an excellent analysis of Humbert as such an ad man, see Jacob Emery, “Humbert Humbert as Mad Man: Art and Advertising in Lolita ,” Studies in the Novel 51, no. 4 (2019): 546-68. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 148. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 39 and 37. Marx, Capital , vol. 1, 165. Ibid., 219. Maria Tatar, Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 13. María Irene Fornés, Lolita in the Garden materials, box 6, folder 7. The Fales Library, New York, NY. Fornés was familiar with Nabokov’s Lolita . Her partner, Susan Sontag, introduced Nabokov in 1964 at his reading at the 92nd Street Y. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 242 and 280. Elisa De La Roche, Teatro Hispano!: Three Major New York Companies (New York: Garland, 1995), 39. Robin Givhan, “Fashion’s Lolita : Fragile, Subversive, and a Paean to White Femininity,” Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , ed. Jenny Minton Quigley (New York: Vintage, 2021), 146-51, quote on 150. Givhan, “Fashion’s Lolita ,” 146. Givhan elaborates further: “Lolita was never a part of me mostly because she was not portrayed as black or brown—like me. She was pale with knobby knees and rosebud lips. She was a character as disconnected from me as Snow White” (149-50). Ibid., 150. Ibid. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 284. Ibid., 308. Ibid. María Irene Fornés, Lolita in the Garden , 3 . Unpublished script courtesy of Katie Gamelli. Fornés, Lolita in the Garden , 4. Ibid., 12. Norma Ford, Notes , Cuban Theater Digital Archive, available at http://ctda.library.miami.edu/writtenwork/1610 . Fornés, Lolita in the Garden , 20. Nash, American Sweethearts, 3. Vogel, Interview with Charlie Rose. Andrea Simakis, “Playwright Paula Vogel Aimed to Write a Reverse Lolita with How I Learned to Drive ,” Cleveland , May 10, 2017, available at https://www.cleveland.com/onstage/2017/03/playwright_paula_vogel_aimed_t.html . Vogel also includes a passage from Lolita in her play Hot ’n’ Throbbing (1995/2000). Graley Herren, “Narrating, Witnessing, and Healing Trauma in Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive ,” Modern Drama 53, no. 1 (2010): 103-14, quote on 103. Vogel, interview by Holmberg. In her review of Mark Brokaw’s production at the Vineyard Theatre, Jill Dolan writes that How I Learned to Drive is about “how our growth is built on loss.” Jill Dolan, review of How I Learned to Drive , Theatre Journal 50, no.1 (1998): 127-28, quote on 128. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 309. Vogel, Drive , 50. Vogel, interview by Holmberg. Joanna Mansbridge, Paula Vogel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 123-45, especially 144-45. Ibid., 145. Simakis, “Playwright Paula Vogel.” Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 316. Ann Pellegrini, “Staging Sexual Injury: How I Learned to Drive ,” Critical Theory and Performance , rev. and enlarged ed., ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 413-31, quote on 416 and 415. Herren, “Narrating, Witnessing,” 108. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 71. Vogel, interview by Holmberg. Ibid. Ibid. Paula Vogel, “Notes on the New York Production,” How I Learned to Drive (New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1998), 7. Here I am inspired by Marvin Carlson’s idea that theater practitioners “have long developed their work with an intuitive understanding” of “the concept of supplement,” privileging neither performance nor the written text. This particular “text-performance dynamic” encourages “an adjustment of perception in both directions.” Marvin Carlson, “Theatrical Performance: Illustration, Translation, Fulfillment, or Supplement?” Theatre Journal 37, no.1 (1985): 5-11, quote on 11. Vogel, How I Learned to Drive , 6. Paul Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture , 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 5. Vogel, How I Learned to Drive , 46. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 62. Auslander, Liveness, 5. Vogel, How I Learned to Drive , 63. Pellegrini, “Staging Sexual Injury,” 422. Vogel, How I Learned to Drive , 63. Ibid., 66. Susan Sontag, On Photography (1970, (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 24. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill & Wang, 2010), 71. Barthes, Camera Lucida , 31. Ibid. Ibid., 96 Ibid. Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University, 1996), 2. Vogel, How I Learned to Drive , 4. Ibid. Compare this to Jennifer Haley, author of The Nether (2013), who recommends that a “prepubescent girl” play the nine-year-old Iris. Citing Bert O. States, Haley explains that the “child actor takes the audience out of the play,” so that the “audience is assured nothing awful will be enacted upon the child.” Presumably this happens because, taken out of the play, the audience knows that there are laws in place that would protect the child actor. Jennifer Haley, The Nether (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 74. Vogel, How I Learned to Drive , 88. Ibid., 90. David Savran, “Driving Ms. Vogel,” American Theatre 15, no. 8 (1998): 16-19 and 96-106, quote on 17. Nabokov, Strong Opinions , 224. Ibid., 224. Ibid. Ibid. David Sexton, “Newlight on Dark Secrets,” The Standard , April 5, 2012, available at https://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/celebrity-news/newlight-on-dark-secrets-7383257.html . Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 306. See Alisa Zhulina, “Queen Sacrifice: The Feminine Figure of Power and Nabokov’s Strategy of Loss,” in Nabokov’s Women: The Silent Sisterhood of Textual Nomads , ed. Elena Rakhimova-Sommers ( Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 19-36. Maguire, “Watching Girls Watching,” online. Senior, “Beginners on Stage,” 21. For a survey of such recent works see Senior, “Beginners on Stage,” 71-72. For example, the Swiss theatre director Milo Rau cast children and teenagers between the ages of eight and thirteen in his Five Easy Pieces (2016) to enact the story of Belgian serial killer Marc Dutroux, who raped, tortured, and killed children and young girls. Bibliography Alizée, “Moi…Lolita” [“Me… Lolita”]. Gourmandises. London: Polydor Records, 2000. Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double . Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958. Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture . 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2008. Barish, Jonas A. The Antitheatrical Prejudice . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography . New York: Hill & Wang, 2010. Beauvoir, Simone de. Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome (1959). Translated by Bernard Fretchman. London: First Square Edition, 1962. Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights . New York: New York University, 2011. Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. ---. “Theatrical Performance: Illustration, Translation, Fulfillment, or Supplement?” Theatre Journal 37, no.1 (1985): 5-11. Carriger, Michelle Liu. “‘Maiden’s Armor’: Global Gothic Lolita Fashion Communities and Technologies of Girly Counteridentity,” Theatre Survey 60, no. 1 (2019): 122-46. Connolly, Julian W. “Who Was Dolly Haze?” In A Reader’s Guide to Nabokov’s Lolita , 53-66. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009. Dolan, Jill. Review of How I Learned to Drive . Theatre Journal 50, no.1 (1998): 127-28. Dubus, Andre III. “ Lolita , Chamonix, France, 2018.” In Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , edited by Jenny Minton Quigley, 119-34. New York: Vintage, 2021. Dunham, Lena. “My 10 Favorite Books: Lena Dunham.” New York Times , January 8, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/08/t-magazine/lena-dunham-book-list.html . Emery, Jacob. “Humbert Humbert as Mad Man: Art and Advertising in Lolita ,” Studies in the Novel 51, no. 4 (2019): 546-68. Ford, Norma. Notes . Cuban Theater Digital Archive. https://ctda.library.miami.edu/writtenwork/1610 . Fornés, María Irene. Lolita in the Garden. Unpublished script courtesy of Katie Gamelli. --. Lolita in the Garden materials. Box 6, folder 7. The Fales Library, New York, NY. Frank, Siggy. Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination . New York: Cambridge University, 2012. Gainor, Ellen J. “ Dance Nation and Its Representational Challenges,” Modern Drama 63, no. 2 (2020): 173-96. Givhan, Robin. “Fashion’s Lolita : Fragile, Subversive, and a Paean to White Femininity.” In Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , edited by Jenny Minton Quigley, 146-51. New York: Vintage, 2021. Haley, Jennifer. The Nether . Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. Harries, Martin. “Theater After Film, or Dismediation.” ELH 83, no. 2 (2016): 345-62. Hatch, Kristen. Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014. Herbold, Sarah. “‘Dolorès Disparue’: Reading Misogyny in Lolita .” In Approaches to Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita , edited by Zoran Kuzmanovich and Galya Diment, 134-40. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008. Herren, Graley. “Narrating, Witnessing, and Healing Trauma in Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive .” Modern Drama 53, no. 1 (2010): 103-14. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation . Hoboken: CRC Press, 2006. Jackson, S. E. “Whose Lulu Is It Anyway? Performing through Dramaturgies of Excess,” Theatre Journal 72, no. 1 (2020): 21-7. Kernfeld, Barry, ed. The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz . 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Kincaid, James R. Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture . New York: Routledge, 1992. Lemon, Lee T and Marion J. Reis, eds. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays . 2nd ed. Translated by and introduction by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. With a new introduction by Gary Saul Morson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2012. Lippman, Laura. “Watching the Detective.” In Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , edited by Jenny Minton Quigley, 69-81. New York: Vintage, 2021. Maguire, Tom. “Watching Girls Watching: HETPALEIS’s Hamilton Complex .” Diversity, Representation, and Culture in TYA. ASSITEJ: Cape Town, South Africa, 2021. 46-57. Mansbridge, Joanna. Paula Vogel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy , vol.1 (1867). Translated by Ben Fowkes. Introduction by Ernest Mandel. New York: Penguin, 1990. Menand, Louis. “Just Like a Woman.” Slate, August 5, 1998. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/1998/08/just_like_a_woman.html . Muse, John H. “Virtual Theatre, Virtual Spectatorship: On Jonathan Ball’s Clockfire .” Theater 48, no. 1 (2018): 79-90. Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita . Revised and updated edition. Edited by Alfred Appel Jr. New York: Vintage International, 1991. ---. Lolita: A Screenplay . New York: Vintage, 1997. ---. “Playwriting.” In The Man from the USSR and Other Plays with Two Essays on the Drama , introductions and translations by Dmitri Nabokov, 315-22. San Diego: Bruccoli Clark, 1984. ---. Selected Letters, 1940-1977 . Edited by Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew Joseph Bruccoli. San Diego: Harcourt, 1989. ---. Strong Opinions (1973). New York: Vintage, 1990. Naiman, Eric. Nabokov, Perversely . Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 2010. Nash, Ilana. American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Parks, Suzan-Lori. “On What Inspired the Red Letter Plays.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdaEk3FMRxI . Pellegrini, Ann. “Staging Sexual Injury: How I Learned to Drive .” In Critical Theory and Performance , revised and enlarged edition, edited by Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach, 413-31. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Rabkin, Gerald. “Is There a Text on This Stage?: Theatre/Authorship/Interpretation.” Performing Arts Journal 9, no. 2/3 (1985): 142-59. Ridout, Nicholas. Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Roach, Joseph R. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance . New York: Columbia University, 1996. Roche, Elisa de la. Teatro Hispano!: Three Major New York Companies . New York: Garland, 1995. Sack, Daniel. Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage . New York: Routledge, 2017. Savran, David. “Driving Ms. Vogel.” American Theatre 15, no. 8 (1998): 16-19 and 96-106. Senior, Adele. “Beginners On Stage: Arendt, Natality and the Appearance of Children in Contemporary Performance.” Theatre Research International 41, no. 1 (2016): 70-84. Sexton, David. “Newlight on Dark Secrets.” The Standard , April 5, 2012. https://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/celebrity-news/newlight-on-dark-secrets-7383257.html . Schiff, Stacy. “Véra and Lo.” In Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , edited by Jenny Minton Quigley, 15-31. New York: Vintage, 2021. Schweitzer, Marlis. “From the Editor.” Theatre Survey 60, no. 1 (2019): 1-5. Simakis, Andrea. “Playwright Paula Vogel Aimed to Write a Reverse Lolita with How I Learned to Drive .” Cleveland , May 10, 2017. https://www.cleveland.com/onstage/2017/03/playwright_paula_vogel_aimed_t.html Sontag, Susan. On Photography (1977). New York: Anchor Books, 1990. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century . Durham, NC: 2009. Sweeney, Elizabeth. “Lolita, I Presume; On a Character Entitled ‘Lolita’.” Miranda 3 (2010): 1- 12. Tatar, Maria. Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood . New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. Vickers, Graham. Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov’s Little Girl All Over Again. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2008. Vogel, Paula. How I Learned to Drive. Revised Edition. New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1998. ---. How I Learned to Drive (1997). In The Mammary Plays , 1-92. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1998. ---. Interview by Arthur Holmberg. “Through the Eyes of Lolita.” American Repertory Theater, November 17, 2009. https://americanrepertorytheater.org/media/through-the-eyes-of-lolita/ . ---. Interview by Charlie Rose. Charlie Rose , June 19, 1997. https://charlierose.com/videos/5709 . Wagner, Matthew. Shakespeare, Theatre, and Time. New York: Routledge, 2012. Wood, Michael. The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction . London: Chatto & Windus, 1994. Zhulina, Alisa. “Queen Sacrifice: The Feminine Figure of Power and Nabokov’s Strategy of Loss.” In Nabokov’s Women: The Silent Sisterhood of Textual Nomads , edited by Elena Rakhimova-Sommers , 19-36. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. ---. “Teaching Lolita in the Department of Drama.” In Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita in the #MeToo Era, edited by Elena Rakhimova-Sommers, 73-91. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. Footnotes About The Author(s) ALISA ZHULINA is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies in the Department of Drama at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts. She is the author of Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life (Northwestern University Press, 2024). Her articles and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in MLN , Modern Drama , Modernism/modernity , Theatre Journal , Theatre Survey , Performance Research , and several edited volumes. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. 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Kirsten Lee 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 W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond Kirsten Lee By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF W. E. B. Du Bois is often recognized as a pioneering supporter of Harlem Renaissance theatre, particularly for his involvement with the Krigwa Players at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL). Committed to the development of a “real Negro theatre,” as he called it, Du Bois’s work with the Krigwa Players brought him into close contact with amateur and professional African American playwrights, dramaturgs, and performers. 1 Du Bois’s involvement with the Krigwa Players of Harlem represents only one facet of his work with African American theatre in the 1920s. A more expansive view of Du Bois’s involvement with theatre during the Harlem Renaissance would show how he collaborated with Black community theatres outside of Manhattan. Indeed, part of the Harlem Krigwa Players’ interpretation of Negro life celebrated Black migrations throughout the United States, illustrated by the fact that “Persons from 27 states have enrolled in Krigwa,” according to Du Bois on January 1, 1926. 2 As this article argues, Du Bois tried to represent and facilitate a broader movement promoting Black theatre grounded in Harlem but not limited to there. Ultimately, tracking the Krigwa Players’ impact inspiring Black theatre-making during the interwar period restores to view drama’slongstanding importance in African American communities. Du Bois always saw the growth of Black theatre as a national project that would rely on and speak to “Negro districts” across the United States. 3 These “Negro districts,” Du Bois understood, were cityscapes shaped by the population flows summarized as the Great Migration. Though Du Bois argued that “The Negro [was] already in the theatre and [had] been there for a long time,” he lamented that performance for “mainly a white audience” expecting “a minstrel, comedian, singer” was “the norm for the black actor” in the United States.” 4 Under such circumstances Du Bois insisted that “a Negro audience desiring to see its own life depicted by its own writers and actors” was the foundation for the “new Negro theatre” capable of contesting the racist stereotyping on display in American performance traditions. 5 For Du Bois, “Negro districts” would prove essential to provide both the audience and the artists, for Du Bois, and thus to transformation of American theatre. Black theatre’s growth in these decades was the direct beneficiary of such migrations and emerging cityscapes, which brought artists from across the United States and the world into dense urban communities. Though we may be tempted to think of the Great Migration showing up in African American plays of a slightly later period, associated with works like James Baldwin’s Amen Corner (1954), Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), and August Wilson’s The Century Cycle (1982-2005), Du Bois’s stewardship of the Little Negro Theatre movement provides an earlier example of the Great Migration’s impact on African American drama. While Baldwin, Hansberry, and Wilson contend with the cultural transformations and consequences of the Great Migration in African American communities through playwriting, Du Bois’s work within the Little Negro Theatre movement provides an example of African Americans experimenting with theatre-making during the Great Migration’s heights. Studying Krigwa in Harlem and beyond shows that Du Bois saw the Great Migration and its émigrés as critical to the national development of African American theatre. Figure 1. “135th Street, all Negro cast drama,” ca. 1925. Image used with permission of the New York Public Library Archives, the New York Public Library. Figure 2. “135th Street, all Negro cast drama” ca. 1925. Image used with permission of the New York Public Library Archives, the New York Public Library. In July 1926, Du Bois penned a piece in The Crisis announcing a launch of a project he had been working on for the past three years at the 135 th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. Over these three years Du Bois had been working closely with Ernestine Rose, head librarian of the 135 th Street Branch, on the possibility of a “proposed ‘Little Negro Theatre,’” as he wrote on April 17, 1923. 6 Rose proved receptive to the idea from the first moment Du Bois presented it, passing along the request to the library's central administration in May 1923. The NYPL agreed to support the “theatre matter” provided that the Harlem Krigwa Players kept the operation rather small, offering the 135 th Street Branch basement as a potential location (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2). 7 By July 1923 local theatre professionals such as Anne Wolter, a former director of Harlem’s Acme Players, were offering their services to Du Bois for the creation of a Negro drama company housed at the 135 th Street Branch. 8 Though Rose wrote to Du Bois in September 1923 suggesting that there was a groundswell of interest in the library’s theatre project, it was not until December 1925 that Du Bois submitted a memorandum to the NYPL outlining the specifics of such an African American theatre. 9 According to his memorandum, Du Bois waited in part because he wanted to be sure that the project would fill a need the existing landscape of New York’s Black theatre scene (Fig. 3). 10 Figure 3. Selection about the Harlem Krigwa Players and subsequent Black theatres from Claude McKay's essay "The Negro Theatre Movement in New York" written for the Federal Writers' Project. Federal Writers' Project Negro Group Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Du Bois’s 1925 memorandum to Rose acknowledged the then-cresting renaissance of African American drama, noting that “We have today, as we did not have previously, a half dozen or more good plays, several Negro dramatists who are writing, and a number of artists and painters who are willing to cooperate.” 11 Critically, though he would lead the Krigwa Players who would call the 135 th Street Branch their home, Du Bois viewed this collaboration with Harlem’s public library as the beginning of a broader and cross-regional “Little Negro Theatre movement.” 12 The ethos of Krigwa, an initialism adapted to transliterate “Crigwa” or “The Crisis Guild of Writers and Artists,” foregrounded Black arts as a foundation of thriving Black communities. 13 In their 1926 handbill announcing their values and plays for the season, the Harlem Krigwa Players introduce the project’s mission, namely to build “in High Harlem, New York City, a Little Theatre which shall be primarily a center where Negro authors before Negro audiences interpret Negro life as depicted by Negro artists.” 14 The Harlem Krigwa Players thus envisioned this urban “center” as the heartbeat of the 135 th Street Branch’s dramatic productions and also the “headquarters in New York” coordinating a network of Black theatre companies across the U.S. 15 In his first public-facing article on the project, the now-famous "'Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre': The Story of a Little Theatre Movement," Du Bois introduced the Krigwa Players as part of a national renaissance in Black theatre. In this 1926 article for the Crisis Du Bois describes the national development of “a new Negro theatre,” which he identifies as the as-yet underdeveloped form of the Renaissance: “Today as the renaissance of art comes among American Negroes, the theatre calls for new birth.” 16 Though Du Bois’s article on the Krigwa Players is often celebrated for its theory of the four principles that should guide “a real Negro theatre,” namely that African Americans should create theatre about us, by us, for us, and near us, he identified the Great Migration as a major precondition for "assembling the “us” in his reference. 17 Inherent in Du Bois’s definition of real Negro theatre is an urban landscape of segregated neighborhoods: “The theatre must be in a Negro neighborhood near the mass of ordinary Negro people.” 18 Through Krigwa the theatre becomes a way to re-imagine Black communities’ relationship to “expressions of racial and spatial violence” within cities as an invitation to make art. 19 In Du Bois’s theory the majority-Black area of a city becomes as important a precondition for theatre-making as Great Migration émigrés themselves. Du Bois's diagnosis of African American theatre of the New Negro era fixates on the markets for dramatic productions in Black urban hubs across the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic especially. For Du Bois, newly congregated densities of African Americans across the country, especially in cities being transformed by Great Migration émigrés, made the national growth of Negro theatre possible. Du Bois’s diagnosis of African American theatre of the New Negro era fixates on the markets for dramatic productions in Black urban hubs across the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic especially. For Du Bois, the idea of “real Negro theatre” could be made real through a model he would at times call the Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre (or KPLNT) aligned with the principles out Black theatre-making he developed in Harlem. In the 1926 Crisis article, for example, he announces that “A second K. P. L. N. T. is being organized in Washington, D.C.,” expressing hope that “the movement will spread widely” beyond the nation’s capital. 20 He also praises “some excellent groups of coloured amateurs are entertaining colored audiences in Cleveland, in Philadelphia and elsewhere” in the same article. 21 Yet he criticizes Philadelphia and Cleveland “groups of coloured amateurs” for casting Black performers in white-authored plays rather than writing and mounting their own productions. 22 To transform these tendencies, Du Bois suggests that there must be a total overhaul of how Black communities view and make theatre, a transformation only possible in response to “a Negro audience desiring to see its own life depicted by its own writers and actors.” 23 By being on stage or writing plays, Black actors, dramaturgs and playwrights could reconfigure their relationship to the Great Migration by aestheticizing its causes, its consequences, and its cityscapes. Du Bois saw this aestheticization as Krigwa’s major work. Du Bois believed Harlem’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre would provide a portable model to unite Black creatives around the issue of producing theatre. The Little Negro Theatre model ultimately was meant to stimulate Black art in all its forms. Dedicated to spreading the Little Negro Theatre model beyond Harlem, the Krigwa Players Cabinet encouraged African Americans across the country “to get together a small congenial group of persons who want to do artistic work, who want to write, draw, paint, produce plays, recite, embroider, or work in any other artistic line.” 24 According to a circular written by the Krigwa Players dated January 1, 1926, each local Krigwa band, as they were to be called, would be expected to “each year produce a play, one written by its own members or one of The Crisis prize plays, or any other good play.” 25 In addition to producing an annual play, the 1926 circular encouraged local Krigwa bands to buy books, host poetry readings, curate art exhibits, visit local museums together, and to publish their works in The Crisis . 26 As the 1926 circular emphasized, each local band was to prioritize “meetings of artists who are working at their art” over “formal organization with a lot of officers and points of order.” 27 The Harlem Krigwa Players planned for The Crisis to help these local bands to connect with each other, imagining the magazine as a mediator. 28 For Du Bois and the Krigwa Players, the Litte Negro Theatre model was a way to build a national network of Black artistic communities across the United States through theatre. Their excitement for the nationalization of Black art via theatre motivated the 1926 circular’s hopeful conclusion, asking, “In how many centers can we have next the beginning of a real Krigwa Theatre which will put on a play” by 1927. 29 This hopeful conclusion was more than idealism and declared a commitment to growing Black theatre and drama as a craft. Many Black communities wrote The Crisis in 1926 indicating their interest in forming a local Krigwa band and the corresponding Little Negro Theatre, showing the immediate popularity of Krigwa’s model. Leota A. Bell of Kalamazoo, Michigan, for example, wrote to Du Bois on April 1, 1926 expressing her regrets that she could not at that time organize a local Krigwa band while confirming that she hoped to in the future. 30 That same month Reverend Neol L. J. Gonsalves of Lexington, Virginia wrote to Du Bois indicating that despite his best efforts he could not form a local Krigwa band due to lack of interest. 31 In late April 1926 W. R. Herndon of Denver, Colorado wrote Jessie Fauset at The Crisis regarding local interest in forming a Little Negro Theatre, pending further information “concerning the Krigwa idea and about organization.” 32 In November 1926 the Dixwell Community House of New Haven communicated interest in organizing “a group of players at the Dixwell Community House,” hoping to collaborate with The Crisis to produce plays the magazine publicized. 33 In reply to Du Bois’s recommendations, a Miss Leonora E Pritchett asks for the rules for a local Krigwa band at the Dixwell Community House. 34 Carrie Clifford of the Washington, D.C. Krigwa band wrote to Du Bois on July 12, 1926 asking for help sourcing a play for their debut production. In her letter Clifford took care to mention to Du Bois that the D.C. Krigwa band hoped to generate materials that could be used by other Little Negro Theatres. As Clifford posits, “Some of our members are also writing plays and hope the N.Y. Little Negro Theatre may use some of theirs some future day.” 35 The D.C. Krigwa band’s playwrights epitomized Du Bois’s dream for the Little Negro Theatre model, namely, to grow the development of Black-authored plays performed by Black actors in Black communities. But the D. C. Krigwa band’s ambitions also made real the dream of the Harlem Krigwa Players Cabinet to stimulate cross-regional collaboration among Black playwrights, dramaturgs, and performers. Though he only led the Krigwa Players of Harlem from 1925 to 1927, Du Bois calls the 135 th Street Branch’s Little Negro Theatre a small triumph in “a long wearisome fight” to develop African American drama during the New Negro era. 36 Reflecting on his work in Black theatre in a 1927 draft of an essay titled “The New Negro Theatre,” Du Bois identifies a few select cities confirming as the sites of recent national progress “toward Negro drama.” 37 Three times great pageants of Negro history and aspiration have been given in New York, Washington and Philadelphia, where audiences of perhaps 30,000 saw thousands of colored actors do folk-drama with surprising aptness and simplicity. Then there came in Harlem and spread to other cities companies of colored players in conventional Broadway plays who outside of certain obvious misfits of bloodplot and circumstance rose to heights of real dramatic ability and drew large colored audiences. 38 For Du Bois the genre of folk-drama, often understood to “arise from the community for which it was intended,” was more suited to real Negro theatre because he believed in the importance of Black artistic self-determination in all media. 39 It would not be enough to have “companies of colored players in conventional Broadway plays”: to Du Bois the growth of African American drama required Black creative collaboration and leadership on and offstage. 40 Though the Harlem Krigwa Players are speculated to have disbanded in part due to creative and financial disputes between Du Bois and playwright Eulalie Spence, their impact endured throughout the decade. 41 At the end of the 1920s African Americans were still writing the Harlem Krigwa Players expressing fervent interest in joining “the National Negro Little Theatre movement,” sometimes writing Du Bois personally to ask “Couldnt[sic] we have a little colored theatre here, such as you have in New York.” 42 The Little Negro Theatre model continued to inspire Black communities to democratize the dramatic arts throughout the New Negro Renaissance. Poised at what he thought would be the end of his formal leadership in New Negro theatre, Du Bois celebrates how the Little Negro Theatre movement “has been suspiciously begun” and “leave[s] it with fondest benediction to those better able than [he] to conduct its growth.” 43 He offers the following questions as a method for aligning the priorities of African American theatre with the values of Black artistic self-determination: The future is bright for the Little Theatre idea in Harlem. But the seed sown needs a period of incubation. We must make up our minds to certain things. Is Negro life dramatic and interesting? Do we want profit or art? Will we subordinate ourselves to authority? When these things are settled we can build a real Little Theatre movement.44 Du Bois positions Harlem’s Little Negro Theatre as one of many sites nationally of New Negro era theatre where “the future is bright.” 45 Seeing New Negro theatre as a medium for movement-building irrevocably tied African American drama to the Great Migration and the mass movements that created “Negro districts” across the country. It is these “Negro districts” bustling with Black (im)migrants that Du Bois sees as the critical laboratories of “real Negro theatre.” 46 Krigwa Little Negro Theatres were to be the means of Black creative freedom made real through the work of theatre-making. As Du Bois well understood, building a “real Little Theatre movement” would require Black creative communities united around the issue of artistic and political freedom, committed to the liberatory potential of art rather than a particular medium. 47 A hundred years later, projects like the National Black Theatre and the Black Ensemble Theatre continue to treat theatre-making as movement work and as a medium capable of harnessing “the Liberationist spirit of the past […] as a catalyzing force for our collective creative future.” 48 In such contemporary declarations, the Krigwa ethos lives on. References 1 W. E. B. Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre’: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement,” The Crisis , July 1926, 134. 2 Krigwa Players, “Krigwa Circular B,” Typescript, New York, N.Y., January 1, 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b034-i170 . 3 W. E. B. Du Bois, “In High Harlem, ca. October 5, 1927,” Typescript, New York, N.Y., October 5, 1927, 3, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b208-i040 . 4 Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,’” 134. 5 Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,’” 134. 6 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Letter to New York Public Library,” Typescript, April 17, 1923, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b022-i296 . 7 Ernestine Rose, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Typescript, April 24, 1923, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b022-i297 ; Ernestine Rose, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Typescript, May 10, 1923, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b022-i301 . 8 Anne Wolter also developed the National Ethiopian Art Theatre, which maintained some correspondence with Du Bois during these years as well, and requested his expertise and oversight. Anne Wolter was white, though she worked closely with many Black collaborators. 9 Ernestine Rose, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Typescript, September 29, 1923, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b022-i303 . 10 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Memorandum to the Librarian of the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library,” Typescript, New York, N.Y., December 18, 1925, 1, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b030-i555 . 11 Du Bois, “Memorandum to the Librarian of the 135 th Street Branch of the New York Public Library,” 1. 12 Du Bois, “Memorandum to the Librarian of the 135 th Street Branch of the New York Public Library,” 1-2. 13 Krigwa Players, “Krigwa prize leaflet,” Typescript, New York, N.Y., 1927, 1, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b039-i276 . 14 “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre Handbill,” Typescript, New York, N.Y., 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b034-i166 . 15 Krigwa Players, “Krigwa Circular B,” 1. 16 Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,’” 134. 17 Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,’” 134. 18 Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,’” 134. 19 Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism , vol. 17, no. 3, 2017, 10. 20 Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,’” 136. 21 Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,’” 134. 22 Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,’” 134. 23 Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,’” 134. 24 Krigwa Players, “Krigwa Circular B,” 1. 25 Krigwa Players, “Krigwa Circular B,” 1. 26 Krigwa Players, “Krigwa Circular B,” 1. 27 Krigwa Players, “Krigwa Circular B,” 1. 28 Krigwa Players, “Krigwa Circular B,” 2. 29 Krigwa Players, “Krigwa Circular B,” 2. 30 Leota A. Bell, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Manuscript, April 1, 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b171-i485 . 31 Neol L. J. Gonsalves, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Manuscript, April 19, 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b033-i360 . 32 W. R. Herndon, “Letter to Jessie Fauset,” Manuscript, April 27, 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b033-i503 . 33 B. V. Lawson, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Typescript, November 3, 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b033-i114 . 34 Leanora E. Pritchett, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Manuscript, November 10, 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b033-i116 . 35 Carrie W. Clifford, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Manuscript, July 12, 1926, 1, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b032-i497 . 36 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The New Negro Theatre,” Typescript, New York, N.Y., 1927, 2, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/pageturn/mums312-b215-i129 . 37 Du Bois, “The New Negro Theatre,” 2. 38 Du Bois, “The New Negro Theatre,” 2-3. 39 Helene Keyssar, “Theodore Dreiser’s Dramas: American Folk Drama and Its Limits,” Theatre Journal , vol. 33, no. 3, 1981, 367. 40 Du Bois, “The New Negro Theatre,” 2-3. 41 For more on Du Bois’s dispute with Eulalie Spence, see Kathy A. Perkins, ed., Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays before 1950 (Indiana University Press, 1989), 106; New Perspectives Theatre Company, “Eulalie Spence,” accessed January 26, 2026 , https://www.newperspectivestheatre.org/eulalie-spence . For more on Harlem’s Black theatre scene after the Krigwa Players, see Claude McKay, “The Negro Theatre Movement in New York,” Typescript, Federal Writers’ Project New York Negro Group, n.d., Federal Writers’ Project Negro Group Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, accessed January 27, 2026, https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/10563282 . 42 Ardella V. Richardson, “Letter to KRIGWA,” Manuscript, December 26, 1931, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b060-i379 ; Sharlie Norman and Charlotte Van Buren, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Typescript, July 9, 1928, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b044-i150 . For examples of late 1920s correspondence to Du requesting information on the Black theatre movement, see J. W. J. Lovell, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Typescript, February 24, 1929, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b049-i387 ; Mila M. Bray, “Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois,” Manuscript, June 6, 1929, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b047-i333 . 43 Du Bois, “In High Harlem, ca. October 5, 1927,” 1. 44 Du Bois, “In High Harlem, ca. October 5, 1927,” 4-5. 45 Du Bois, “In High Harlem, ca. October 5, 1927,” 4-5. 46 Du Bois, “‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,’” 134. 47 Du Bois, “In High Harlem, ca. October 5, 1927,” 4-5. 48 National Black Theatre, Our History , https://nationalblacktheatre.org/mission/ , accessed 17 Apr. 2026. Footnotes About The Author(s) Kirsten Lee is an Assistant Professor of English at Auburn University, where she specializes in early African American print and material culture, intellectual history, transnationalism, archival poetics, and Black women writers. Her current book project studies the aesthetic relationship between calls for reparations and abolitionism in Black print and manuscript across the long nineteenth century. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in  Early American Literature ,  American Literary History , and  Resources for American Literary Study . Since 2025, she has served as a co-director of the Black Women Diaries Project alongside Dr. Jennifer Putzi of the College of William and Mary. 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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By Amelia Hertz, Jadwiga Kosicka | An innovative collection of plays based on bizarre and macabre episodes from history and legend. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Decadent Histories: Four Plays by Amelia Hertz Amelia Hertz, Jadwiga Kosicka Download PDF Translated and Edited by Jadwiga Kosicka Born in 1878, Polish-Jewish playwright Amelia Hertz wrote in the early twentieth century innovative plays based on bizarre and macabre episodes from history and legend. She created a tightly controlled theatre of cruelty-set in decadent periods of ancient history–that confront extreme situations and pose “no exit” ethical and existential dilemmas. Hertz died in the notorious Pawiak Gestapo prison in Warsaw in 1942, a victim of the Nazis. Ysolde of the White Hands, Fleur-de-Lys, The Destruction of Tyre, and A Great King, which make up this volume of Decadent Histories, deal with fin-de-siècle subjects rife with perverse sexuality and violence: the Tristan myth in revisionist guise from a female perspective; the serial child-murderer Gilles de Rais and his young daughter who develops a taste for murder herself; the Prophet Ezekiel as he visits the ruins of Tyre; and the decline of Byzantium under Justinian and his general Belisarius during a time of conspiracies. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Bess Rowen Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month Bess Rowen By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF Becca Blackwell and Amanda Duarte in It’s That Time of the Month at Soho Rep. Photos: Julieta Cervantes . Courtesy Soho Rep Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month By Becca Blackwell and Amanda Duarte Directed by Jess Barbagallo Soho Rep New York, NY December 3, 2023 Reviewed by Bess Rowen Right under the poster art for It’s That Time of the Month , which features a dripping red smiley face against a dark pink background, Soho Rep’s website includes a statement in large font that reads: “ Trigger Warning: There will be fluids! ” But this was the only preparation for what would transpire after I passed through the bright pink, fleshy folds that led me into the space for a unique meditation on menstruation. It’s That Time of the Month is part talk show, part game show, part variety show, and part stand-up routine written and performed by Becca Blackwell and Amanda Duarte, and directed by Blackwell’s frequent collaborator, Jess Barbagallo. The audience follows Blackwell’s Snatch Adams, an out of work (clown) vagina whose journey to Soho Rep is covered in an animated video (designed by Derek Rippe) that precedes Snatch’s entrance. After running from some scary laws targeting women and trans people, Snatch enters the theatre and is given the chance to make a wish. Snatch wishes for a talk show, which ends up being co-hosted by Duarte’s Tainty McCracken, a fellow comedian with the gender politics and misogyny level of an average shock jock. These two foils create an environment where improv and crowd participation are essential parts of a journey through the trails and tribulations of menstruating people, a topic that is still too rarely discussed, especially in mixed company. Before a word is ever spoken or a video played, Greg Corbino’s production design set the stage for both the “taboo” topic and the forthright approach of Blackwell and Duarte. Audiences enter through the aforementioned pink, vaginal canal into a space featuring a golden vulva—complete with clitoris—framed by an open pair of legs. Illuminated letters spell “It’s That Time of the Month” above the legs, while the area underneath each leg provides a seating area for each host. Tainty’s features a sign reading “Man Cave” while Snatch’s holds the video screen that also plays commercial breaks between each scene. Snatch and Tainty’s entrances reveal their visceral costumes, designed by Amanda Villalobos. Snatch is a six-foot-tall vagina that people can reach into—as the audience discovered when Blackwell asked audience members of different identities (e.g. gay man, lesbian, straight man) questions and then told them to take a treat out of their snatch. Tainty wears a furry coat with a puckered heart fascinator and a mantle of balls that Duarte often had to adjust throughout the performance. The layering of textures in both costumes during the performance was all the more impressive because of how much crowd interaction there was, meaning that the audience had the chance to see the details of these pieces up close. The layering of textures in each costume was yet another instance of mirroring form and content, as the structure of It’s That Time of the Month was also a purposeful mix of genres. Blackwell and Duarte were joined by Becky Hermenze and Amando Houser, who comprise the “Slit Crew,” a nod to the “Pit Crew” from RuPaul’s Drag Race . Hermenze and Houser are equally important members of this team, as it takes all four performers to accomplish all that this show requires. From cleaning up the unfortunate yeast infection that causes Snatch to spit up some mealy liquid to helping prepare the space for the special guest (Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael R. Jackson for this performance), the Slit Crew helps keep the tone consistent across the ever-shifting scenes. The performances re the most crucial component of It’s That Time of the Month since Blackwell and Duarte are the thread that ties everything together. Becca Blackwell and Amanda Duarte in It’s That Time of the Month at Soho Rep. Photos: Julieta Cervantes . Courtesy Soho Rep. Blackwell, a storied and respected downtown performer, has an easy-going stage presence that inspires trust. They are charming, but they are also incredibly intuitive, funny, and quick-witted. These qualities allowed for moments of gravitas and pathos that one might not expect from someone dressed as a six-foot-tall vagina. Duarte’s character is certainly more abrasive, as Tainty is meant to be a Me-Too’d comic, but she managed to use this persona to make fun of such people instead of simply recreating the type on stage. And her easy rapport with Blackwell made the two a truly dynamic duo. Within the framework of the show, Tainty was there to serve as the ignorant one, which was easier to watch because Duarte is also someone who has an experience of menstruation. Of course, one important lesson I took away from this show is that having a period does not make you an expert on one. I learned a great deal myself! Aside from the knowledge gained, I was also struck by how comforting it was to see menstruation treated as a topic that can be painful and difficult. This was possible because of Blackwell’s approach, particularly because of how their grounded, masculine energy encouraged participation from the cis men in the audience in ways that surprised and inspired me. Blackwell’s final monologue touched on some of the nuances of being a trans person who has a period, and about the differences they have noticed in how people react to them now versus how they did before their transition. Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month is a rare piece of theatre that focuses on a common bodily experience in a way that increases inclusivity and works against stereotypes and taboos through comedy. Having a trans performer lead a show about the monthly realities of periods across the gender spectrum proved an excellent model for how to push back against cisheteronormative expectations in discussions of health. And to do it in a way that included facts, prizes, puppets, and a splash zone only made it feel all the more relevant and fun. It’s That Time of the Month does indeed include the fluids it promises in its cheeky trigger warning, but those are only meant to w(h)et your appetite for what comes next. Becca Blackwell and Amanda Duarte in It’s That Time of the Month at Soho Rep. Photos: Julieta Cervantes . Courtesy Soho Rep. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Bess Rowen (PhD) is an Assistant 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.” Other recent work can be found in Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders & Sexualities , Theatre Survey , and The Eugene O'Neill Review , among other publications. She also serves as the LGBTQ+ Focus Group Representative at ATHE and as the Co-Editor of the Journal of American Drama and 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 Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Lauren Friesen 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 Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Lauren Friesen By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage is a book that would have been helpful a century ago but could not have been written then; it would have prepared everyone for the winds of change that began then and continue today. This volume avoids prior emphases on form and structure and instead focuses on diverse methodologies and aesthetics. It provides hindsight into where playwriting has been and, more importantly, makes suggestions, even offering practical exercises as a guide to the current situation and the future of the craft. Every chapter in this landmark publication explores alternatives to Aristotelian structuralism, first articulated in Aristole’s Poetics (ca. 330 BCE). The essays have been carefully and logically selected to outline alternatives to a linear structure with its unities, singular plot line, and heroic characters. Sara Freeman’s 2023 publication Playwriting, Dramaturgy and Space begins the quest for a new direction . Decentered Playwriting takes that quest for new perspectives and presents them in full bloom. Philosophers have observed that space and time are the two constants in human experience, and playwrights have often structured their works according to time sequence (i.e., Hamlet occurs during nine months in his life). Decentered Playwriting begins with Sarah Johnson’s chapter “Playwrights as Architects of Third Space: The Dramaturgy of Japanese Traditional Performing Arts.” Johnson’s suggestion is to lay aside, for the time being, the narrative of time and explore the possibilities of space. With that declarative beginning, the following three chapters examine playwriting on “nothingness,” praxis, and hip-hop. Few playwriting guides of the past have availed themselves of philosophical foundations for dramaturgical analysis, but these chapters wrestle with the philosophical roots of Sartre, Kant, and Paul Butler, respectively. Decentering Playwriting takes another leap by advocating alternatives to the well-made play, the epic sagas of Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett’s existential wanderings. There is, instead, a vigorous emphasis on giving a listening ear to the people, issues, and connections that form the web of a playwright’s immediate social and cultural life. The book outlines how theatre can and should focus on contemporary themes rather than myths, on the daily lives of people rather than heroes, on stories about supportive relationships instead of linear plot lines, and on valuing interconnectedness over stock characters. Characters that emerge from a variety of cultural contexts, including Indian, Hawaiian, Indigenous, African, Filipino, and others, are explored throughout the book. Decentered Playwriting has sixteen chapters that present a meaningful guide to fresh writing methods with pedagogical techniques that often focus on emotional memory of cultural expressions and the ingredients for attentive relationships. This guide emphasizes the connection each writer has with their own family, local identifiers, animal interactions, local rituals, and the interactions with the wider community. Instead of exploring the universal, this study challenges playwrights to fully examine the particular, beginning with the self in community. Faculty, students, and theatres seeking approaches that reflect contemporary social and artistic sensibilities will be interested in what this text explores. Each chapter forwards a unique voice for a new aesthetic and its cultural context. Essayists of Native American, African, Indian, Cuban, LGBTQ, and other identities are included. In addition, unique and constructive methods are also represented, such as the archeology of identity or the analyzing of human experience as one dimension of a community eco-system rather than the solitary hero or victim narrative. Chantal Bilodeau’s chapter titled “Decentering Humans” offers a challenge to seasoned and aspiring playwrights: “Every play should aspire to fundamentally change our relationships to the world and to each other, and to ‘dethrone’ the human species while emphasizing that despite growing uncertainty, safety and connection are still possible” (81). According to Bilodeau, plays can present how humans are entwined with all of creation where everything is dependent on others for their existence and well-being. This interconnectedness is vital in character development to shift each one past a stereotype or two-dimensional portrait. Each chapter provides an array of options for interpersonal analysis and collaborative methods for devising scripts for stage performances. This is especially true in Oluwatoyin Olokodana-James’s chapter, in which the community as author is valued above the individual talent. The process is presented as a shared venture instead of assuming that a play is the expression of the solitary voice who is bringing the latest tablets from a mountain peak to an eager audience. This new trend might be viewed as a modern variation on the playwriting processes at the Globe in London (see Gary Taylor, “Why Did Shakespeare Collaborate?,” Shakespeare Survey , vol. 67, Cambridge University Press, 2014, 1-17). This book picks the ripe fruit for an epic theatre that is not bound by traditional rules for the stage. Brecht’s alienation effect ( verfremdungseffekt ) once served as an alternative to the well-structured play, but the chapters in this volume move beyond Brecht. Authors here instead explore how characters have meaning not because they present the alienation dynamic but because they do the opposite: illustrate the social fabric of their relationships. Diane Clancy describes how the character’s identity “aligns with the fabric of your own being” (163). The emphasis in each chapter is on new concepts and methods that focus on liberation, personal integrity, and communal experience for devising new work. Although each chapter presents new and creative playwriting approaches, the careful reader will note that Wole Soyinka, Paula Vogel, María Irene Fornés, Augusto Boal, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, and C. C. Mehta have paved the way for the current climate where the voices of Decentered Playwriting ’s authors will now be heard and absorbed. They also laid the groundwork for jettisoning colonial perspectives, moving away from Western styles, and incorporating marginalized communities. Every chapter deconstructs those previous norms and advocates a performative nature that emerges from those that previously had no voice. In summary, this contribution to the field of playwriting is a significant and practical development. If Decentering Playwriting had been available during my teaching years, I would have clung to it as a lifeboat that is headed to a new land. References Footnotes About The Author(s) LAUREN FRIESEN is the David M. French Professor Emeritus of Theatre at the University of Michigan. He is Past Chair of the Kennedy Center’s National Playwriting Program. He recently published Theatre and Aesthetics: Performance and Transformation. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. 2024. 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.

Richard Jones Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director Richard Jones By Published on May 27, 2018 Download Article as PDF Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director . Natka Bianchini. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; Pp. 204. To discuss the production history of Samuel Beckett’s work in the US is inevitably to begin with Alan Schneider. Schneider directed the American premiere of all twelve of Beckett’s major works, from the Miami opening of Waiting for Godot in 1956 to Catastrophe and What Where in New York in 1983; five of these ( Happy Days , Not I , Ohio Impromptu , Rockaby , and What Where ) were world premieres. He also directed the aptly titled Film , whose collaboration occasioned Beckett’s only visit to the US. In Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America , Natka Bianchini examines the growing relationship between Beckett and Schneider, and charts the development of Beckett’s American productions. Bianchini’s introductory chapter makes two crucial points. First, Beckett scholarship, even of his work for the theatre, has concentrated rightly or wrongly on dramatic texts rather than on theatrical productions; this book seeks to balance those scales at least a little. Secondly, for production histories to be any more than cursory, we need more than production reviews. Luckily, both Beckett and Schneider were avid letter-writers, and Bianchini benefited enormously from “Schneider’s inveterate saving of his notebooks, letters, and theatrical ephemera” (8). Indeed, the geographical distance between the two men contributed to more detailed and thoughtful correspondence between them than would have occurred had they been able to communicate more freely and informally. It should come as no surprise that the period from 1956-71, described by Bianchini as one of “resistance to and uncertainty about Beckett’s work” (14), and encompassing the American premieres of Waiting for Godot , Endgame , Krapp’s Last Tape , and Happy Days , should receive three of the five numbered chapters and nearly half of the book’s total text. The first post-introductory chapter draws its title from one of the most misguided promotional campaigns in theatre history: producer Michael Myerberg’s attempt to capitalize on the star quality of Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell by hyping Waiting for Godot as “The Laugh Sensation of Two Continents.” The out-of-town opening at the Coconut Grove in Miami appropriately receives more attention here than does any other collaboration between Beckett and Schneider, despite its failure in virtually every sense of that term. It was the first time the two had worked together, and it was clear that Schneider had attempted to stage the play Beckett wrote, while Lahr saw the play as a star vehicle, and Myerberg was more interested in placating his star than in supporting the authority of his director. The subsequent two chapters, more traditionally titled “Finding a Home Off-Broadway” and “A Series of Firsts,” trace simultaneously the growing if perhaps grudging acceptance by the New York establishment of Beckett as a writer of stature and the burgeoning professional relationship between Beckett and Schneider. Perhaps of particular significance is the 1958 letter from Beckett to Schneider about a change in the “business” of Endgame . Although Schneider had convinced designer David Hays to simplify the set and resisted the producers’ attempts to “gag it up” (50), he did, in the final tableau, burden Clov with skis, a climbing rope, a backpack, and an oar—none of which appear in Beckett’s stage directions. Beckett, hearing of the change, wrote “I’m told Clov carries skis…I think I understand your idea, but I feel this is wrong, stylistically…Load him down with as much as you like with shabby banal things…but not skis” (51). One wonders if even such an apparently insignificant departure would have been tolerated in another director. Unfortunately, no correspondence remains from the next few months, so whether Schneider apologized for the change, or whether he removed the skis for the end of the run, is unknown. The next two chapters, “New York and Beyond” and “American Zenith,” discuss both revivals of earlier works and the premieres of Beckett’s later plays, including four world premieres. Beckett was now firmly established to the point of having February 16, 1984 declared “Samuel Beckett Day” in Manhattan in ceremonies attended by not only New York’s mayor Ed Koch but both New York US Senators, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Alfonse M. D’Amato. By this time, Beckett’s plays were more likely to be produced off-Broadway or outside New York altogether in the burgeoning regional theatre scene, at academic conferences, and on university campuses. The book concludes with an excellent if brief assessment of Schneider’s legacy. Wondering why Schneider is not more highlighted in lists of significant American directors, Bianchini muses that perhaps he was devalued for “slavishly following an author’s text without contributing his own artistic vision” (148). She points out, aptly, that “regardless of the level of detail in Beckett’s stage directions, there is still work to be done in mediating the text” (150). Bianchini ultimately argues that Schneider as a Beckett director should be viewed precisely the way that Billie Whitelaw is perceived as a Beckett actor, as an example of how “ interpretation of the author’s text can be both visionary, and, simultaneously, truthful to the author’s intent” (149). One could certainly find fault with some details of this book: a couple of grammatical errors made it into print, some points are merely repeated without expansion, the index could be more comprehensive, and a chronology would be useful. Bianchini sides with Schneider in all disputes except those with Beckett himself, and she accuses those who discount or argue with Schneider of “bias” (7) or even “duplicity” (24). But these are quibbles. This book is a readable, often fascinating work that relies on a host of source material never before brought together: the notes and bibliography total more than a quarter of the book’s length. Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America will be of enormous assistance to those who wish to better understand either of its central characters, or the American theatre especially in the period from 1956-71, or indeed the relationship between playwright and director in the theatrical process. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Richard Jones Stephen F. Austin State University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Catherine M. Young Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines Catherine M. Young By Published on Download Article as PDF Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines: Woman’s Work. By Jessica Silsby Brater. Methuen Drama Engage Series. Series editors Enoch Brater and Mark Taylor-Batty. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama Press, 2016; Pp. 255. The Methuen Drama Engage Series “offers original reflections about key practitioners, movements and genres in the fields of modern theatre and performance.” Prior to the publication of Jessica Silsby Brater’s Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines: Woman’s Work , the series published books on Ibsen, Brecht, and Howard Barker. As the first book in the series to assess a woman in theatre, Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines underscores the importance of an ongoing commitment to recuperative scholarship that plumbs the archives, asks new questions, and approaches subjects in deliberately interdisciplinary ways. Ruth Maleczech’s own interdisciplinarity as a performer, director, and co-artistic director informs the content and structure of the book. What are the lived experiences and public profiles of women in collaborative performance ensembles? How is artistic and logistical labor distributed and documented? Yolanda Broyles-González has taken up these crucial questions in her work on El Teatro Campesino (1994), while Helen Krich Chinoy’s posthumously published research on the Group Theatre acknowledges such power imbalances (2013). Silsby Brater’s project contributes to this mode of inquiry, her subtitle “Women’s Work” signaling that Maleczech’s labor was gendered. Maleczech, along with other company members mainly known for performing, was consistently sidelined by critical and journalistic privileging of Mabou Mines co-artistic director Lee Breuer (Maleczech’s former husband and the father of her two children). The project is indebted to now-canonical feminist theatre studies frameworks forged in the late 1980s and 90s, as well as James Harding’s more recent analysis of feminist performance and the American avant-garde (2012). In addition, Silsby Brater builds on Mabou Mines scholarship by Iris Smith Fischer (2011), Alisa Solomon (2002), and Bonnie Marranca (1977, 1996). She focuses on Maleczech’s work from 1980 until her death in 2013 because it was from the 1980s onward that Maleczech’s independent vision as a director developed (27). In her assertion that the the book “functions in part as a recuperative history,” (28) Silsby Brater contends that “the full significance of Maleczech’s work has been ignored in part because she was a woman and in part because she was best known as a performer” (28-29). The fact that theatre and performance scholarship often privileges writers and directors over performers further demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary analyses of interdisciplinary artists. In her multivalent approach to Maleczech’s work, Silsby Brater draws on video documentation of a dozen productions and several interviews with Maleczech, her family, and other collaborators. These oral histories reveal a dense, interconnected web of personal and artistic affiliations. Silsby Brater is writing at the intersections of ethnography, performance studies, and theatre history, accessing her mentee/mentor relationship with Maleczech by combining intimate knowledge of the subject with expertise in the subject matter. The book’s eleven production stills bring another dimension to the work, showing readers a diversity of staging approaches. From the glass flasks and beakers used to play Marie Curie in Dead End Kids (1980) to the ethereal puppetry and trapeze in Red Beads (2005), Mabou Mines’ avant-garde aesthetics show Maleczech’s facility with various performance modes over decades. Founded in 1970, Mabou Mines, The Wooster Group (founded in 1975), and, of course, The Living Theatre (founded in 1947) have become increasingly canonized as the key collaborative ensembles of the American avant-garde, even as they are marginalized in traditional accounts of US theatre history. Each group represents a different permutation of influence by Europeans working outside the aesthetics of realism, most prominently Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, and Jerzy Grotowski. Silsby Brater’s introduction offers basic biographical information and places Maleczech in her cultural context, identifying the similarities and differences she shares with other key women of the US avant-garde based in New York City, including Judith Malina, Elizabeth LeCompte, Ellen Stewart, and JoAnne Akalaitis, a Mabou Mines co-artistic director. This helpful treatment allows readers to consider the specific aesthetics and innovations sometimes obfuscated by broad terms such as “American avant-garde” or “downtown performance.” Silsby Brater contends that Maleczech’s “singular focus on the representation of women on stage sets her apart” (10) from her contemporaries. In addition, Silsby Brater details Maleczech’s investment in the work of Samuel Beckett, and the influences of the Berliner Ensemble, Herbert Blau, and Grotowski on Maleczech’s expansive oeuvre. Maleczech’s body of work is analyzed in four thematically organized chapters that focus on the roles women play on and off stage. Chapter One, “Ordinary Women,” takes up Maleczech’s performances as Annette in Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Through the Leaves (1984) and her turn as Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (1996) to argue that Maleczech elevated the seemingly unimportant, i.e. women without social status. In the second chapter, Silsby Brater flips the script by focusing on “Extraordinary Women.” Her evaluation of Dead End Kids , Belén: A Book of Hours (1999), which Maleczech directed, and Lucia’s Chapters of Coming Forth by Day (2007) allows Silsby Brater to thematically connect three distinct performance histories across decades. The chapter highlights Maleczech’s non-hierarchical collaborative directing approach, which contrasts with Akalaitis and Breuer’s styles. “Family Drama,” the third chapter, reads Mabou Mines’ production of Lear (1990) alongside the autobiographical Hajj (1983) in order to explicate how the two very different shows unsettle “the traditional notion of the father figure” (109). The theme of financial resources in both works allows Silsby Brater to discuss the stress Mabou Mines experienced in “keeping the company solvent” (114). Artistic issues were often family issues. The fourth chapter, “Mother-Daughter Collaboration” extends scholarship on productions written and directed by Breuer involving performances by Maleczech and their daughter, Clove Galilee. Silsby Brater also takes up Maleczech’s second and third directing projects, Wrong Guys (1981) at The Public Theater and Samuel Beckett’s adapted short story Imagination Dead Imagine (1984), which featured a levitating hologram image of Galilee. With her interdisciplinary approach and use of oral history, Silsby Brater offers the reader remarkable stories of motherhood in the avant-garde. Mabou Mines’ pathbreaking approach to collaboratively funding childcare still seems progressive today. Silsby Brater then pivots to close reads of the work that so often masks the reproductive labor required to bring it to fruition. In this, her scholarship contributes to theatre studies’ increasing attention to the unresolved dilemmas of combining family life and theatre. Silsby Brater not only places Maleczech more fully within the American avant-garde, but within the theatre history canon, connecting Maleczech’s actor-manager-director status to performance traditions including noh and commedia dell’arte, and to specific figures such as Caroline Neuber and Molière. Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines: Woman’s Work explicates the aesthetic and interpersonal complexities of a sustained avant-garde performance practice and the invisible labor women often shoulder. It will interest researchers of experimental and avant-garde performance, women in theatre, US performance history, and New York City’s downtown theatre scene. In addition, I hope it inspires more scholars to recuperate neglected figures of theatre history. References Footnotes About The Author(s) CATHERINE M. YOUNG New York University, Tisch School of the Arts Guest Editor for Special Issue: Bruce McConachie Editorial Board for Special Issue: Meredith Conti Allan Davis John Fletcher Ju Yon Kim Scott Magelssen Julia Walker Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Acting in the Academy: The history of professional actor training in US higher education. Peter Zazzali. London, New York: Routledge, 2016; Pp. 219. 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Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 15 Spring 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Interview with Nasser Rahmaninejad by Babak Rahimi By Babak Rahimi Published: June 15, 2024 Download Article as PDF Nasser Rahmaninejad. Photo courtesy of the author. Interview with Nasser Rahmaninejad By Babak Rahimi The introduction of theatre under the Qajars (1789-1925) marked a new era in the cultural history of Iran. First, the theatre played a pivotal role in shaping new cosmopolitan spaces, mainly among the middle-class population who viewed the new art form as a civilizing means to become modern. Second, considering the complex ways in which theatre developed as an aesthetic medium for critical thought during the Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911), a political movement aimed to limit monarchical despotism by establishing a representative government, cities from Rasht to Tehran saw staged performances by growing independent theatre troupes and ensembles, who actively produced plays for political progress. As in the late Qajar period, however, various new theatre groups performed plays mainly for an educated and elite audience, many of whom saw translated European performances in “Clubs” and small theatres with limited public access (1). This was to change under the Pahlavi regime (1925-79) when theatre's popularity grew with the nationwide eruption of theatrical productions. Many productions, mostly translated American and European plays, were staged by an emerging generation of independent theatre makers who showed a deep intellectual interest in drama in a reflective search for the modern experience. The most significant development in the Pahlavi-era theatre productions took place between 1947 and 1949 when the Ferdowsi Theatre, under the directorship of Abdolhossein Nooshin (1906-71), staged European plays for a wider audience, who saw a brief period of openness after the forced abdication of Reza Shah by the Anglo-Soviet invasion in 1941. Earlier in 1939, Lalehzar Street in Tehran saw the opening of Honarestan-e Honarpishegi-e Tehran (The Tehran Acting School), where director and playwright Seyyed Ali Nasr (1894-1962) established the first permanent troupe and a school for acting. By the mid-twentieth century, theatre represented one of the most popular cultural practices in an increasingly modernizing Iran. With the 1953 U.S.-led coup that toppled the government of Mohammad Mossadeq and brought back the monarchy of Mohammad Reza Shah, Iranian theatre, like other artistic spheres of activities, encountered increased state censorship. The mid-1950s and late 1970s marked more organized attempts to regulate theatre production as part of a broader campaign by the State Organization for Intelligence and Security (SAVAK) to stifle dissent across the country. While industrialization and, by extension, urbanization gave way to a robust middle class, a broader perception of social inequality implied a critical response to the growth of frivolous consumerism and unfettered wealth. By the 1960s, a vibrant and politically conscious youth viewed the despotic regime of the Pahlavi dynasty as an impediment to an equal and just political order. While the Pahlavi state continued to build artistic and cultural centers, the independent theatre offered an alternative medium for cultural life, particularly in its modernist manifestation. Inspired by the new European intellectual trends and global revolutionary movements, post-coup playwrights and theatre directors staged translated and original plays, displaying a mix of realist and surrealist genres as critical commentary on a rapidly changing society. The proliferation of independent theatre groups and the emergence of innovative playwrights such as Bahram Beyzaie (b.1938), Abbas Nalbandian (1947-1987), Akbar Radi (1939-2007), and Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi (1936-85) represent a vibrant Iran-based theatre culture that sought to carve out new cultural spaces while under increasing state censorship. In this post-coup context, Nasser Rahmaninejad’s contributions to Iranian theatre reflect this dynamic shift led by a new generation of dramatists. Rahmaninejad also represents a generation of theatre actors and directors whose interest in staging performances of varied theatrical genres not only challenged Pahlavi consumerism, especially the escapist theatres of Lalezar Street in Tehran, but offered a critical expression for political change among the masses. Rahmaninejad’s theatre activities mirror the ideals of an era when experimentation and translation of theatre entailed the revolutionary conviction that to do theatre is to engage with the emancipatory possibility of performance. While the publication of his 2020 memoir, A Man of the Theater: Survival as an Artist in Iran , provides a detailed account of Rahmaninejad’s professional and political experience, in this interview we aim to discuss a range of topics that reveal the complex relationship between politics and theatre in the Pahlavi period (2). The following interviews were conducted via email and Zoom on January 10, 2024. They have been edited for length and clarity. Babak Rahimi: Our interview takes place just weeks before the forty-fifth anniversary of the 1979 Revolution in Iran. Before we discuss your views on the relationship between theatre and revolution, I’d like to ask you about your experience as a theatre producer, director, and actor in pre-revolutionary Iran. As you explain in detail in your A Man of the Theater: Survival as an Artist in Iran (2020), you began your life in theatre by attending the Anahita Acting School in Tehran in 1959. Established in 1958, the Anahita acting school was the first educational center where the Stanislavsky system was taught amid an emerging independent theatre culture that sharply contrasted with the escapism of what you call “commercial theatre.” Could you expand on your early training at the school and the role of Konstantin Stanislavsky in modern Iranian theatre? Nasser Rahmaninejad : As you mentioned, I began my theatre career and training at the Anahita Theatre School in 1959. The Anahita Acting School was the first training center to systematically teach Iran's Stanislavsky system. The training school was founded in 1958 by a couple named Mustafa and Mahin Oskui, both of whom were trained in Moscow under the supervision of Yuri Zavadsky. Of course, teaching this system in Iran was not comparable to what was taught by government-funded facilities in the Soviet Union. Still, the basis of the concept and philosophy of training, which mainly emphasized acting as experience, in contrast to mere representation, was the same. Before the Anahita Acting School, there was limited understanding of the Stanislavsky system in Iran. It was taught for Iran's growing theatre when Anahita School enrolled students and trained new actors. As for drama education, the first acting school in Iran, called Honarestan-e Honarpishegi-e Tehran [The Tehran Acting School], was established in 1939 and was active until 1958. The instructors of this school were trained in the French acting style. But before that, theatre actors in Iran had mainly been trained experimentally and almost spontaneously, mostly by Abdolhossein Nooshin, who studied theatre in France and taught his students in the French acting style. There were attempts to initiate a modern theatre in the mid-1930s. But the dictatorship of Reza Shah, despite his apparent efforts to modernize Iran, severely suppressed such attempts, and other progressive artistic, cultural, and social activities. It was after World War II, that is, with the removal of Reza Shah from the throne and the end of his dictatorship, coupled with the anti-fascist atmosphere around the world, that Iran's social and political atmosphere opened, albeit briefly. Many talents dormant under the dictatorship, including in the theatre field, emerged during this period. Nooshin’s activities appeared during this time, as he established his theatre group and trained his actors, as I mentioned, according to the modern French method. So, Iran’s modern theatre was influenced by the French theatre school from the beginning and continued to be so for many years into the Pahlavi period. After the CIA-led coup of 1953, commercial theatre grew in popularity. There are two reasons for this development. First, the new censorship policies, which primarily involved the suppression of leftist activists, limited the development of intellectual and progressive theatre. Second, the sponsorship of escapist and reactionary theatre performances became a dominant form of theatrical production after the coup. This situation continued until the early 1960s, when the Shah was forced to make economic and social reforms, known as the “White Revolution,” primarily because of the Kennedy administration’s policy to limit Soviet influence in Iran. During this era, Lalezar Street, which was the center of a robust leftist and progressive theatre, and also the central meeting place for intellectuals at cafes before the 1953 coup, gradually changed into a cultural space of entertainment. After the coup, Lalezar Street became the symbol of superficial theatre, staging vulgar and worthless comedies. Connected with this development, the audience of these theatres also changed, as owners and producers of such theatre venues introduced a range of Turkish and Arab belly dancing and juggling. Theatre became a small part of the performances. Meanwhile, the Administration of Fine Arts established a branch of theatre called the Office of Dramatic Arts in 1957, which supported apolitical performances while censoring leftist theatre. BR: Your first professional experience with theatre came six years after the 1953 U.S.-led coup that toppled the government of Mohammad Mossadeq and restored Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the country’s monarch. Could you describe the burgeoning independent theatre groups during the post-coup period as Iran experienced heightened Pahlavi state repression and an increasing regime of censorship? Rahmaninejad : After the CIA-led coup of 1953, the theatre groups that had emerged and matured during the 1940s, mainly under the influence of the progressive and leftist movements, were destroyed by state crackdowns. Even those groups that could potentially be formed into political organizations were quickly suppressed one by one by the security forces, preventing their activities from forming and hence making them disappear. On the day of the coup d’état, Saadi Theatre, for example, which was the most influential theatre at the time and had inspired a new generation of progressive theatre makers, was burned down by thugs and lumpen, who were recruited by the police. They destroyed the buildings and offices of the Tudeh party, the Iranian Communist party, nationalist organizations, progressive publishing houses, and bookstores, beating people who resisted and so on. After the restoration of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s monarchy, brutal repression, and insular censorship ensued, and for several years, no one dared to raise their voices in opposition. Cultural and intellectual meeting places were closed. Even gathering five or six people for poetry reading or storytelling became impossible. Society came to a standstill. However, in the second half of the 1950s, we see limited signs of opening. After the 1953 coup and the political suppression that followed, groups that formed in the relative freedom of the 1940s, or that were inspired by the theatre of that period, disappeared . One of these groups, for example, was the Oscar Theatre group, which was forced to disband in 1956 after only two years of activity. Many of its actors later joined the Anahita Theatre School. During the 1950s, after the coup, we faced a contradiction in the field of artistic, cultural, and political activities. On the one hand, the Tudeh Party was dismantled as the only well-organized and influential political organization and the most crucial oppositional force. The Party’s many members were arrested, while all branches of the Party were destroyed. All other cultural and political activities with nationalist orientation and critical of the regime were also shut down. The worker unions also refrained from activism. A reign of fear permeated throughout the country. But, on the other hand, a few years after the coup, there were theatre groups here and there, including at the University of Tehran, which started to take shape. For example, Mohammad Ali Jafari, an actor who was a member of the Tudeh Party, worked with Saadi Theatre, most of whose actors were also members of the Party. The theatre was burned down on the day of the coup by thugs who were supported by the Pahlavi regime. Jafari was released from prison in 1956. Later, he established his theatre called “Jafari Theatre Troupe.” Despite the repression, the theatre continued to be alive. It was in such a precarious situation that I grew up. I was lucky to know a few survivors of the previous generation who described to me good stories of life before the coup and terrible stories that followed the coup. So, with these historical events in mind, when I started my involvement with theatre, I had an idea of the theatre in my imagination that I wanted to do. And I was not alone, as others like me formed theatre groups. This is how independent and progressive theatre, or I should say opposition theatre , was born. In Iran, each generation had to begin afresh with a new experience, often with a tragic ending. If the harsh and bitter reality of that time is any indication, our growth has always been limited by repression, hardly ever simply handing over the flag to the next Iranian generation. For the most part, in Iran, not a single generation has tasted the stability to continue creating its art. Life and the artistic career of our youth have always been interrupted midway. This is the sad fate of Iranian theatre. Look at my life, for example. At the height of my artistic bloom, I was arrested and imprisoned several times, and my works were censored. Though I was released during the revolution (1979), I could not work for more than two years after the revolution. The atmosphere of terror forced me to flee my homeland and, once again, my life and career were interrupted. Even in exile, despite all my efforts, due to dispersion of Iranian compatriots because of ideological and political differences, the necessary connection between the artist and the audience never took form. Broadly speaking, the community support for continuity and coherence, which is essential for the growth of artists and their creative activity, never materialized. BR: You founded The Mehr Theatre Group (1966). How did your theatre group contribute to Iran’s independent theatre culture? Rahmaninejad : When I founded Mehr Theatre Group in 1966, there were still a limited number of independent theatre groups. Of course, I must say that most of them did not influence the theatre nor did they establish a stable venue to stage performances, due to lack of financial support or producing a coherent mission statement. For the most part, the theatre of this period was primarily amateurish since theatre needs continuity of stage performances. This was one of the reasons why, after two years of working under the name of Mehr Theatre Group, I inevitably changed the group’s composition and invited those friends who saw theatre as a serious activity and not just as a hobby. Those who saw theatre as a hobby had other ambitions in their lives than theatre. With a clear mission statement and a reliable theatre group, the Iran Theatre Association was founded in 1968. So, to answer your question, I must say that the Iran Theatre Association truly identified as an independent theatre group and, at times, the only independent theatre group that aimed to make an effective contribution to the field of theatre in Iran. We Can't Pay? We Won't Pay! by Dario Fo, directed by Nasser Rahmaninejad, produced by Iran Theatre Association, 1980. Photo courtesy of the Iran Theatre Association. BR: What were some of the productions of note that were staged by your theatre group and how were they received? Rahmaninejad : Our productions were generally well received. The problem is that we were limited in our activities because we didn’t have venues to rent, long-term, for our performances. Even after the 1979 Revolution, when we staged Bertolt Brecht’s epic parable Round Heads and Pointed Heads, the provisional government gave us the prominent Sangelaj Hall for one month. Later, when the performance was moved to the larger Rudaki Hall, despite the agreement that the venue would be available to us for two months, we faced opposition from the management and, following several meetings and intense discussions, they finally agreed to lend us the hall for two weeks. We then only had sixteen performances. Mohsen Yalfani’s The Teachers in 1970, directed by Saeed Soltanpour, was among the most notable productions. Bertolt Brecht’s The Visions of Simone Machard in 1972, again directed by Saeed Soltanpour (I was in prison at the time), was also successful. Maxim Gorky’s The Petty Bourgeois , the Persian translation of The Philistines , which was first staged in Rasht, capital city of Gilan, a progressive province in north of Iran, was received enthusiastically. BR: In A Man of the Theater , you portray your experience with post-coup theatre as deeply political. Would you describe your theatre activities, as an actor and director, as revolutionary? Rahmaninejad : This is a difficult question! First, let me say that I have never claimed to be a revolutionary. I have always considered myself an independent member of the left and in the revolutionary opposition. I did not imagine theatre could make a revolution, but I believed, and still do, that it could contribute to the idea of a revolution. In my opinion, art, literature, and, broadly, cultural activities do not lead to revolution by themselves but as mental factors that could help bring about a revolutionary moment. Revolutions require other, more important, and necessary factors and conditions. In the first place, the chaotic economic condition of the working class and the poverty of the masses, the repression and violence of the government against the people, the irresponsibility of the government failing to protect the people, and many other objective and necessary, concrete factors lead to the disruption of the social order. Revolution occurs in a complex setting and a long process. We see the same factors in the revolutions that have occurred so far. These factors contribute to popular dissatisfaction and protests, demonstrations, strikes, and resistance as people organize themselves to change the status quo for something different. In such a situation, art, literature, and theatre can enrich and strengthen the idea of a revolution. There are distinct and specific situations where theatre can play a more prominent role. For example, in the revolutionary period, theatre played a role in strengthening the idea of revolutionary movements and the larger urban protests and strikes. This is the kind of theatre that politically and openly challenges the status quo in the spreading of political ideas, which is known as agitprop theatre. With other names such as guerilla theatre and street theatre, such forms of political performances take place among the people, on the streets, in the factories, universities, and at heart of a social movement. As I mentioned, this type of theatre appears in certain political situations, such as the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, the student revolts of 1968 in England, France, and the United States. It played a role in the 1979 Revolution in Iran too. However, in the case of Iran, the presence of agitational theatre was very weak and mostly affiliated with political organizations, which lacked independence. All in all, to answer your question, art in general and theatre in particular can enrich the human aspect of a revolution, but it cannot alone make revolution. So, theatre can be a creative force in a revolution, but it cannot create revolution on its own. BR: In your book, you write about various censorship measures that you and your theatre group had to deal with. What was censorship like before and after the revolution? And how, if at all, did you circumvent censorship? Rahmaninejad : The main difference between Pahlavi, a secular dictatorship, and the Islamic Republic, a religious despotism, lies in the type of censorship applied to shape public opinion. These forms of censorship can be shown, if not accurately and in detail, with specific examples. Let me expand on this. During the Pahlavi period, a critic or a dissident of the regime was censored, threatened, and imprisoned. This was the general policy of the regime. Now there were cases that some were murdered, mostly under Reza Shah (1925-1941), and under the pretext of political activity deemed a threat to state power. Broadly speaking, under the Pahlavi regime, censorship had unwritten rules, which the artists and writers already knew. We could circumvent censorship by simply deleting or modifying certain content. We could then proceed to stage a performance mostly without the knowledge of the censors. We did this by first showing the work to our close friends, who discussed the content of a play, suggesting what could be included or edited. We had to be clever about what could be presented to the censors. For the most part, though, the criteria for censorship were clearer in the Pahlavi period, and because the monarchy was not a theocracy, we had more flexibility with our publications and staging a performance. This was the case in 1970 with Mohsen Yalfani’s play Kenar zendegi [By the Side of Life]. After a private performance for a group of friends, a discussion ensued that led to changes with the content of the play. With modification with the content, Yalfani then decided to change the title to The Teachers . In anticipation of the censors objecting to the revised version, I then submitted a letter to the Supervisory Council without presenting the new play but only explaining that due to change of the title, The Teachers, we kindly request to issue a new performance license. We then got the permission and staged the play. The Pahlavi censorship bureaucracy was hardly meticulous or able to detect and understand the changes. But there were other times when censorship could not be avoided. For example, b efore appearing on stage in Tehran in 1974, The Parasites by Maxim Gorky was shut down, as all members and actors of the Iran Theatre Association were arrested and sentenced to nearly fifty years in prison. In this case, censorship included imprisonment to prevent critical art. Yet, despite censorship, in terms of production before the revolution, the Iran Theatre Association was successful in staging several plays. Under the Islamic Republic, however, censorship of theatre became broader, prohibiting especially themes that may be deemed a threat to religion. Such a form of censorship has consisted of two important features: first, effective techniques in monitoring theatre production and, second, a consistent ideological campaign to clamp down on secular culture. First, as an effective technique, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, a government organ in charge of censorship, has adopted the extra procedure of viewing a performance before being staged. Sometimes, the censors would view a play several times, asking the director to change dialogue, words, content, and movement. The most effective way to censor has been to inhibit performances and make arrests to create an atmosphere of fear in the theatre community. Second, since 1979 and mainly under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, repression against intellectuals, particularly secular leftists, became more effectively institutionalized. This anti-secular repression continues to operate under the Islamic Republic, with victims ranging from poets and songwriters to cinematographers, playwrights, and theatre directors. Regarding this aspect of censorship, the Islamic Republic is innovative with measures to regulate the language of the public sphere, especially of a secular kind. We could call it “lexical censorship,” or regulation of speech in what could be said and published in print or live production of plays. Censors have significantly impacted the meaning of artistic works, changing the author’s language, and sometimes rendering the language meaningless. All in all, censorship under the Islamic Republic, though complex, is inherently contradictory, which sometimes seems to be pointless or simply madness. BR: The following question is sensitive since it involves your imprisonment experience under the Pahlavi regime. In recent months, a revisionist discourse, led primarily by monarchists, has depicted the notorious intelligence and security force, SAVAK, as a patriotic institution heroically defending Iran against domestic and foreign foes. In a recent documentary, Parviz Sabeti , the former director of SAVAK, Parviz Sabeti, who now resides in the U.S., has denied that his security force committed torture. He has also broadly described the use of force necessary for protecting national security. You were arrested for your political activities during a period when Sabeti played an integral role in consolidating SAVAK as an intelligent institution, implementing security measures that clearly included torture. If possible, could you explain why you were arrested? Were you tortured? Also, what is your response to Sabeti? Rahmaninejad : Our arrest occurred during a critical period when the armed struggle had spread in response to growing repression. Armed struggle was ultimately viewed as a vital threat to the regime’s existence. So, SAVAK decided to adopt harsh measures against armed organizations. The security campaign implemented by SAVAK was as follows: first, extending confinement of prisoners whose sentences had ended and were expected to be legally released; second, the arbitrary imprisonment of anyone deemed suspicious, which included those who appeared leftists or intellectuals. This might sound odd, but decisions to arrest people included how a person wore a particular mustache, a pair of glasses, jeans or velvet pants, sports shoes or boots, long hair, or simply a stylish or patterned t-shirt or shorts. The securitized atmosphere advanced a view that if one leftist or dissident was arrested out of a hundred, the government had made a significant accomplishment. The campaign also included the detainment of young people who entered Iran from abroad or students who came to visit their families during the summer. The objective was to determine if they were affiliated with the Confederation of Iranian Students or political groups abroad. At universities, anyone who questioned or engaged in suspicious discussions could be identified and arrested by SAVAK informants operating among the students. In prison, torture was done to the point of death. After arrest, the prisoner would be taken directly to the torture chamber without any investigation or interrogation, and to crush the will to resist, the interrogator or torturer would first beat up the victim, punch, kick, and then use electric cables. While torture had been used before, its intensity and extent changed. In such a situation, we were among the first suspicious individuals with the potential to be arrested. Obviously, not all members of the Iranian theatre community were Communists or members of a leftist political organization. But the government viewed artists with suspicion. As for our relations with intellectual circles, such as the Iranian Writers’ Association, and the production of critical art, the government saw us as a threat. Such perception of threat was essentially because of our independence. At that time, there was no independent organization in any field, artistic or otherwise. The only independent organizations were the Iranian Writers’ Association, which was not allowed to be active, and the Iran Theatre Association, which staged only one play a year. Moreover, we were not members of a political organization and had no political activity other than doing theatre from a political perspective. Our work in theatre followed the regimes’ legal procedure, albeit our subversive attempts to bypass censorship. That is, the plays we staged had proper license by an official censorship commission. None of the actors or directors in the Iranian Writers’ Association were political activists, and, in fact, the state did not convict them on political charges. But the sad truth is that SAVAK fabricated lies about us. For example, in my case, if the agency needed evidence, they would come up with fabricated documents so as to accuse me of “forming a communist group under the guise of theatre.” And this was applied to theatre actors who faced imprisonment. Such accusations implied that we were members of a Communist organization and therefore acted against national security. It is no exaggeration to say that nearly 80 to 90 percent of Iran’s political prisoners during the Shah’s era were not political activists in the true sense of the word. Now, one should ask Mr. Sabeti, in defense of which national security did he execute all those innocent young people and turn the existence of thousands of families into ashes? As the head of the third department within SAVAK, Sabeti was directly responsible not only for killing and torturing many prominent and talented young people of Iran, but also for the death of hundreds of innocent people during demonstrations during the revolution. Mr. Sabeti should be handed over to the International Court of Justice for his crimes against humanity! Moreover, the government of the United States had no compunction about hiding its own complicity with crimes that occurred during the reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was supported by Washington. It is a legitimate question to ask. Give me one example, just one example, of a politician who has committed crimes during his or her career and has freely confessed to those crimes. Sabeti is no exception. For the moment, the extremist right-wing government of Israel continues to massacre the Palestinian people while the United States along with other Western countries defend such atrocities with all their might. Do you think the perpetrators of such gruesome crimes, particularly Netanyahu, will be brought to justice? I doubt it. We live in an upside-down world. . BR: These two broad questions follow your experience with dissident politics. What was the shared view, if at all, amongst theatre practitioners about the role of theatre in political transformation in the 1970s? Broadly speaking, how do you see theatre’s contribution to the 1979 revolution? Rahmaninejad : Before the revolution, most theatre practitioners in Iran were employed by the Theatre Programs Administration, a Ministry of Culture and Arts section. As a government employee, a person in a theatre production played an important role in following state laws and regulations, including, of course, censorship. When you are employed by the government, you inevitably must comply with the imposed regulations, including censorship, and especially when in need of a job, you are completely at the disposal of the government. In this way, artistic, creative work becomes a job like any other governmental profession. And since the nature of the regime was dictatorial, censorship was widely and severely implemented within the press, publications, cinema, literary, cultural, intellectual fields, and theatre. This explains why conservative approaches in art and culture were widespread during this period. The plays that had a critical aspect were, first, limited in terms of production and, secondly, involved shallow and superficial content. If a play included a severe criticism of the regime, SAVAK would immediately react. As I mentioned earlier, this was the case with Mohsen Yalfani’s 1970 The Teachers. The show was closed after ten nights of performances, followed by the arrest of its author, Yelfani, and its director, Saeed Sultanpour. In the 1970s, the Iranian theatre saw an increase in the number of productions but not in political change. For the most part, theatre had become more and more conservative, primarily because of censorship. As for the rest of your question, I must say that, unfortunately, the theatre’s contribution to the 1970 revolution in Iran was very limited. Only in the final months leading up to February 1979, when the insurrectionary phase saw its completion with the regime's collapse, a small segment of the theatre community openly supported the revolution. BR: In 1983, you left Iran for the U.S. Could you briefly discuss your theatre activities in the diaspora? Rahmaninejad : Yes, in early 1983, I escaped Iran and traveled through Kurdistan to Turkey, then to Paris, France, where I became a political refugee. I was in France for almost four years, and during this time, I produced four plays. Then, I migrated to the United States to join my family. Working in the diaspora involves many problems, especially in the beginning. Apart from the basic problems of living in a new country, a new culture, a new language, and a new set of laws, being unfamiliar with everything, it is a major challenge to resolve everyday problems and requires a lot of effort. As for theatre in the diaspora, the first problem is finding the right play for an audience no longer in the homeland. This audience now lives in a different environment and deals with different problems, so it demands different subjects. The second is the financial problem. As an artist, how do you meet your financial needs? Then there is the problem of finding a place for performance. Where do you go to rehearse and meet with your group? Then there is the problem of finding people who are willing to devote their time to theatre without expectation of financial reward. The reality is that theatre in exile does not facilitate financial support. I have never been able to support myself through theatre during all the years that I have been active in theatre outside of Iran. In many instances, I have even paid from my own pocket to produce theatre. But in some European countries, Iranian diasporic theatre has thrived due to the financial support of the state. For example, two annual theatre festivals are held in Germany (“Iranian Theatre Festival”) in which Iranians and, most recently, Afghani theatre groups have participated. The continuation of these festivals is only due to the financial support of the local municipalities; otherwise, like many other theatre groups, they would disappear. In general, the theatre activities of the Iranian diaspora have decreased compared to the early waves of exile following the 1979 revolution. And especially since Covid-19, the number of theatrical productions has decreased even more. BR: What do you plan to do next? Rahmaninejad : In terms of producing plays, I must say that there is no clear perspective. When I imagine working on a play and the exhausting process of rehearsals along with the problems that come with it, such as the actors being late for rehearsals, sometimes the absence of some, providing the budget of the show, determining a suitable performance date that is acceptable to everyone, finding the right venue, and dozens of other problems, I can only describe it as a nightmare. In recent years, I have focused on writing and translating, and I am satisfied with this work. Writing usually needs considerable research, which is a learning and enjoyable process for me. BR: A final rather broad question: How do you see the future of theatre in Iran? Rahmaninejad : As long as the Islamic regime is ruling, theatre has no future in Iran, nor anything nor anyone. Iranian theatre has a high capacity for creative transformation and development, but it must be provided with suitable conditions for it to grow. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes On Iranian theater of the Constitutional Revolution, see Babak Rahimi, ed, Performing Iran: Culture, Performance, Theatre (London: I.B. Tauris, 2021), 12 and Willem Floor, The History of Theater in Iran (Washington D.C., Mage Publishers, 2005), 222-258. See Nasser Rahmaninejad, A Man of The Theater (New York: New Village Press, 2020). References About The Author(s) Babak Rahimi is the Director of the Middle East Program and Associate Professor of Culture, Communication, and Religion at the Department of Literature, U.C. San Diego. He is the author of Theater-State and Formation of the Early Modern Public Sphere in Iran: Studies on Safavid Muharram Rituals, 1590-1641 C.E. (Brill 2011) and Senses of Mourning: Muharram Performances in Iran, 1868/9-2022 (forthcoming). Rahimi is also the editor of Theater in the Middle East: Between Performance and Politics (Anthem Press 2020) and Performing Iran: Culture, Performance, Theatre (I.B.Tauris 2023). Rahimi’s research interests concern the relationship between performance, religion, and technology. The historical and social contexts that inspire his research range from early modern Islamicate societies to the Global South . Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Carving a Path: Desiring-Production in Displaced Syrian Theatre Interview with Nasser Rahmaninejad by Babak Rahimi Arab American Drama: Five Books that Inspired My Journey Five Arab American Plays Everyone Should Read MIDNIGHT IN CAIRO: THE DIVAS OF EGYPT'S ROARING '20S. By Raphael Cormack (REVIEW) Previous Next Attribution:

Shilarna Stokes Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 3 Visit Journal Homepage Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Shilarna Stokes By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF Over the course of five evenings in May 1914, more than eight thousand St. Louisans dressed up as Indians, Pioneers, and a host of allegorical figures—Gold, Poverty, and Imagination among them—to perform two versions of their city’s history before over a half million spectators. Hailed by George Pierce Baker as the crowning achievement of the early twentieth-century pageantry movement in the United States, The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis proved “what this drama of the masses may do for the masses.” [1] As the most prominent Symbolist dramatist in the U.S., the Masque’s creator, Percy MacKaye, enjoyed a well-established reputation for plays in which “time is a dream” and in which “the real and the ideal, the substance and the show, the actor and the audience, the poet and the figment of the poet’s imagination” are all interchangeable. [2] A friend and advocate of modernist theatre pioneer Edward Gordon Craig, he echoed Craig’s attack on realism in his own writings and advocated instead for the use of emblematic design elements, allegorical plots, and figurative choreographies. [3] In his view, these were essential to what he called “rituals of democracy,” mass masques cultivating “the half-desire of the people not merely to remain receptive to a popular art created by specialists but to take part themselves in creating it.” [4] By enjoining his fellow theatre artists “to illumine and body forth the life of the people in perennial symbols of power and beauty,” MacKaye pointed to a convergence of Symbolist aesthetics and nationalist sentiment that distinguished his unique contributions to the pageant movement in the United States. [5] The Masque was an elaborate work of verse drama, written in an erudite style and meant to be heard as well as seen. Nonetheless, like other pageants of its time, its narrative and its visual impact depended on the collective movement of large numbers of performers. Mass dances, pantomimes, and gestures allowed Masque performers to communicate its complex story to vast audiences that included spectators hundreds of yards from the stage. In U.S. pageantry, all scenes were, in some sense, crowd scenes. Due to their scale—with hundreds or thousands of citizens performing local histories for hundreds or thousands of their fellow citizens—mass pageants claimed an unambiguous correspondence between the actors and characters onstage, and the spectators in the audience. In doing so they were able to generate performative arguments about civic engagement, citizenship, and democracy on a grand scale, to promote certain kinds of collectivities over others, to incorporate communities seen as vital to the development of the social body, and to exclude communities that were regarded as dangerous to its integrity. To date, David Glassberg’s American Pageantry (1990) is the only published work to offer a substantive discussion of The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis . [6] Though he notes the Masque’s significance as a work of theatre, he is mainly interested in how it reflects Progressive Era conceptions of public history. As such, he steers clear of performance-based analytical approaches. By contrast, I offer here a close analysis of the Masque as a multi-layered performance that sought to shape St. Louisans’ conceptions of collectivity through embodied practices of dance, gesture, and pantomime, as well as the embodying practices of casting and puppetry. In what follows, I discuss how MacKaye’s Masque performed processes of civilization and Americanization that were designed to influence the newly expanded white population of the city. I draw on archival materials, MacKaye’s published works, contemporary secondary sources, and the text of the Masque to demonstrate how its three distinct choreographic modes sustained these processes. Its first and second modes of “playing Indian”—the ritualized and the savage—demonstrated for audiences the difference between rational forms of collective self-organization and wild expressions of collective fervor. The third mode, “Playing Pioneer,” gave shape to an ideal civic body that was consistent with the political and economic vision of city officials. The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis and its audience, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. Reaching its peak of influence in 1914, the American Pageantry movement, as it was called by its supporters, sought to achieve the complete transformation of society through the nationwide production of large-scale pageants: vast open-air historical dramas in which hundreds or thousands of local amateur performers participated. [7] Pageants could be fitted to almost any purpose, though they were nearly always associated with Progressive Era causes and themes. Whereas some reformers saw pageants as civic rituals that would, in time, give shape to a genuine democratic social order, others saw them as an efficient means of achieving immediate political reforms and modernization schemes. Given the wide range of aesthetic and social ideals to which pageants aspired, and the variety of communities that created them, it is not surprising that current scholarship concerned with the American Pageantry movement is similarly varied, tending to ground itself in matters specific to locality and history, and to organize itself around discrete social problems. [8] For MacKaye, pageantry was an antidote to the problem of commercialized leisure and its effect on the white urban working classes. In The Civic Theatre in Relation to the Redemption of Leisure (1911), MacKaye’s sweeping proposal to reform theatre in the United States, he writes that “The use of a nation’s leisure is the test of its civilization. How then does [this gigantic producer America] organize his night leisure? Into what hands of public trust does he commit this most precious engine of national influence? Ignored by the indifference of public spirit, [it] has been left to be organized by private speculation—the amusement business.” [9] For MacKaye, only the symbolist theatre’s refusal to reproduce reality, its utopian insistence on transformation, and its emphasis on universality were powerful enough to redirect the gaze of spectators past motion-pictures, vaudeville, and burlesque shows, and towards a “nobler theatre” existing “not primarily for the boards” but “in the mind of man.” [10] It is on that imaginary stage, MacKaye believed, that human beings may play their proper roles and begin to envision better forms of social organization. The St. Louis Pageant Drama Association (SLPDA), organizers of The Pageant and Masque , had two interrelated aims: to inspire a sense of civic unity in a city with a rapidly growing and increasingly heterogeneous population, and to use this sense of civic engagement to convince voters to pass a new city charter calling for the construction of a downtown plaza and bridge. Three years earlier, Civic League members who had led the charter campaign represented it as a boon to business owners and real estate developers. When the campaign failed they blamed ethnic divisions that, from their perspective, kept residents focused on the growth of their own neighborhoods rather than on projects benefitting St. Louis as a whole. Reinvented as the SLPDA in 1914, former Civic League members argued that The Pageant and Masque would “influence and control the emotions of the masses that their civic activity will be along proper lines,” thereby convincing voters to pass the charter. [11] Whereas MacKaye drew on the language of art, spirituality, and the social good to explain the purpose of his masques and pageants, the SLPDA expressed its aims in terms of progress, efficiency, and the social order. Both, however, operated on the same collective subject: white St. Louisans whose collective mind needed redirection and cultivation, and whose collective body needed redefinition and reorganization. By 1914 St. Louis had already been the site of several monumental celebrations including the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition and Olympic Games, the 1904 Democratic National Convention, and the 1909 Centennial of the city’s incorporation. Whether to surpass its own recent history of mass performances or to outdo other U.S. cities that had recently hosted mass pageants, the SLPDA made a bold decision when it agreed to MacKaye’s plan for a colossal double-feature. Thomas Wood Stevens’s naturalistic pageant would present historical episodes performed during daylight hours. Beginning at nightfall, MacKaye’s masque would reinterpret Stevens’s play in the mode of symbolism, employing allegorical mass characters, abstract design, and sequences of symbolic mass movement. MacKaye’s frequent collaborator, Joseph Lindon Smith, would direct and choreograph the Masque , which in the end took more than five hours to perform. [12] The American Pageant Association defined the masque as a subgenre of pageantry in which the balance between realism and symbolism favored the latter. [13] The differences were more significant, however, for MacKaye. Whereas the function of a pageant is to reenact the past, the aim of a masque, according to MacKaye, is to point to the future progress of civilization. Unlike other pageants of the period, which MacKaye regarded as “tending [too much] toward the static,” his Masque sought to represent the dynamic energies of modern life with its crowded cities and its seemingly endless flows of people by means of “large rhythmic mass-movements of onward urge, opposition, recoil and again the sweep onward”—crowd movements that were part of the script and integral to the plot. [14] The plan to produce both a pageant and a masque solved what MacKaye described as “a special problem in crowd psychology.” [15] Because “a huge, half-socialized, modern multitude [is] unused by experience to imagining,” the unique function of the Masque was to “lead the attention of [the] large masses” from the realistic images presented in the earlier Pageant towards symbolic forms representing the theme of the Masque : “the fall and rise of social civilization.” [16] The idea that civilizations, like organic species, must evolve or suffer extinction, was one to which MacKaye subscribed. Like many among the intellectual elite, he believed that European civilization was in a state of irreversible moral and physical decline because of increasing political unrest and urban overcrowding, plagues that threatened to reach U.S. shores via the mass migration of Europe’s working classes. The Masque took place at the height of the “Great Departure,” historian Tara Zahra’s term for the period between 1846 and 1940 when more than fifty million Europeans moved to the Americas, the majority from Italy, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. [17] Between 1900 and 1910, St. Louis’s foreign-born white population increased nearly 35%, leading to an overall population increase of nearly 20%. Because St. Louis’s rapid growth was directly attributable to recent immigration, city officials recognized the need to communicate with a greater variety of immigrant communities than the city had seen in its history. The SLPDA claimed The Pageant and Masque would break down divisions between the city’s ethnically diverse communities. However, the eventual result of the six-month long casting process was to expand the definition of who counted as a St. Louisan by implicitly establishing whiteness, rather than duration of residency, as the only essential criterion. Although black St. Louisans outnumbered all but the city’s German and Irish populations, and although the overall percentage of black residents was increasing at a much higher rate than that of white residents, only one Black St. Louisan appeared in MacKaye’s Masque —in the allegorical role of Africa. St. Louis’s Indigenous community was small by comparison with other ethnic groups. Nonetheless, when a Chippewa group proposed to perform in an exhibition baseball game for a fee the SLPDA declined their offer. [18] Not one Indigenous person appeared in MacKaye’s Masque. As one example of the “rituals of race” described by Alessandra Lorini, the Masque of St. Louis proposed to gather as many as possible under the sheltering canopy of whiteness in order to answer the question of how to create cohesive civic bodies in an age of racial and ethnic conflict. [19] Although the SLPDA’s refusal to allow the Chippewa to participate was only one of many acts of exclusion from the pageant’s history, the number and variety of Indigenous communities represented in the Pageant by white performers (Mississippians, Osage, Missouri, and more), in contrast to the total invisibility of black communities, invites questions concerning why “Indians” were so heavily represented in the Masque . For the majority of its performers, participation in the city’s largest civic spectacle meant covering one’s face and body with copper greasepaint and “playing Indian,” a concept Philip Deloria has used to describe performances of nativeness by non-native peoples that serve to negotiate contradictory models of U.S. national identity. [20] In the Masque , the symbolic value of Indian bodies is so great that actual Indigenous bodies, as persistent reminders of colonial violence, are rendered invisible. MacKaye himself blamed the “reverted social state” of “the Indian race” on the invasion of the hordes of the bison. [21] Building on Deloria’s work, Shari Huhndorf provides additional context for an interpretation of the Masque through her focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century examples of “going native” that contributed to “the regeneration of racial whiteness and Euro-American society,” particularly during “moments of social crisis that [gave] rise to collective doubts about the nature of progress.” [22] In keeping with Huhndorf’s assessment of the kinds of social malaise that “going native” has habitually addressed, representations of Indians in the Masque in fact bore little resemblance to other contemporary attempts to portray Indigenous peoples, such as those that took place in Wild West shows or World’s Fairs. Rather, “playing Indian” in the Masque was a way to engage and represent white urban workers to themselves—the same leisure-seekers who MacKaye’s Civic Theatre plan proposed to re-educate. That pageants often linked the bodies of Indians to those of white urban workers can be seen in countless images that represent workers and Indians mirroring one another in costume or in gestures of submission. In cartoons like one from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat , Masque participants perform gestures involved in Indian work and ritual on a mound “built by Moundbuilders Local no. 6,” and discuss “working class” themes such as baseball, lumbago, and the need for tobacco. The Masque’s representation of Indians was both a continuation of and an exception to the modes of “playing Indian” that took place in Wild West shows or in World’s Fairs, both of which had begun to attract massive audiences well before the pageant movement began. Like the Wild West shows in which Indigenous performers “[observed] traditional spiritual and cultural practices, [and] simulated hunting, shooting, and fighting back,” the Masque’s red-face performers engaged in similar activities for an audience. [23] Like the 1904 World’s Fair that took place in St. Louis, in which a model Indian school operated alongside a model ethnological village, the Masque aimed to articulate differences between “progressive Indians” and “primitive Indians.” [24] Unlike both the Wild West shows and the World’s Fairs, however, no Indigenous performers appeared in the Masque. As such, the Masque’s Indians did not aim at authenticity and were not subjects of an anthropological gaze. Rather, they offered an example of red-face performance that wholly consumed and expelled the bodies of Indigenous persons in order to re-present them as a collective symbol of a vanished past. Mass masques like MacKaye’s were spectacles that claimed to be anti-spectacle, and commercial enterprises that claimed to be anti-commercial. Defined as gatherings of the people and as events performed by the people (rather than as entertainments performed by paid professionals) the exclusion of Indigenous performers in pageants and masques was consistent with the contradictions inherent in an art form that sought to give shape to ideas of “the people” by excluding so many of them. To participate in a pageant not only meant “going native” but “becoming native,” in the sense of performing one’s affective belonging to a place in which one was not born. Indigenous peoples stood apart from the structures of belonging that the pageants and masques offered to others because, being neither white nor able to become white, they could only ever be foreign. Poster for A Pageant of Progress in Lawrence, Massachusetts (1911), courtesy of Dartmouth College Library, and “Sidelights on the Pageant.” St. Louis Globe-Democrat , May 29, 1914. The Prelude to the Masque depicted an invented lamentation ritual of the Mississippian or “moundbuilding” peoples, the eleventh-century inhabitants of the middle Mississippi river valley known for their creation of colossal earthwork mounds. In MacKaye’s mass pantomime, the Moundbuilders performed ceremonial dances, acrobatic feats, and prayers in honor of a deceased leader. Employing a ritualized mode of “playing Indian,” the Masque offered spectators a demonstration of a self-governing civic body that supported both MacKaye’s theatrical vision and the SLPDA’s economic vision, a body that achieved physical excellence through ritual dances imitating the geometrical forms of the city’s sacred architecture. Although few St. Louisans were familiar with them, MacKaye was so enchanted by his visit to the “Mounds” in nearby Cahokia, Illinois that he decided to recreate them in St. Louis’s Forest Park. The densely populated urban center of Mississippian culture, also called Cahokia, was composed of a vast central plaza, surrounded by mounds of differing geometrical shapes that may have corresponded to different civic functions. [25] The plan of this ancient city, with its monumental buildings, vast causeways, and interconnected plazas, correlated well with the city-of-the-future envisioned by the SLPDA. It also suited MacKaye’s goal, which was to imbue his Masque with classical values of form, beauty, and serenity. Despite the depiction of Moundbuilder rituals in the Globe-Democrat cartoon, the participants in the Prelude were not middle-aged men, but Boy Scouts and girls from local athletics clubs as well as young leaders of these organizations. Baker described the choreography of the scene: “Slowly and exquisitely, figures walking, swaying, dancing, filled the great stage [with] right arm extended before them and right knee raised high like figures in Assyrian bas-reliefs , [. . .] their bodies stained a yellow-brown.” [26] Ernest Harold Baynes added, “They represent the race at the very height of its civilization—a people beautiful of form and dress, lithe and graceful of movement, rejoicing in the strength and skill of their bodies which have been brought to a wonderful state of perfection.” [27] As described by Baker and Baynes, the athletic bodies of the Masque’s young performers provided the model material from which great civilizations may be built; moreover, their callisthenic acts confirmed that bodies can be “brought to perfection” through the performance of civic rituals such as the Masque . The Moundbuilders’ tightly choreographed ritual, designed by Joseph Lindon Smith, demonstrated their ability to create complex patterns without the instruction of a visible leader. [28] Instead, their movements were directed by the geometrical motifs of the emblematic setting: the cubic altar, the circular shrine, and the pyramidal mounds. Photographs taken during rehearsal and in performance indicate that although both male and female Moundbuilders entered in winding lines imitating the shape of a river, the boys soon began to dance in a rectangular pattern around the center altar while the girls danced towards them, eventually forming circles on stage left and right. The men playing older priests arranged themselves symmetrically at the edges of the largest central mound, creating a triangle while younger boys imitated their elders by making human pyramids on top of the two smaller mounds at stage left and stage right. In Smith’s choreography, the Moundbuilders were represented as a people who have so thoroughly incorporated the architectural shapes surrounding them that they need no leader to guide their movements. They performed as a self-governing civic body, whose rational and efficient movements corresponded in every detail to the design of their city. Moundbuilders rehearsing the Prelude , courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. As the Moundbuilders’ ritual faded from the audience’s view, an enormous puppet called Cahokia was revealed sitting on the center mound. Waking from a long sleep, he explained to the audience that the preceding Prelude enacted his dreaming memory of the glorious city in which he was once a revered priest. Now, Cahokia lamented, his people have vanished. MacKaye lovingly called Cahokia “my Über-marionette.” [29] Although the convention of beginning a pageant with a soliloquy delivered by an Indian was already well-established, MacKaye’s decision to use a giant puppet was unusual. Cahokia’s majestic presence not only underscored the extent of Edward Gordon Craig’s influence upon MacKaye’s ideas for reforming US theatre, it provided an aesthetic form through which MacKaye communicated his understanding of the relationship between the creative artist and the people in the socio-aesthetic work of pageantry. MacKaye’s profound reverence for Cahokia is unmistakable in numerous photographs that show him gazing up at the puppet and holding his hand. Conversely, photographs showing MacKaye rehearsing with actors tend to betray the posture of a stern disciplinarian. The different attitudes displayed in these photographs suggest that, for MacKaye, as for Craig, the human body was less suitable material for art than the Über-marionette. Unlike the “half-formed” people of St. Louis, who “provide[d] in themselves [the] creative material” for the poet-dramatist to shape and control, Cahokia’s puppet-body was an already complete work of art exemplifying MacKaye’s ideal civic body—his limbs, head, and hands moving in harmony with each other and with the music of the hidden orchestra. [30] MacKaye professed disagreement with Craig’s idea to banish from the theatre all “the personal elements implied in the work of the actor.” [31] However, his repeated descriptions of Masque participants as materials to be harmonized through performance suggest that MacKaye relished the opportunity to transform the individual bodies of St. Louisans as well as the civic body of St. Louis into works of art that might move with as much grace and precision as a puppet. MacKaye holds Cahokia’s hand. MacKaye directs Raymond Koch. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. Although the Moundbuilders, like Cahokia, embodied physical perfection, they did not speak. Consequently, it was left to Cahokia to speak as the last member of his once-civilized tribe: [. . .] Ai-ya, my people! Where are the tribes of Cahokia? Lo, where the trails of twilight Hide them, naked and scattered, Luring them backward—backward Deeper in primal darkness, Masking with brutes, and mating In lairs of the jungle.[32] With these lines Cahokia bewailed the de-evolution of his people into the beast-like Wild Nature Forces, a group of characters that allegorized all the allegedly savage Indigenous communities descended from the Moundbuilders. A brief glance at the text of Stevens’s Pageant helps makes this clear for its opening scenes trace the de-evolution of the Indian from a supposedly single, distinct culture (that of the Moundbuilders) to a passel of nomadic hordes whose degenerate habits are easily repelled, then reeducated through the heroic efforts of European colonists. In Stevens’s Pageant the Osage and the Missouri are represented as homeless, cowardly thieves who survive by means of begging and stealing. Those St. Louisans who played Osage and Missouri in Pageant scenes were double-cast as Wild Nature Forces in the Masque. [33] MacKaye’s stage directions indicate what has become of them: “ Below [Cahokia], mysterious, half-seen, at the foot of the mound—crouched on its sides and lurking in the dark background–brute-headed forms of the “Wild Nature Forces” move and mingle with glimmering limbs of savages .” [34] Recognizing the Masque’s Indians as a representation of the city’s rapidly expanding white working-class population, it becomes apparent that the transition from “playing Moundbuilders” to “playing Wild Nature Forces” signified a descent from civilization into savagery, and from culture into nature, that was resonant with contemporary fears about urban overcrowding and the corrupting influence of urban life. Like the denizens of modern cities, which sociologist E.A. Ross described as scenes of “mingling without fellowship and [. . .] contact without intercourse,” of “wolfish struggle, crimes, frauds, exploitations and parasitism,” the tribes of Cahokia, the puppet-priest explained, were lured away from their ancestral grounds. [35] No longer heeding Cahokia’s prayers, the Wild Nature Forces began to obey gods of Chaos who urged them to give into their basest animal instincts towards lust, greed, and violence. In all their aspects, the Wild Nature Forces illustrated the savagery of the modern city. Their movements consisted of lurking, crouching, crawling, mingling, mating, leaping, rushing and, unsurprisingly, crowding. Unlike the Moundbuilders, the Wild Nature Forces exhibited only groping, half-formed motions or rowdy, uncontrolled dancing. They gestured in multiple, arbitrary directions, all at the same time. They remained close to the ground where it was darkest and their shapes, which are described in the text of Masque as “half-seen” or “half-hidden,” were indistinguishable from one another. When the allegorical character named Saint Louis first entered the Masque , he appeared as a four-year-old boy, dragging behind him an immense sword that was too heavy for him to lift. Sensing his weakness, the Wild Nature Forces attacked the child, attempting to kidnap him. At the moment Saint Louis miraculously heaved the sword high above his head, the Wild Nature Forces suddenly froze, stunned into stasis and silence, “the beast faces [. . .] startled, glowering, murmurous.” [36] Then, all at once, they “swarm[ed] down the mound sides, rush[ed] into the darkness and vanish[ed].” [37] Saint Louis’s first victory in the Masque was one in which the mere appearance of a symbol of European conquest possessed the power to bring savage bodies to order and banish them from the stage. Having cleared the stage of actual Indigenous persons, stage Indians, and allegorical Indian figures by the end of the first act, the remainder of MacKaye’s Masque followed the actions of an equally complex representation of the urban masses: the Pioneer. Like the Indian, the Pioneer was familiar from earlier public celebrations. Scenes of pioneers marching with the tools of their various trades or symbolically clearing the land in front of them with axes had been a staple of US civic parades since the eighteenth century. [38] Participants in such performances embodied the nation’s pursuit of manifest destiny and the conquest of the frontier. In the Masque of St. Louis , however, the Pioneer was adapted to reflect twentieth-century concerns. Whereas the Masque’s Moundbuilders illustrated a vanished preindustrial and proto-national collective subject, the Pioneers of the second act represented an emerging national and progressive collective subject, one that must repeatedly confront the problems of participatory democracy in an age of industrialization and mass immigration. The first of the Masque’s Pioneers entered a theatrical space from which the ritual center, the sacred altar fire of the Moundbuilders, had been removed. The only remaining light on stage emanated from the small shrine at the apex of the center mound. “Marching [forward] in widespread numbers” with spades, scythes, axes, and rifles, the Masque’s Pioneers were unlike their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forebears. [39] Carrying useless tools that clear no land, they presented themselves as lost and leaderless bands of men, desperately in search of a place to make camp or a direction in which to move. As if suddenly recognizing the urgent need for guidance, one Pioneer cried out: “Our trails blaze with desire and danger and hope born of to-day. For tomorrow is dim and yesterday–dead. Now lead us to-day! Lead us, St. Louis!” In unison the others echoed: “Lead us, St. Louis!” Emerging from a nearby shrine, Saint Louis suddenly appeared as a young knight clad in white armor with a brilliant white sword. The sword, as tall as the actor, animated the immense spaces of the pageant stage, directing the Pioneers onstage and the spectators’ attention. From this scene onward, the Pioneers did not move or act unless directed to do so by Saint Louis and his sword. As the Masque’s promptbook reveals, the leaders of each of the three Pioneer groups were given typewritten sheets that explained where their groups should assemble and provided precise instructions for movement and choral speech. When read together, and in conjunction with the text of the Masque, they demonstrate the degree to which the Pioneers functioned as an automatic onstage audience, one formed by a reflexive, nearly involuntary instinct to applaud the actions of civic leaders. [40] Though the Pioneers were unable to move forward on their own, they were able to pledge their obedience to new leadership without hesitation. By performing spontaneous consensus and by demonstrating their willingness to be guided by familiar symbols of Anglo-European culture, the Pioneers provided an onstage model of the kind of civic responsiveness SLPDA members hoped St. Louisans would emulate offstage. Throughout the Masque’s Second Act, the Pioneers displayed their boundless energy. The prompt sheets instructed them to move swiftly from mound to mound and between various parts of the stage, often for no reason connected to the action of the scene. [41] Though their movement rarely indicated any achievement, it nevertheless performed the dynamism of modernity MacKaye sought to represent. Whereas the measured, ritualized group movement of the Moundbuilders expressed the rhythms of ancient, civilized collectivities, the velocity and urgency of the Pioneers’ numerous flights across the stage expressed the rhythms of the modern city. Though they did not represent a self-organizing collective body on the model of the Moundbuilders, the Pioneers were no less attuned to the necessity of precision, repetition, and rhythm in their collective movements. Once they arrived at their appointed positions on the stage, their vocabulary of gestures was even more restricted than that of the Moundbuilders. Confined to gestures of deference and supplication, the prompt sheets instructed them to stand, half-kneel or kneel, to extend their arms up or out, and to point towards symbols as they appear on stage. Perhaps one of the only opportunities for creative self-expression came in the form of a repeated request, appearing in almost every prompt sheet, for the Pioneers to “make a great show of interest” through audible noises and visible gestures whenever any astonishing action occurred onstage. The Pioneers provided an onstage audience for the allegorical Saint Louis that was intended to serve as an exemplary model for the Masque’s actual audiences. Their prescribed range of movement suggests that in the Masque’s view, being an active participant in modern civic life meant being an appreciative and impressionable spectator. It meant performing one’s patriotism by recognizing symbols, manifesting visible and audible signs of reverence for them, and agreeing to be led by those who employ them. Saint Louis and the Sword, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. If MacKaye hoped that audiences would concentrate on the mass symbols and choreographies performed by their fellow citizens, the St. Louis press was more focused on the masses of spectators themselves. Local newspapers attempted to give readers an experience of the Masque’s scale by printing panoramic photographs of its audiences, which by the end of its run comprised more than a half-million individuals. Many more saw the Pageant and Masque during its week of rehearsals prior to opening day. The test of any pageant’s success was the degree to which it could hold the attention of its vast crowds. As such, newspaper accounts remarked on the degree to which St. Louisans paid attention to an event that so many had presumed they could not understand. Spectators reportedly sat silent through sizzling summer days just to watch rehearsals, stood in the rain for many hours to gain access to the pageant grounds, and climbed dangerously high into trees to get the best viewing spots. Sitting amongst the minority of spectators who paid for their seats, Baker described several of his co-spectators chattering through the Prelude. From his perspective, they chatter because they are leisure-seekers, unaware that they are participating in a civic ritual. Eventually, however, the Masque worked its magic; the group became quiet and still as the performance continued. Before they left, he explained, they turned back to look at the stage once more before silently walking away. For Baker, this transformation proved that the Masque had succeeded in sparking a moment of collective attention that might be mobilized for social purposes if repeated often enough. [42] Despite Baker’s insistence on its singular social and cultural significance, MacKaye’s Masque , like so many previous civic entertainments, was absorbed into the urban spectacle it promised to transcend. Local papers reported everything from women overcome by heat, children lost in crowds, horses run astray, and water boys mobbed by thirsty spectators. Far from the ideal of civic enlightenment MacKaye describes in The Civic Theatre , spectators at one performance broke through seating barriers and caused a brawl. Rather than diverting attention away from the city’s commercial entertainments, some members of the Pageant and Masque’s chorus performed onstage at one of the city’s vaudeville houses immediately after an evening performance of the Masque. Although the Masque ’s critical and popular success was unsurpassed by any previous or subsequent event to emerge from the American Pageantry movement, its legacy remains fraught. On the one hand, the Masque’s success directly contributed to the passing of the charter, which in addition to its construction projects ensured stronger concentration of authority in the mayor’s office, fewer elected and more appointed positions, and rezoning provisions that narrowed participation in the political process. On the other hand, it also led to the establishment of the St. Louis Municipal Opera Company, the expansion of St. Louis’s public arts programs, and the construction of a permanent outdoor amphitheater in Forest Park. Despite MacKaye’s belief that large-scale participation in the Masque would encourage St. Louisans to work together for reforms that grew out of their own desires and imaginations, he misunderstood the extent to which the SLPDA’s interpretation of the Masque as well as its definition of popular participation predetermined its potential social meanings. Luther Ely Smith, who saw the Masque as evidence of “the [same] civic spirit which will build our bridge, pass our charter, [and] stretch a plaza from 12th Street to Grand Avenue” was but one of many voices echoing the official interpretation. [43] In the end, MacKaye’s Masque may have taught St. Louisans more about collectively performing towards the aspirations of its leaders, than about collective action or even collective dreaming. It stands as an unusual cultural experiment, and as a reminder that greater participation by citizens in the social and cultural work of performance neither equates nor necessarily leads to greater participation in official political processes. The work of coalition-building requires more sustainable performance practices than pageant-makers like MacKaye tended to have in mind. Acts of inclusion, when performed on a monumental scale, have the power to make a positive impact on communities, and even to instantiate processes of engagement, but their long-term efficacy depends on how they cultivate the meaning and the practice of collective participation before, during, and after the crowds go home. References [1] George Pierce Baker, “The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis.” World’s Work , vol. 28 (Aug 1914), 389. Though known primarily for pioneering the study of playwriting in the United States, Baker was a prominent advocate of pageantry as well as a pageant writer and director. [2] Thomas Dickinson, Playwrights of the New American Theater (New York: McMillan, 1925), 19. Despite his lack of popular success, Dickinson and others considered MacKaye one of the most important playwrights of his day. His most well-known plays are The Canterbury Pilgrims (1903), Jeanne d’Arc (1906), Sappho and Phaon (1907), The Scarecrow (1911), and Yankee Fantasies (1912). [3] Directly quoting Craig’s On the Art of the Theatre (1912) in his own book, MacKaye described realism as “the blunt statement of life, something everybody misunderstands while recognizing,” (Percy MacKaye, The Civic Theatre in Relation to the Redemption of Leisure. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912: 28). Despite their occasional disagreements, MacKaye and Craig were lifelong friends and correspondents. On their relationship, see Susan Valeria Harris Smith, Masks in Modern Drama (Berkeley: UC Press, 1984): 49-84. [4] Percy MacKaye, quoted in Joyce Kilmer, Literature in the Making, By Some of its Makers (New York: Harper, 1917), 314. [5] Letter from Percy MacKaye to Grenville Vernon, March 12, 1907, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. MacKaye’s work in the masque genre predated the rise of the pageantry movement. The Saint-Gaudens Masque , performed at the Cornish Art Colony in 1905, was MacKaye’s first critical success. His first pageant was performed at Gloucester, Massachusetts in August 1909 and, though it never materialized, he developed a pageant for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1910. After The Masque of St. Louis MacKaye created his most well-known and most often studied masque, Caliban by the Yellow Sands, based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It was produced both in New York and Boston in 1916. MacKaye remained a member of the American Pageantry Association’s Board of Directors until its dissolution in 1930. [6] David Glassberg’s American Pageantry: the Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990) currently serves as the starting point for scholarship on MacKaye’s Masque . Two dissertations also consider the event in some detail from different perspectives: Kenneth Graeme Bryant, “Percy MacKaye and the Drama of Democracy,” (PhD diss., Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln, 1991), ProQuest AAT 9200131, and Michael Peter Mehler, “Percy MacKaye: Spatial Formations of a National Character,” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2010), ProQuest AAT 3417299. [7] A bibliography of contemporary works on American pageantry can be found in Caroline Hill Davis, Pageants in Great Britain and the United States: a List of References (New York: New York Public Library Association, 1916). The American Pageant Association (APA), founded in 1913, was organized for the purposes of protecting the new genre from commercialization, disorganization, and low aesthetic standards. Its founding and development is discussed in Naima Prevots, American Pageantry : a Movement for Art and Democracy (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990). [8] For examples of the variety of forms that current pageant scholarship takes, see the following: Karen Blair, “Pageantry for Women’s Rights: The Career of Hazel MacKaye, 1913-1923, Theatre Survey , Vol. 31, no. 1: 23-46; Brook Davis, “Let the children speak: The ‘Pageant of Sunshine and Shadow,’ a child labor pageant by Constance D’Arcy Mackay,” Theatre Studies , 1997, Vol. 4: 33-44; Brian Hallstoos, “Pageant and Passion: Willa Saunders Jones and Early Black Sacred Drama in Chicago,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre , 2007, Vol. 19, no. 2: 77-97; Hannah Hammond, “A Masque on Behalf of the Birds,” New England Theatre Journal , Vol. 27: 41-62; Jenna L. Kubly, “Staging the Great War in the National Red Cross Pageant,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre , 2012, Vol. 24, no. 2: 49-66. [9] Percy MacKaye, The Civic Theatre in Relation to the Redemption of Leisure , 30-31. In the Civic Theatre MacKaye draws heavily on Jane Addams’s Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909) and Michael D. Davis’ Exploitation of Pleasure (1911) for support for his ideas. See also, George Elliott Howard, “Social Psychology of the Spectator,” American Journal of Sociology , vol. 18, No. 1 (July 1912): 37-41. [10] Percy MacKaye, “On the Need of Imagination in the Drama of To-day,” Harvard Advocate , vol. 63, no. 10 (June 30, 1897): 140. [11] Luther Gulick, quoted in Glassberg, American Pageantry , 199. [12] Percy MacKaye, Saint Louis: A Civic Masque (New York: Doubleday, 1914), xi-xii. [13] Anne Throop Craig, “Pageantry,” Encyclopedia Americana (Encyclopedia Americana Co., 1919): 101. [14] Percy MacKaye, “Worcester Address on Pageantry,” February 26, 1912, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library; MacKaye, Saint Louis , xiv. [15] MacKaye, Saint Louis , x. [16] Ibid., xvi-xix. [17] Tara Zahra, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), 4. For demographic data see The Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910: Statistics for Missouri , 602-622. [18] My description of the casting process is based on Glassberg, 178-181, and upon documents in the Dartmouth College Library. [19] Alessandra Lorini, Rituals of Race: American Public Culture and the Search for Racial Democracy (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1999), 236-243. [20] Glassberg, American Pageantry , 178; Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 5. [21] MacKaye, Saint Louis , xix. [22] Shari Huhndorf, Going Native (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001): 3, 14. [23] Rosemarie K. Bank, “Show Indians/Showing Indians: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and American Anthropology,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism , vol. 26 (Fall 2011): 152. [24] L.G. Moses, “Indians on the Midway: Wild West Shows and the Indian Bureau at the World’s Fairs, 1893-1904,” South Dakota History, vol. 21 (Fall 1991): 24. [25] Sally A. Kitt Chapel, Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 142-145. [26] Baker, 391. [27] Ernest Harold Baynes, “The Biggest Show Ever Staged,” Boston Evening Transcript , undated, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. [28] Joseph Lindon Smith was a painter known primarily for the skill with which he recreated ancient artifacts discovered on archaeological expeditions in Egypt. My description of his choreography for the Prelude is based on more than fifty rehearsal and performance photographs in the Dartmouth College Library, as well as dozens of newspaper accounts from MacKaye’s scrapbook on the Masque , also in the Dartmouth College Library. [29] MacKaye wrote this on the back of a photograph of Cahokia in the PMK Papers. Edward Gordon Craig explains his theory of the Über-marionette in On the Art of the Theatre (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2008), 54-94. Both Robert Edmond Jones and Thomas Dickinson regarded the Masque as the only theatrical work to successfully explore the possibilities of the Über-marionette on the US stage. [30] MacKaye, Saint Louis , x. [31] MacKaye, The Civic Theatre (fn.), 27. [32] MacKaye, Saint Louis , 7-8. [33] Program of the Pageant and Masque of St. Louis , PMK Papers. [34] MacKaye, Saint Louis , 5. [35] Edward Alsworth Ross, Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order (New York: MacMillan, 1901), 19. Highly influential during his lifetime (1866-1951), Ross wrote twenty-seven books and over 300 articles on social psychology, history, and urban reform. [36] MacKaye, Saint Louis , 22. [37] Ibid. [38] See, for examples, Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theater in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1986), David Waldstreicher , In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: the Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1997), and Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). [39] MacKaye, Saint Louis , 42. [40] Promptbook of The Masque of St. Louis , courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. [41] Ibid. [42] Baker, 391. [43] Luther Ely Smith, “Pageant to Make City Better Place to Live In,” Bulletin of the Pageant and Masque of Saint Louis , No. 2 : 7. Footnotes About The Author(s) SHILARNA STOKES is a Lecturer in Theater Studies at Yale University. Her research centers on how mass theatrical events give shape to ideas about public space, collectivity, and political life. Editorial Board for Special Issue: David Bisaha Meredith Conti Leah Lowe Inga Meier Robert Vorlicky 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: Embodied Arts Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Stephanie Nohelani Teves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Pp. 220. Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017; Pp. 198. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement. La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 200. Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina. Noe Montez. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017; Pp. 239 + xi. Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical. Kevin Winkler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; Pp. 368. Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018; Pp. 399. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Caitlin A.Kane Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Caitlin A.Kane By Published on May 17, 2023 Download Article as PDF Leigh Fondakowski (they/she) has dedicated nearly 25 years to creating theatre from narrative interviews and archival research. In works including The Laramie Project, The People’s Temple, I Think I Like Girls, and Spill, Fondakowski uses the words of real people to create nuanced portraits of communities in crisis and to illuminate difficult moments in U.S. history. In 2018, they were commissioned to craft a podcast about women’s liberation in honor of the 19th Amendment centennial. That commission led to Feminist Files , [i] an audio theatre series about the “nerdy revolutionaries” (including Dr. Bernice “Bunny” Sandler, Pauli Murray, Edith Green, and Representative Patsy Takemoto Mink) who started the “academic sex revolution” by clandestinely passing the legislation that we now know as Title IX. Although the commission for that work came before the pandemic began, Fondakowski’s research and creative process were undeniably affected and constrained by pandemic-era shutdowns and by rising awareness of the need for more accessible approaches to producing and presenting theatre. In this conversation, conducted via Zoom in November 2022, Fondakowski and I discuss how these forces shaped their development of a hybrid podcast-theatre form that blends Fondakowski’s first-person narrative, recorded interviews with relatives of those who led the fight for gender equity in academia, and performances of edited archival materials. Podcasts and other audio forms, we both agree, have great potential for theatre artists interested in exploring experimental and unconventional dramatic forms and for creating more accessible theatrical works. Caitlin Kane: Can you describe Feminist Files for those who have not yet heard it? Leigh Fondakowski: Feminist Files is a ten-part narrative audio series that tells the secret origin story of Title IX. It covers the years of 1969-1976, tracing how this group of women in Washington went behind the scenes to create legislation that has had an amazing impact. CK: In the series, you describe those women as “nerdy revolutionaries,” and it is such an apt descriptor. LF: Right, there are a lot of cliches about women’s libbers from that period: bra-burning, protests in the streets, all that kind of stuff. That did happen. The radical lesbians were really at the forefront, but the women [whose stories we tell in the series] were not doing that. These were women who were focused on legislative change. The thing that I love about the [timing of this project] – it’s tragic in a way – but Feminist Files was released on the 50th anniversary of Title IX in June [2022], and the day after that, Roe was overturned. So, in 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment and Title IX pass, and in 1973, Roe is instated. Half a century later, Title IX is the last one standing. It is incredible in terms of the arc of history. CK: It makes the series even more urgent at this moment. There is a lot that we can learn about the legislative side of activism from the women whose stories you tell. LF: Right. I think my biggest discovery was realizing the intricacies and the convergence of different people’s work that went into [passing Title IX]. I never really thought about how the sausage gets made. CK: How did you become interested in the stories of this group of feminist activists and the history of Title IX? LF: The project has a bit of a history. I was approached by this media company called Frequency Machine – a young startup co-founded by two women. They wanted to do something for the centennial of the 19th Amendment, so they approached me with this outline they had created for a women’s series, right? I wish I could show you this document. Each episode was an epic chunk of women’s liberation from 1910 to the present. So, I was like, I’ll take this, and I’ll see what I can find. I knew Title IX could be one of the episodes, so I sat down to talk with Rora [Brodwin, another playwright who had previously written a solo show about her Great-Aunt Bunny Sandler, the “godmother of Title IX”], and I realized the series could tell Rora’s story and the story of Title IX. Then, I went to the Schlesinger Library and was convinced that it could be the whole series because I found all this material there. There was so much material, and there were so many parts to the story that I was discovering. So, I went back to [Frequency Machine], and I pitched it. The producers had a background in reality television, so we had to learn how to talk to one another, how to find a common language. I had to learn to speak in TV dramatic logic, which I’m still learning. It took a lot to convince them that there would be enough drama in it because this is not true crime, you know. I told them, “We’re gonna use oral history, but we’re gonna have an actor perform it.” And they were like, “Why are we gonna have an actor perform it? Can’t we just use the real audio of it?” But Bunny Sandler isn’t an actor, so the real audio doesn’t quite have that dramatic energy. I said, “I’m gonna adapt it to my style.” It was a long process of me convincing them this could be dramatic enough, which it turns out it absolutely is. In the end, I think maybe [the producers] were beaten down by my endlessly returning to this pitch! They also gave me the freedom to create something they didn’t entirely understand at first, which is a rare opportunity as an artist, to be trusted in that way. So, the origin story of it was that it was supposed to be this gigantic women’s history. From a hundred years of women’s history, I homed in on Title IX. CK: The audio theatre form that you developed for this project blends the dramatic forms that you use in your interview- and archival-based plays with a more conventional podcast structure. Can you describe how this developmental process built on the processes that you’ve used in the theatre? LF: What’s interesting about it for me as a writer is I really hear text musically when I’m playwriting, both when there’s pre-existing text and when I’m making the text up. In a way, it was like a long rehearsal process. I could live with these recordings and edit from these recordings. Instead of saying to the actor, “Cut that line” or “change this around,” I could just do that with their voice. It did give me the thought that, in the future, when I’m playwriting from big source material again, I’ll have actors record the read-throughs of the whole play so that I have that audio and can play with that audio as I’m playwriting. This form also frees you from having to worry about bodies and space. You create an image world for each episode –you can really focus on voices and story. CK: What do you see as the possibilities for this form looking forward? LF: I think that it’s an underexplored form. I mean, it’s interesting to see what’s happening in the theatre, right? Audible is putting plays on tape… LA Theater Works has been doing it forever, but I think people are more open to audio now, and Hollywood has jumped on the bandwagon because it’s a proof of concept, right? They don’t have to invest in developing a TV series. It can be a podcast first, and then, they can decide they want to make it into a TV series. But there are also people who – instead of selling their intellectual property to someone in Hollywood – they are making an audio version where they have more control and can play with form. It has been called the Wild West because it doesn’t have a lot of rules. SAG and Equity don’t know what to do with it. It’s not governed by any of that stuff, so people are still just exploring. I think it’s a truly experimental landscape right now. It’s also just a different form, right? When [the producers] were giving me notes, they were saying that I needed to imagine someone doing their laundry, being on the treadmill, or cleaning their house. So, we’ve lowered the artistic bar, but it’s also universal. Everybody can access it. It’s not expensive, so in terms of what you were saying earlier– CK: In terms of what the COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated for us as theatre-makers– LF: Right, we still have an issue in the theatre of affordability and accessibility: how much money is spent to make the thing, who gets to watch it, and who are the gatekeepers. In this podcast world, you still have some constraints, but anybody can make a podcast, and most people can access it. CK: You are somewhat present in your theatrical work as an interviewer or narrator figure, but in Feminist Files, you play a much more substantive role. What was it like to be that present as the host and narrator of this series? How did it feel to put yourself into the work in that way? LF: I’ve always resisted that, but in this form, it felt like an inevitability because I’m the one finding this stuff, and I’m trying to recreate this experience for the listener of going on this journey [as a researcher]. Before I found the oral history transcript [in Bunny Sandler’s files at the Schlesinger Library], Rora [Brodwin] had already told me most of Bunny’s history and her own story of sexual assault, including her going into the Title IX office that her great-aunt had created and not being able to tell her great-aunt about that experience. So, that was a narrative arc, right? Then, some of the most moving experiences for me were finding Pauli [Murray’s] journal, realizing that I was working beneath her portrait [in the archive], and Rora introducing me to her as a figure in history. I thought Rora was going to be able to thread all those other elements in. I spent an unbelievable number of hours putting [Rora and Bunny’s] voices together, so they were telling the story together. I thought it was just gonna be the two of them talking to each other because they couldn’t talk to each other in real life anymore, but there was too much that needed to be filled in. I needed to talk people through and give context. I would also say that Sarah Lambert [my co-producer] had a lot to do with it because she is the standard bearer for artistic integrity. So, when Sarah was encouraging me to put myself forward, I knew I had to pay attention. She had never said that in any other process. And, of course, Sarah fact-checked everything to within an inch of its life, so I always felt confident in everything we were saying, you know? And then I had to learn how to direct myself narrating, which was a process. CK: Right – I can imagine how different that felt from working in a theatre with actors, particularly amidst the pandemic. Can you describe your directorial process? How did you do the recordings? Was the whole process done via Zoom? LF: Yeah, [the actors] would set up recording studios, most of the time in their closets, and then they would record, and I would direct via Zoom, but I didn’t have a live feed to the recording because they were sent these kits with SIM cards, so it was nerve-wracking. I could hear how they were sounding over Zoom, and I could hear when they messed up a line, but I couldn’t hear the quality of the recording until they sent us the files, so some of the editing was based on the takes and how they sounded. It was a very different process than when you’re building work in a room with actors. CK: Did you do all the editing yourself, or did you do a rough edit and then have audio engineers who cleaned things up? LF: I did all the editing. I’m trying to think of how many passes on average, but we did a pass, and then, [the producers] would give notes, and then, we’d do another pass, and they would give notes. As it came more into form, they had more and more to say about it. In the beginning, they didn’t know what it was going to be, so they didn’t have much to say, but as it began to take shape, they wanted to weigh in more and more. Then it went to the sound person, Gary [Grundei], and he would edit based on sound, which was such an important element. So, there were probably three to five editing passes for each episode. CK: You mentioned that the process of creating this felt like being in twelve straight weeks of tech. LF: It really did. After I would make the final layout of the words, it would go to an engineer who does a pause pass, which is like a pacing pass. Then, it went to Gary for sound design again, and it came back to me, and I would usually edit out large swaths of the text based on Gary’s work. CK: He does beautiful work, recreating the sounds of the archive for instance, which is both such a quiet space and a space that really comes alive in this podcast. Given how effective this form was in activating this period of feminist history and the capaciousness of the title, Feminist Files, I wonder if there is any plan for additional seasons or episodes? LF: I wanted to call it The Consequential Feminist. CK: What happened to that title? LF: That title never made it out of committee! CK: That’s too bad! LF: I know. I wanted it to be called The Consequential Feminist. I really fought for that title. I think that’s why you hear the term so often in the series. The producers were a bit wary of Feminist Files, too. They wanted to shorten it to be F Files. Because feminism is a “bad” word – people recoil and don’t want to pay attention to feminism. The producers were feminists themselves but having worked in Hollywood for as long as they had, and experienced the sexism and misogyny of the industry, they felt people would be afraid of the word. CK: That’s disheartening. Do you know what the response has been to the project, given the title you chose? LF: It has a steady following but not gigantic because they are a young startup without a big marketing budget. We’re hoping that we’ll be nominated for a GLAAD Award so it can gain some traction. It’s had a steady following, but I only know that from hearing from people that they’re listening to it and enjoying it. CK: If it gets a more robust response, do you think there will be other iterations of the project? LF: That was the idea. The idea was that it could be anthologized, that we’d go back to the archives. I don’t think they’re gonna let me do it, but the story that I want to do next is one I came across accidentally in my research. Somebody left in the scanner a membership card for women in the KKK. It was just sitting there, and Teddy [one of the archivists] said, “Oh, they’ve left this in here.” We were both looking at it and looking at each other, and she said, “Yep, that archive is here.” I mean, that’s a whole different story. We tend to think of the history of mobilization on the left, but I don’t think we think of the history of mobilization on the right. CK: It would be a hard story to sit with for a long time, and you’d have to find an entry point for yourself and audiences, to help them find their way into that story and recognize it as part of our history that we need to grapple with. This project centers on a more uplifting narrative, but it was crafted at a difficult time. You began researching Feminist Files before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the recording and editing of the project was completed in 2020. What was it like to be working on it in the early months of the pandemic? LF: Well, as you know, it was a very scary and isolating time. Once we figured out the mechanics of how to send people the [recording] kits, and I started directing those recordings, though, it was like, “Oh, I’m back in my world.” Being able to spend those hours with Mercedes [Hererro], who is a longtime collaborator of mine, getting to be in the room with Ronald Peet, having conversations with Margo Hall about Black Lives Matter and her life – it was like air in a world without air, you know? And in the end, the producers and I did find a common language and we became strong collaborators, we trusted each other. They were able to get Jodie Foster on board to play Bunny, which shows how much they believed in this project. Getting to work with Jodie [Foster], with that high calibre of an actor… I got off that Zoom call, and I was dancing around the living room. It was lifesaving to have something big to focus on and to be able to connect artistically with people to create it. As a director, working with actors is the whole game, right? Without having that contact, you can think about the projects you want to make and read plays and do other things, but that engagement is where the creative flow really happens. [At the beginning of the pandemic], it felt like that was gone, and it would never be back. But then, it was right there. I could connect with these actors. It was amazing. The decision to have them break character from time to time to have conversations with me was me trying to capture that feeling of creating something together. We’re discovering something together. We’re in community, which is how the women in the story were also in community. I was trying to mirror that. It was a gift. References [i] Fondakowski, Leigh. Feminist Files. Accessed November 10, 2022. https://feminist-files.sounder.fm . Footnotes About The Author(s) CAITLIN KANE (she/they) is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Dramatic Criticism at Kent State University and a freelance dramaturg, director, and intimacy director. Their research and creative practice sit at the intersection of theatre and social change and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies and center on queer and feminist approaches to staging history. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.