Eileen Curley 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 Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Eileen Curley By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF 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. Marlis Schweitzer’s Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century explores girl actors and societal responses to them in the first half of the century. This interdisciplinary work contextualizes the careers of girl stars Clara Fisher and Jean Margaret Davenport—and many other child actors as well—in an overlapping series of historical frameworks, seeking to understand their careers in theatrical, cultural, artistic, literary, and economic histories, among others. Schweitzer uses the girls as two throughlines within a wide-ranging discussion of the performance of girlhood onstage and in the press, informed by a diverse set of theories and approaches to interrogate specific moments in time or items in the archival record. Structurally, Schweitzer reproduces the nineteenth century theatre’s packed evening bill by including a prologue, epilogue, and chapters interspersed with interludes. More than just an appropriate historical nod, this format enables Schweitzer to effectively tell the complex histories of Fisher, Davenport, and other girl actors in a roughly linear narrative, with interludes allowing short diversions into fascinating related topics and historiographic challenges that might otherwise have disrupted the flow of the individual chapters. Practically, this format also enables these excerpts of the book to be used effectively in introductory undergraduate research methods courses as engaging trips through the archive; Interlude 3, for example, is both an excellent model of an historiographical research process and a fascinating theory of the potential meaning behind three sentences in Mrs. John Drew’s 1899 memoir. Those few words are contextualized in transatlantic touring, amateur theatricals, the shifting attitudes towards professional actors during Drew’s lifetime, and more. The chapters delve more deeply into character types performed by Fisher and Davenport and how those reflect shifting audience and societal perceptions of children, child actors, and celebrity, all the while connecting these types and the performances to broader historical and societal contexts. Chapter 1 explores the fad for young girls playing old men such as Richard III, framing Fisher’s career as drawing on Master Betty’s fame, while also exploring its presence amid contemporary interest in miniaturization, phrenology (Fisher’s head was cast and studied), girlhood, and burgeoning press interest in celebrity. Chapter 2 explores her career as it moves into the terrain of travesty roles. Here, Schweitzer focuses on the role of Little Pickle in The Spoiled Child , contrasting the child performer against adult women who specialized in these lines, such as Dorothy Jordan, and she argues that the de-sexualization of the performer’s body––and thus the role–– undermines its prior transgressive power, shifting the focus towards a nostalgic view of childhood impishness that was particularly well received in the colonies. While this appealed to colonial audiences on transatlantic stops of Fisher’s tour, as Chapter 3 discusses, her continued aging and movement closer to an adult physique was sufficiently distressing as her career again morphed, this time into farcical roles written for girls. She had the most success in the breeches role of Matilda from Old and Young , which is notably written for a girl who must perform as her poorly behaved fictional brothers and which “enlists the plasticity of the girl actress to query emerging binaries of age and gender” (121). Throughout the first three chapters, Schweitzer also analyzes Fisher’s father’s motives and attempts to shield his daughter from the press while still exploiting its coverage of her vital content for then understanding the subsequent discussions of Davenport and her father in Chapters 4 and 5. Indeed, the tightly woven intersections between the chapters, the two performers, and the contextual topics raised is a delight—in part because Davenport’s career was so obviously modeled on Fisher’s—but also because those parallels and nuanced discussions are incredibly well foregrounded and supported by Schweitzer’s structural choices. Chapter 4 covers Davenport’s early career in the 1830s, which quite closely follows the roles, marketing, and framing of Fisher’s career, complete with attempts to balance competing demands of privacy, propriety, and celebrity. As with Fisher, Davenport’s aging eventually presents challenges, discussed in Chapter 5 alongside the limitations of her father’s engineering of good press on their transatlantic tour to colonies which approached Davenport’s performance of masculinity in these roles with much more concern. The strengths of Schweitzer’s work are the broad-ranging use of interdisciplinary research to explore our inherently interdisciplinary theatrical world and her deft inclusion of historiographical process and exploration of archival finds. Schweitzer makes excellent use of artefacts of actors’ careers throughout the book, regularly offering analyses of images which support her discussions of changing societal comfort levels with girls in breeches roles, travesty roles, and performing as adult men alongside adults on stage. Indeed, Schweitzer actively, but not intrusively, shares her historiographical process with readers throughout the book. Evidence gaps are discussed, such as when Schweitzer details her argument that Fisher’s father likely “had ample opportunity to follow debates about children’s reading” (33), thereby contextualizing his choice to expose his daughters to Shakespeare and have them perform as Richard III. These approaches are particularly seen in the interludes, which support the tightly woven narrative of the book by introducing contexts such as popular contemporary vehicles for celebrity, transatlantic culture, and performances of childhood. Schweitzer begins with the career and influence of male child star, Master Betty, in Interlude 1. Fisher’s fame draws on and responds to his career and ensuing Bettymania, just as Davenport overtly draws on Fisher’s, and thus the historical throughline and evolving popular trends of child stars and the representation of children on and off-stage is reflected in the structure of the book. Interlude 2, on the tomboy in society, drama, lays the groundwork for Chapter 2’s travesty roles, and looks far ahead to the final chapter’s discussion of childhood, performance, and race in the British Empire. Fandom is another constant, with a deeper exploration of fans’ material culture detailed in Interlude 4. The final interlude, then, offers another historiographical discussion of a scrapbook of transatlantic travel owned but possibly not written by Davenport, wherein a “most peculiar story of colonial anxiety emerges” (163), setting up Chapter 5’s discussion of scrapbooks and Davenport’s positioning in the British Empire. In part, this comprehensive range of approaches is necessary to better understand the complex interactions that Schweitzer is detailing—between performer, culture, text, audience, empire, and history. It also stems from Schweitzer’s following the archival trail to logical places, a process that is refreshingly explored throughout the book and shared in her overt discussions of historiographical process. The result is a refreshingly varied and vibrant work, reading as much as a cultural history of the period and exploration of the artists’ careers as it is an entry into Schweitzer’s own process of storytelling, research, and artistry. References Footnotes About The Author(s) EILEEN CURLEY is Professor of English/Theatre at Marist, where she serves as the Director of the Theatre Program and teaches a wide range of theatre, drama, American Studies, and English courses. She is also the Editor in Chief of USITT’s Theatre Design & Technology . Her research on nineteenth-century amateur theatre has appeared in The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Popular Entertainment Studies, Pamiętnik Teatralny, Theatre Symposium, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, and edited collections. She holds an MA and PhD in Theatre History, Theory, and Literature from Indiana University and a BA in Theatre from Grinnell College. 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 The Utopians by Michael Kliën and En Dynamei at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. Is it possible to defy the narrow constraints of our personal identity, discover and develop new fields of relationships among humans, and achieve co-existence on equal, soul-democratic terms? In 2023 choreographer Michael Kliën worked with his team at the Laboratory for Social Choreography (Kenan Institute at Ethis at Duke University) to create a uniquely immersive experience based on Robert Musil’s play 'The Utopians' for the inclusive performance ensemble En Dynamei. This is the stunning documentation of the premiere in the Athens Epidauris Festival, one of Europe’s most prestigious festivals. The work features an original soundscore by Volkmar Kliën. The choreographic concept is inspired by Robert Musil’s play Die Schwärmer (The Utopians), tackling the possibility of logic and dream going hand in hand. In an empty industrial space, an environment consisting of an electroacoustic soundscape and pertinent lighting, a group of approximately fifty people with seemingly mixed abilities move around, personally marking their own trajectories. A deeply complex, collective logic generates a special condition, with the roughly two hundred spectators becoming part of the piece, aided by a group of “guides”. In this manner, from spectator, each participant becomes an active agent. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents The Utopians At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Theater, Dance, Documentary, Performance Art This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country Greece Language Non-Verbal Running Time 95 minutes Year of Release 2023 Is it possible to defy the narrow constraints of our personal identity, discover and develop new fields of relationships among humans, and achieve co-existence on equal, soul-democratic terms? In 2023 choreographer Michael Kliën worked with his team at the Laboratory for Social Choreography (Kenan Institute at Ethis at Duke University) to create a uniquely immersive experience based on Robert Musil’s play 'The Utopians' for the inclusive performance ensemble En Dynamei. This is the stunning documentation of the premiere in the Athens Epidauris Festival, one of Europe’s most prestigious festivals. The work features an original soundscore by Volkmar Kliën. The choreographic concept is inspired by Robert Musil’s play Die Schwärmer (The Utopians), tackling the possibility of logic and dream going hand in hand. In an empty industrial space, an environment consisting of an electroacoustic soundscape and pertinent lighting, a group of approximately fifty people with seemingly mixed abilities move around, personally marking their own trajectories. A deeply complex, collective logic generates a special condition, with the roughly two hundred spectators becoming part of the piece, aided by a group of “guides”. In this manner, from spectator, each participant becomes an active agent. Camera: Christos Efthmiou Editing: Apostolis Koutsianikoulis Production: Thalia Griva; produced by Athens Epidauris Festival 2023 About The Artist(s) Michael Kliën is a choreographer and artist whose work has been situated worldwide. Kliën’s artistic practice encompasses interdisciplinary thinking, critical writing, curatorial projects, and, centrally, choreographic works equally at home in the Performing and Fine Arts. He has been commissioned by leading institutions such as Ballett Frankfurt, Martha Graham Dance Company, New Museum, PS122, Volksoper Wien, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Athens Festival, Hayward Gallery, and ZKM. As Artistic Director/CEO of Daghdha (2003—2011, Ireland), Kliën developed a distinct movement aesthetic in correspondence with influential concepts of politically engaged choreography, performance, and dance. He received a Ph.D. from the Edinburgh College of Art in 2009. After living and working in Greece, he was appointed Professor at Duke University in 2017, inaugural director of the MFA in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis in 2018, and founding-director of the Laboratory for Social Choreography at the Kenan Institute of Ethics in 2020. En Dynamei Ensemble is a theater group comprised of young artists with and without disabilities, operating since 2008 as a non-profit entity led by artistic director Eleni Dimopoulou. The purpose of the group is to support and facilitate its members to join society as equals, using art as a means of integration. Using the research of new methods of communication as their main tool, the group organizes and presents fully developed artistic proposals in the fields of visual and media arts, theater, dance, and music. En Dynamei Ensemble maintains a collaboration with renowned art professionals and leading institutions in Greece and abroad. The group’s performances have received rave reviews from audiences and critics alike, claiming a spot next to the most groundbreaking works of the Greek artistic production. Get in touch with the artist(s) mk366@duke.edu and follow them on social media www.michaelklien.com https://en.endynamei.com https://aefestival.gr/festival_events/oi-oneiropoloi/?lang=en https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/laboratory-for-social-choreography/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Isaiah Matthew Wooden Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Brothers Size Isaiah Matthew Wooden By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF The Brothers Size By Tarell Alvin McCraney Co-Directed by Tarell Alvin McCraney and Bijan Sheibani The Shed (Co-Produced with the Geffen Playhouse) New York, NY September 6, 2025 Reviewed by Isaiah Matthew Wooden In the nearly two decades since Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size debuted Off-Broadway as a part of the third Under the Radar Festival, the evocative three-hander has garnered considerable praise for its trenchant, poetic dramatization of some of the lasting questions shaping the lives and relationships of Black men in the United States. Audiences and critics alike have found much to admire in McCraney’s shrewd fusion of ancient tales drawn from Yoruba cosmology with given circumstances and dramaturgical devices of his own making that invite reflection on such themes as brotherhood, masculinity, vulnerability, love, and freedom. No doubt adding to the play’s appeal are the rich opportunities it affords the actors portraying its central trio—Ogun Size; his younger brother, Oshoosi Size; and Oshoosi’s close friend and former cellmate, Elegba—to flex an extraordinary range of performance muscles. The play’s return to New York City in 2025 in a co-production by The Shed and the Geffen Playhouse reaffirmed its status as one of the most compelling and resonant dramas to spotlight and interrogate the intricacies of the inner lives and social worlds of Black men. Co-Directed by Bijan Sheibani and McCraney, and featuring three actors who have achieved notoriety for their stage and screen work, André Holland (Ogun Size), Alani iLongwe (Oshoosi Size), and Malcolm Mays (Elegba), this revival was remarkably elegant in its simplicity, relying mostly on the physical and vocal agility of its performers to bring expressive clarity to the details of their respective characters’ at once mythic and mundane journeys. The integration of live music by Munir Zakee and choreography by Juel D. Lane enhanced the overall rhythm of the performance while also reinforcing the sense of call-and-response that McCraney’s striking incorporation of spoken stage directions aims to evoke. Suzu Sakai’s spare set design, which was anchored by an improvised circle marked out with a white, chalk-like substance in a clear nod to the symbolic spaces central to various syncretic spiritual traditions of the African diaspora, further bolstered the production’s invitation to audience members to embrace their roles as co-creators of the storytelling. This necessarily created space for some of the play’s more distinct features, including its setting in a fictional town in the Deep South at some point in the “distant present,” to accrue fresh significance, while also allowing Holland, iLongwe, and Mays to embody their characters with incredible specificity and vitality. André Holland (Ogun Size). The Brothers Size , The Shed, New York, August 30-September 28, 2025. Photo: Marc J. Franklin. Courtesy The Shed. Given Holland’s longstanding connection to The Brothers Size and to McCraney’s work more broadly—he played Elegba in the 2009 staging of the play co-produced by The Public Theater and the McCarter Theatre Center, and also starred in the McCraney-penned films Moonlight (2016) and High Flying Bird (2019)—it was especially moving to witness the layered complexity he brought to his portrayal of the elder Size brother. While Oshoosi often admonishes Ogun for moving through life with unnecessary hardness, Holland was deliberate about endowing the character with charm and tenderness. His insistence on surfacing the character’s multidimensionality made moments like his recollection of the suffering endured by his former lover, Oya, or his account of always getting blamed for Oshoosi’s troubled behavior during their youth, reverberate long after the action had shifted focus elsewhere. The sensitivity of Holland’s performance came into sharpest focus in what remains one of The Brothers Sizes’s most touching and restorative scenes. When Oshoosi yet again finds himself teetering on the brink of captivity by a criminal legal system that views all young Black male life as fungible, the elder Size brother commands that his sibling flee their distressed hometown as soon and as fast as possible. The boom and quake in Holland’s voice as Ogun vowed to deny his younger brother up to three times when the Law came looking for him, deepened the emotional intensity of the duo’s final embrace and, in so doing, further distinguished Holland as one of the most dynamic interpreters of McCraney’s sublime language. iLongwe and Mays likewise proved adept at surfacing the idiosyncrasies and subtleties of McCraney’s dramaturgy. The tremendous energy and vigor of iLongwe’s Oshoosi served to punctuate how the character’s relentless yearnings to make freedom mean something often complicated his everyday life. Indeed, while Oshoosi’s articulated aims to acquire a car and find a woman registered as pretty straightforward, at least at first blush, iLongwe’s nimble portrayal called attention to the ways they were symptomatic of his much larger aspirations to imagine and enact possibilities unencumbered by carceral and other oppressive logics. This accounted for the powerful hold that Mays’s spry and clever Elegba seemed to maintain over Oshoosi’s life. Much like the orisha of the same name, Elegba often appears at key moments of decision-making in the play, reminding Oshoosi of the beauty and power inherent in choices. Mays’s portrayal of Elegba as simultaneously sweet and crafty amplified his allure for Oshoosi while shedding light on why Ogun remained so deeply suspicious of the pair’s friendship. Malcolm Mays (Elegba), Alani iLongwe (Oshoosi Size), and André Holland (Ogun Size). The Brothers Size , The Shed, New York, August 30 – September 28, 2025. Photo: Marc J. Franklin. Courtesy The Shed. The minor script revisions McCraney made for the production underscored the crucial role that love—familial, platonic, erotic, and otherwise—can play in sustaining the bonds between Black men. These updates, paired with McCraney and Sheibani’s sleek staging, Adam Honoré’s subdued lighting, and Dede Ayite’s practical costumes, not only sharpened the overall storytelling but also accentuated the play’s enduring emotional and thematic resonances. Simultaneously and significantly, they enabled the production to make a persuasive case for why The Brothers Size ’s stirring explorations of Black men’s interiorities and vulnerabilities marks it as a singular and transformative work of twenty-first-century theatre. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ISAIAH MATTHEW WOODEN is a scholar-artist, writer, and Associate Professor and Chair of Theater at Swarthmore College. He is the author of  Reclaiming Time: Race, Temporality, and Black Expressive Culture  (2025) and co-editor of  August Wilson in Context  (2025),  Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration  (2020), and “Manifestos for Black Theatre, Then and Now,” a special section of  Theatre History Studies  (2024). Additionally, he served as the volume editor for the Methuen student edition of  A Raisin in the Sun  by Lorraine Hansberry (2025). Wooden’s articles and essays on contemporary art, drama, and performance have appeared in numerous scholarly and popular publications. As a director and dramaturg, he has collaborated on projects in venues ranging from the Uganda National Theatre to the Kennedy Center, including works by Lorraine Hansberry, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Lynn Nottage, and Robert O’Hara. 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.

Russell Stone Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community Russell Stone By Published on November 24, 2022 Download Article as PDF As the Federal Theatre Project fell under the scrutiny of Congressional investigations in its final months, National Director Hallie Flanagan relied on the significant show of public support from America’s religious communities to demonstrate the value of the Project in locally meaningful terms. When Flanagan was allowed to testify before the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities in December 1938, she cited nearly a hundred religious organizations of various faiths that had pledged their appreciation for the Federal Theatre. When asked if the Project had produced any plays that were “antireligious in nature,” she responded that the Federal Theatre had staged more religious plays than any group in the country, including church performances for Christmas programming in Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities. [1] She even asserted that although the Federal Theatre’s primary purpose was to entertain its audience, it also offered plays that “must also and can also often teach” and are capable of “inculcat[ing] religious principles.” [2] That last point had proven especially effective in winning over the country’s religious communities, whose assurances of the Federal Theatre’s value for their congregations were sent to Flanagan’s office, her regional bureaus, and the Un-American Activities committee itself. In the weeks and months ahead, as the House Subcommittee on Appropriations, chaired by Representative Clifton Woodrum (D-VA), began its own investigation to decide funding of the federal arts programs, members arguing to maintain or to defund the Federal Theatre agreed that it had won impressive support among the religious community. This support was founded less on the artistic merits of producing, among their other offerings, obscure medieval drama—an argument that both Representatives and WPA Director Colonel F.C. Harrington made during the debate—than on the spiritual impact of the plays that religious leaders so valued for their congregations. [3] The extent of this support attested, too, to Flanagan’s efforts since the previous year to engage the religious community in the Federal Theatre across its several regional offices. In response to Flanagan’s call for the Federal Theatre to stage drama within the community via partnerships with churches, schools, and clubs, one of her most prolific directors was Gareth Hughes, who had been assigned to lead a religious unit when the Los Angeles Project opened in December 1935. [4] A Welsh-born, promising stage actor in New York in the 1910s, a silent film star in the following decade, and an itinerant theatre player after the advent of the talkies, he had largely disappeared from the public eye before the Federal Theatre came to Los Angeles. In the Project headquarters, he spoke to newspaper reporters of the fulfillment that he found in training and collaborating with younger actors. The press wrote of his ability to recite any line of Shakespeare, his attention to his younger colleagues trying their hand at historical drama, and “his kindness that is not sentimental, his love for the theatre, [and] his enthusiasm that has awakened and stimulated his actors.” [5] Over the next three years, these qualities would allow Hughes to become an effective advocate for Flanagan’s vision of bringing the Project into public arenas. Creating a traveling unit that brought medieval and early modern drama to community venues, Hughes adapted religious plays as pieces to be acted in churches as an extension of, and complement to, the liturgy. [6] He founded his two signature plays for the Los Angeles Project, The Nativity and Everyman , on engagement with church congregations as audience-participants, humanizing the play’s characters to foster empathy with this audience, and emphasizing the Christian tenets imbedded in the plays. [7] Through these strategies, Hughes established a production model of staging the plays within Los Angeles churches that fulfilled his personal agenda for the Project, responded to Flanagan’s call for regional offices to offer performances in collaboration with their local religious communities, and provided a line of defense against the Federal Theatre’s detractors, who perpetuated the groundless rumors that the Project had been infiltrated by Communists and was thus a government-funded, subversive enterprise. Rejecting these rumors, Hughes promoted it as a vehicle for realizing Flanagan’s vision among the smallest of audiences, especially within schools and churches. In the latter, his handling of The Nativity and Everyman as liturgical performances convinced the Los Angeles religious community that the Federal Theatre might be welcomed as a partner not merely for providing entertainment but even for augmenting the act of worship. Neighborhood by neighborhood, in its second largest market, his success in sacred venues won local support for the Project and in turn provided Flanagan with a valid, but ultimately futile, argument for the religious value of the Project in the escalating national debate over funding the Federal Theatre. Establishing an Audience for Religious Drama in Los Angeles Flanagan’s success in identifying an audience for the Federal Theatre, and Hughes’s particular success in appealing to the religious community in Los Angeles, relied on an ongoing reconsideration of staging Project plays. It has been well documented that the Federal Theatre’s chief audiences were those who had not previously seen live drama, and perhaps could not have afforded to do so, and those whose primary entertainment was provided by cinemas and radio programming. [8] By mid-1937, the Project had successfully drawn these working class audiences to its performances. In Los Angeles, the second largest Federal Theatre market behind New York, over a quarter of those attending Project performances self-identified as trade or office workers. [9] According to audience surveys, a spring run of The Merchant of Venice at the Hollywood Playhouse (featuring Hughes as Shylock) was also seen by a number of teachers, students, and housewives. [10] Soon thereafter, however, Flanagan announced her intention to reverse the model of attracting audiences to commercial houses rented by the Federal Theatre; rather, she wanted also to bring the Federal Theatre to the community and stage productions within public venues. Having founded the Project on an assurance of quality of plays,talent and the promise of live drama that would be at once entertaining, artistic, didactic, and capable of imparting an appreciation for the theatre among audiences unaccustomed to it, Flanagan wrote to her regional directors that in 1938 the Federal Theatre would have an opportunity for “growing up.” [11] She first called for an expansion of the Project beyond the commercial houses that it rented to host its productions and beyond urban areas into both rural and communal spaces, especially those that served the poor. By September 1937, the Federal Theatre had staged over 37,000 shows in parks, hospitals, schools, Civilian Conservation Corps camps for workers on relief, and public and private clubs across the country. Soon after, Flanagan began to consider how to establish permanent touring groups to stage productions in smaller cities and towns. [12] A key stakeholder in this expansion beyond commercial houses would be the religious community, who acknowledged the reciprocal benefits of staging religious drama and extensive Christmas programming that would bring live drama to a wider audience but would win the Project public support in turn. While her regional directors received suggestions for pieces of broad appeal, Flanagan’s more ambitious vision was to stage in select cities the late medieval mystery cycles, and the civic pageants staged to enact biblical history from the Creation to the Ascension. Frustrated at the scant amount of productions in the holiday season of 1936, she remarked to her regional directors that religious drama would offer the Project some defense against the “irate clergymen [who] storm into the office and accuse me of being anti-Christ.” [13] Then, into fall 1937, she encouraged them again to bring the holidays “into the community” by cooperating with local choirs and singing groups, churches, schools, orphanages, and homes for the elderly, broadcasting Christmas productions over the radio, and staging them at public venues. [14] In adopting this model, Federal Theatre officials had an extensive catalog of religious plays from which to choose. The Bureau of Research and Publication was charged with researching possible plays for production, and as they compiled lists of Greek and Roman, British, European, and American plays before and since 1895, staff members solicited recommendations from both Christian and Jewish organizations. [15] Religious leaders had assisted in local planning for the Project since its inception. As for Christmas programming, the Bureau published annotated lists of their suggested medieval and early modern religious plays. Among these pieces, the texts of miracle and mystery plays had only been made widely available in modern critical editions in the previous fifty years or so, and they had only been performed for modern audiences for just over thirty. It would be another two decades before scholarship into the plays began in earnest, and American theatre professionals were largely ignorant of medieval pieces that had not been rendered into modern English for stage performance. [16] Nor, however, were they subject to the controversies that had hindered productions of the mystery and morality plays among the previous generation, owing especially to the restrictions on the portrayal of God well into the twentieth century. [17] For example, in 1901, the English actor William Poel was able to stage the first modern production of Everyman , because it was largely unknown to censors in the Lord Chamberlains’ Office, which still enforced sixteenth-century laws against portraying the deity and “confining the limitless and potent God to the body of an actor, to his mortal gestures and mimicry.” [18] One of Poel’s actor-managers then brought the production to New York, where its presentation of religious material was legally permitted but still controversial for an audience largely ignorant of medieval drama. [19] Nonetheless, Everyman toured across eastern and midwestern cities for two years, suggesting an interest among American audiences that would support the production of similar plays in subsequent years. [20] The lack of formal censorship of religious material in the American theatre gradually allowed directors to more freely explore mystery and morality plays, which became increasingly popular through the 1910s as academic pieces suitable for both lectures and performances informed by the antiquarian sensibilities of Poel and his successors. [21] In the 1920s and 1930s, the reception of medieval drama diverged on either side of the Atlantic. In England, the Religious Drama Society, guided by a principle of “solemnity, simplicity, and sincerity,” performed biblical-themed pieces in churches and schools, and in the former they were allowed to portray divine characters, opened with prayers for the congregation, and anonymized their casts of players, all techniques that Hughes employed in Los Angeles. [22] In America,however, university campuses became popular venues for outdoor productions devoid of such liturgical elements. [23] This model evoked the origins of medieval drama as a public art to be staged within the community rather than on the professional stage, but it did not allow for the spiritual reflection encouraged by the Religious Drama Society in their church performances. [24] A memo circulating from the Federal Theatre’s Bureau of Research and Publication through Project offices recognized, however, that the primary challenge in staging these plays remained their inaccessibility. It encouraged directors that: Carefully studied scripts could be prepared, with business written in to interpret the characters, the lines and the action, with judicious cuttings and rearrangements of scenes, and even (though most rarely) with some word substitutions for obsolete or slang words. . . . Unlike the garbled actors’ versions of some of the plays, now in existence, the prepared scripts would give the playwright a production nearer to the original text; and the play itself would seem better on the stage than in the reading room of the library. Along with the revised play, suggestions could be made for the simplest kind of production that would allow the director to concentrate entirely upon the nature of the play.[25] To further encourage the performance of these plays, the Bureau issued a separate report on the universal appeal of their characters and themes. The authors noted, for example, that Herod in The Nativity was a particularly attractive character, long played as a boisterous hypocrite who rants and raves about his own kingly authority being usurped by the Christ child before he is dragged off to Hell. The Deluge , a comedic narrative of Noah and his wife, “should be rollicking and perhaps burlesqued a little . . . [and was] exceedingly interesting as a humanization of a Biblical story.” [26] Everyman had a certain thematic appeal (“the troubled spirit of man and the trials and tribulations common to most of us”) and that, given its potential to evoke reflection and pathos among the audience, was likewise ideal for the holiday season. [27] These observations suggest a concern for making the characters relatable and appealing to the audience through the allegorical narrative of human life from a state of sin to one of grace that is especially apparent in the morality plays. [28] Robert S. Sturges has argued that these plays served as “mediators between theater and religion,” in that they exhorted the audience to adhere to a virtuous, faith-based lifestyle, in contrast to the various representations onstage of villainous and transgressive behavior. [29] The didactic aspects of the plays have lent them a certain timelessness, as have the characters who populate them. [30] Although the presentation of Christ as both human and God and the “ultimately imitable” figure is central to the cycles, through the mix of comedic (e.g., Noah and Joseph) and bombastic (e.g., Herod) characters, the plays successfully mingle “sacred and profane” themes and figures, and humanize their narratives by emphasizing the traits and emotions of their large casts of characters. [31] Who the audience for the plays might be, however, took time for Project administrators to figure out. As the second largest Federal Theatre branch office after New York, both in terms of staffing and potential theatre-goers, Los Angeles was an ideal city in which to establish community partnerships and to stage pre-modern drama. Enjoying a uniquely deep pool of talent once employed in the film industry, the Los Angeles Project experimented with a wide range of genres and venues. During its first two years, it was largely distinguished by its success in drawing audiences back to the long-shuttered commercial houses rented by local administrators in Hollywood and downtown. [32] Staging medieval and early modern drama was initially left to academic-minded, veteran actors (including Hughes) through “Project 6,” a cooperative venture with the University of Southern California to stage pieces by Molière, the Jacobean duo Beaumont and Fletcher, and Shakespeare on campus in the spring of 1936. [33] Within a year, the Los Angeles Project was regularly able to sell out its five commercial houses, and whereas the productions at USC were staged for free for students and faculty, admission was charged for the shows in Hollywood and downtown, and revenue was allocated for paying rent for the theatres there. [34] When Los Angeles administrators first assigned Hughes to produce medieval religious drama during Christmas week of 1936, they selected the Mayan, one of these downtown houses that they had revitalized. Leading a hybrid classical and religious drama troupe, Hughes himself adapted from the York, Coventry, Chester, and Wakefield cycles two pieces, The Nativity and The Deluge . He also modernized a mumming play entitled St George and the Dragon and selected the music to accompany each of the plays. In the playbill, Hughes explained that he had followed the model of Tudor scribes who sought to reinvigorate Biblical plays written three centuries before their time and six centuries before his own. [35] Despite his careful attention to staging the plays, the Christmas run of 1936 would be the only time that he directed in one of the Los Angeles or Hollywood theatres that the Project rented. Whether or not the plays appealed to a ticket-buying audience in a commercial venue must have been a question to consider, but having drawn academic audiences to USC with “Project 6” productions, Hughes may have realized the relative inaccessibility of medieval drama (compared to Shakespeare) for the general public. In the director’s report filed to Project headquarters, he included a negative review from the Los Angeles Evening News , in which the critic noted that the plays may attract those few people interested in the history of drama but did not offer much entertainment value, and he admitted the actors’ difficulty in pronouncing the archaic words of the script. Hughes suggested in the same report that the religious plays were better suited for churches, schools, and libraries, where he encouraged Project officials to stage the plays each December. [36] They evidently heeded his advice, and in the following year his unit was given the opportunity to perform medieval and early modern drama in just these sorts of public venues in Los Angeles. The Nativity at St John’s (December 1937) Hughes dedicated himself in 1937 to responding to Flanagan’s call for Federal Theatre directors to stage plays in partnership with the community. Away from the commercial houses, he became an ambassador for the Project and a negotiator with civic, private, and religious clubs and organizations for booking performances of The Nativity for the holiday season. Although he occasionally had to convince the city’s religious leaders that the Federal Theatre was not a Communist organization, Hughes fostered personal relationships in the community that assuaged any political concerns about the national project. [37] As he wrote to Flanagan: As for the clergy, they are elated, and as I have said for two years, we have sorely needed a little unit like this—we have stressed the social drama too much, and too little attention paid to things spiritual. I am so happy in it all dear Ms. Flanagan especially now that I feel your co-operation and enthusiasm. I will do anything for you and it matters not a damn whether I get 94 or 175 dollars a month. The spirit of the thing is all.[38] His strategy for creating a sustainable audience for medieval drama within the religious community was threefold. No longer playing at commercial theatres, he re-created his troupe as a traveling one that would perform on location; he staged the plays not as mere entertainment but as performances that would complement the liturgy for the congregation-audience; and he revised his productions to make church leaders and members hosts, audiences, and participants. In several houses of worship, he convinced priests and ministers to participate in the performance. Having the clergy dress in costume and reading the Banns adapted from the Chester cycle (the prologue announcing the theme of the plays), lead a procession of the actors, and even read a speech on the Federal Theatre in their Sunday services before that week’s performance all helped Hughes to gain support from church leaders. [39] Widening his network through letters, meetings, and word of mouth, Hughes led his troupe in staging twelve performances of The Nativity in churches or church-sponsored organizations of multiple denominations that December. Hughes’s production decisions in staging The Nativity in these venues are evident in the multiple copies of script (his second adaptation, after the version performed at the Mayan) that he meticulously annotated for himself and others and in the detailed, descriptive letters that he sent Flanagan after each performance. Although he routinely categorized the letters as director’s reports, they were colored by his emotions and frustrations in convincing local churches to host his troupe, his attention to movement and music, and his effusive praise for Flanagan’s vision of community engagement. The signature performance of The Nativity that season was at St John’s, an Episcopalian church in the West Adams district, where Hughes’s troupe played on the invitation of the church’s dean and rector. A photograph of the opening procession that he included in a letter to Flanagan captures the scope of involvement from both Federal Theatre personnel and church members. Hughes carried a cross through the front doors and led the St John’s children and adult choirs alongside that of the Federal Music Project, while a second crucifer bore the Jerusalem cross (the medieval design of a large central cross surrounded by four smaller ones) ahead of the cast of the play and various extras recruited from the congregation. In all, one hundred and ten people from the church and the Federal Theatre and Music Projects passed along the nave to the high altar carrying all manner of props and liturgical items. Cast members brought banners representing various guilds to recall the medieval origins of the play, torches, and tapers, choir members held lanterns on poles, someone in the long line held up an ornamental star of Bethlehem to be used for the manger scene, and the pipe organist behind the altar and trumpeters following Hughes signaled the processional’s arrival. In a copy of the script that he annotated for the church’s dean, he made clear his intent for the congregation to participate. Hughes relied on “O Come All Ye Faithful” as the opening hymn, but the dean was to ask the congregation to stand and sing as well, and once the procession concluded, he was to provide the opening remarks describing the play’s subject and themes. [40] Hughes’s opening of the play at the Mayan the previous December sheds light on how considerably his production evolved in relocating from the commercial theatre to local churches. In the script for his first adaptation of The Nativity , Hughes notes that the play was to begin with a Federal Music Project choir marching from the lobby and up the aisles on either side of the audience. [41] Singing “O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant,” they strode towards the lower of the theater’s two stages before exiting left and right while singing from offstage. Two actors dressed as friars and bearing lit tapers soon followed up the aisles. As the curtains of the lower stage opened, the friars stepped up to light the two candelabra there and placed oversized folios on two lecterns placed next to them. While the choir concluded the opening hymn, the friars stepped back to allow the audience to read the large, black and red scripts on the folios: “Nativity of the Child” on the left, and “Hail, Mary” on the right. A trumpet call signaled another actor to step through the curtains of the upper stage, and proclaiming himself as the prophet Isaiah, he announced the subject of the drama to come. The roles of cast members and spectators were firmly established: the one moves towards the stage while performing, and the other remains fixed in their seats as passive observers. In St John’s, however, the distinction between the two was not so rigid. Members of the church choir joined the procession, congregants sang and listened to their own church leader act in character, and continuous movement created an intimate performance space. While in the Mayan, he had relied on these lower and upper stages as the focal points of the main action for his audience, in St John’s he made use of the larger, intricately partitioned space to continuously shift his audience’s attention. In his final director’s report for the Los Angeles office, Hughes noted that because of the constant challenge of restaging the play in cramped settings during the December run, he relied on portable screens to provide a backdrop for his cast. [42] In St John’s, however, he seems to have made strategic use of the interior of the church. As he described to Flanagan in a letter the next morning, his actors recited their abbreviated lines or pantomimed the narrative from multiple spots in imitation of the figures portrayed in the stained glass images of the stations of the cross. Hughes based his usual role of Gabriel on Edward Burne-Jones’s rendition of the Annunciation, and with long blonde hair capped by a halo and a flowing white robe layered with gold trim and embroidered with a pattern of crosses at the hem, he stood still with his hands raised as if in prayer. Mary, inspired by Botticelli’s Venus, stood on the altar with one hand towards her chest and another drawing her garments close and looked askance from the crowd. [43] He reserved the high altar as a stage for the most important, solemn scenes of the play, including the “Magnificat,” the hymn to Mary that concludes the Annunciation. Remaining still until the choir sang the first words of the hymn, “my soul doth magnify the Lord,” Hughes slowly turned away from the actress who portrayed Mary, stepped down from the altar, and along the nave. When he exited through the atrium at the front of the cathedral, behind the view of the spectators, twelve girls and boys entered and retraced his steps towards the altar and knelt at the rail where parishioners normally took communion. They then arose in unison and returned to either side of the transept, their exit timed to the closing words of the Magnificat, “glory to the Father and to the Son, / and to the Holy Spirit: / As it was in the beginning, / is now, and will be for ever. Amen.” [44] This careful, methodical choreography of scenes with Mary, Joseph, and Gabriel was disrupted by Herod, the antagonist and comic foil of the play. As Hughes wrote in the explanatory notes that he distributed to the audience for performances of The Nativity , the role of Herod had a long and colorful history of buffoonery, involving yelling, rolling around, lashing out against his sentries, and the generally brutish and exaggerated behavior that inspired Hamlet’s line on actors who could “out-Herod Herod.” As a modern adaptor of the play, Hughes explained that he had inherited through the medieval cycles an especially prideful version of Herod that had developed in early English drama, and he allowed the character more depth and stage presence than any other in the play: he speaks in lengthy monologues, barks orders at his soldiers, and vacillates from bombast and outrage when he hears of the Christ child to grief over learning that his own son was killed in the Massacre of the Innocents. [45] The script annotations for The Nativity reveal the excitement that Herod immediately brings to the performance. Contrasting with the harps that announce Gabriel’s arrival in the Annunciation scene, for example, Herod enters the play cued by blaring trumpets and heralds, and his frequent tirades involved stomping in a fit of rage and shouting promises of vengeance against the Christ child. In his closing scene, as Herod learns of the death of his son, he delivers a final show of violent madness before acknowledging his life misspent and damnation. In a scene reminiscent of Faustus, Hughes noted that demons were to approach from the left and right to drag him away from the audience’s view. [46] Immediately thereafter, Hughes restored order and calm. He noted in his copy of the script that upon Herod’s departure he himself delivered a benediction for the audience and began the Nicene Creed: “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty.” At the closing words, “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen,” the organ rang out the opening chords to “Christians Awake,” and the actors and extras sang the words of the eighteenth-century Yorkshire hymn, “salute the happy morn, whereon the Saviour of the world was born.” [47] He explained in his report to Flanagan that as they sang, he stepped down from the altar and led the recessional back towards the doors from which he had led the processional. Rather than the clergy and crucifers who had accompanied the director to begin the performance, he led the cast of characters, beginning with the actors portraying Mary and Joseph and concluding with those in supporting roles, along the nave to exit the cathedral. The actors left, while the congregation remained. In the early hours of the following morning, Hughes wrote Flanagan that “it was the happiest moment of my life, carrying the great jeweled cross and leading my boys and girls up to the Throne of God.” [48] The dean of St John’s responded in precisely the manner that Hughes must have hoped for: “given with reverence and will all the atmosphere of religion, [the performance] cannot help but do good in strengthening the faith of all who see the play.” [49] This reaction was valuable for Flanagan as well. Having received such frequent and detailed correspondence from Hughes regarding his performances of The Nativity , she had been well aware of the significance of the church bookings for the play, which had already been scheduled when she arrived in California in the fall of 1937. During this second visit to the west coast, she was preoccupied with accusations of nepotism and bribery among the more disgruntled staff and talent in Los Angeles, but Hughes’s relationship with the religious community evidently brought her some peace of mind. As she recorded in her travel notes, “I am awaited upon by a delegation asking me to look into the moral life of our actors, but in spite of this one cloud in the horizon we are doing the nativity plays in the Episcopalian church.” [50] After her arrival, she attended a production of Hansel and Gretel and Pinocchio staged by the children’s troupe at the Hollywood Playhouse, where she found a small but vociferous group of protestors awaiting her in the lobby. They echoed the increasingly widespread accusation of the Federal Theatre’s support of Communism but confessed, when she attempted to have a conversation over their concerns, that none of them had attended a play produced by the Los Angeles Project. It was a moment of honesty that she quickly used to her advantage, and so with the holidays approaching, she advised them on her way out of the lobby to go see Hughes’s production of The Nativity and reassess their opinion of the Project. [51] Flanagan publicly and privately stated her appreciation for Hughes and his religious unit beginning in those final weeks of 1937. Beyond maintaining their regular correspondence, she intervened with local WPA and Project administrators to secure musical instruments for the pieces that he selected for the church performances and began to endorse the value of the unit’s work to Los Angeles religious leaders and school administrators. [52] Everyman at St Joseph’s (September 1938) Encouraged by the reception of The Nativity among the local religious community, Hughes turned his attention the following year to developing for the Federal Theatre what he described to Flanagan as “a real 14 th [-]century production” of Everyman . [53] Unlike The Nativity , whose script he had adapted himself, the Bureau of Research and Publication provided him with a version of Everyman suitable for his desired production. In early 1936, just a few months after the Federal Theatre had been established, the Bureau had purchased the rights to a straightforward translation of Everyman newly completed by a Father Clarus Graves, a Benedictine priest and university professor from Minnesota. Hughes’s plans to stage the play came to fruition that summer, when his contact at St Joseph’s Cathedral, where he had staged The Nativity the previous December, wrote that while he looked forward to the biblical play for Christmas, he hoped, too, to host the premiere of the morality play. [54] The invitation provided Hughes with an opportunity for another signature church performance to follow the performance of The Nativity at St John’s the year before. St Joseph’s Cathedral was to celebrate that fall its Golden Jubilee, the fiftieth anniversary of the parish, and Hughes’s troupe was invited to stage their latest featured play on the opening night of the festivities in early September. As Hughes wrote to Flanagan, he considered his Federal Theatre production of Everyman as opportunity for his own redemption. Over the previous twenty years, professional productions of Everyman in Los Angeles had relied on a translation by the American poet George Sterling of the adaptation by the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Sterling’s translation was commissioned by the Polish director Richard Ordynski, who recruited Hughes himself to play the titular role in a 1917 production at Trinity Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles. When Hughes accepted the invitation to stage Everyman at St Joseph’s, he wrote Flanagan that the version of the play used by the Project offered him a chance to return to “the glorious old original” of the text and atone for the “mess that I created in the English speaking world under Ordynske [sic]” two decades earlier. [55] Hughes’s preference for the Federal Theatre version stemmed from its faithful treatment of the source, whereas the earlier adaptation had effectively departed from its source for an early-twentieth-century audience. The Project’s version preserved the comedic elements of the play (when a number of would-be companions find excuses to abandon Everyman) and its physical display of penance (Everyman’s self-flagellation and wearing of a sackcloth), while keeping the narrative’s focus on the main character’s emotional and spiritual progression. In the preface to his translation, on the other hand, Sterling argued that von Hofmannsthal had “vivified and humanized” a play whose performance had bored Sterling himself with its “bleak and not always intelligible passages” that necessitated the translator’s task of modernizing the text and narrative: The appeal of ‘Everyman’ to the medieval mind must have been vast, for it was a child’s mind, and therefore one to be moved far more greatly by things seen than by things preached. But though the moral pill was deftly enough sugar-coated for the audience of those distant days, ‘Everyman’ can but seem a somewhat crude and unconvincing affair to the pampered and sophisticated public of today.[56] Besides revising the language of the play, the von Hofmannsthal-Sterling adaptation supplemented the narrative with a fuller backstory for the protagonist, portrayed as a hedonistic young man who enjoys banquets and camaraderie, a forlorn lover who quarrels with his partner, and a headstrong son who refuses to listen to his mother’s warnings about his lifestyle. With this translation, Ordynski offered a version of Everyman that challenges the audience to empathize with the eponymous protagonist. This is largely due to the recreation of that protagonist from a universal human figure to a symbol of materialism and greed born from wealth (the von Hofmannsthal-Sterling adaptation was subtitled “The Play of the Rich Man’s Death”). The result is an Everyman that may be recognizable to the audience not as a mirror of themselves but as a portrayal of a higher social class, and so his character is removed from the allegorical intent of the medieval original. [57] Much attention is given in Sterling’s translation to Everyman’s material world, constructed around an interpolated backstory in which we see him ordering his cooks to prepare feasts, scorning his poor neighbors seeking alms, constructing a pleasure garden, courting his lover, and lording over his estate. Contemporary reviews of the production comment on the staging of elaborate scenes to display this opulence in the first half of the play. [58] Appropriately amongst this setting, Everyman is a hedonistic landowner who admires his opulence and sermonizes on the power of material wealth to elevate a man’s status above others: “Money lifts the world above/All mean exchange and barter,” he explains to a friend, “and each man/In his own sphere is as a lesser God.” [59] In the second half of the play, when Everyman should repent this previously sinful behavior, the von Hofmannsthal-Sterling adaptation is oddly ambiguous. It is the protagonist’s newfound sense of morality that strengthens Good Deeds and sets up the resolution of the play, but empathy of the poor and the field workers, the men whom Everyman had previously scorned but who now take pity on him. Such a reaction is not so easy for the audience. Given Everyman’s arrogance and petulance as the titular “rich man,” he can equally be cast as the object of their empathy as well, the intent of the morality play as a genre, or desire to see him punished and stripped of the material possessions that he flaunts, a reaction made possible by the modern revision of the play. Both receptions rely on the moral caveat that even one who is socially and financially superior to the audience will suffer the same fate. Nearly twenty years later, in September, 1936, the von Hofmannsthal-Sterling adaptation of the play served as the script for another, far more ambitious Los Angeles production. [60] Daily features in the Los Angeles Times hinted at the extravagant staging of the play by the Danish director and actor Johannes Poulsen at the Hollywood Bowl, where Everyman was billed as “the greatest spectacle ever offered in Hollywood” and “an epic of humanity, with comedy, drama, thrills, and throbs,” Poulsen’s Everyman presented three spaces to the audience. [61] Golden-painted gates opened to reveal heaven erected on a platform high above the stage, where a queen presided over an angelic court, a medieval village housed the initial scenes, in which Everyman surrounds himself with friends and entertainment, and a glimmering Byzantine cathedral towered above the audience’s gaze. The cathedral served as Everyman’s initial destination, the place to which he follows Good Deeds before continuing to heaven above, and it rested upon a series of steps representing the progression of history before the late medieval composition of Everyman – presumably a suggestion of the passage of time and universal nature of mortality that the protagonist must accept, as well as the triumph of Christianity. Poulsen had conceived of his adaptation of Everyman as a festival play that would be produced as if it were a motion picture, especially in its elaborate costume, lighting, ballet numbers, and the musical accompaniment provided by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. On the opening night, red flares lined the streets surrounding the venue, and multiple spotlights drew attention to the seating area, where Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and a host of celebrities from the entertainment industry and civic leaders arrived along a red, velvet carpet leading to their choice seats near the stage, beneath Poulsen’s monumental settings. [62] As the Federal Theatre Bureau of Research and Publication noted, Everyman relies not on spectacle but emotional investment from the audience. The structure of the text, beginning with God’s lament and subsequent summoning of Death to fetch Everyman, ensures that this audience is privy to a divine plan of which the protagonist is ignorant and so allows them to scoff at his futile attempts to evade his own mortality. [63] As the narrative progresses, they must be encouraged to empathize with Everyman, respond to his sorrowful displays of emotion when he is abandoned by his friends, and take heed of his willingness to adhere to Knowledge and Good Deeds, who advise him towards redemption. Through this empathy, Everyman as a morality play relies on the assumption that an audience would be motivated to receive the protagonist as an exemplar of the human condition and reject the behavior represented by those who would lead them astray. [64] Poulsen’s handling of this adaptation suggests an exaggerated notion of what John McKinnell underscores as a central aspect of staging Everyman : ensuring that the audience becomes distracted by the revelry of the protagonist’s hedonism earlier in the narrative to the point that they forget his transgressions and thus the pending return of Death at the play’s end. [65] It is reasonable to assume that the more the audience is entertained by sights and sounds on stage, the more they forget about this overarching structure of the play that begins with God’s anger and disappointment in humanity and concludes with Everyman foreswearing all of the worldly entertainments presented to the audience. However, compelling the audience to do so also threatens to undermine the crucial dramatic irony of Everyman , reliant upon the audience’s knowledge of, and the protagonist’s ignorance of, the roles of God and Death. In the original narrative, any distraction offered by mundane entertainments is abruptly removed for the second half. Everyman finds himself abandoned not only by his friends but eventually, too, by the allegorical representations of his physical and intellectual qualities (Beauty, Strength, Discretion, and Five Wits), a moment that also has the potential to surprise the audience. [66] In Poulsen’s staging of the play, those mundane entertainments never leave the stage, for they are intended to captivate the audience for the duration of the production, rather than for Everyman alone as evidence of his distraction from spiritual matters in the first half of the narrative. This intent to unceasingly stimulate the audience with the trappings of set design, costume, dance numbers, and lighting was Poulsen’s own, directorial interpolation, an edifice of spectacle built onto the textual additions already offered by von Hoffmansthal and Sterling. In that, he was effective. As a Times critic commented on the experience of viewing the play, “that such magic of stage craft were possible no one would ever dream.” [67] Although Hughes had particular ideas about how his production might appear before the audience in a church setting, his focus remained on the spiritual message of the play’s narrative. In his director’s report for the Los Angeles office, he wrote of the same challenges and resolutions of staging Everyman as he had faced in staging The Nativity the year before. The venues were too small, he could never get quite the number of Federal Music Project performers that he needed, and he relied again on large screens to serve as a portable backdrop, since many venues lacked a proper stage. [68] As he had done the previous December, Hughes described many of his staging details to Flanagan in frequent letters written after each performance. To complement the simplicity of the script in the Graves translation and make the best use of the churches where his troupe performed, Hughes relied on careful positioning of his actors and props to focus the audience’s attention. [69] He again insisted on carefully choreographed movement in performing the play. When the other characters approached and departed from Everyman and thus away from the audience’s attention, the staging resembled a processional, and it has been argued that keeping the protagonist fixed amidst this deliberate, minimal movement emphasizes his isolation. [70] As he had done in St John’s, Hughes had his actors otherwise stand in “stained glass attitudes” in St. Joseph’s, a stage direction indicating that they were to deliver their lines in tableau-vivant poses reminiscent of the figures in the cathedral’s windows and stations of the cross, and rely on physical gestures and exaggerated emotions. [71] Perhaps anticipating his audience’s lack of familiarity with the play, he also relied on embroidered titles (e.g., “Good Deeds,” “Strengthe”) across his actors’ costumes to identify the allegorical figures, as captured in photographs that he included with his director’s report for the Los Angeles office. [72] The primary characters were distinguished by these labels and their costumes: Good Deeds wore a halo, Knowledge wore a crown, and Death appeared in dark flowing robes and a veil that covered his face. As he had done just over twenty years ago on his first visit to Los Angeles, Hughes played the titular role, wearing a variegated, ornate Elizabethan costume for the majority of the play and plain white robes for the last moments, as the character prepares himself for death. Standing in place and relying on gesticulations and exaggerated manners to convey emotion, the actors remained before screens painted to resemble wood paneling, which the art director had borrowed from Federal Theatre productions of Shakespearean plays. Whereas Everyman and the allegorical figures thus relied on movement and posturing within various areas of the church interior, Hughes kept another visual cue in the play fixed in a central location. Death is the only other constant presence in the play besides Everyman, and the Federal Theatre script calls for him to remain in place immediately after he enters the play. As Everyman opens, a messenger explains to the audience its primary themes (the transitory nature of life and the futility of sinful behavior), and the figure of God laments that humanity has devoted itself to sin and pleasure, a perverted state of the world that elicits disappointment and anger. “I hoped well that Everyman/In my glory should make his mansion,” he begins, but observes that in their hedonism and negligence of divine mercy, those collectively termed “Everyman” must be met with justice, and so he summons Death to begin the action of the play. [73] From the first lines of the play, the audience is thus made aware that death is the only outcome of the play, emphasized by the fact that the character does not leave the audience’s view. [74] Death is summoned to serve as both messenger and audience, and while he interacts with the protagonist in their dialogue early in the play, in Hughes’s staging, Death remained fixed before the front of the congregation, a passive viewer of Everyman’s vain attempts to evade the mortality of which he is a harbinger. [75] Along with the audience, Death waits to see not merely when the protagonist will die but how he will do so: that is, whether or not Everyman will earn his redemption in time, a suspense that he exaggerates by placing an hour glass and lit candle on a table in the center of the audience’s view. The script also noted that the characters and the audience might track Everyman’s progress through the Book of Life, an inventory of his good and bad deeds that an angel places on the same table and a prop to which Death and Good Deeds are occasionally prompted to point as a reminder of man’s selfish, overly indulgent past. Everyman, too, is aware of the presence of Death and the book. In begging his family to accompany him on his dreaded journey, his cue is to look over his shoulder at the ominous figure and explain that “I must give a reckoning straight/For I have a great enemy, that hath me in wait.” [76] In examining the book with Good Deeds, he further calls the audience’s attention to the book by crying out that “for one letter here I cannot see” on the side of the ledger meant to record his acts of kindness and charity. [77] When Knowledge and Confession instruct him how to scourge his body of its sinfulness by whipping himself and dressing in sackcloth and how to pray to God for mercy, he finds his “accounts” are balanced in the book and is ready for the act of sacrament and unction offered by a priest. By the last moments of the play, Everyman, having atoned for his past transgressions and seeking the purification offered by Knowledge and Confession, looks towards the audience and delivers a reflective monologue that addresses those watching him: Methinketh, alas, that I must be gone; To make my reckoning and my debts pay, For I see my time is nigh spent away. Take example, all ye that this do hear or see, How they that I loved best do forsake me, Except my GOOD-DEEDS that bideth truly.[78] As he moves towards a mock grave, he appeals to God for mercy, motivated not by fear for what the afterlife may hold for him but by the faith that he now articulates in his maker: “In manus tuas” (“in your hands”), he states, “commendo spiritum meum” (“I entrust my spirit”). [79] At this moment, Hughes had his musicians ring a bell that, as he wrote Flanagan, he bought out of pocket, because its toll suited the solemnity of playing the morality play in a cathedral and reminded him of the church bells he heard knell while walking one evening in the medieval Bavarian town of Rothenberg. [80] In the director’s report, he noted, too, that Handel’s “Dead March” from Saul would accompany Everyman’s descent into his grave. [81] Finally, at Everyman’s final words, the script prompts Death to extinguish the candle to signal the end of his mortal life, while Knowledge explains to the audience that the protagonist was successful in his journey to heaven and greeted by angels, given voice by the choir’s chanting. In Hughes’s handling of the play, Everyman is thus portrayed as the embodiment of sinful but ultimately pensive humanity, rather than an individual wealthy man whose atonement is sudden and unconvincing. He is not quite an innocent or passive victim, for the play suggests that he has lived life according to his own terms before Death’s arrival, but neither is he an arrogant figure whose redemption can be called into question, as he had been presented in the von Hoffmanstahl-Sterling adaptation. [82] The Federal Theatre script underscores the qualities of Everyman that compel the audience to associate themselves with him: when confronted by Death, he seems ignorant of his own mortality, and after realizing that he cannot bribe his adversary, he quickly realizes that his fate is not merely the act of dying but of dying without having recorded many good deeds in his book of recompense (“my writing is full unready,” he explains to Death, as a bell tolls and the book remains in full view). [83] From the moment the two meet, Everyman acknowledges his isolation, and although his subsequent abandonment by the allegorical representations of both his material wealth and his physical senses (Beauty, Strength, and Five Wits) is hardly a surprise for the audience or the character himself, the emotional impact of these scenes is still poignant. [84] When Everyman cannot compel the latter group of figures to enter the grave with him at the play’s end, he addresses the audience, per the script’s direction, to explain, “how they that I loved best do forsake me,” except for Good Deeds, who carries his book of reckoning into the grave. [85] Hughes’s Everyman also shows a justified range of emotions. He is understandably afraid at the unexpected arrival of Death, he is hurt by the rejection of his companions, and he earnestly seeks to understand how to get to heaven, once Good Deeds, Knowledge, and Confession explain how to do so. Under Hughes’s direction, Everyman presented its title character as an archetype of the human condition that was especially suited to a church performance: beginning the play in sin, he concludes it in a state of grace, a maturation of the character that provides an exemplum for the audience. [86] New Audiences for Religious Drama Following the performance, Hughes added Everyman to his troupe’s repertoire for local high schools and colleges. Applying the same model to Los Angeles school administrators as that which he had established within the religious community, he wrote letters, held meetings with educators, and attended charity events where he was asked to speak on Flanagan and the Federal Theatre. His troupe frequently performed scenes from Shakespearean plays (often The Merchant of Venice , Richard II , and Hamlet ) for high schools and charitable organizations, and Everyman served as a feature play for the drama department at Los Angeles City College a few weeks after the performance at St Joseph’s. Without a proper office for audience research (the Los Angeles branch had been closed in mid-1937), Hughes both created his own audience in the community and inspired them to provide feedback. [87] Among the thank-you notes from local clergy, principals, and faculty, none appeared in an official Federal Theatre report. Rather, these individuals wrote personal letters to Flanagan in Washington, WPA’s California offices, and Los Angeles Project headquarters. Their letters attested to Hughes’s fulfillment of a foundational tenet of the Project to those who could not otherwise see live drama: it impacted them emotionally and intellectually. The Diocese of Los Angeles and San Diego wrote the Los Angeles Project, for example, that a performance of The Nativity for one of its impoverished neighborhoods had “brought a glimpse of beauty rare in their lives,” while a faculty member at Los Angeles City College noted that students were keenly interested in Hughes’s performance as Shylock, in that he “swung the sympathy of the audience back to a racial sympathy at the end.” [88] Flanagan replied to the college’s Department of English that she considered Hughes’s work in the community more impactful for the Project than those performances drawing large audiences downtown and in Hollywood. His traveling troupe, built within a network of churches and schools, required a resolve for which she expressed her “greatest admiration and affection.” [89] These anecdotal testimonies may have been written in support of Hughes and his troupe, but they had applications well beyond Los Angeles. By spring of 1939, when the Los Angeles Project had been largely dismantled, Hughes resigned as director of its Shakespeare and religious unit ahead of the official closure of the Federal Theatre. However, he soon found other avenues for pursuing his belief that the mystery and morality plays could still be staged as narratives embedded within the religious service and performances intended to supplement the liturgy and inspire spiritual reflection. On 30 November 1944, just over five years after the termination of funding for the Federal Theatre, Hughes wrote Flanagan from the isolated village of Nixon, Nevada. He explained to her that he had taken up missionary work on the Paiute reservation that spanned the northern part of the state. He confided in his longtime correspondent that he found the work to be fulfilling yet lonely, and he admitted how he often reflected on the Federal Theatre, Flanagan’s leadership, and “the untimely end of our beloved project.” [90] Responding two weeks later from Smith College, Flanagan suggested that Hughes’s new career was hardly a surprise to those who knew his personality and work ethic, and when she recalled in turn their accomplishments in the Project, she was particularly thankful for his “beautiful religious plays.” [91] He became a working, if not ordained, minister, applying the role that he had begun in the Federal Theatre—an actor and director who considered himself a spiritual leader when staging medieval drama within the religious community—to the tribal community in Nevada. A reporter in Los Angeles wrote that Hughes approached his missionary work in Nevada “as though he had stepped back into the 14 th century, using the patterns of teaching that inspired the early [biblical drama] of the Church,” [92] and Hughes explained to a friend that he still performed (presumably playing multiple parts) The Nativity at Christmas and Everyman during Lent. [93] As Hughes wrote of these performances, “when produced in church or theatre in a spirit of reverence and with a minimum of stage ‘business,’ these glorious little plays have unbelievable beauty, power, and exquisite poetry.” [94] This steadfast belief that elaborate costume and staging might distract the audience from the text and the reflective, solemn experience that it offered was fundamental to Hughes’s success in the Federal Theatre. Situating performances of the medieval plays as an extension of the liturgy, he found in the religious community the opportunity to use live drama as a spiritual teaching tool for the audience. So successful were these performances during Hughes’s tenure as a Project director in Los Angeles that they ultimately provided evidence for Flanagan in her argument before the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities in December 1939. As she explained to the Committee, the Federal Theatre had proven that plays could not only entertain but even, within its religious offerings, instill spiritual values in their audiences. In the two years leading up to that testimony, Hughes had directly responded to her call for Project leaders across the country to introduce live drama beyond commercial houses and engage with religious communities, in particular. Flanagan’s original directive was not without its political aims, given that she needed religious leaders to show public support for the Project. However, Hughes relied on the mystery and morality plays to sermonize to his audience-congregation, an objective that she had not articulated in addressing her directors in 1937. In so doing, his productions of medieval religious plays helped Flanagan both realize and expand on her vision for what the Federal Theatre could accomplish at the local level. References [1] 76 Cong. Rec. vol. 84, pt 7, 2,866–867 (1939). [2] Ibid, 2,869. [3] Ibid., 8,089. For the references to Everyman and The Nativity , see ibid., 7,291 and 7,372; Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, 114 (1939). [4] Hallie Flanagan, Arena (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940), 276. [5] Sanora Babb, “The Los Angeles WPA Theatre Project,” New Theatre 11, no. 6 (1936): 23. [6] In referring to his sources for The Nativity , Hughes used the term “mystery” plays for the cycles of biblical drama, whereas the Federal Theatre Project used the term “miracle” in newspaper advertisements. As Meg Twycross, “Medieval English Theatre: Codes and Genres,” in A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c.1350 – c.1500 , ed. Peter Brown (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 456, notes, the designation “miracle” for the genre did not remain in widespread use beyond the late Middle Ages. [7] John R. Elliott, Jr., Playing God: Medieval Mysteries on the Modern Stage (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1989), 56, writes that the Religious Drama Society in Hughes’s native Great Britain produced religious plays in England in a similar fashion. [8] John O’Connor, “The Federal Theatre Project’s Search for an Audience,” in Theatre for Working-Class Audiences in the United States, 1830 – 1980 , ed. Bruce A. McConachie and Daniel Friedman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 171, and Cecelia Moore, The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Drama (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), 9. [9] O’Connor, “The Federal Theatre Project’s Search for an Audience,” 174. [10] “Merchant of Venice: Audience Survey Report (Los Angeles, CA)” 14 May 1937, RG 69, Box 254, 2287303, National Archives (NA). [11] Hallie Flanagan, “Design for the Federal Theatre’s Season: In which the director of the FTP states some plans for the year in 1938,” FTP, Series 1, Box 4, Folder 2, George Mason University Libraries (GMUL). See Bonnie Nelson Schwartz, Voices from the Federal Theatre (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 2003), xii. Hallie Flanagan, “Brief delivered by Hallie Flanagan before the Committee on Patents, House of Representatives,” 8 February 1938. Federal Theatre Project Collection (1932–1943), ML31.F44, Container 5, Library of Congress (LC), pledged that no plays “of a cheap, trivial, outworn, or vulgar nature” would be produced. [12] Frederic H. Bair, “Educational Aspects of the Federal Theatre Project,” 12–15 September 1937, FTP, Series 1, Box 16, Folder 16, GMUL; Hallie Flanagan, “FTP Policy Board Meeting,” 12 April 1938, Hallie Flanagan (1890–1969) Papers, T-Mss 1964-002, Series 1: Federal Theatre Project, Sub-series 2: Administrative Files (1935–1939), Box 8: Administrative Files, New York Public Library Archives and Manuscripts (NYPL). [13] Hallie Flanagan, “Talk at the Meeting of Regional Staff,” 19 August 1937. FTP, Container 962, LC. [14] Hallie Flanagan: “The Christmas Program for the Federal Theatre – To the Regional Directors,” 14 October 1937, FTP, Container 2, LC. [15] Katherine Clugston, “Reorganization of the Play Bureau,” September, 1936, FTP, Series 1, Box 4, Folder 15, GMUL; “Religious Letters of Commendation,” FTP, Container 1, LC. [16] Stanley J. Kahrl, “The staging of medieval English plays,” in The Theatre of Medieval Europe: New Research in Early Drama , ed. Eckehard Simon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 130–48 [17] Katie Normington, Medieval English Drama: Performance and Spectatorship (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 84. [18] Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 3. Poel still took care to have an actor read the role of God (renamed Adonai) from offstage. Susanne Rupp, “Performing Heaven: The State of Grace in Seventeenth-Century Protestant Theology,” in Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England , ed. Susanne Rupp and Tobias Doring (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 131, argues that the prevailing theological concept behind these concerns over presenting God on stage was a sacrosanct “tension between [human] knowledge and [divine] secret [ensuring] that the fundamental difference between God and his creature is maintained.” See also Alexandra F. Johnston, “English community drama in crisis: 1535–80,” in Drama and Community: People and Plays in Medieval Europe , ed. Alan Hindley (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 265, for Protestant receptions of the plays’ Catholic heritage and Murray Roston, Biblical Drama in England: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day (London: Faber, 1968), 109–15, for the Puritans’ objections to the humanization of God onstage. The laws were rescinded in 1951. [19] Elliott, Jr., Playing God , 42–62. See also Katie Normington, Modern Mysteries: Contemporary Productions of Medieval English Cycle Dramas (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007), 24–25. [20] Robert Potter, The English Morality Play: Origins, History and Influence of a Dramatic Tradition (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 224. [21] Claire Sponsler, Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 156–65. See also John Marshall, “Modern productions of medieval English plays,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre , ed. Richard Beadle (Cambridge, 1994), 290. [22] Elliott, Jr., Playing God , 57; Sponsler, Ritual Imports , 167, and Gerald Weales, Religion in Modern English Drama (Philadelphia, 1961), 111-12. There is no surviving evidence suggesting that Hughes was directly influenced by member of the Religious Drama Society, but he was likely aware of their church performances by the late-1930s. Hughes was an ardent theatre scholar, and he had kept abreast of live drama in England since his professional days in London, notably through his friendship and correspondence with Iden Payne, director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and admirer of the Federal Theatre. [23] Sponsler, Ritual Imports, 169. [24] Although Johnston, “English community drama in crisis: 1535–80,” 248–49, notes that the plays could be staged for any number of practical reasons (e.g., festivals, fundraising), Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack, English Drama: A Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 11, argue that the procession of the plays through the streets of a given city was intended “to consecrate the everyday environment.” [25] Federal Theatre Project, Play Bureau, “Suggested Repertory of Classic English Plays,” Records, RG 69, Box 348, 2385588, NA. [26] Federal Theatre Project, Bureau of Research and Publication, “Publication Report,” Records, RG 69, Box 161, 2526405, NA. [27] Ibid. [28] Lawrence M. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 210, argues that the plays emphasize for the audience a moral interpretation of biblical history, founded on the “virtues of obedience and faith.” See, too, Christine Richardson and Jackie Johnston, Medieval Drama (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1991), 98, for the central theme of the progression from sinfulness to grace. Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 79–80, argues of the morality plays that, although this moral teaching of sin and salvation lay at the heart of the narrative, their “flamboyantly bad behavior . . . is by no means entirely subordinated to the plays’ themes of repentance.” [29] Robert S. Sturges, The Circulation of Power in Medieval Biblical Drama: Theaters of Authority (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 136–40. [30] Margaret Rogerson, “Medieval Mystery Plays in the Modern World: A Question of Relevance?”, The Yearbook of English Studies 43 (2013): 362, notes that the 2012 revival of the York cycle used the allegorical nature of the plays to recast the narrative of Adam and Eve through child actors, who are replaced by adults after the Fall. [31] Christina M. Fitzgerald, The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 145; David Bevington, Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 240; See Lynette R. Muir, The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4, and Ruth Harriett Blackburn, Biblical Drama under the Tudors (Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015), 17. [32] John Musgrove (Federal Theatre Project Research Bureau), “Theatre Buildings in Los Angeles,” Records of the Work Projects Administration (1922–1944), Records, RG 69, Box 242, 2319732, NA. [33] Katherine T. von Blon, “Government Subsidy for Drama Seen,” Los Angeles Times , March 1, 1936, California State Library (CSL). [34] Susan Quinn, Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desperate Times (New York: Walker & Co., 2008), 214; Stacy Claire Brightman, “The Federal Theatre Project in Los Angeles” (PhD diss., University of California, Davis, 1999), 79–80. [35] “Program Notes Regarding the Miracle Plays,” FTP, Container 1046, LC. [36] Production Records (“Miracle Plays”), FTP, Container 962, LC. [37] In December, 1937, he reported to Flanagan that leaders in the local Baptist community had asked him whether the Federal Theatre supported Communism, and then in October, 1938 he notified her that certain educators among Los Angeles’s Catholic community would not host his troupe, owing to the same suspicions of the Project. See Letters, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, December, 1937 and October, 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1: Correspondence, Box 6: Miscellaneous A:Z (1935–1958), NYPL; Elizabeth A. Osborne, Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre Project (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 9. [38] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, 8 December 1937, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [39] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, December 1937, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [40] Hughes, The Nativity , Records, RG 69, Box 306, 2315596, NA. [41] Hughes, The Nativity , Federal Theatre Project Scripts (1935–1939), Box 8, University of Southern California Libraries Special Collections (USCL). [42] Production Records (“The Nativity”), FTP, Container 1046, LC. [43] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, December, 1937, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [44] All stage directions refer to the Hughes’s own annotated copy for the December, 1937 performances: Hughes, The Nativity , Records, RG 69, Box 306, NA. [45] “Program Notes Regarding the Miracle Plays,” FTP, Container 1046, LC; See Sturges, The Circulation of Power , 55–57, and Muir, The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe , 107. [46] Hughes, The Nativity , Records, RG 69, Box 306, 2315596, NA. [47] Ibid. [48] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, 21 December1937, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [49] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, 21 December 1937, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [50] Hallie Flanagan, Travel Notes, 19 November 1937, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 2, Box 9, NYPL. [51] Flanagan, Arena , 284. [52] Ibid., 257. [53] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, December, 1937, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [54] Letter, Father William to Gareth Hughes, 28 July 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [55] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, 8 August 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [56] George Sterling, The Play of Everyman (San Francisco: A.M. Robertson, 1917), “Preface.” [57] Potter, The English Morality Play , 230. [58] “Theatre Notes,” Los Angeles Herald , 8 January 1917, and 17 January 1917, CSL. [59] Sterling, The Play of Everyman , 21. [60] The 1917 version was republished as The California Festival Edition of the Play of Everyman (Los Angeles: The Primavera Press, 1936). [61] Advertisement, Los Angeles Times , 8 September 1936, CSL. [62] “‘Everyman’ Lures Society,” Los Angeles Times , 9 September 1936, CSL. [63] Ron Tanner, “Humor in Everyman and the Middle English Morality Play,” Philological Quarterly 70 (1991): 150. [64] Sponsler, Drama and Resistance , 80. [65] John McKinnell, “How Might Everyman Have Been Performed?”, in Bells Chiming from the Past: Cultural and Linguistic Studies on Early English , ed. Isabel Moskowich-Spiegel and Begoña Crespo-García (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 129. [66] Phoebe S. Spinrad, “The Last Temptation of Everyman,” Philological Quarterly 64, no. 2 (1985): 192. [67] “Fire Postpones ‘Everyman,’ Show Will Go on Tonight,” Los Angeles Times , 14 September 1936, CSL. [68] Production Report (“Everyman”), FTP, Container 1006, LC. [69] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, 8 August 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [70] Stanton B. Garner, Jr., “Theatricality in Mankind and Everyman,” Studies in Philology , 84 no. 3 (1987): 281, observes that the allegorical figures move through the play “with an almost processional simplicity”; Yeeyon Im, “The ‘Scourge of Penance’ and a ‘Garment of Sorrow’: Catholic Reforms and the Spectacle of the Passion in Everyman ,” Medieval and Early Modern English Studies 24 (2016): 137–38. [71] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, 8 August 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. Dunbar H. Ogden, The Staging of Drama in the Medieval Church (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 114, argues that the physical gestures employed in church performances were rooted in the mass; in Ibid., 165, he identifies the primary emotions of awe, joy, sorrow, fear, and anger as those to be portrayed in an exaggerated fashion within the large space of a medieval cathedral. [72] Lesley Wade Soule, “Performing the mysteries: demystification, story-telling and over-acting like the devil,” European Medieval Drama 1 (1997): 221. Leslie Thomson, “Dumb Shows in Performance on the Early Modern Stage,” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England 29 (2016), 28, notes that the convention was maintained into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. [73] Unknown, “Everyman,” 2, FTP Scripts, Box 16, USCL. [74] Thomas F. van Laan, “ Everyman : A Structural Analysis,” PMLA 78, no. 5 (1963): 466. [75] Thomas Willard, “Images of Mortality,” in Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: The Material and Spiritual Conditions of the Culture of Death , ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 418 [76] Unknown, “Everyman,” 9, FTP Scripts, Box 16, USCL. [77] Ibid., 14. [78] Ibid., 24. [79] Ibid., 25. [80] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, 29 August 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [81] Production Report (“Everyman”), FTP, Container 1006, LC. [82] Jérome Hankins, “Staging Everyman . A ‘Dance of Life,’ or of the use of medieval drama to re-energize our contemporary stage,” Etudes Anglaises: Revue du Monde Anglophone 66 (2013): 397. [83] Allen D. Goldhamer, “ Everyman : A Dramatization of Death,” Classica et Mediaevalia 30 (1969): 589–99, posits that a key detail suggesting the protagonist’s unawareness of mortality is the fact that he does not recognize Death when the two first encounter each other. [84] Julie Paulson, “Death’s Arrival and Everyman’s Separation,” Theatre Survey: The Journal of the American Society for Theatre Research 48 (2007): 126, argues that this awareness of isolation is thematically unique among the morality plays, which feature an allegorical battle between virtuous and sinful behavior, rather than a character’s psychological reaction to pending death; Bob Godfrey, “ Everyman (Re)Considered,” European Medieval Drama 4 (2000): 165: “the personal characteristics have been adopted to make the internal conflict of Everyman more immediately poignant to the audience. Foregrounding the physical attributes in this way makes unavoidable an empathetic response to the acting of these final moments in the play.” [85] Unknown, “Everyman,” 24, FTP Scripts, Box 16, USCL. [86] Potter, The English Morality Play , 53–54. [87] O’Connor, “The Federal Theatre Project’s Search for an Audience,” 173. [88] Letter, Gertrude Peifer to Jerome Coray, 23 December 1937, Records, RG 69, 1068204, NA; Letter, Mabel L. Loop to Gareth Hughes, 22 November 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [89] Letters, Hallie Flanagan to O.D. Richardson, 2 December 1938 and Hallie Flanagan to Gareth Hughes, 29 November 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [90] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, Undated, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [91] Letter, Hallie Flanagan to Gareth Hughes, 12 December 1944, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [92] “Actor Turned Minister Comes Back for Visit,” Los Angeles Times , 15 September 1952. CSL. [93] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Charlton Laird, Undated, Gareth Hughes Papers (1925–1965), NC803, Box 1: Correspondence, University of Nevada, Reno Special Collections. [94] Gareth Hughes, “Mediaeval Religious Drama,” The Desert Churchman , 3, no. 5 (1945), 3. Footnotes About The Author(s) RUSSELL STONE is Assistant Provost for Academic Assessment at Boston University. As a scholar of the classical tradition, he has published widely on the reception of Alexander the Great in medieval Europe. His current research focuses on a more recent legacy of that tradition, the staging of classical and medieval drama within the Federal Theatre Project. 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 “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution:

Steven Otfinoski 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 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Steven Otfinoski By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Above: Cherry Beaumont (Eliza Fichter) negotiates with Mr. Bezos (Noah Ilya Alexis Tuleja) in Great Barrington Public Theater's production of How To Not Save the World with Mr. Bezos . Photo: Lauren Jacobbe. Since the presidential election of 2024, theaters have turned to the political arena with both new plays that reflect the turmoil in our nation and plays of an older vintage that take on new meaning in the age of Trump. This is especially true in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, where three major theatres—Barrington Stage Company (BSC) in Pittsfield, Great Barrington Public Theater (GBPT) in Great Barrington, and Shakespeare & Company (S & C) in Lenox—know their audience and its political bend and have chosen works that relate to the moment. One of the plays most in the moment was BSC’s N/A. The N/A of the title are former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (N) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (A), although their full names are never given, as are none of the other political figures mentioned, including a president they both detest. The play opened with the two high-powered women meeting in Pelosi’s office, AOC having just won the Democratic primary in her district. Sparks flew as A questioned the pragmatism of N’s politics and N, in turn, denigrated A’s uncompromising progressivism. Kelly Lester was a cool, aloof Pelosi, deeply committed to her causes with a withering wit that kept the laughs coming as the drama deepened. Diane Guerrero was every inch her equal, a fiery advocate and an irresistible blend of New York savvy and Latina passion. The sense of urgency was heightened by Wheeler Moon’s mind-numbing lighting and Brandon Bulls’s jagged sound design, especially in the vivid recreation of the January 6 th attack on the Capitol. In this battle of wills over how to best save our democracy, both women made a good case for idealism tempered by pragmatism, and each came to appreciate the strength and character of the other, even when in the end A turned down the retiring Speaker’s offer of House Whip to blaze her own trail. The play ends, but the drama goes on. More imaginative but no less compelling is GBPT’s production of Maggie Kearnan’s How to Not Save the World with Mr. Bezos . Artistic Director Jim Frangione called it “a rollicking, bold and thought-provoking play” and it certainly lives up to that description. The play is set in an America of the near future where it’s illegal to be a billionaire. One of the most famous of this exclusive club, Jeff Bezos, had agreed to be interviewed by journalist Cherry Beaumont (an animated and deliciously unpredictable Eliza Fichter) in exchange for information about the federal case against him. Bezos was played to a T by Noah Ilya Alexis Tuleja, right down to the billionaire’s braying laugh. As these two sparred and parried over why Bezos and the other richest of the rich couldn’t eliminate poverty and save the world, the Fact Checker (a nerdy but endearing Shai Vaknine) informed the audience of what was fact, fake, and fiction (made up by the playwright). It was a clever conceit but at times an annoying one, pulling us away from the central conflict. The two characters engaged in a lively game of beer pong and dance to Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpies Overture” and Gene Kelly crooning “Singin’ in the Rain.” (Was this a homage to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange that set the same background music to a rape and murder?) Some of the air went out of this engaging play of ideas when it was revealed that Cherry’s secret motive was revenge for her mother, who grew up with and later worked for Bezos. The bloody finale, while powerful, was a bit predictable, and one wishes the playwright had dug a little deeper into her original argument. BSC reached further back to an earlier political era in its season opener, Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground , a one-man show starring Broadway veteran John Rubenstein as the 34 th president, a fierce defender of democracy at home and abroad. Playwright Richard Hellesen has found a solid dramatic device to propel Eisenhower’s 80-minute monologue—a historians’ survey that ranks the presidents, placing Eisenhower, much to his chagrin, at number 22. He set the record straight, musing about his long career (the play is set in 1962) in a tape recorder for a projected memoir. Rubenstein was in fine form as the indignant ex-president. Along with his triumphs he recalled his regrets—failing to defend his friend George Marshall from the red-baiting Joe McCarthy and being indirectly responsible for the death of his first-born son. Scenic designer Michael Deegan created a spacious living room in Eisenhower’s Gettysburg home for him to ramble and fume about in. An entertaining drama about a much underrated president, the play also reminded us how far the Republican Party has fallen since Eisenhower’s day, loyal not to the Constitution but to a president totally lacking the character of Ike. Eisenhower’s words, delivered with fiery passion by Rubenstein, drew spontaneous applause at the performance this critic attended. The title’s “piece of ground” refers to the farmland that Eisenhower cultivated in retirement, but by play’s end it could be seen as America itself, a ground that desperately needs saving. The presidency of Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy, is remembered as a new beginning for the nation, a time of great promise. It is forever linked to the Lerner-Lowe musical Camelot , which opened that same landmark year of 1960. BSC’s robust revival is helmed by Artistic Director Alan Paul who states in the program notes that the musical is “really about democracy.” It is also about the loss of those democratic ideals that inspired another leader, King Arthur of Britain. Both Kennedy and Arthur’s crusades ended in tragedy—the president was assassinated in November 1963 and Arthur’s reign was brought down by passion and political intrigue. Ken Wulf Clark’s Arthur is a winning combination of boyish enthusiasm and manly idealism, whose final triumph over mankind’s base desires is revealed in the play’s final moments as he mentored a young boy to carry on his mission. This “child” was African American and dressed in army camouflage, bringing out the contemporary connection. The rest of the cast is singularly fine with Ali Ewoldt as a winsome and passionate Guinevere and Emmett O’Hanlon as a stalwart, guilt-ridden Lancelot. Race and racism are major issues in our cultural wars and they were stage center in S & C’s sterling production of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson . The suffering and resilience of enslaved African Americans and their descendants is symbolized in a family heirloom, the titular piano. The two inheritors of this bitter but compelling heritage were siblings Boy Willie, a bundle of energy and earnestness embodied by Omar Robinson, and Berniece, a towering, unyielding Jade Guerra. Boy Willie wanted to sell the piano to buy the land his family share cropped on for generations, while Berniece refused to surrender it. Their struggle is witnessed and influenced by a supporting cast of family and friends that capture both the earthiness and spirituality of Wilson’s beloved Hill District of Pittsburgh. Worth singling out is ranney, who played the sly Wining Boy, who had his own conflicted relationship to the piano. The ghosts and demons of the family’s dark past were brought to life through the impressive efforts of lighting designer James McNamara and sound designer James Cannon, which in the play’s unforgettable climax transform the family home into a house of horrors. But horror gives way to love and final redemption for the feuding siblings as they awakened to a new state of self-recognition and forgiveness. Misogyny countered by a rising feminism from a far earlier time and place is central to GBPT’s production of Anne Undeland’s Madame Mozart, the Lacrimosa . From the first moment Mozart’s widow Constanze made her entrance, dragging her husband’s shrouded corpse down a staircase, it was clear she was a desperate woman. The play related Constanze’s struggle to keep her husband’s untimely death a secret until she could find someone to finish his unfinished requiem and get the money from the fickle count who commissioned it. He, along with Mozart’s assistant, who had sexual designs on Constanze, her acid-tongued mother, and all the other characters were played to perfection by Ryan Winkles, in a tour de force performance. Tara Franklin was equally fine as Constanze who grew before our eyes from a helpless widow to a tigress of a mother and preserver of her husband’s legacy. Mozart’s music was played with passion onstage by pianist Hudson Orfe, providing a dramatic backdrop to the play. Director Judy Braha brought color and light to this enchanting drama, making the most of that dominating staircase that charted Constanze’s fall and ultimate rise, an inspiration to the women of today who still struggle in a world that is still too often dominated by men. All three theatres should be commended for challenging their audiences to reflect on the chaotic times we live in with plays that keep us fixed in the moment. References Footnotes About The Author(s) STEVEN OTFINOSKI teaches in the English department at Fairfield University. He is an award-winning playwright with productions across the Eastern states and abroad. His ten-minute comedy “The Audition” won the Best Script Award at the Short + Sweet Festival in Sydney, Australia. Steve is also the author of more than 200 books for young adults and has been the long-time reviewer of summer theater in the Berkshires for New England Theatre in Review . He lives in Stratford, Connecticut with his wife Beverly, a retired teacher and editor, and their two Aussie Shepherds. 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.

Andrew Gibb 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 Performance in the Zócalo: Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present Andrew Gibb By Published on December 11, 2023 Download Article as PDF PERFORMANCE IN THE ZÓCALO: CONSTRUCTING HISTORY, RACE, AND INDENTITY IN MEXICO'S CENTRAL SQUARE FROM THE COLONIAL ERA TO THE PRESENT. Ana Martínez. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020; Pp. 222. In recent years, our understanding of the deep complexities of race and power in early colonial Mexico has been advanced greatly by scholars treating the era from a range of interdisciplinary approaches. Many works have taken up performance as a primary analytical lens, including Linda A. Curcio-Nagy’s The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City (2004), Patricia Ybarra’s Performing Conquest (2009), Paul A. Scolieri’s Dancing the New World (2013), and Leo Cabranes-Grant’s From Scenarios to Networks (2016). Ana Martínez’s 2020 Performance in the Zócalo expands the discourse in important new directions. The author’s architectural and scenographic expertise brings spatial considerations to the fore in fresh new ways, a perspective heightened by the book’s diachronic analysis of a single space (Mexico City’s central Plaza de la Constitución, popularly known as the Zócalo) over time, from the sixteenth century through the twenty-first. Martínez’s unique approach is to“study urban spaces through embodied practices across time”(5). To manage such study over a span of more than five centuries, she carefully selects a handful of key events staged in Mexico City’s main square from the colonial period through the Porfiriato and into the twenty-first century. Martínez further frames her analysis by choosing case studies that foreground the agency of Indigenous participants, a move that not only resists foundational and ongoing erasure of Native Mexican identity and history, but also provides a basis for her central thesis that the space and flows of the Zócalo have always served as a“site of officialdom and liberation” (5). Martínez’s particular interdisciplinary methodology takes advantage of the“overlapping areas of performance studies, Mexican studies, and urban studies”(11), borrowing equally from the insights of scenographers, sociologists, and critical geographers. Each of the five chapters begins with a thorough contextualization of a particular historical spectacle, including a spatial description of the plaza at the time of the performance. Analysis then progresses through a thick description of the event, setting up a theorized exploration of its social meaning(s). The first chapter is a study of a civic festival mounted in the square and surrounding streets in 1539, less than two decades after Cortés’s destruction of the Mexican capital of Tenochtitlán. Martínez interprets the festival– a four-day jumble of mock battles, athletic competitions, and public banquets–as a Spanish/Indigenous collaboration, intended by the former as a celebration of the newly-constructed colonial center, and seized upon by the latter as an opportunity to perpetuate pre-conquest forms of cultural expression. Notable here is Martínez’s use of contemporary maps, both Spanish and Native. With Chapter Two, the author treats the 1721 Paseo del pendón (parade of the royal banner), by which viceregal authorities attempted to appropriate a nearly two century-old local celebration for the purposes of strengthening imperial ideology. As Martínez shows, the compulsion of Native participation by colonial officials unintentionally created a space for Indigenous artists to reassert the place of their communities into the imagining of Mexican identity. Here the author makes excellent use of contemporary paintings in arguing her point. Chapter Three takes us into the twentieth century, and the centennial commemoration of Mexican independence staged in the Zócalo by President Porifirio Díaz in 1910. Mounted just a few short months before the outbreak of the Revolution, one might expect the celebrations to have represented the final gasp of Mexican authoritarianism. Instead, Martínez argues that these spectacles (including the first delivery of the grito from the balcony of the National Palace) cemented the Zócalo as the premier space for performing Mexican identity, and (particularly in the case of the Gran desfile histórico ) solidified a narrative of past Indigenous glory and current Native absence that continues to haunt Mexican popular historiography today. Having established the centrality of the Zócalo as Mexico’s commemorative center, Martínez shares with the next chapter an example of liberatory counter-performance in the plaza: the 2001 Zapatista march on Mexico City. Quoting movement leaders such as Comandanta Esther, the author brings the spoken words of Indigenous agents directly into her narrative. With the final two chapters of the book, Martínez effectively contrasts twenty-first century performances that underline her thesis regarding the Zócalo as a space for performing both officialdom and liberation. First, she critiques President Felipe Calderón’s use of the 2010 bicentennial celebrations to boost support for his unpopular administration, spotlighting the participation of notable Mexican theatre artists otherwise known for their criticism of governmental authority. Martínez also notes the parallels between the historical parades of 1910 and 2010, with respect to both the appropriation of Native culture and the exploitation of Indigenous performers. With the final case study, Martínez treats the 2018 inauguration of President López Obrador, during which he symbolically received the Bastón de mando (baton to lead) from Indigenous leaders. She focuses on the potential of AMLO’s recognition of Native sovereignty, while expressing the reservations shared by many regarding the new administration’s commitment to Indigenous rights. Scholarship on historical performance in the Americas will benefit greatly from the architectural and urban studies lenses that Martínez brings to her analysis. Her attention to the historical relationship between Mexico’s Indigenous peoples and its successive governments furthers the understanding of all interested in that aspect of Mexican society and history. Methodologically, the book represents an excellent example of transhistorical curation of case studies, enabling a chronically wide-ranging argument by limiting focus to a single, highly symbolic performance space. The structure also serves the book’s usefulness as a teaching tool, in that it can be assigned in its entirely, or broken into chapters to serve the needs of any number of discipline-specific seminars. With this work, Martínez has made significant contributions to both Mexican history and to our understanding of how sociopolitical power circulates through performance References Martínez, Anna. Performance in the Zócalo: Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Footnotes About The Author(s) Andrew Gibb is Graduate Advisor and Co-Area Head for Theatre History, Theory, and Criticism in the School of Theatre and Dance at Texas Tech University. He is the author of Californios, Anglos, and the Performance of Oligarchy in the U.S. West (Southern Illinois UP, 2018), and has published work in Theatre History Studies , New England Theatre Journal , Latin American Theatre Review , Theatre Symposium , and Texas Theatre Journal . Dr. Gibb is a past editor of Theatre Symposium : A Publication of the Southeastern Theatre Conference , and has served as the Association for Theatre in Higher Education's Vice President for Conference, as well as the Pedagogy Symposium Co-Chair for the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Dr. Gibb was awarded the Ph.D. in Theatre Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the M.F.A. in Acting from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 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.

Julia Rössler Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Julia Rössler By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF The art of playwriting is not fundamentally a narrative art like novel writing; it is dialogic, it proceeds from contradiction, not cause and effect. - Tony Kushner , “Notes About Political Theater”[1] Since the post-war period, American drama and theatre has been shaped by a strong political consciousness: the Theater of the Ridiculous, queer and gay drama, and the growing public presence of Latin-American and African-American playwrights during the 1960s to 1980s reflect a thematic and aesthetic diversification of American drama that is unparalleled in its history. Some scholars relate new formal developments to the impact of postmodernism as the prime characteristic of a distinctly contemporary American drama and theatre. [2] Moreover, it shows a growing interest among dramatists to establish drama and theatre as a site for critical self-reflection and public debate in which “socio-political goals of challenging hegemonic political representations and presenting identities outside the established social ideal of how Americans ‘should be’” are a central function. [3] In the early 1990s, Tony Kushner, for instance, has received much critical attention for his landmark play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1992) in which he documents multiple ills of US-American society, culture, and politics during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s. Kushner, who has for years been an openly political voice in American theatre, has on numerous occasions identified himself as a writer of political theatre and describes his political aspirations as a form of “conscious intent to enter the world of struggle, change, activism, revolution, and growth.” [4] Explicit citations of socio-cultural and political events and historical circumstances pervade his dramatic oeuvre in plays such as A Bright Room Called Day (1994), Slavs! (1995), or Angels in America (1992). In many of his plays, dramatic plots and the character’s actions function as symbolic explications of the interrelation between human suffering and the dominant ideologies that inform our understanding of reason, morality, and truth while displacing the absolute value and legitimacy of such notions. In particular, his alertness to the social inequalities and injustices resulting from the discriminatory policies on race, ethnicity, and class give his plays political force and has contributed to his reputation as a receptive analyst of the multiple precarious situations that shape human life and experience. Occasionally, Kushner’s plays give the impression of being a personal venture into the possibilities and limits of a dialectical and Marxists world-view. Many critics see this venture as one main feature of Kushner’s work as a dramatist and yet respond with mixed reactions: Harold Bloom, for instance, voices some concern over an ideological overburdening of Kushner’s creativity and dramatic talent at the expense of his artistic and intellectual openness. [5] Other scholars have taken the political suggestiveness of his plays as cues to explore Kushner’s dramatic and aesthetic style in relation to a close intellectual affinity of his oeuvre with the works of Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, or the theories of Marxism. [6] In this paper, I will situate Kushner’s play Angels in America (1992) in the poetological tradition of tragedy and, in particular, the notion of the tragic. As I will later outline, these two interrelated dimensions have posed profound difficulties both as a matter of literary form and a model of thought during the intellectual climate of the 1980s when Angels was written. Kushner thus resorts to the tragic in a time when it is seen by many as an outdated view on human existence. In this respect, I suggest that Angels in America draws its pressing political consciousness from the way in which Kushner develops his unique poetics of the tragic. It relates the causes of human suffering and agony to concrete moral and political ideologies as well as the ethical implications of human action and will. In this sense, the play most clearly departs from the traditional metaphysics of tragic fate. Even more so, unlike other modern tragedians who negotiate the limitations of human agency as the tragic essence of life, Angels rejects a tragic surrender of human agency in favor of its force to induce change and progress. Finality gives way to visions of progress and profound moral conundrums contribute to a growth of character, will, and new conceptions of freedom. From the perspective of dramatic form, Kushner’s conception of the tragic bears resemblance to one crucial dimension of the Hegelian model of tragic collision which rests on Georg Friedrich Hegel’s assumption, as Simon Goldhill points out, that “the abstract, normative idea of the tragic results in tragedy’s becoming the site where aesthetics, politics, and history are most intimately intertwined.” [7] It is at the intersection of the political and aesthetic innate to the idea of the tragic, in which I place the following discussion of Kushner’s Angels in America . This informs the play’s deeply dialectical grasp of reality and dramatic form. In this vein, the play artfully intermingles aesthetic and politics and can be read to challenge the often presumed separation of the tragic and the political as two mutually exclusive modes of expression and intent while exposing the innate political potentials of the tragic from the perspective of formal structure and ethical inquiry. Visions of the Tragic in the Twentieth Century The tragic, as a site for the literal and figurative envisioning of human agency and its limits has, from the early twentieth century onwards, occupied the minds and creative efforts of American dramatists. [8] Eugene O’Neill’s dramatic works envision the tragic conundrum of human existence as the impossibility to escape suffering. The multiple existential struggles that befall his characters embody this inevitability: the tragic protagonist is one who suffers from shattering inner demons as O’Neill dramatizes a pervading sense of despair against the mechanisms of coping with this innate facet of human existence. It is well known that Arthur Miller envisioned modern tragedy as a transfiguration of the tragic hero’s nobility into the preservation of human dignity against relentless and dehumanizing social orders. [9] While O’Neill bespeaks an insight into the tragic as a human condition as such, Miller’s take on tragedy evokes the quotidian and a concrete social reality. His dramatic accentuation of the average man as a tragic hero inspires a fierce critique on the commodification of human experience and a thoughtful reflection on the changing nature of values, ideals, and virtues in modern US-American society. Dramatists such as O’Neill and Miller have given crucial impulses to many studies that explore the uniquely modern visions of tragedy and the tragic in the mid-twentieth century and link this emergence with the general trend of modern American drama to give shape and meaning to their dramatis personae in relation to social, political, or natural environments and their psychological constitutions. Modern tragedies in this sense are more closely related to a metaphysics of the tragic, although they seldomly refer to the divine or fate as the responsible metaphysical forces but conceive of social, natural, and psychological forces as the constitutive powers that shape human existence. In his study From Büchner To Beckett , Alfred Schwarzer argues that realism and naturalism came into existences as a new poetic of dramatic writing in an attempt to understand and examine the “contemporary version of man’s tragic condition.” [10] He outlines that the modern tragedians dramatize the modern individual’s exposure to natural and social forces that are beyond his immediate control as an essentially tragic experience. [11] Tragedy, hence, serves as a model of thought and dramatic form, as it explores the tragic as a mode and epitome of modern existence in the context of human agency, psychology, or natural and social determinism. During the increased presence of political criticism in the 1980s and 1990s—the time in which Angels was written—tragedy, as a model of thought and a literary form, suffers from a rapid decline of interest. It has often been remarked that in this intellectual climate of the time, tragedy was contemplated as a highly outdated and insufficient literary form with regard to the critical work plays were meant to perform. In her expansive survey on tragic theory, Rita Felski remarks that tragedy was “perceived as the enemy of politics in promoting a sense of hopelessness, fatalism, and resignation” and therefore was cast to the margins of critical discussion. [12] Moreover, in an US-American context, Felski argues, the notion of tragedy became highly unpopular because of its power to displace uniquely American myths such as the “sovereignty of selfhood” and was thus regarded as outmoded in a time in which self-determination and individualism were important ideational cornerstones to the idea of freedom. [13] The Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton situates the occasional abandonment of tragedy from critical debate in the 1980s and 1990s within its particular history of reception as “the word signifies a kind of writing which is no longer possible”. [14] And this principal abandonment of tragedy from critical inquiry results in a discrepancy between theory and practice. In a similar vein, I have signaled in the first section of this paper that this view can be challenged as a premature verdict with regard to Kushner’s Angels in America . In fact, only in recent years a great body of dramatic work has been reconsidered in response to an increased reclaiming of tragedy to critic’s attention (see “Introduction” in this special issue). The skepticism towards the notion of tragedy has survived as a persistent force. In the later twentieth century, George Steiner was a main influence in this regard as he challenged the place and value of tragedy in his book The Death of Tragedy (1961). Steiner’s main claim is that the particular world view that tragedy requires—a metaphysics of the divine and inescapable and unjust fate—has, in modern times, been superseded by the shaping influence of the metaphysics of Christianity and Marxism. The former receives its meaning from the principles of redemption and forgiveness while the Marxist world view draws its effective momentum from the notions of progress, change, and justice. [15] In his personal political commitment to Marxism, Kushner’s association with the tragic seems counterintuitive. Unredeemable failure and radical finality, the cornerstones of tragedy on account of Steiner, are absent from such a logic and thus constitute the basic “anti-tragic” metaphysics of the modern and contemporary period. Because “tragedy is irreparable” and cannot lead to justice, resolution, or atonement but forces us to accept the harrowing insight that “things are as they are,” true tragedy seeks to confront us with the radical and tragic limitedness of human agency. [16] And Kushner’s own aesthetic of theatre coincides with Steiner’s argument to the extent that it renders a certain impossibility of tragedy due to its promotion of a progressivist logic and, as I believe, resistance to the limitedness of human agency. Kushner openly voices his discomfort embracing an essentially tragic outlook on life in his plays: in his essay “Notes About Political Theater” he refers to the “tragic” as a “rhetorical dead end” if it is merely understood as a permanent and universal, or “natural” condition of human existence which withholds the political implications of action and event. [17] In contrast to Steiner’s idea to declare the death of tragedy, Kushner’s Angels in America can be regarded as a successful and imaginative transposition of the tragic into a politically motivated dramatic form in order to explore the dilemmas of contemporary experience. Its openness of form appeals to the investment of the tragic with political meaning and significance which does, in Kushner’s own words, not “lie beyond politics, beyond history” but presents the world as “an interwoven web of the public and the private” suggesting that “the personal is political.” [18] For Kushner, the tragic must rest within the political, the private, and the public and not outside of it, precisely because it—as a dramatic force—artistically enriches drama with multiple impulses of critique, perception, and reflection on the world of lived experience. Meanwhile, Steiner’s claim itself has been challenged from various theoretical directions, let alone through the striking new interest in contemporary rewritings of Greek tragedies (see the article by Konstantinos Blatanis in this issue). But regarding the fact that we need to approach the tragic anew in order for it to work as an insightful operational tool, his arguments are still illuminative. [19] In fact, a number of scholars have made attempts to save the tragic from this “rhetorical dead end” of which Kushner speaks and pursue to interrogate different modalities of the tragic. In this respect, the work of scholars like Williams, Wallace, or Felski reflect a trend to rethink the tragic beyond familiar parameters and to include new frameworks from the field of philosophical aesthetics or reception theory. [20] Rita Felski, for instance, strongly advises to view the tragic as an aesthetic term that involves a “distinctive forming of material” beyond a mere representation of suffering but as a “particular shape of suffering.” [21] The process of shaping that Felski refers to is also a pivotal dimension of Eagleton’s view on the tragic when he writes: “Tragic art involves the plotting of suffering, not simply a raw cry of pain.” [22] Both propose to view the tragic as a particular mode of expression which creates the material composition and symbolic meaning of the play. This appropriation of the tragic beyond the parameters of metaphysics but within the context of drama’s poetological form has its roots in a long tradition of thinking and conceptualizing the tragic. In particular, German Idealism of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century regarded the tragic as a model of philosophical thought. [23] Since then, Michelle Gellrich points out, the notion of the tragic conflict began to inform attempts of a systematic theories of drama and tragedy. [24] In fact, the notion that conflict is an essential element of tragic drama can nowadays be traced in a lineage of thinkers on tragedy from Hegel (1830), to Martha Nussbaum (2000), Raymond Williams (1966), or Terry Eagleton (2009). [25] The German idealist Georg Friedrich Hegel, in his “Lectures on Fine Arts,” was among the first philosophers of the theory of tragedy to explicitly single out the conflict as a central feature of plot for the dramatic arts. [26] In his chapter on the principle importance of action in dramatic poetry he writes: “it rests entirely on collisions of circumstances, passions, and characters, and leads therefore to actions and then to the reactions.” [27] On the one hand, collisions are an important engine for a swift and effective progression of dialogue and plot. On the other hand, and more importantly, in tragedy, the dramatization of collisions or conflicts between individuals has a particular “manner” or quality: the characters embody what Hegel calls a “substantive basis” as they signify meaning beyond their individual existence: they symbolize general systems of value such as the family, body politic, religious faiths etc. [28] The principle task of tragedy consists in plotting such realms of ethical life against each other to kindle the tragic meaning of the conflict. And, as is well known, Hegel builds his argument primarily on Sophocles’ Antigone . In the confrontation between Antigone and Creon about the rightful burial of Antigone’s brother, Hegel recognizes a clash of equally valid systems of value—family (Antigone) versus the body politic (Creon)—which creates a tragic situation resulting from the juxtaposition of two ethically legitimate realms. As both require different imperatives of action and will, a resolution of the conflict inevitably involves a violation of ethical conduct, and finally death. [29] Hegel writes: “each can establish the true and positive content of its own aim and character only by denying and infringing the equally justified power of the other.” [30] This in essence defines the kind of tragic conflict that Hegel had in mind. It is Hegel’s point that this particular shaping and patterning of conflict—plotting equally valid ethical systems against each other—as the “artistic appearance” of tragic drama determines its tragic essence; the condition of Hegel’s poetics of the tragic is the dramatization of positions of mutual exclusiveness and the characters’ “active grasp” of this conundrum as tragic. [31] But he also acknowledges that the powers and forces that are plotted against each other are subject to historical change: in ancient tragedy, the character’s actions were features of their “essential nature” that was defined by some external law or ethical code. [32] In modern drama, Hegel argues, the internalization of the notions of freedom, free will, and self-determination manifest the codes of conduct: To genuine tragic action it is essential that the principle of individual freedom and independence , or at least that of self-determination , of will to find in the self the free cause and source of the personal act and its consequences, should already have been aroused. [33] Hegel argues that the tragic requires the principles of freedom and self-determination, the theoretical possibility to act otherwise based on one’s own assessment and judgement. Or as Glicksberg put it: “freedom of choice . . . is basic to the tragic conflict.” [34] This refers to another important focus of Hegel’s view on the tragic: his concern with the human subject from a modern perspective which sees the individual’s conflicts as a confrontation between internal and external, or as Goldhill writes, between “inner freedom and external necessity.” [35] Hegel’s notion of tragic action envisions a basic understanding of human agency as an end in itself and thus maps out a pattern of inner logic to the tragic conflict. Williams, rephrasing Hegel’s argument, understands the particular nature in which the tragic conflict figures in modern drama as a “self-contained model of integrity.” [36] American culture has been particularly responsive to the notions of individualism and freedom in their shaping and forming of cultural and national identities, an aspect that is also put to critical scrutiny in Kushner’s poetics of the tragic. Overall, Hegel’s attempt to view tragedy as an embodiment and reflection of human progress on account of the dramatization of tragic collisions has been widely influential for subsequent tragic theory. And the theorems of the transformative impulses of historical and social progress have been particularly attended to by Marxist critics (e.g. Raymond Williams). But I want to conclude my discussion of Hegel by referring to a critical expansion of the kind of critical work the tragic conflict can perform which bespeaks Kushner’s formal procedure. According to Michelle Gellrich, the shortcomings of Hegel’s interpretation lie in his way “of naturalizing the disruptive strategies tied to tragic collision” and she makes the point that Hegel circumvents “textual resistance” [37] in favor of dramatic resolution and closure in order to qualify tragedy as a literary form that achieves a “higher level of spiritual consciousness.” [38] Angels in America : The Poetics of the Tragic Angels in America is set in the New York winter of 1985 to early 1986 amidst the AIDS crisis and Ronald Reagan’s presidency. While the first part, Millennium Approaches , serves as a prolonged exposition which stages the onset of the tragic conflicts that happen in the protagonist’s lives, the second part, Perestroika , becomes centrally a matter of how things can end: in the surrender to fatal error, loss, and suffering or the recognition of the powerful forces and value of human will and agency. This two-part structure in itself mirrors the play’s appropriation of the tragic as a matter of dramatic structure and ethical inquiry. The interrelatedness of both dimensions constitute the particular aesthetic and political implications that are essential to Kushner’s poetics of the tragic: a dialectical dynamic between irreconcilable conflict and resolution, surrender and resistance, self and other. As the play plots the existence of its characters as a series of struggles with conflicting ideologies and ethics, it recalls the hermeneutical infrastructure of tragedy as the tropes of fate (illness), unbearable conflict, or the unavoidability of human suffering are among the salient concerns of the play: Kushner’s play expresses a grasp of reality in which racism, the decline of the ethics of care, irresponsibility and multiple forms of social-cultural discrimination pervade the United States of the 1980s. In the play, all account for the personal struggles the characters have to endure as their actions and decisions are motivated by the internalization of spiritual ideals, religious faiths, or the paralyzing experience of rejection and discrimination. The play’s expansive dramatis personae, on the one hand, symbolizes the omnipresence of suffering on a global scale, and on the other hand, creates a dynamic intersection of multiple storylines and scenes, as the play’s dramatic world impresses through its unusual level of scale and complexity. All minor subplots converge in the play’s dramatization of the relationship between Prior Walter and Louis Ironson. In particular Louis’s reaction to Prior’s incurable illness manifests a dramatic center from which various actions, encounters, and confrontations subsequently precede. This dramatic center unearths Kushner’s negotiation of the tragic as a site of irreconcilable, moral conundrums which cast the protagonists in a profound state of existential precarity about their own ethical situatedness. Like in classical tragedy, this often involves dramatic situations that test a character’s strength and will. Luis’s confrontation with his partner’s outbreak of AIDS emerges as an impossible test of will and character and challenges him to compromise his idealist and dialectical world-view which he holds sacral. In a central scene in the play, Louis probes into the unethicality of his anticipated separation from Prior in a conversation with the Rabbi on the occasion of his grandmother’s funeral: LOUIS : Rabbi, what does the Holy Writ say about someone who abandons someone he loves at a time of great need? RABBI : Why would a person do such a thing? LOUIS : Because he has to. Maybe because this person’s sense of the world, that it will change for the better with struggle, maybe a person who has this neo-Hegelian positivist sense of constant historical progress towards happiness or perfection or something, who feels very powerful because he feels connected to these forces, moving uphill all the time. . . . Maybe that person can’t, um, incorporate sickness into his sense of how things are supposed to go. Maybe vomit . . . and sores . . . and disease . . . really frighten him, maybe . . . he isn’t so good with death (25).[39] The conversation reflects the dramatization of Louis moral conundrum as a crisis of authenticity of the self. Louis’s self-understanding is spiritually and intellectually informed by Hegelian ideals of progress and reason, as the striving towards such ideals is associated with life’s meaning and the purpose to achieve “happiness or perfection.” Louis’s attempts to justify his struggle resonates with the plays’ careful crafting of Louis’s conundrum as an intellectual one: he becomes an object of his own reflection and contemplates the rationale of his actions; self-doubt (‘maybe’) pervade his speech as he refers to himself as ‘this person’ in order to objectify his own actions. In this sense, the play links the crisis of the authenticity of the self with a tragic rift between one’s integrity to the self and one’s loyalty to the other. This involves an active grasp of Louis’s situation as irresolvable and tragic, as the play stages his choice in light of the inevitable violation of his ethics of self or the care and loyalty towards the other. These situations of profound collision and struggle create a level of abstraction in Angels in America that motivates a reflection beyond its concrete and local exploration of the competing ideologies of race, sexuality, and politics. [40] As the intellectual and emotional resourcefulness of the play comes from such an exploration of universal experiences of human existence—such as suffering, love and morality, free will—the careful plotting of the tragic conflict becomes an elemental dramatic feature in Kushner’s poetics. Moreover, in the play this rift between autonomy of the self and the self’s situatedness within communal and interpersonal bonds bespeaks a specific conundrum of the self-perception of the modern subject. In this sense, Angels more explicitly engages with the tragic dimensions of human experience as it reflects on the agential powers of the modern sense of the self which oscillates between self/other, integrity/betrayal, and progress/stasis. The manifestation of the modern sense of self involves a self-perception as an autonomous self that is informed by individualism and freedom as “inner facult[ies]” to use Terry Eagleton’s words. [41] The play does not merely exemplify such struggles but promotes critical examination of the “self-contained model of integrity” as an absolute imperative for action. [42] In this sense, such profound confrontations of mutually exclusive value systems give rise to the dramaturgy of tragic tension. Hence, the dynamic of the tragic is symbolized by Louis’s personal conundrum as the play explores modern notions of selfhood through the prism of the self in relation to the other. On a different level, the play effects a great suggestiveness about the actual realities of American conservative value systems as sources of tragic outcome in its representation of Joseph ‘Joe’ Pitts struggle. Joe, Louis’s first affair after his separation from Prior, is stricken by an internal struggle: faithful to the beliefs of Mormonism, he rejects his own sexual orientation. His marriage to Harper, who suffers from a morphine addiction, is shaped by his failing attempts to simulate attraction and sexual interest which protects him from the “one thing deep within” him which is “wrong or ugly” (40). Joe’s contemplation of Mormonism (a world view which, in the play, is also embodied by Hannah and Harper) as a “second skin” and a layer of “protection” (201) is radically subverted by Kushner as he puts the tragic inherent to Joe’s conflict in the service of critiquing precisely those mechanism of oppression and injustice that are innate to such value systems, i.e. the denial or rejection of homosexuality. The coloration of Joe’s languages with despair and emotional numbness poetically conveys the sense of unbearable existence as a response to the sanction of one’s will, autonomy, and true self. Or, as Joe tells his wife Harper, “so long as I have fought, with everything I have, to kill it” and “I’m a shell. There’s nothing left to kill.” (40–41). It is precisely this powerful disruptive force of tragic conflict, according to Gellrich, which contains a potential to critique and displace the dominant systems of value: Dramatizations of tragic conflict . . . are problematic for critical approaches based on assumptions of normative order because they are subversive. Typically they question a culture’s truths and systems of knowledge, overturn standards of rational consistency, and upset a basis in the tragic action from which resolution, synthesis, or catharsis might come. In short, conflicts in tragedy indirectly challenge the terms on which such critical accounts stand[43] And precisely because the tragic commonly engages with the metaphysics of unalterable fates, natural and cosmic forces, and the absolutisms of civic orders that are beyond human control, Angels , in its fierce political intent, interrelates suffering from AIDS to systematic powerlessness and stigmatization; suffering from AIDS bears political meaning insofar as it gestures towards the mechanisms of power involved in its public perception: in the play, Roy Cohn, who has just been diagnosed with the illness, forbids his doctor to diagnose him with AIDS: “ No , Henry, no . AIDS is what homosexuals have. I have liver cancer” (47). Roy refuses to assume the role of a tragic subject as an outcome of the illness because its potential withdrawal of status, agency and power: “Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean. AIDS. Homosexual. Gay,” and Roy continues, “like all labels they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? Not ideology, or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout” (46). Moreover, in its firm place within the aesthetic spectrum of political drama, Angels does not welcome an orientation of the tragic as an end to human agency. Kushner’s play is distinct as it resists the rash impulse to view human experience as essentially tragic, a notion, which is most explicitly spelled out in the event of unpreventable, physical suffering. Kushner’s grasp of reality rejects the tragic as a site for the failing and suspension of human agency which does not principally exclude tragic circumstances from his dramatic universe. Angels ’s tragic figures are those who suffer from misfortunes that give no hope for resolution or betterment. In classical tragic thought, this dramatization promotes a perception of human existence as tragic by nature due to humans’ limited agency and freedom in light of fate, natural disasters, or hereditary forces. However, in Kushner’s play, the response to the inevitable restriction of one’s own agency—for which the sick body functions as a central symbol—do not inevitable lead to surrender and resignation. Prior’s and Roy Cohen’s bodies are stricken by severe pain, bodily dysfunctions, and severe liaisons: “ Prior stops, suddenly feeling sick again: leg pain, constricted lungs, cloudy vision, febrile panic and under that, dreadful weakness ” (279, original emphasis). This plight of suffering is refigured into powerful metaphors for the persistence of human will as forceful dimension of human agency which can challenge the hopelessness that metaphysical determinisms of a tragic view on life commonly involve. In the case of Prior, Joe, and Harper, for instance, the growing consciousness to oppose the loss of their individual will coincides with a spiritual strengthening that eventually triggers life-changing actions. Prior, despite the physical agonies of his battle with AIDS, displays a striking strength and sense of hope which lead him to reject the prospect of relief and eternal spiritual life offered by the Angels. Prior’s comment, “I HAVE SIGHT I SEE ” (224) alludes to the new forms of perception and his strength of will. In as much Prior’s new found perception of life is triggered by his rejection of the Angel, Harper’s personal catharsis comes with her learning the truth about her husband’s real sexual orientation: HARPER : Look at me. Look at me. Here! Look here at — JOE ( Looking at her ): What? HARPER : What do you see? JOE : What do I . . . ? HARPER : What do you see? JOE : Nothing , I— ( Little pause ) I see nothing. HARPER ( A nod, then ): Finally. The truth (244). Prior and Harper both experience such a “threshold of revelation” (199, 218): Harper finally recognizes her husband’s attempt to conceal and suppress his true sexual nature. She experiences a sense of liberation from knowing the truth. The withholding of truth has been the tragic force of Harper’s inner imprisonment as she only finds relief in her hallucinations and her imaginary friend. This prospect of overcoming and opposing tragic circumstances that the play offers, prompts the question of its ending. According to David Kornhaber, much criticism of Kushner’s play finds the ending unsatisfactory because of its “downgrading of revolutionary demands” that Angels otherwise seems to promote. [44] And yet, in Kornhaber’s view the ending circumvents the final surrender of the characters to tragic defeat in the formation of an inclusive polis and a civic community that the play finally stages. The coda of the play, set during a “a sunny winter’s day, warm and cold at once” (288) in Central Park during January 1990, suggests reconciliation instead of irreversible alienation as one alterative outcome of tragic circumstances. Indeed, on this level, dramatic closure is channeled into visions of social change and progress that the character’s imagine during this final conversation in which tragic situations find internal closure in the character’s hopeful envisioning of a better, more just future. This ending also reflects Kushner’s own belief in the transformative potentials of theatre and the political work his plays are meant to perform, or as Louis says: “That’s what politics is. The world moving ahead” (288). This view on the dynamic of constant movement through struggle and conflict also effect the play’s symbolic structure from the point of view of dramatic form. In “Notes About Political Theater,” Kushner writes that in his view, the narrative form of drama is a matter of “contradiction.” [45] Throughout, the play’s aesthetic is grounded on this premise. Kushner’s elaborate use of conflict and juxtaposition as dramatic devices create those situations that contain the tragic tensions. These are not so much concerned with the dramatization of a verdict over human existence as essentially tragic. Rather, these function as a symbolic representations of the human condition in contemporary America as an outcome of particular socio-political and cultural structures. In this respect, the play is reminiscent of the conventions of social realism in its sharp exposure of the multiple inequalities in US American society and its discriminatory ideologies on the grounds of race, sexuality, or religion as a main sources of suffering. It also reflects on the human condition of the modern subject as a sphere of inseparable and conflictual interconnections and relations between the private and the public, the personal and the political, the self and the other. In Kushner’s craft, theatre’s capacity for symbolic representation intermingles with his precise vision of the unique dynamic of dramatic form and reflects his inspiration to create art that is meaningful beyond its self-contained enclosure. Recurrently, the play develops a discursive dynamic that springs from its stress on a composition of dialog that is motivated by the negotiation of different world-views and ideologies. The integrity of the dramatic categories of dialogue and dramatis personae to express meaningful communication and interaction are essential in Kushner’s poetics. Moreover, the poetics of the tragic are grounded in the play’s negotiation of the place and value of human will and agency in the American consciousness and perception. In a scene between Louis and his on-and-off friend Belize, a former drag queen who now works as a nurse, the dynamic of the conversation is driven by the exchange of viewpoints when the implicit question of politics and the implications of one’s own situatedness lead to a heated confrontation: LOUIS : But I mean in spite of all this the thing about America, I think, is that ultimately we’re different from every other nation on earth, in that, with people here of every race, we can’t—Ultimately what defines us isn’t race, but politics. . . . (94). BELIZE : Here in America race doesn’t count. LOUIS : No, no, that’s not—I mean you can’t be hearing that. BELIZE : I— LOUIS : It’s—Look, race, yes, but ultimately race here is a political question, right? Racists just try to use race here as a tool in a political struggle (96). . . . BELIZE : Unlike, I suppose, banging me over the head with your theory that America doesn’t have a race problem (97). . . . BELIZE : You have no basis except your—Louis, it’s good to know you haven’t changed; you are still an honorary citizen of the Twilight Zone , and after your pale, pale white polemics on behalf of racial insensitivity you have a flaming fuck a lot of nerve calling me an anti-Semite. Now I really gotta go (99). As Louis and Belize argue about the politics of race in the country and spring from implicit suggestions to explicit accusations, the dramatic function of such situations is pivotal in the play to create the movement from the specific to the general: beyond the prisms of psychological individuality and socio-cultural determination, the characters of the play can be regarded as embodiments of different world views that are constitutive for the level of abstraction interrelating the dramatic reality and the actual empirical reality of US-American society it refers to: Joe/Hannah (Mormonism, Conservatism), Roy Cohen (Republicanism, corrupt law), Louis (American individualism) and so on. In a conversation between Louis and Prior on the subject of different faiths, Louis ponders on the question of guilt as a matter to be “ abs tracted”: PRIOR : You could never be a lawyer because you are oversexed. You’re too distracted. LOUIS : Not distracted; ab stracted. I’m trying to make a point: . . . LOUIS : That it should be the questions and shape of a life, its total complexity gathered, arranged and considered, which matters in the end, not some stamp of salvation or damnation which disperses all the complexity in some unsatisfying little decision—the balancing of the scales (38-39). The occasional establishment of the protagonists as objects of critical contemplation resonates with a Hegelian logic of the tragic conflict. But in contrast to Hegel’s interpretation that sees the characters as abstract representations of the family and body politic, Kushner’s protagonists are not limited to ethical archetypes but are finely crafted and autonomous individuals. [46] To this extent, the play relies on the staging of rational contemplations, motivations, social and political environments to establish meaningful dramatic action. This effects a logic of representation to realistically portray and seek answers. Even the play’s interspersed minor monologues rarely express subjective, inner perceptions but stage the characters’ confrontation with the validity of different world-views and involve ethical inquiries (e.g. Joe or Louis). Besides, while in the Hegelian model the tragic, internal resolution and formal closure are a necessity to achieve tragic drama, in Kushner’s poetics of the tragic, dramatic conflicts neither ultimately lead to defeat nor to absolute resolution. The dynamic of juxtaposition and debate pervades the play and relieves the tragic of its traditional task to mean final surrender. Ambiguity, movement, and the value of will are all associated with the tragic. Even though Angels permits the prospect of dramatic resolution as a metaphor for the agency of an open dialectic, its attitude towards the political and historical circumstances that lead to a tragic outcome are far from conciliatory intent. It does not involve a sense of resignation in light of the harmful conditions that shape human existence. The seriousness of tone and concern that permeates much of the dialogue of the play creates a dramatic space motivated by the constant negotiation of the state and the ethics of social politics. Moreover, essential to the play are its staging of real circumstance and personalities to reach a symbolic level of reflection. Roy Cohen is the play’s epitome to rely on a historical framework that relates the play to the reality of politics; of all characters, Cohen is the most distressing symbol for the play’s negotiation of the ethical decline and ill state of American politics: JOE ( A beat, then ): Even if I said yes to the job, it would still be illegal to interfere. With the hearings. It’s unethical. No. I can’t. ROY : Un-ethical. Would you excuse us, Martin? . . . ROY : Un-ethical. Are you trying to embarrass me in front of my friend? . . . This is—this is gastric juices churning, this is enzymes and acids, this is intestinal is what this is, bowel movement and blood-red meat! This stinks, this is politics , Joe, the game of being alive. And you think you’re. . . . What? Above that? Above alive is what? Dead! In the clouds! You’re on earth, goddamnit! Plant a foot, stay a while (70-71). Kushner’s rewriting of the infamous jurist Cohen marks his attempt to create a close relatability between the imaginary and the real; his creation of Roy is informed by evoking the actual realities of American politics rather than by parodic and sarcastic intent. In fact, Kushner felt it necessary to clarify the terms of his inclusion of Roy Cohen into the dramatis personae not as a bleak imitation but as an artistic as well as a metaphorical transposition of actual conditions into a dramatic form: in a footnote on the character of Roy Cohen he writes: “The character Roy M. Cohen is based on the late Roy M. Cohen (1927-1986), who was all too real; . . . But this Roy is a work of dramatic fiction; his words are my invention, and liberties have been taken.” [47] Kushner’s oeuvre constantly negotiates the interplay between art and politics – or, put differently, the creation of a distinctly artful and politically meaningful drama. Occasionally, the play breaks with realistic representation and rational discourse as its own principles of dramatic form. In many situations in the play in which unbearable physical or spiritual suffering give occasion for angels to appear, hallucinations to enter the mind, and visions to inspire new forms of insight and understanding, the boundaries of reason and possibility are crossed: in the Diorama Room of the Mormon Visitors’ Center, Prior suddenly sees Louis on stage as part of the costumed mannequins and questions the reliability of his own mind and senses: “Am I dreaming this, I don’t understand” (197). These situations are saturated with symbolic meaning as the rational gives way to the irrational and the play’s own experimentation with dramatic form. When trial victim Ethel Rosenberg frequently appears on stage and hunts Roy Cohen’s consciousness, or when Prior is confronted with the appearance of Angels and his forefathers, the protagonists inner struggle is externalized and transformed into a physical and material presence on stage. On a formal level, this inclusion debases the play’s own reliance on a narrative model of contradictions of reason and introduces the irrational which, from the perspective of formal structure, adds to the play a sense of openness, ambiguity, and a heightened sense of theatricality. This stylistic hybridity bears testimony to Kushner’s openness to form and his devotion to the exploration of dramatic and theatrical territory which is playfully expressed in his own conception of the “Theater of the Fabulous.” [48] Kushner’s achievement with Angels in America is his construction of the tragic beyond the promise of ultimate spiritual transcendence and as a site where human action and will are a matter of ethical and political acts that bear meaning to questions of responsibility, justice, and change. In this sense, the inclusion of the visionary and the irrational also gesture towards the utopian, and the final reward of change which is perhaps most clearly symbolized in the epilogue of the play. If, as Goldhill argues, the essence of true tragic drama according to Hegel was a matter of the subject’s final reconciliation between inner freedom and external necessity, the ending of Angels reaches no such formal or ethical closure. Prior still suffers from AIDS and remains unreconciled with Louis. But Prior’s final words of the play “we won’t die secret deaths anymore. . . . The Great Work Begins” (290) link struggle and suffering with the prospect of a more hopeful future, in which structures of injustice, discrimination, and exclusion can be overturned. Conclusion Kushner’s play derives much of its dramatic and artistic force from the unique interplay of aesthetics and politics. At the beginning of this paper I have argued that the political and the tragic are often regarded as a mutually exclusive dramatic aesthetic. The benefit of creating a relation in the context of political theatre has therefore so far been overlooked. Moreover, Angels in America , as this paper intended to argue, is one striking example of American drama in which the role of the tragic renders the dramatic properties of conflict and contradiction essential to the symbolic value of the play. Change comes from struggle is one of the key ideas that informs the political dimension of the play. Hence, and in contrast to Steiner’s approach to place the tragic in the realm of the metaphysical, I read Tony Kushner’s Angels in America as a striking example that rejects such logic. The play displaces the tragic mode from a universal one—one that refers to a permanent and metaphysical condition of human existence—and situates it in a local contemporary setting to evoke the political challenges of the 1980s and 1990s America. Moreover, in contrast to Hegel, Kushner’s contemplation of the tragic is rooted within a complex, self-reflexive theatre aesthetic. And while Hegel’s view reconciles the tragic in a transcendent experience of the human consciousness, Kushner envisions the tragic as a force resulting from political, personal, and historical circumstance that the protagonists seek to control, confront, and overcome. This struggle, in essence, speaks of the play’s central metaphor on the transformative power of human agency as a social and political responsibility to achieve change and progress. What Kushner has in common with Hegel is the concentration of the human subject as the main locus of the tragic, and the importance of contradiction and collision as a matter of an ethical and formal necessity to express the tragic sense innate to his play. And, in Kushner’s case, within this conjunction of the tragic resides a resonant and meaningful symbiosis of art and politics. Overall, what appears as fitting final description of the innate political dimension of Kushner’s poetics of the tragic is perhaps best summarized by Christopher Bigsby as a “arena for debate.” [49] In this line of thought, I read Tony Kushner’s Angels in America as a continuation of American dramatists’ ongoing interest in and imaginative preoccupation with tragedy and the tragic—among whom rank such great dramatists such as Eugene O’Neill or Arthur Miller. Unlike his predecessors, Kushner subjects tragedy’s metaphysical offerings to critical scrutiny and establishes the tragic as a distinct modality of the poetics of drama as it informs its shape, patterns, and forms of expression. What I refer to as the poetics of the tragic in Kushner’s Angels in America thus describes Kushner’s attempt to reconcile the tragic as a specific poetological mode of composition and expression with a politically motivated theatre that overall promotes a sense of social relevance of art in general. References [1] Tony Kushner, “Notes About Political Theater,” The Kenyon Review: New Series 19, no. 3/4 (Summer–Autumn 1997): 19. [2] Annette Saddik, in her book Contemporary American Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007) writes: “contemporary American theatre as an experimental theatre of inclusion and diversity that, in postmodern fashion, questions the nature of reality, presents multiple versions of truth(s), complicates the notion of an origin or ‘essence’, and destabilises the illusion of fixed identity by blurring the boundaries between role-playing and authenticity, or acting and being,” 7. See also: Kerstin Schmidt. The Theater of Transformation. Postmodernism in American Drama , (New York: Rodopi, 2005). [3] Saddik, Contemporary American Drama , 5. [4] Tony Kushner, “Political Theater,” 26. See also: Tony Kushner. “How do you Make Social Change?” Theater 31, no. 3 (2001): 62–93. [5] Harold Bloom, “Tony Kushner,” in Modern American Drama , ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005), 297. [6] Christopher Bigsby, Contemporary American Playwrights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). [7] Simon Goldhill, “The Ends of Tragedy: Schelling, Hegel, and Oedipus,” PMLA 129, no. 4 (October 2014): 635. [8] Much criticism has explored tragedy’s importance to the dramatic oeuvre of Eugene O’Neill: see for instance Miriam M. Chirico, “Moving Fate into the Family: Tragedy Redefined in O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, ” The Eugene O’Neill Review 24, no. 1/2, (Spring/Fall 2000): 81-100; Stephen A. Black, “ Mourning Becomes Electra as a Greek Tragedy,” The Eugene O’Neill Review 26 (2004): 166–88. [9] Arthur Miller, “Tragedy and the Common Man,” The New York Times , 27 February 1949 http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/00/11/12/specials/miller-common.html (accessed 09 September 2018). [10] Alfred Schwarz, From Büchner To Beckett: Dramatic Theory and the Modes of Tragic Drama (Athens, Oh: Ohio University Press, 1978), 5. [11] Schwarz, Tragic Drama , 10. [12] Rita Felski, “Introduction,” in Rethinking Tragedy , ed. Rita Felski (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 4. [13] Ibid., 11. [14] Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (New Jersey: Wiley, 2009), 65, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ub-lmu/detail.action?docID=320111&query=9780631233602. [15] George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. [1961]), 332–42. [16] Steiner, Tragedy , 8–9. [17] Kushner, “Political Theater,” 22. [18] Ibid., 21. [19] A brief reference to German Romanticism and Friedrich Schiller as the most prominent philosopher and representative of viewing life as an essentially tragic experience shall suffice at this point to stress the long tradition of critical thought that interrelates tragedy and metaphysics. [20] Jennifer Wallace, The Cambridge Companion to Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Rowan Williams, The Tragic Imagination , (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Felski, “Introduction,” Rethinking Tragedy . [21] Felski, “Introduction,” 10. [22] Eagleton, The Idea of the Tragic , 63. [23] Goldhill, “The Ends of Tragedy,“ 634. [24] Michelle Gellrich, Tragedy and Theory. The Problem of Conflict since Aristotle . (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988), 19. [25] Eagleton, The Idea of the Tragic, Raymond Williams. Modern Tragedy . (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966). [26] G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art . Volume 11, trans. T.M.Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). [27] Ibid., 1159. [28] Ibid., 1194. [29] An excellent reading of Hegel’s approach to tragedy can be found in Rowan Williams’ The Tragic Imagination (2016) in the chapter entitled “Reconciliation and its Discontents: Thinking with Hegel”. [30] Hegel, Aesthetics , 1196. [31] Ibid., 1194–97. [32] Ibid., 1194. [33] Hegel qtd. in Williams. Modern Tragedy . 33 [34] Charles Glicksberg, The Tragic Vision in Twentieth Century Literature (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), xii. [35] Goldhill, “The Ends of Tragedy,” 636 [36] Williams, Tragic Imagination , 63. [37] Gellrich, Tragedy and Theory , 10;22. [38] Ibid., 32. [39] Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (New York: Theatre Communication Group, 2013), emphasis added. Subsequent references will be provided parenthetically. [40] A highly illuminative discussion on the way in which Kushner represents American ideologies and myths in his play is offered by David Savran’s essay: “Ambivalence, Utopia, and a Queer Sort of Materialism: How ‘Angels in America’ Reconstructs the Nation,” Theater Journal 47, no. 2 (1995): 207–27. [41] Eagleton, Idea of the Tragic , 118. [42] Williams, Tragic Imagination , 63. [43] Gellrich, Tragedy and Theory , 10. [44] David Kornhaber, “Kushner at Colonus: Tragedy, Politics, and Citizenship,” PMLA 129, no. 4 (October 2014): 737. [45] Kushner, “Notes About Political Theater,” 19. [46] Goldhill, “The Ends of Tragedy,” 635 [47] Kushner, Angels in America: The Characters In Millennium Approaches , 2013. [48] Kushner, “Political Theater,” 32. [49] Bigsby, Contemporary American Playwrights , 87. Footnotes About The Author(s) JULIA RÖSSLER works at the department for North American Literary and Cultural Studies at the Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt. In her dissertation, she considers the principal role of mimesis in contemporary Anglophone drama. She is one of the organisers of the international conference “Tragedy in American Drama and Theatre: Genre—Mediality—Ethics” and guest-editor of this issue. Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Konstantinos Blatanis Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Konstantinos Blatanis By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF Ever since the late 1960s and early 1970s, a host of diverse American playwrights and directors have resorted to ancient Greek tragedy more intensely than their predecessors had ever done before. Varied in scope and aims as well as distinct in form and expression as these works have been, they have mainly served to re-contextualize the source material in their own present moment and their immediate sociocultural and political settings. Similar to what holds true for their forerunners, [1] American rewrites of Greek tragedy of the last five decades highlight in multiple and inventive ways the “‘presentist’ dimension,” which, in Hugh Grady’s terms, underlies all ventures into “works of the past.” [2] Furthermore, these modern plays also verify in practice the scholar’s argument that “the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, [and] Euripides . . . have never been mere exemplars of a later discourse on the tragic.” [3] Specifically, they manage to do so as they reclaim those resources and particular qualities of classical tragedy by means of which artists and audiences alike are able to engage with issues of historical understanding. In essence, contemporary American rewrites of Greek tragedy reaffirm in their own modes the close connections that the cultural form has perennially sustained with history on both a theoretical and a practical level. In her influential work on tragedy and modernity, Olga Taxidou insightfully stresses that history “forms one of the main structuring forces of tragic form” that has nonetheless “always occupied an ambiguous position in studies of tragedy.” [4] The author elaborates on the findings of her research and proceeds to endorse in particular those “new ways of talking about tragic form that create historical accountability, radical critique and introduce the possibility of change.” [5] It is precisely the possibility of such an accountability that fuels the aspirations in the two different plays studied in this article. Seeking to interrogate how this age-old and fertile dialogue between tragedy and history can be reclaimed in present-day terms, the discussion focuses on two works which undertake the exact same challenge while being separated from each other by four decades. In general terms, David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) are singled out here as objects of study precisely because they confront questions of historical perception which relate primarily to the US but also prove of great significance for the rest of the Western world during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In particular the argument in this article develops around two distant, yet intricately related and highly critical moments in recent and contemporary American history. Simultaneously, attention is specifically dedicated to the fact that both plays were voiced within a sociocultural and political climate characterized by a wide-spread and detrimental waning of historical understanding. First, The Orphan attracts interest as an experimental rewrite of Aeschylus’s The Oresteia that seeks to dissect the multiple ways in which the Vietnam trauma was engendered by a seriously compromised sense of history that the war itself intensified even further. Second, The Persians is recognized as an innovative re-reading of the homonymous Aeschylean prototype which examines the implications of the Iraq War and inspects the ways in which the dissolution of historical awareness interrelates with specific policies and practices that postindustrial late capitalism dictates on global scale at present. It is indeed no surprise that the two plays examined here grapple with these issues over the same time span during which the crisis of historical sensibility became the primary focus of attention across different disciplines and for a large number of outstanding theorists and critics who vary from Henri Lefebvre and Fredric Jameson to David Harvey and beyond. [6] As a result, the discussion seeks to elucidate the inventive ways in which both Rabe’s The Orphan and McLaughlin’s The Persians recognize the practice of re-writing as an ongoing, constantly evolving process through which they test their own “poetic, rhetorical, and performative dimensions” that, as historian Dominick LaCapra argues when he discusses the contributions of art to historiography, “not only mark but also make differences historically.” [7] It is precisely for this reason that both plays return to Greek tragedy and aspire to reclaim it as a genuinely “conflictual topos ” where, according to Taxidou’s insightful schema, “the King does not simply and unproblematically stand for the state and its people but acts as a ruse through which the whole concept of power is questioned.” [8] In other words, what inspires the explorations of historical accountability in these two modern plays is the fact that classical tragedy acquired its political significance and resonance by being first and foremost an indispensable constituent to the very birth and growth of democracy. [9] It is through this prism that both plays, similar to what scholar Sanja Bahun-Radunović notes about Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest , and Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play , address “one specific concern of the recent philosophy of history: the challenge to think history outside the traditional notion of (teleological, recorded) history of events, [and] yet not to deprive it of its human potential.” [10] In this plane of inquiry, central questions revolve around the political efficacy of contemporary drama and theater. In particular, this article places emphasis on whether the two plays can serve as historiographical tools of an unconventional type by means of which instances of multisided crisis are adequately interrogated. Thus, what attracts attention is the role that these works prescribe or at least anticipate for the spectator. Indeed, the issue of spectatorship proves worth exploring since the two plays undertake—in terms analogous to those LaCapra outlines for professional historiography—an “investigation already inserted in an ongoing historical process, a positioning toward which one may attempt to acquire some transformative perspective or critical purchase.” [11] In its effort to test the possibilities of such a “transformative perspective” on history, The Orphan recognizes the Aeschylean prototypical trilogy as an invaluable source of instruction. This third play in a series of four [12] —originally produced between 1969 and 1976—that sought to document the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its impact on private landscapes as well as on the collective conscience of the American people, reaffirms in its own exceptional mode the fact that The Oresteia provides, more than anything else, incomparable guidance on how the dynamics of tragedy are simply unimaginable without the active engagement of the polis with everything that takes place in the orchestra . Indeed, this proves an acknowledgment of utmost significance for a play whose primary aim is to alert audiences to the fact that over the period of the late sixties and early seventies, in spite of the unprecedentedly vigorous antiwar movement, the American public in large part chose to ignore the very actuality of war. In reviewing the moment, Rabe has poignantly remarked on several occasions that “people [in the US] were interested in simplifications, in the debate about the war rather than in the experience of the war itself.” [13] Professionally produced for the first time in April of 1973, the play aspires to attract attention to a highly crucial aspect of a chapter of contemporary history that originally remained consequentially unaddressed. In the playwright’s own words, this is nothing less than the effort “to embrace a portion of that inherently unembraceable subject.” [14] Faced, thus, with the urgency of its own historical moment, The Orphan turns inventively towards the classical trilogy noted for its masterful response to the exact same task. As classicist Michael Walton explains, “Aeschylus’ central concerns . . . are contemporary to the Athens of his time, to the Council of the Areopagus, all but suppressed in 461 BC, and to the growth of democracy in fifth-century Athens.” [15] It is important to note that The Orphan paves its own way by attuning carefully to the instruction it receives from the source text while also aptly exploiting a significant aspect of rewriting, what Julie Sanders terms “the pleasure principle, . . . the connected interplay of expectation and surprise.” [16] In particular, the play takes a large number of major liberties with the prototype both on the thematic and the structural level and thus manages to reflect the atmosphere of confusion and indeterminacy prevalent in the US in the early seventies but also to question its own effort to address the specificity of the moment. First and foremost, the work proposes an unconventional chorus made up of multi-layered and transformational characters who inspect critically the dramatis personae drawn from the Aeschylean trilogy and at the same time interact with them directly. These essentially anonymous entities, noted as The Speaker, The Figure, The Girl, undergo a series of metamorphoses, evidently modelled upon the practices and transformation techniques of Joe Chaikin’s Open Theater, and encapsulate idiosyncratic stances as well as general attitudes prevalent in the US during the early seventies, particularly among young people. [17] Furthermore, they specifically display reactions of the type that can be expected from the members of an experimental theater group working on the classical source text. Thus, they emerge as the main agents of a conscious theatricality through which the play interrogates its own position in history. One of the first major questions the audience is invited to consider is concurrently and instructively pertinent on all these different levels of signification. The Speaker, outlined as “a young woman dressed elegantly [and] hold[ing] a flashlight and a microphone,” [18] greets both the classical figures and the spectators in these words: “Think of time as a pool. Do we speak to the past? Or merely look at it? Is it right? Left? Up? Down?” (90). The great challenge of conversing with the past, whether distant or more recent, looms particularly intensely for the play itself but even more so for its enveloping sociocultural and political context. In the US of the early seventies, the multisided crisis of a nation unable to account for its own doings rendered questions regarding historical agency and responsibility both impossible and absolutely vital. It is precisely this pressing need for questions which remain consequentially unattended that the play stresses by rewriting the prototype in a thoroughly self-conscious mode. Interest in the present discussion revolves around the validity of this historiographical attempt at a moment of crisis and thus what attracts particular attention are elements such as the distancing effect that informs Orestes’s effort to see himself within the overall course of tragic action and the employment of two distinct characters for Clytemnestra at two different moments in her life. As the twentieth-century anonymous characters invite both those onstage and those offstage to engage with the Aeschylean trilogy, emphasis is specifically placed on the ways and means through which one acquires an understanding of one’s own position in history, both as a subject and an object of it. Most of all, what the work highlights is the very notion of historical accountability. Thus, as the action in the first act accommodates fragments from the original source text, Clytemnestra Two tellingly asks Agamemnon to recognize the palpable trails of his own actions and at the same time discloses her own plans to intervene in the scheme of things as an active agent: “You smell of time gone, Agamemnon. It’s time that you bathe. . . . You are filth and filth must bathe. Where’s the net? We must have the net” (93). To the same end, Rabe attempts an extensive cross-fertilization between Agamemnon , the first part of the trilogy, and Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis . [19] The confrontation between the prototypical tragic heroine and hero unfolds thus in an unprecedented way and attention is carefully drawn once again to the issue of historical accountability: “but between this departure of Helen and our daughter’s death, nothing real exists—do you see—unless you put it there” (108). Furthermore, the work seeks to interrogate the crisis of historicity that it witnesses for its own moment and thus it intently highlights the plea Clytemnestra One addresses to her husband: “Please find a way to lift us from this fate. I beg you, Agamemnon, think! Think! . . . Pride is your motive—vanity and power. The wind is your alibi and excuse” (116–17). Undoubtedly, these are questions that prove urgent on the level of the collective and the political, and not on any exclusive or private terrain. This modern work courageously strives to reclaim and redefine in contemporary terms the qualities that made Greek tragedy, as Stathis Gourgouris argues, “especially well configured to place before the polity the event of its own hubris .” [20] Half-consciously, half-instinctively, through these loose and experimental rewriting techniques, The Orphan attempts to recast in late twentieth-century terms what Taxidou notes about the “spectacular, physical, collective, physiognomic (as Benjamin would call it) dimension of tragedy.” [21] Indeed, what incites the interrogations of historical accountability and the questions surrounding the well-being and integrity of the collective in this modern work is the recognition of the fact that in “the Athenian tragedies,” as Grady insightfully stresses, “human alienation from the social and the natural is clearly in evidence, in fact, center-stage.” [22] The scholar elaborates on his point by noting characteristically that “Greek tragedy is always materialist-for-us,” since “the difficulty of founding a stable sense of good and evil, of right and wrong, is as problematic for Orestes, Oedipus, Antigone, Creon, Pentheus, and Phaedra . . . as it is for us in the early twenty-first century.” [23] In The Orphan , Orestes’s agon serves to epitomize this precise type of problematics. At the end of act one, The Figure, “a man with a thick black beard [who] wears a T-shirt, Levi’s jacket and jeans, and boots” (89) assumes the role or even the form of Apollo and foreshadows the action of the second act in these words: “It is time that Orestes arrive with his story . . . understanding nothing. . . . And it will not be his story that will matter, nor will it be his hatred, but only the knife” (124). Reflecting his parents, Orestes faces the insurmountable difficulty of making sense of his own position as a subject and an object of history, the very challenge of “founding a stable sense of good and evil.” [24] In other words, the play resorts to classical tragedy as a paradigmatic “conflictual topos ” [25] in an effort to interrogate the specificity of its own historical moment. To this end, particular emphasis is placed on the way Orestes questions the mission with which he has been assigned: “This is written, that is written. Who is doing all this writing?” (134). However, what proves definitely formative in his case is the set of questions his mother’s plight highlights in act one and which are now dynamically reclaimed by him for the purposes of the second one: “What is my motive, which my alibi—what is my excuse?” (156). In this mode, The Orphan aspires to render possible on stage a peripeteia that unfolds concurrently both within the mythological topography of the original source text and the distinctive sociocultural and political geography of the US in the early 1970s. To this end, Pylades—who similarly to his classical counterpart accompanies Orestes—provides both on-stage and off-stage audiences with a sharp account of Aegisthus’s ways and practices: “He wars against the Persians—he diverts our resources into a pointless struggle with the Peloponnesians. He slaughters the Vietnamese. . . . . He burns their villages” (139). For the exact same reason, moments later, Pylades also delivers a short monologue which accommodates fragments of a penetrating, disarming narrative of the My Lai massacre and which materializes on stage in the form of a flash that cuts across the evolving main action (147). The play articulates its own distinctive political statement by emphasizing primarily the adventurous course Orestes follows as he confronts a cosmos imbued with violence on all different counts. The questions with which the character struggles are pertinent to both the mythological Argos and the contemporary US and thus serve to define the qualities of this exceptional historiographical inquiry. The words with which Orestes addresses Iphigenia constitute a case in point: Why our father killed you, and did your spirit move the wind? . . . I say there are certain things that, if I am to remain a human man, I must not ever cease to know them. What are they? Please tell me! Does no one want to help me? Does no one care what happens to poor Orestes fed so fucking long on bread and dreams he thinks that both are real! (158) Interestingly enough, this singular agon develops within the boundaries of a realm noted for the presence of mostly young people who are fascinated with large-scale crime as well as hallucinatory experiences, and whose centerless quest for a way out of stagnation goes hand in hand with political causes that never become fully defined or adequately developed. Despite the fact that Orestes for most of the action in act two personifies the very effort to resist this force-field of pervasive violence and terminal confusion, he eventually surrenders to it. Thus, his own act of avenging his father’s murder becomes indistinguishable from occasions that either epitomize the general public’s obsession with the Charles Manson family murders, or merely reflect the dullness and anesthesia of drug abuse. Aided decisively by The Figure—who abruptly drops the mask of Manson to assume the role of Apollo—Orestes is led to pronounce himself innocent: “I thought I could not kill. I let fear run me all over the world, but I have caressed my demon, picked up my monster, and I know now I can kill and survive” (175–76). In the final scene of the play, tragic action proves an impossibility as Orestes rises to the sky not to be released but to remain suspended in mid-air. The character emerges now as a palpable symbol of cynical acceptance of violence but also of the very failure to oppose its force and question its far-reaching repercussions. In sharp contrast to his counterpart in Aeschylus’s trilogy, Orestes here attains no deliverance either for himself or the city. His agon culminates in a phase of absolute suspension and deterritorialization during which no future perspective is visible for the private, familial context and no opening can be envisioned either for the larger one of the collective conscience. Evidently, The Orphan highlights the significance of this failure and impossibility so that the chronicle of a terribly missed opportunity can be adequately communicated to the audience. As the playwright himself sharply comments: The Vietnam War . . . was the swamp where history paused and could have shown who were and who were becoming. In its flash and violence it was a probe into the depths, an X ray knifing open the darkness with an obscene illumination against whose eloquence we closed our eyes.[26] On a surface level, the play as an unconventional historiographical attempt which turns critically towards classical tragedy and reviews its own moment, bridges the crucial gap that Terry Eagleton, in his uncommon genealogy of both tragedy and tragic theory, identifies in these words: “While the scholars have been speaking of tragedy with caught breath as estimable and ennobling, or issuing elegiac laments for its decline, history has been awash with warfare, butchery, disease, starvation, political murder.” [27] More importantly, The Orphan exploits the dynamics of a self-reflecting stage and resorts to a source text that “is above all the work of a specific period, of a definite social condition, and of a contingent moral argument,” and thus argues that this failure to see tragic action to its end defines its own standing as a work of art but even more so the historical moment in which it is voiced. [28] In an experimental mode, the play registers the specificity of the moment and does serve as a document that, in LaCapra’s schema, does not “simply represent but also supplement[s] the realities to which [it] refer[s].” [29] It is important to highlight that the play’s contribution is valuable, for as the historian explains, historical research “involves not only the processing of information but also affect, empathy, and questions of value.” [30] Thus, in the early 1970s, The Orphan as an unorthodox supplement to the multisided Vietnam crisis invited the audience to reassess the immediate moment by attending closely to all those elements that affect, empathy and questions of value render possible on stage. As a result, spectators were also led to reconsider their own positions as receivers and translators. It is contended here that the emphasis on physicality and the inspiration from the seminal explorations of the performance theater style of the sixties and the seventies [31] that inform this work do not preclude but rather reinforce Jacques Rancière’s argument that “viewing is also an action that confirms or transforms [the] distribution of positions.” [32] Indeed, precisely because viewing is pivotal in disseminating the message, historiographical endeavors of this type can never attain their potential without an “emancipated spectator” who is willing to act upon what she receives. [33] The promise Greek tragedy entails for historiography and historical awareness as well as the formative impact that the latter two have on the former have been extensively explored by Ellen McLaughlin in her numerous and significant rewrites of classical works. [34] It is no surprise that the first extant tragedy is one of them, since Aeschylus’s The Persians epitomizes precisely this promise. The work addresses directly a chapter in what was then recent history for the city of Athens and offers thus a critical insight into matters which were of primary urgency for its own immediate context. [35] For her part, McLaughlin, in the introduction to her play, clearly identifies what she deems valuable in this work and stresses that while being “the only surviving Greek tragedy that treats a contemporary theme [it is also] typical of all the Greek plays that have survived for us in its unsentimental and clear-eyed view of politics and war.” [36] Furthermore, the playwright emphasizes the fact that “the great Greek dramatists were citizens in a unique political experiment—a burgeoning democracy, newly minted, unsettled and constantly under threat, from both within and without.” [37] Evidently, this appraisal of the genre is in tandem with interrogations that define contemporary scholarship on Greek tragedy. Thus, indicatively, Taxidou elucidates the fact “that tragedy has always been about democracy,” and goes on to explain that “this notion of democracy, however, . . . is not simply about progress, visibility and civilization but also about violence, exclusion and barbarism.” [38] Aspiring to create a modern play which, in its own right, invests in these precise qualities and the ensuing possibilities of the classical genre, McLaughlin undertakes to rewrite the Aeschylean prototype as “a direct response to the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003.” [39] The act of rewriting Greek tragedy is consciously approached here as a process that renders possible a courageous engagement with recent and contemporary history. [40] Similar to what McLaughlin has attempted to achieve in most of her work, what underlies her efforts in this play is the conviction that there can never be an “easy relevance” between the source text and the present moment. [41] In particular, she explains that her effort is to steer away from a “glib, formulaic response [that] does justice neither to [the American people] nor to the Greeks and belittles the complexity of what Aeschylus was responding to and [the] distinct [American] national crisis” of the early 2000s. [42] Indeed, the play aims precisely at making audiences aware of the stark differences between the Athenian polis and its own contemporary context. To this end, both the value of the overall historiographical outlook of the original classic and its specific details are highlighted in the prologue McLaughlin co-wrote with Ethan McSweeny. Thus, in a Brechtian mode, the audience is presented, early on, with the information that the source text “contains the only eyewitness account we have of [the] battle [of Salamis], or indeed of any battle in the Persian Wars.” [43] The Persians , as a modern play, sets out to explore the multisided interaction between tragedy and history through a series of tightly organized, economical scenes that succeed each other with no formal breaks as well as by means of an equally simple, direct and unaffected dialogue construction. In this mode, the opening scene highlights the question of historical agency and brings into focus issues that relate to political power and responsibility, as the members of the chorus outline both the setting of the play and the condition that prevails in the city of Susa: RELIGION : It is a city peopled only by anxious, silent womenTheir eyes darting for omens. CHAIRMAN : And by us, the trusted,The ones who pointed west and told them to go,Commanding them to leave us and seek conquest. (267) Almost as if despite themselves, these counselors to the Persian monarchs offer a historical account which serves to disclose, first and foremost, the thrust of the imperialist expansion: “Defeat is impossible. Defeat is unthinkable. . . . When Xerxes first saw the Olympian mountains rising triumphant. . . . He thought: This too shall be Persia’s” (273). Interestingly enough, at the same moment they emerge acutely aware of the absolute stillness and sterility that now informs the Persian kingdom and as a result they are led to reflect on their own “brazen confidence” and the fact of having been “merely deafened for years by the din of [their] own empire-building” (274). Indeed, the play invites no direct parallelism between Susa of the fifth century BC and the US at the turn of the millennium. And yet, this is a highly topical interrogation for the intended audience of a play that received its first professional production in April of 2003; a critical moment in the second decade of the US as the world’s sole power. As Howard Zinn notes, the economic and military hegemony of the US, which entered a new phase in the early 1990s, is one of multiple, far-reaching implications: In the early nineties, the false socialism of the Soviet system had failed. And the American system seemed out of control—a runaway capitalism, a runaway technology, a runaway militarism, a running away of government from the people it claimed to represent.[44] It is thus no surprise that McLaughlin turns critically towards the Aeschylean tragedy and allows her own work to respond inventively to a work which, as Simon Stow insightfully notes, epitomizes the fact that “it is one thing to tell an audience to avoid hubris but quite another to try to cultivate an ethos that will help them to do so.” [45] In particular, the scholar argues that through the agonistic juxtaposition of nationalism and empathy [Aeschylus’s The Persians ] sought to cultivate in its audience an ethos appropriate to an increasingly imperialistic democracy [and thus] to motivate them to action by identifying their interests, such as avoiding the strategic and military consequences of hubris. [46] McLaughlin’s The Persians places primary emphasis on Atossa in an effort to cultivate this precise ethos in its own spectators. In an almost metadramatic tone, the figurative scheme that Justice, as a member of the chorus, employs to describe the position the queen now occupies speaks for the play’s aims; he openly likens Atossa to “a candle borne across a wasteland [that] shows a divine light” (276). As the plot develops, what proves even more illuminating is the character’s own insight into the absolute suspension and pervasive crisis in which the empire finds itself and which is inscribed on her own body: “I am haunted by my own useless importance. Every surface reflects my aging worried face back to me. I rattle around my gilded palace alone, echoing and reflecting myself” (277). Furthermore, the same lines reveal the queen’s realization that this a moment during which she is required to review her own response to history. Precisely because interest here revolves around the validity of this unconventional historiographical venture, what attracts attention is the distinctive way in which the play illuminates the character’s body as an entity that both receives and answers back to history, both intervenes in it and is ultimately claimed by it. The body of a mother and a queen as well as the motherland, a kingdom in terminal crisis, struggle here with the urgency of the moment: “What do these horrors mean? Does Persia, even now, fall from her heights, blinded and bloody? Shall my son return?” (279). Atossa’s nightmare does anticipate and at the same time fails to capture the full extent of the catastrophe Persia encounters in history. What proves valuable for the interrogation of historical accountability more than anything else in this play are the questions Atossa articulates regarding the factors that contributed to the creation of this “blinded and bloody” empire. In an effort to emphasize this interrogation even further, McLaughlin moves beyond the source text and has also recourse to Herodotus, and thus adds a choral section on the flogging of the Hellespont (292). To the same end, the pivotal role that the Herald’s account of the Persian defeat occupies in the original prototype is reclaimed here in a self-reflecting tone: “I can’t tell it well enough to make you see it. That’s only a fraction. It’s all swimming in my head. Worse things happened” (286). Reflecting the modern play in its entirety, the Herald’s narrative is valuable since, for all its fragmentary nature, it aims at a “critical purchase” of the historical moment in question. [47] Similar to what is argued here about Orestes’s agon in The Orphan , this is indeed a “fraction” that nonetheless allows “affect, empathy, and questions of value” to inform the spectators’ engagement with history. [48] Motivating audience members to grow viscerally aware of their own positions as agents who act upon what they view as interpreters and translators, the play highlights effectively the question of historical agency as well as the notion of political accountability. In other words, what unites the stage and the auditorium in this case is the effort to acknowledge the material and practical dimensions which define any given subject’s position and responsibility in time and history. Similar to The Orphan, McLaughlin’s The Persians invests in tragedy not as “an antidote to suffering and pain” but as “a radical form of critique” through which the key constituencies of the democratic polis question, first and foremost, their own actions. [49] It is indeed the agon of an active agent in history that Atossa courageously strives to fulfill when she appeals to her dead husband. Summoning Darius on stage, she manages to show both on-stage and off-stage audiences why it is imperative that the collective body of the people appeals to its past; in other words, why it is absolutely essential that the Persians reconnect with their own history. Through Atossa’s call, the play argues that recognition of the past, historical awareness and political accountability are closely interrelated. In these terms, the Persian queen leads the way for the chorus, who at first merely rush to free themselves of any responsibility for the present catastrophe and can only blame Xerxes for what they themselves had specifically authorized at a critical moment in the past. If there is anything promising in this suffering for the Persians this becomes sensible only when they turn to history. It is only thus that they may begin on their way towards a candid review of their own responsibility for the predicament Persia now faces. It is contended here that scenes of this nature allow the play to prove in practice what is promising about the very process of dynamically rewriting Greek tragedy, nothing less than the very cultivation of ethos through “agonistic” tension that Stow accurately discerns in the Aeschylean prototype. This type of critical assessment of the empire’s true worth emerges particularly pertinent to the context of the US in the early 2000s. The work outlines effectively an “agonistic” tension between blind trust in the empire’s might on the one hand, and the struggle to understand the complicated repercussions of its rule on the other. Indeed, the play receives instruction from classical tragedy which “was a questioning not a didactic genre, one that sought to provoke theoretical reflection on the values and conflicts that the audience faced as democratic citizens.” [50] Atossa’s struggle to understand the moment epitomizes what the two plays discussed here aspire to examine. Both works invite audiences to face the challenge of growing aware of the specificity of the present moment, what Rabe terms its “eloquence,” and thus to engage actively with questions which pertain to historical agency and accountability. [51] Spectators are encouraged to reflect on the responsibility of those in power as well as of those in the names of whom the empire marches on. Within this frame, the two plays revisit the classical genre seeking to cultivate “both an ethic and action ” at two disparate moments of severe crises. [52] This double effort is what Darius’s message highlights: “Mourn the dead of this great country. . . . They shall lie in the restless waves as testament / To what horrors an overweening pridefulness can reap” (299). In the original prototype, Darius delivers his speech from the palace at Susa to address the Athenian polis . In McLaughlin’s play, the words of the deceased Persian monarch are clearly meant to alert audiences in the US, but also across the Western world, of the actuality of present-day horrors. It is argued here that the endeavor that these two modern plays undertake proves particularly strenuous and thus even more vital since they both acquired shape in times during which historical understanding of the immediate moment was seriously undermined. In the early 1970s, The Orphan struggled to claim its own ground against a setting characterized by the generalized unwillingness to recognize the Vietnam War for what it really was and the ensuing hostility towards the veterans. Forty years later, The Persians confronted a historical instance infused by what Zinn terms “the atmosphere of wartime jingoism.” [53] As the historian shrewdly observes, in the early 2000s, the ubiquitous display of the American flag epitomized, among other things, the reluctance and inability of the citizens to criticize the government’s foreign policy and, in particular, the US intervention in the Middle East. [54] In both cases, key questions of the type Zinn articulates in the following lines remained, to a large extent, an impossibility for the collective American mind: “Is there ‘a national interest’ when a few people decide on war? . . . Should citizens not ask in whose interest are we doing what we are doing?” [55] The two plays studied here trace and register on stage primarily the weight of these challenging questions. Rabe’s The Orphan and McLaughlin’s The Persians target areas that are simply unthinkable without the active engagement of the audience. To this purpose, they explore the dynamics of “the adaptive faculty” and prove in practice Linda Hutcheon’s point that this “is the ability to repeat without copying, to embed difference in similarity.” [56] Furthermore, they also reflect Edward Said’s seminal insight on the act of rewriting as one that leads not backwards to a previous work but “rather toward ‘writing in progress’.” [57] As argued above, by means of this “progress” they test their own potential as versatile tools of historiographical inquiry and showcase that “what is finally at stake is the subjectivity of the spectator, which is not necessarily passive, even if the spectator remains seated in his chair.” [58] In these words, Alain Badiou shares Jacques Rancière’s view and inspects “subjective transferences, transformations [which] occur even if the spectator is immobile.” [59] It is significant to note that such transferences and transformations are particularly prominent in these two rewrites of Greek tragedy which, similar to what Toby Zinman argues about a wide array of American plays of the past two decades, manage “what media pundits and statistics cannot do: revealing the emotional truth of war.” [60] Indeed, contemporary theater work of this type incites audiences “to consider the ethical dimension of [historical] understanding [as well as the] emotional response to these insights.” [61] In these terms, the two plays discussed here prove that “viewing is an action” and thus highlight that political efficacy in drama and theater can only rely upon the level of action which is “owned by no one” but subsists between those on stage and those off stage. [62] References [1] The fact that this effort of resituating the parent text in one’s own surroundings has been a driving force for American rewrites of Greek tragedy produced well before the period on which this article focuses is precisely what Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) best exemplifies. [2] Hugh Grady, “Tragedy and Materialist Thought,” in A Companion to Tragedy , edited by Rebecca Bushnell (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 130. [3] Ibid. [4] Olga Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 15. [5] Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning , 16. [6] In his highly influential book The Production of Space , first published in 1974, Henri Lefebvre identified this very “dissolution” of historical sensibility as one of the major pathologies of contemporary Western societies. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space , trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 416. In 1983, Fredric Jameson outlined “historical amnesia” as one of the most distinguishing features of postmodernity. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Postmodernism and Its Discontents: Theories, Practices , edited by E. Ann Kaplan (London: Verso, 1988), 28. David Harvey, in 1990, commented specifically on postmodernism’s “incredible ability to plunder history.” David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1990), 54. [7] Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 15. [8] Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning , 5. [9] Stathis Gourgouris accurately notes that tragedy is “endemic” to democracy. Specifically, the scholar stresses that “tragic theater is political, not because of its content, but because, by all accounts, it is endemic to this peculiar mode of self-organization that emerged in Athens.” Stathis Gourgouris, “Democracy is a Tragic Regime,” PMLA 129, no. 4 (2014): 811 (emphasis in original). [10] Sanja Bahun-Radunović, “History in Postmodern Theater: Heiner Müller, Caryl Churchill, and Suzan-Lori Parks,” Comparative Literature Studies 45, no. 4 (2008): 466. [11] LaCapra, Writing History , 36. [12] The other three plays David Rabe wrote in response to the Vietnam War are Sticks and Bones (1969), The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971), and Streamers (1976). [13] David Savran, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988), 193 (emphasis in original). [14] David Rabe, “Afterword: 1992,” in The Vietnam Plays. Volume Two: Streamers, The Orphan (New York: Grove Press, 1993), 193. [15] Michael Walton, The Greek Sense of Theatre: Tragedy and Comedy Reviewed (New York: Routledge, 2015), 74. [16] Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), 24–25. [17] In his detailed stage history of Rabe’s work, Philip Kolin documents insightfully how formative the experience of watching Jean-Claude Van Itallie’s The Serpent at the Open Theater in 1969 proved for the playwright. Philip C. Kolin, David Rabe: A Stage History (New York: Garland, 1988), 52. [18] David Rabe, The Orphan , in The Vietnam Plays. Volume Two , 89. Further references to this play will be noted parenthetically in the text. [19] Kolin provides information on the experience of a 1967 Off-Broadway production of Euripides’s tragedy that inspired the playwright to write a one-act play by the title The Bones of Birds , which was performed for the first time in 1968 at Villanova University while Rabe was still a graduate student there, and which he later re-worked and expanded into what resulted in The Orphan . Kolin, David Rabe , 51. [20] Gourgouris, “Democracy is a Tragic Regime,” 811. [21] Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning , 7. [22] Grady, “Tragedy and Materialist Thought,” 141. [23] Ibid. [24] Ibid. [25] Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning , 5. [26] Rabe, “Afterword: 1992,” 197. [27] Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 205. [28] Roland Barthes, “Putting on the Greeks,” in Critical Essays , trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 65. [29] Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 62. [30] LaCapra, Writing History , 35. [31] See Kolin, David Rabe , 52. [32] Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator , trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), 13. [33] Ibid. [34] McLaughlin’s first rewrite of Greek tragedy, Iphigenia and Other Daughters (1994) , offers a distinctive and invaluable feminine perspective into history, in general, and the role that history written by men assigns to women across the ages, in particular. The play was by no means an exception and was followed by works that also address issues of historical understanding, such as The Trojan Women (1995) and Oedipus (2005). [35] The Persians was first presented, as part of an otherwise missing trilogy, during the City Dionysia of 472 BC. In his insightful reading of Aeschylus’s work, Simon Stow quotes Harry C. Avery’s following lines on the characteristics of that historical moment, “Themistocles was probably still in Athens. Xerxes was still on the Persian throne. . . . The victories of 480 and 479 had been magnificent, but it had taken the Persians ten years to return to Greece after Marathon. What guarantee was there that the Persians would not come back again?” Simon Stow, American Mourning: Tragedy, Democracy, Resilience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 127. In the process, the scholar articulates his own point that, “in such circumstances, the dangers of overconfidence emanating from the Greek victory at Salamis were all the more pressing.” Stow, American Mourning , 127. [36] Ellen McLaughlin, “Introduction,” The Greek Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005), 253. [37] Ibid. [38] Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning , 7–8. [39] McLaughlin, “Introduction,” 254. [40] Ellen McLaughlin is in no way isolated regarding her approach to Greek tragedy. It is instructive to note that a large number of significant contemporary theater practitioners have adapted the same view of the classical genre over the past few decades. It is precisely in this vein that Tony Randall, founder and artistic director of New York City’s National Actors Theatre, invited McLaughlin to pen this rewrite of Aeschylus’s work. Randall stressed that the Iraq invasion could not go unnoticed by theater people and that there was a pressing need for artists to examine what he himself termed “a terrible time in [contemporary American] history.” McLaughlin, “Introduction,” 255. Interestingly enough, several other important efforts in contemporary drama and theater had already targeted the exact same area. It suffices to note as an example Peter Sellars’s controversial production of The Persians in 1993, which was conceived as a reaction to the first Gulf War. [41] McLaughlin, “Introduction,” 254. [42] Ibid., 255. [43] Ellen McLaughlin, The Persians , in The Greek Plays , 266. Further references to this play will be noted parenthetically in the text. [44] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), 638. [45] Stow, American Mourning , 123 (emphasis in original). [46] Ibid., 126–27. [47] LaCapra, Writing History , 36. [48] LaCapra, Writing History , 35. [49] Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning , 2. [50] Stow, American Mourning , 120 (emphasis added). [51] Rabe, “Afterword: 1992,” 197. [52] Stow, American Mourning , 123 (emphasis added). [53] Zinn, A People’s History , 680. [54] Ibid. [55] Ibid., 685. [56] Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 174. [57] Edward Said, “On Originality,” in The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 136. [58] Alain Badiou, with Nicolas Touring, In Praise of Theatre , trans. Andrew Bielski (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015), 33. [59] Badiou, with Nicolas Touring, In Praise of Theatre , 35. [60] Toby Zinman, “American Theatre since 1990,” in Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama , edited by David Palmer (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018), 227. [61] Freddie Rokem, “Discursive Practices and Narrative Models: History, Poetry, Philosophy,” in History, Memory, Perfomance , edited by David Dean, Yana Meerzon, and Kathryn Prince (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 27. [62] Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator , 13 (emphasis added), 15. Footnotes About The Author(s) KONSTANTINOS BLATANIS is Assistant Professor of American Literature and Culture at the Faculty of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. His research interests lie in American literature, modern drama, popular culture, media studies, and critical theory. He is the author of the book Popular Culture Icons in Contemporary American Drama (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003) and co-editor of the volume War on the Human: New Responses to an Ever-Present Debate (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017). Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Hui Peng Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. Hui Peng By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor brings attention to Disney tourism as a significant site of theatre and performance study, particularly immersive and participatory theatre. By placing the idea of “tourists as actors” at the center of analysis, this multi-author collection helps readers to understand Disney’s experience economy and goods through the lens of theatre and stretches the definition of “actor,” charging it with more cultural and societal connotations. Just as tourists at Disney can decide their own way to navigate the theme parks, readers here can decide how to approach this book: follow the order of the chapters or jump from one chapter to another, connecting the dots themselves to chart an interdisciplinary journey of the quintessential American theme park experience. Thirteen chapters are divided into five sections based on analogous subjects and methodologies: “Introduction,” “Time, Tomorrowland, and Fantasy,” “Environments as Ideologies,” “Liveness and Audio-Animation,” and “Counter Identities.” In the introduction, editors Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson borrow David Allen’s concept of the “tourist as actor” to challenge the stereotype of passive guests who lose their control in the “Disney virus” made of “artificiality, consumerism, and lack of depth” (6). This concept calls attention to the guest’s autonomy and agency—tourists are actually agentive subjects; they consume the illusive Disney experience with self-awareness and an understanding of how that illusion is constructed, scripted, and delivered. The subsequent four sections discuss how tourists take on their role as actors through “complicated negotiations with race, gender, sexuality, capitalism, nationality” (19). The first section, “Time, Tomorrowland, and Fantasy,” explores the dissolution of linear time and performed temporalities. Tom Robson’s opening essay excavates nostalgic time travel in Main Street and Tomorrowland installations of Disney World Park. In this signature essay, Robson investigates how the Main Street serves as a theatrical lobby, where guests transform from citizen to tourist to actor, detaching from real-time as well as the normative behavior in their everyday lives. Attuned to historical erasures, Victoria Pettersen Lantz delineates four problematic portrayals of indigenous Americans in the Disney narrative of consumerism, critiquing the romanticized representations and staging indexical absence of First Nation peoples. The section closes with Christina Gutierrez-Dennehy’s illuminating essay about “inserting the values of Middle Class America into the European Middle Ages”; as she notes, the pricy ticket and food in Fantasyland crafts the participatory experience of tourists as actors specifically for the white middle-class, making the experience a privileged act, or at least, an exclusive one (66). Section two, “Environments as Ideologies,” considers how Disney creates a reality game through the use of characters and landscapes. This reality game, “does not simulate the ‘real’; rather, it celebrates the art of simulation, or the ability to construct fantasy worlds as if they are ‘real’” (93). Jennifer A. Kokai’s essay, “The Nemofication of Nature, Animals, Artificiality, and Affect at Disney World,” succinctly criticizes the depiction of nature as “controllable, consumable, and even constructible good that is superior to geographically occurring nature” in her historical investigation into the evolution of The Living Seas to The Seas with Nemo and Friends (102). Kokai asserts that such problematic depictions further reinforce the stereotypes of increasing anthropomorphism and human estrangement from nature. This section also features Chase A. Bringardner’s essay about the Splash Mountain attraction, which details the erasure of racial narratives and identities in Song of the South as well as problematic queer representations of Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear. The section closes with Laura MacDonald’s insightful essay on Shanghai Disneyland and its mantra “authentically Disney and distinctly Chinese” (128). Through the strategy of a “glocalized” Broadway-branded musical, for instance, on the one hand, The Lion King in Mandarin with its all-Chinese cast, enables local consumers to appreciate the familiar Chinese elements, while satisfying the Western fantasy and global experience on the other. As such, they are rehearsed to “feel” authentic and become normative guests who contribute to Disney’s rising enterprise in the East. The third section, “Liveness and Audio-Animation,” explores the non-human and human performers in Disney Park and how they interact with tourists, shaping guest performances in changing contexts. This section begins with Li Cornfeld’s illuminating essay about the must-see, yet boring auto-animatronic robots performing in The Carousel Theater of Progress. These once-futuristic robots were originally featured as a prelude to an expo of forthcoming General Electric products introduced in 1975, and a portrayal of American families enjoying advances in household technology. Yet, decades later, the once-futurist robots now function as objects of cultural nostalgia. Cornfeld uses the robot dramaturgy, such as the asymmetrical aging of the Carousel cast, to showcase how Disney naturalizes its historical vision. Joseph R. D’Ambrosi focuses instead on how non-human performers create an idealized way of behaving for human beings. Drawing upon Jill Dolan’s notion of utopian performativity, D’Ambrosi proposes the term “prescriptive performativity” to describe the forms and functions of Disney’s utopian framework in a case study on the Audio-Animatronic actors in the Hall of Presidents. The final essay by Maria Patrice Amon shifts our attention from non-human actors to human ones. Amon explores how space and narrative in the Magic Kingdom construct a melodramatic imagination for the guests, encouraging and even teaching them to participate in this alluring environment as actors. The fourth section, “Counter Identities,” explores how the tourist-as-actor evolves over time and influences Disney’s audience today. Jill Anne Morries’s refreshing essay outlines the history of gated amusement parks from Luna Park to Disneyland to argue that the pay-one-price ticket shifts our attention from racial exclusion to class construction—everyone is welcomed as long as they can afford the tickets, which actually feeds colorblind racism and requires more ethical reexamination. Christen Mandracchia, in turn, focuses on the villain characters in Disneyland including the Big Bad Wolf, the Evil Queen, and Captain Hook, attuned to the ethics of their representation. Dismantling the dichotomy of good and bad, Mandracchia brilliantly explores how bad characters are normalized and celebrated as good in merchandise, attractions, and events. This fascinating section ends with Elizabeth Schiffler’s analysis of Disney’s radical consumers from Disneyland Social Club to subcultures, such as the communities attending Bats Day or Gays Day. Schiffler argues that the tourists and subcultural fans deploy agency to re-cast specific characters as their heroes, which changes their reception and meaning. Building on Maurya Wickstrom’s conception of the “Disney brandscape,” Susan Bennett closes the book by proposing the term “exemplary Disney” to scrutinize how the theme park “has provided a stage for conceiving and realizing (as well as regularly updating) performance practices, contexts, and markets” (269). This edited collection is a worthy addition to popular cultural studies, tourism, environmental studies, and theatre and performance scholarship. Accessible and interdisciplinary, Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience contributes significant American nuances to the scholarship of immersive, interactive, and participatory theatre, a realm that is predominantly occupied by British and European scholars. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Hui Peng The Graduate Center, City University of New York Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Theatre of Isolation “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Eric M. Glover Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented Eric M. Glover By Published on April 29, 2021 Download Article as PDF The 1991 Lincoln Center Theater (LCT) production of Langston Hughes (1902-67) and Zora Neale Hurston’s (1891-60) 1931 antimusical The Mule Bone represents a milestone in Black theater history. The 1991 production resurrected a historical collaboration between two major Black artists and it used their work to offer a pointed critique of the 1990s New Jim Crow and US carceral system. In The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity , Raymond Knapp argues that in an antimusical, Black performers direct and turn the form back on itself by ironically reflecting the conventions of the genre. [1] The Black performer in an antimusical simultaneously deals critically with the form as a system of white supremacy while engaging in song and dance. In the brief exploration below, I focus on two episodes in The Mule Bone —the first, a trial set in a Black church, and the second, a song that depicts Black stowaways on train cars. Each suggests how the original 1931 work and its 1991 adaptation make milestone interventions in performing the policing of Black bodies in the Jim Crow and New Jim Crow eras respectively. Hughes and Hurston, like activist Michelle Alexander, had new ways to address problems, such as violence against and surveillance of black bodies, if only readers had paid close attention to their alternatives to practices that would produce the profit-driven prison industrial complex. Animated by a staged reading held in 1989 at the Rites and Reason Theatre (RRT), [2] Providence, where playwright and director George Houston Bass [3] laid the groundwork for reimagining the The Mule Bone, Lincoln Center picked up where Rites and Reason left off. Lincoln Center gave the antimusical the presentation that had eluded its authors back in the 1930s in part because of The Theatre Guild’s Theresa Helburn’s conceptual bias against it and in part because of the falling out between Hughes and Hurston during their collaboration on the work. Thus the 1991 production of The Mule Bone becomes significant for premiering a book and a score written, directed, choreographed, and designed largely by a Black creative team. Bass wrote a prologue and an epilogue introducing Hurston as a character, composer Taj Mahal set five of Hughes’s previously published poems to music, director Michael Schultz and choreographer Dianne McIntyre helped performers give characters body and voice, and scenic designer Edward Burbridge and lighting designer Allen Lee Hughes transformed the physical setting of Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theater into Jim Crow-era Eatonville. [4] Building on the early Black musicals of Eubie Blake, Will Marion Cook, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Hughes and Hurston levy a critique of Jim Crow in everyday life—a critique thrown into bold relief against what Michelle Alexander calls “the New Jim Crow,” the mass incarceration that builds on the legacy of Jim Crow using custom and law to secure a disproportionate amount of Black people incarcerated through the three-strikes rule for violent-felony convictions and the War on Drugs. [5] Thus, the Lincoln Center production marks a milestone in Black theater because Schultz and McIntyre’s interpretation helped to reclaim Hughes and Hurston’s places as radical political philosophers. Hughes and Hurston’s The Mule Bone , based on Hurston’s short story, “The Bone of Contention” (1929), about a political and religious fight between Baptists and Methodists, tells the story of a bromance between two figures in 1924 in Hurston’s hometown, Eatonville, in Orange County, Florida. In the short story, Dave, an angler, a Baptist, a hunter, and a local Nimrod, and Jim, a hen thief and a Methodist, do not have a bromance. In the musical Dave and Jim are transformed into a Baptist and a cakewalker and a guitarist and a Methodist, respectively. The events of The Mule Bone unfold around Dave and Jim’s characters. “Ain’t they playin’ somewhere for de white folks?” Daisy Taylor, the object of both Dave and Jim’s affections, asks. [6] Dave and Jim arrive from a performance engagement in a nearby all-white town and they treat the citizens of Eatonville to song and dance. They perform their song, “But I Rode Some,” with Dave dancing the cakewalk and Jim playing the guitar. Their desire to win Daisy drives the action forward but Dave stands in the way of Jim’s desire. Daisy chooses Dave but Jim lams him over the head with a mule bone in anger. Jim must stand trial before a judge and jury of his peers. “Now, who’s gonna take me home?” Daisy asks. [7] Act 2 takes place in the Macedonia Baptist Church which also serves as the courtroom. As James R. Grossman notes, “African-Americans in general looked to the church as an institution independent of white domination,” [8] suggesting that in this instance the church may have offered a site to administer Black rather than white justice. Joe Clarke, mayor of Eatonville, presides at the bench and other citizens serve in the capacities of defense counsel (Reverend Simms), prosecution (Elder Long), and town marshal (Lum Boger). The church gallery is full of Dave and Jim’s supporters, the division between Baptists and Methodists becoming more and more pronounced. Joe finds Jim guilty of assault against Dave and makes Jim leave town, rehabilitate himself, repent for his sins, and return in no less than two years. “We colored folks don’t need no jail,” Lounger, a citizen of Eatonville, declares. [9] However, Dave and Jim repair their relationship and run away together. The Mule Bone illuminates how theater invited Dave and Jim, the characters in the antimusical, to survive and thrive under Jim Crow. Dave and Jim earn their living by performing for white audiences. [10] Dave and Jim’s songs, framed as diegetic performances, clue the audience in to the fact that they are in control of who they are and what they want: “Dem foots done put plenty bread in our moufs,” Jim says of Dave’s dancing. Dave replies, “Wid de help of dat box, Jim,” referring to Jim’s guitar playing. [11] Given that they have to contend with “two competing forces: the demands to conform to white notions of black inferiority and the desire to resist these demands by undermining and destabilizing entrenched stereotypes of blacks onstage [sic],” the audience sees “Dave” and “Jim” in the imaginations of white audiences juxtaposed against the “real” Dave and Jim. [12] Dave and Jim’s proxies, Hughes and Hurston, transform the minstrel stereotype that Dave and Jim perform to undertake social justice. Through their songs and dances, Dave and Jim imagine alternative worlds for themselves. For example, they re-create their subjugation by white audiences in “But I Rode Some” but they also ironically find their antidote to the internalization of white supremacy. Dave and Jim’s “But I Rode Some” tells the story of a stowaway on a train captured and beaten by a white conductor, before being thrown in jail and shoved onto a chain gang: First thing I saw in jail Was a pot of peas. But I rode some, But I rode some. First thing I saw in jail Was a pot of peas. But I rode some, But I rode some. The peas was good, The meat was fat, Fell in love with the chain gang jus’ for that, But I rode some. (90) Hughes and Hurston reflect on the fact that Black people in the 1920s-30s often experienced denial of a sense of place and displacement by taking up themes of escape and resistance in the musical number. Even in the face of violence, Dave and Jim resist: “Grabbed me by the neck, /And led me to the door, /Rapped me cross the head with a Forty-Four, / But I rode some!” [13] The song structure itself has roots and routes both in the era of slavery and freedom and influenced other genres of popular music around the world. [14] Illicit travel by passenger train, often called “riding the blinds,” offered a dangerous way for Black passengers to experience a thrill of autonomy. They parked their bodies between the locomotive tender (coal car) and the “blind” end of a baggage car to hitch rides from the South to the North and everywhere in between. If conductors caught a Black person riding the blinds, conductors would (literally) throw the passenger from the train. [15] Through its strategic use of irony and subversion, the antimusical The Mule Bone is as much about the affective and cognitive powers of representational visibility as it is about Black people’s resilience. It was important to Hughes and Hurston that their Black audience saw a community of Black characters enjoying and loving life–Jim Crow be damned–self-governing their city and supporting its citizens. Looking at its 1931 and 1991 histories alongside each other invites scholars of Black theater to imagine how artists working more than half a century apart have deployed their creative powers to combat patterns of systemic racism that echo across the decades. References [1] Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton UP, 2006), 91. [2] Rites and Reason Theatre, based in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University, is dedicated to producing continental African and diasporic stage works. [3] Bass, in his capacity as Langston Hughes’s estate’s executor, wrote two scenes for the production and he edited a critical edition of the script. [4] As directed by Schultz and choreographed by McIntyre, the opening night cast of the original Broadway production assembled the floor and the walls of a general store which also served as a jook joint with barrels and crates. A train track, beginning off stage left in the fly loft, formed a semicircle around the general store. The opening night cast also assembled the Macedonia Baptist Church which also served as the courtroom, including multiple rows of pews that faced downstage center, a stained-glass window upstage center, and the bench located downstage right. A community of Black people developed through song and dance in some of the most arresting musical numbers in the video of The Mule Bone that is on file at the Theater on Film and Tape Archive at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, New York. [5] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010), 55-56. [6] George Houston Bass and Jr. Henry Louis Gates, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life (Harper Perennial, 1991), 58. [7] Bass and Gates, 99. [8] Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, To Make Our World Anew: A History of African-Americans since 1880 (Oxford UP, 2005), 90. [9] Bass and Gates, 78. [10] Musician Kenny Neal, a 1991 Theater World Award winner for acting, played the role of Jim and Eric Ware played the role of Dave. [11] Bass and Gates, 125. [12] David Krasner, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African-American Theater, 1895-1910 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 1. [13] Bass and Gates, 89-90. [14] It follows what blues musicians refer to as the A-A-B pattern where the first, second, fourth, and fifth lines repeat and the remaining respond. [15] Kusmer, 144. Footnotes About The Author(s) ERIC M. GLOVER Swarthmore College Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf 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 "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit by Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. Roll Call: The Roots to Strange Fruit is a visual, sonic opera that weaves together the peculiar institution of slavery from Auction Blocks to Fugitive Slave ads to “Information Wanted” family notices as a reclamation to unearth the journey of Black people on this foreign, stolen, soil. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula Theater, Dance, Film, Performance Art, Spoken Word, Other This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country United States Language English Running Time 23 minutes Year of Release 2022 Roll Call: The Roots to Strange Fruit is a visual, sonic opera that weaves together the peculiar institution of slavery from Auction Blocks to Fugitive Slave ads to “Information Wanted” family notices as a reclamation to unearth the journey of Black people on this foreign, stolen, soil. Executive Producers National Black Theatre Creative Doula LLC Conceived & Directed by Jonathan McCrory Composer Chaitanya /sangco and Joy Abalon Tamayo of Brick Shop Audio Choreographer Rickey Tripp Director of Photography/ Editor Thomas Wirthensohn Costumes Designer D. Elem Delta Production Manager Belynda M’Baye Sound Engineer Brick Audio Dancer LaWanda Hopkins Narrations by Denise Manning Michael Oloyede Tramell Tillman Marquise Vilsón Kara Young About The Artist(s) Jonathan McCrory is a Tony Award and Emmy Award nominated producer, two time Obie Award-winning, Harlem-based artist who has served as Artistic Director at National Black Theatre since 2012 under the leadership of CEO, Sade Lythcott. As Artistic Director (Creative Duala), he is the creative heart of the institution helping to select, develop and manage acclaimed programs and productions, such as The Peculiar Patriot and Kill Move Paradise. His creative force also helped the theatre expand its reach with the creation of the National Black Theatre of Sweden. As a director, he has helmed numerous productions including Dead and Breathing, HandsUp, and Blacken The Bubble and devised works like Hope Speaks, Evoking Him: Baldwin and Emergence: A Communion (based on adrienne marie brown's book Emergent Strategy). He has been acknowledged as an exceptional leader additionally through Craine’s New York Business 2020 Notable LGBTQ Leaders and Executives and in 2016 he was awarded 40 under 40 Rising Star award from the New York Nonprofit Media. He has been awarded the Emerging Producer Award by the National Black Theatre Festival of Winston Salem, North Carolina and the Torch Bearer Award by theatrical legend Woodie King Jr. He is a founding member of the producing organizations Harlem9, the Movement Theatre Company and national services organizations such as Black Theater Commons and Next Generation National Network. McCrory sits on the National Advisory Committee for Howlround.com and was a member of the original cohort for ArtEquity and Emerge NYC. He is also on the steering committee of the JUBILEE, working to help artists from marginalized communities. In 2019, McCrory was appointed to the nomination committee of the Tony Awards and he was also a member of the nominating committee for the Lucille Lortel Awards. A Washington, DC native, McCrory attended Duke Ellington School of the Arts and earned his BFA from New York University Tisch School of the Arts. To learn more, please visit www.jonathanmccrory.com . Get in touch with the artist(s) jonathan@nationalblacktheatre.org and follow them on social media https://www.jonathanmccrory.com/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson, Guest Editors 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 Introduction: Embodied Arts Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson, Guest Editors By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF This American Society of Theatre and Drama special issue of JADT offers four essays that reconsider the contours of the study of U.S. American performance through centering embodiment as the site where aesthetic values are developed, mobilized, and contested. Though all of the arts are arguably embodied, this special issue, by isolating “The Embodied Arts,” features scholarship about forms that foreground the body as the primary meaning maker. Our CFP was inspired by Nadine George-Graves’s proposal in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater (2015) that performance research might productively adopt an overarching rubric of “performative embodiment” to explain performance phenomena. [1] In coining this phrase, George-Graves sought to bridge what Kate Elswit calls “[t]he artificial divisions between the thing most often called ‘theatre’ and the thing most often called ‘dance’ in both academic and artistic spheres.” [2] Drawing on current scholarly energies around this interdisciplinary (or in George-Graves’s essay, “intradisciplinary”) concern, one of our central questions was: What might emerge as a coherent area of scholarly inquiry were disciplinary divisions forsaken in favor of metrics of legibility that arise not from genre but from the materials of performance phenomena themselves? The four essays featured in this issue demonstrate the efficacy of performative embodiment as a new metric to understand a diversity of performance events. The resultant collection of essays does much more than probe or surmount the generic academic divide between dance and theatre studies; it also offers a breadth of methodologies drawn from dance, theatre, and performance studies. The sites investigated by these four authors — Broadway, vaudeville, pageantry, and music videos — have historically incorporated both choreographed movement and mimetic action. As such, these sites are situated in the center of a proverbial venn diagram of performative embodiment. In a welcome shift, the four essays that compose this special issue refocused our initial call away from academic genre toward a more expansive examination of bodies in motion. The essays share a scholarly commitment to elucidating the interrelationships between body-based performances and what Susan Leigh Foster has termed “bodily theorics,” or a given historical moment’s normative and resistant modes of embodiment. [3] A focus on historically situated power dynamics emerges when these essays are examined collectively. Rather than evidencing an ideological project that equates identity politics with embodiment, this focus develops from a primary physics of choreography, wherein time and energy produce the power required to activate movement repertoires. All movement happens within sets of constraints; here, our authors consider U.S. American norms of bodily comportment as socio-cultural constraints that frame the choreographies their subjects generate and complicate. The essays therefore comment on the hierarchies of power embedded in embodied performances, opening up conversations about race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and size. All four essays engage with popular representations that challenge traditional aesthetic values about bodies in motion. Each essay articulates and argues against an ideal U.S. American form: the trim, athletic, disciplined, white body. Through their discussions of thin and fat bodies, bodies that trouble ideas of femininity, oppositional aesthetics of white and indigenous bodies, and the legacy of black female embodiment, the authors show how performing artists describe, interpret, and subvert established norms of bodily comportment through their embodied performances. Additionally, the authors’ serendipitous shared focus on forms of popular entertainment reveals a wide range of social and cultural implications of embodied performance. We interpret this emphasis on “popular” (though not always commercial) rather than “concert” performance as affirmation of the degree to which theories of embodiment structure the bodily lives of everyday people. Ryan Donovan’s investigation of Broadway casting practices in relation to body size and the widespread commodification of thinness opens our issue. “‘Must Be Heavyset’: Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies” contributes to a growing and compelling body of scholarship at the intersection of performance studies and fat studies, as well as the current and lively conversation on casting within performance studies. Utilizing an archive comprised of original interviews and voluminous press seen through theories of fat embodiment and performativity, Donovan carefully describes the process of workshopping and producing Hairspray for Broadway, a process wherein allegedly inclusive aims were hamstrung by commercial imperatives. Contextualizing Hairspray within historical and contemporary Broadway productions reveals an unsurprising yet critical emphasis on women’s body size and a concomitant mandate of thinness in order for female romantic desires to be culturally legible and, importantly, profitable. Donovan’s attention to not only the representational dynamics of these productions but also their pragmatics, including the language of fat stars’ contracts and the use of prosthetics, broadens his critique to include Broadway’s means of production as well as its narrative content and form. Donovan concludes that “The lack of fat actors cast in leading roles belies Broadway’s vision of itself as a fully inclusive institution, and the use of fat suits and contractual weight clauses has perpetuated fat stigma,” and, moreover, “[B]y not casting fat women outside of prescribed roles, Broadway musicals enforce a system of gendered bodily norms that police how all women act, consume, and labor in the U.S.” In “Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville,” Jennifer Schmidt demonstrates how female comics on the vaudeville stage used their embodied caricatures to fight against the superficialities of feminized consumer culture found in the theatre and print media of the late nineteenth century in the U.S. Schmidt places the performances of female mimics Cissie Loftus, Elsie Janis, and Gertrude Hoffmann in a critical conversation with the embodiment of femininity emblematized by the Gibson Girl and the women of Florenz Zeigfield’s Follies . For instance, Hoffmann’s burlesque of the Gibson girl included an exaggerated “kangaroo walk” which satirized the embodied impact of that “ideal” on the female form. Through rich archival details of their physical performances, Schmidt argues that these mimics, through their mockery of both feminine and masculine figures, brought attention to the manufactured nature of womanhood at the turn of the twentieth century. The women additionally disrupted the audience’s expectations of gender, by maintaining their “girlishness” even when creating caricatures of figures like President William McKinley. Schmidt demonstrates that, through these embodied forms of reproduction, Loftus, Janis, and Hoffmann created critical space which allowed them to comment on the representations of women in the celebrity culture of their time. Through a detailed examination of their repertories, Schmidt’s essay reveals the cultural and political potentials of embodied performance, by showing how the moving body can be a tool for creating critical parodies of popular culture. Shilarna Stokes’s essay “Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis ” reveals how Percy MacKaye’s symbolist pageant reinforced the processes of civilizing, and thereby Americanizing, both participants and observers through mass embodied practices of dance, gesture, and pantomime. In MacKaye’s view, the “emblematic design elements, allegorical plots, and figurative choreographies” he created in the masque were an essential element of what he called the “rituals of democracy.” Stokes shows how the hundreds of thousands of everyday people involved in the creation of MacKaye’s embodied performance, “were able to generate performative arguments about civic engagement, citizenship, and democracy” through their participation in the pageant. Through Stokes’ close analysis of the Masque , including a wealth of new archival research, she demonstrates how the pageant shaped St. Louisans’ conceptions of collectivity and directly influenced the newly expanded white population of the city. In her reading of the Masque, Stokes identifies three distinct choreographic modes of embodiment. She analyzes the pageant’s two modes of “playing Indian,” one which she terms “the ritualized” and the second “the savage,” arguing that these embodiments showed audience and performer alike “the difference between rational forms of collective self-organization and wild expressions of collective fervor.” The contrast between the two modes of “playing Indian” pointed St. Louisans’ toward acceptable forms of civic organization. The third mode she identifies, “playing pioneer,” modeled an ideal citizen who conformed to the “political and economic vision of city officials.” Through her detailed analysis, Stokes critically parses the fraught legacy of the Masque , revealing both MacKaye and the city officials’ aims for the piece as well as the impact of the pageant on the city and its citizenry. Finally, Dana Venerable’s essay “Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe & The Memphis ‘Tightrope’ Dance” considers contemporary popular performance as a site of critical intervention in the daily repertoires of constrained embodiment experienced by black U.S. Americans. Venerable provides a detailed close reading of the popular music artist Janelle Monáe’s instruction of the “Tightrope,” a dance to accompany Monáe’s 2010 hit of the same name. Venerable locates Monáe in a genealogy of black female performance makers and theorists, emphasizing Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston, who share a project of performance as collective healing for marginalized black U.S. American communities. This genealogy is placed in conversation with contemporary theories of black experience developed by Arline Geronimus and Christina Sharpe that posit “weathering” as quotidian strategies for living in a climate of anti-blackness. Venerable argues that the “Tightrope” “acknowledges in its name and choreography the physical risk of black embodiment in the U.S. and enacts strategies of emotional stability, physical balance, spontaneity, and support as navigational tactics.” Her analysis is rooted in the moment of 2010 and she reads the “Tightrope” as responsive to both local dance scenes, particularly in Memphis, Tennessee, and national narratives of racialized embodiment activated by the Obama presidency. Venerable’s essay offers alternative lineages of influence that cross “high” and “low” dance and posit that distinctions in cultural production are secondary to tracking the omnipresence of the hostile environment within which black U.S. Americans live and create. These seemingly disparate essays, which interrogate entirely different landscapes and forms, create generative conversations about performance when gathered under the rubric of embodiment. By foregrounding disciplinary concerns in our CFP, we unwittingly replicated the generic binary of dance and theatre. Donovan, Schmidt, Stokes, and Venerable instead highlight the work which already takes place at the boundaries of what performance is and can be. In this way, the “Embodied Arts” issue gathers scholarship evidencing Elswit’s observation that “Once presumptions about form are suspended, even temporarily, all sorts of histories in the borderlands begin to emerge, and with them larger ecosystems of practice.” [4] By drawing on theoretical frames that consider embodiment as epistemological as well as historical, lived social choreographies, these authors raise the stakes of their respective analyses to include both representational and experiential dimensions of performative embodiment. This special edition ultimately seeks to spur a conversation around the proposal that we might do more to probe the cultural relevance of performance in the Americas thinking through, but not within, genre distinctions and disciplinary divides. This conversation has benefitted enormously from the guidance of Dorothy Chansky, President of the American Theatre and Drama Society, from the mentorship of JADT editors Naomi Stubbs and James Wilson, and from the members of our Editorial Board, who tirelessly and generously devoted their time and energy to furthering this discussion. We hope readers will engage the scholarship within this issue as they continue to reimagine the histories and theories of American performance. References [1] Nadine George-Graves, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater (New York: Oxford University Press), 2015: 5. [2] Kate Elswit, Theatre & Dance (London: Palgrave), 2018: 2. [3] Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 1995: 8. [4] Elswit (2018), 28. Footnotes About The Author(s) LEZLIE CROSS is an Assistant Professor at the University of Portland. Her published articles and book reviews appear in Theatre History Studies, Theatre Annual, Shakespeare Bulletin, The Journal of American Drama and Theatreand Theatre Survey as well as the book projects Women on Stage, Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom and Performing Objects and Theatrical Things. Lezlie is also a professional dramaturg who works at regional theatres across America. ARIEL NERESON is Assistant Professor of Dance Studies at the University at Buffalo – SUNY where she teaches across the MA, PhD, and MFA programs in Theatre & Dance. Her current book project, Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past, theorizes choreo-historiography as a method of understanding how movement makes, conveys, and reimagines historical narratives of race and nation. Her essays on movement and embodiment across dance and theatre can be found in American Quarterly, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Studies in Musical Theatre, and in JADT, amongst others. 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.

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 20, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne Published: July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF By Dan Poston Image Credits: Article The Schaubühne’s Festival International New Drama (FIND) is well known in Berlin theater circles as a bright spot in the season. This year almost all of its productions sold out. The festival offers an intelligently curated and manageably compact chance to see exciting, internationally buzzy theater companies and their new productions without having to leave the city or go in search of different dates and touring schedules around town. The mix of plays and companies for 2025 was admirably balanced between highlighting a particular artist (the French director Caroline Guiela Nguyen), drawing together interestingly relatable work from other artists, and featuring chances to see new, experimental work by lesser known theater makers of the sort one might find at a larger “fringe” festival. FIND presented productions from 6 countries that, taken together, created a picture and conversation about new forms of naturalism, autobiography, and documentary theater, specifically about artists’ attempts to depict lives and situations that do not generally fall under the gaze of mass culture and its normative myths. All in all, the festival avoided the frequent paradoxical feeling of provinciality that can accompany efforts at “internationalization” in the cultural space—an achievement that speaks, again, to the intelligence of the Schaubühne’s current operation. Part of that cosmopolitan intelligence was an unadvertised concentration of theater pieces (4 out of 12) from Belgian companies representing different language and cultural groups—Flemish, Walloon, Burundian, and Spanish—whose histories and identities intersect complexly with the long tradition of Belgium’s own status as an “artificial” center and result of international negotiation. “Belgium” as a questioned place of belonging and citizenship in the festival could be taken as an abstract mirror for the ambivalent belonging-place of “Childhood”, another site and alleged protected center of contemporary societies that seems to cover so many silent figures of the sort the festival sought to foreground and bring to public speech. On the first night of the festival (Friday, April 4), I attended a piece in the new ground-floor performance complex, “Ku’damm 156”, just next door to the Schaubühne’s main building. The refreshingly still roughly renovated former retail space has an expansive, open “black box” layout, with several adaptable playing areas promising flexible Schaubühne use for the next, presumably leased years. The Walloon actor Cédric Eeckhout’s memory play, Héritage , was a perfect aesthetic fit for the new facility; both site and play a featured a well-designed mixture of minimalism and leftover, consumerist clutter and formlessness. Héritage picks up on Eeckhout’s earlier work about his mother (Jo Libertiaux), who in this production appears as a co-star and is, in part, also doubly portrayed by the son, Eeckhout in drag. In the post-show discussion, it was pointed out that the play could be compellingly performed in the future by actors who have no biographical connection to either Libertiaux or Eeckhout. Indeed, adding to the subtle formal arrangement and layering of Eeckhout’s tastefully faux- informal production is the sense that the play’s two characters are sculpted allegorically in a literary fashion out of their differing last names. Libertiaux (Jo) sits square in the center of her temporary temple, listening and visibly choosing to repeat lines that are fed to her in an agreeably friendly and slightly ironic manner that captivatingly suggests her support for her son and art, her modest bemusement with being the evening’s subject and shape-giver, and, yes, her freedom from the cult and regime of theater. The on-stage Eeckhout (Cédric) eeks out indeed an independent identity through various positionalities and rhythms in relation to his mother, whom he places sometimes as conversational mirror, sometimes as central dominating planet or star for his own calmly awkward or “hysterically” frenetic orbit. It is a simple story that partially celebrates and partially mourns its muse’s never-laureled status as historically avant-garde: a suburban hairdresser in the early 1980s emancipates herself from a stifling married life in a big house and raises her sons independently, while maintaining an ambivalent, non-reactionary relation to her former husband, partially for the sake of her sons and partially for the sake of (what it used to be common to call) complex humanity and love. Liberty (as Muse) on Her Throne: Jo Libertiaux in Héritage (© Bea Borgers) Héritage pays homage to the unknown heroism of people like Jo, who move history incrementally forward through strong, difficult, and sometimes joyful independent living. At the same time, the piece is a nuanced, honest, and multi-layered meditation on actual adult European gay male identity and the historically split social formation of “Generation X” divorce kids. In Eeckhout’s contemplative dance between the personal and the mass, the planet of littered electronic goods produces an intimately remembered, screened projection of ultimate—but only temporary—transcendence: bicycling up above it all with a wrinkly, vulnerably abject brown alien, the children accompanying ET were lifted temporarily (Cédric remarked) up into the popular gaze by Spielberg’s ingenious use of spectacle to transform the a domestic divorce drama into a 1980s blockbuster. Like ET, the “non-theatrical” Jo of Eeckhout’s bio-drama is treated, in Brechtian fashion, as a fount of reluctant wisdom; a reminder of mortality, love, and fragility in the general tempest; the subject of dispassionately extractive science; and a nostalgically restored mother goose for everyday misfits. Minimally mimicking the Spielberg sprezzatura of cloaking artificial intellectual arrangement in the bedazzlement of deployed cliche and nutritiously flavored schmalz, Eeckhout choppily smooths and composes Cédric’s generational statement-story using a dusty wedding-gift plastic blender from the 70s. That blender—a smart, developed postmodernism sturdily manufactured throughout the latter half of the last century—still quietly works in the age of optimally personalized, saturated Jamba Juice from perfectly ethically sourced ingredients on every city corner. Enhanced by Pauline Sikirdji’s skillfully modulated mixed-on-stage music, the production was the highlight of the festival for aesthetic achievement. Cédric as His Mother in Héritage (© Bea Borgers) The following night, I saw two comparatively maximalist productions in the main building of the Schaubühne. The Swiss director Milo Rau, who is now based in Vienna after a five-year stint in Belgium, brought his Flemish-speaking cast of mostly children from the NTGent to Berlin in order to stage a much bloodier divorce story, one also based on real events. Medea’s Children combines the classical myth of Medea with the true-story criminal case of Geneviève Lhermitte, whose horrific murder of her five children shocked Belgium in 2007. Rau’s discursive meta-drama plays exquisitely with our contemporary, indulgently simultaneous embrace of “innocence” and rejection of classical tragedy’s proscription against on-stage violence. The play opens with an extended, ironic mimesis of classical tragedy’s nachträgliche narration—the method by which it produces and suppresses the obscene. Pretending to forego dramatic business in favor of our era’s supposed post-analytical efficiency, the audience is teasingly welcomed into an “after-talk” about the production of Medea’s Children that they are told they have just seen. The ensemble’s only live adult member, Peter Seynaeve, conducts a discussion with the production’s six child actors that touches—with sprinkled moments of humorously precise, rhapsodic over-intellectuality delivered by the reflective children—on classical and modern dramaturgy, from Aeschylus to Beckett. The joke of children virtuously and monstrously performing adult routines never gets old as Rau inverts the classical Greek theater’s presentation of children as mute figures. The children’s production coach, Dirk, fails to appear (like Godot, one of the children remarks at the end of the play) except on video in the role of “Dr. Glas”. But that video only appears once the fine, opening “after-talk” breaks and the curtain opens, the nightmare of the production restarting in response to the children’s enthusiastic desire to re-perform parts of the play again, including its most violent scenes. Rau’s theater of bare (moral) cruelty, already famous for its controversial use of child actors to re-enact incredible violence against other children (in his earlier 5 Easy Pieces ), covers itself in a thick aesthetic of irony, saturated scenic design, and meta-theatrical discourse. The absorptive set of Medea’s Children , designed by ruimtevaarders (Karolien De Schepper, Christophe Engels), looks almost like a surrealistic dreamscape— Strandkorb at the end of time—waiting for the liquid element of the children’s massively spilled blood to transmogrify the solid half-architectures and extra-large back-drop video projections into satisfying art. Moving in and between these open scenic units, the talented children of Rau’s ensemble re-enact what is journalistically known about Amandine’s relationship and crimes, taking on both adult and child roles and often imitating videos previously shot on location with adult actors. Through this layered, interrupted, and always-again alienated dramatic storytelling, the audience witnesses key scenes in the tale of Dr. Glas’ long-term, pederasty-tinged financial support and live-in relationship with Amandine’s husband, whose trip to North Africa with the older man apparently drives Amandine to the gruesome, premeditated murder of their children. Where Tarantino coyly promised and demurred in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood , Rau goes for the full, long, real-time gore-porn shot. As the stage action lingers in excruciating naturalism, the child playing Amandine calls each of the other five children individually into a room and inefficiently strangles them, clobbers them over the head, and cuts their throats for minutes at a time. The remaining children are immersed in watching a film in an adjoining room. Medea on the Beach (© Michiel Devijver) The violence done and prodigious realistic blood spilt, the after-talk element of the show and the conceit of an actor/child-training Lehrstück is restored: the children discuss their mimetic techniques and reflect on mortality, as if not just Aristotle but actually Plato had counterfactually won the argument over tragedy and the right use of role-playing. The audience, meanwhile, partially covered their eyes or walked on shaking aged legs out of the theater, supported by strangers, friends, colleagues, and theater personnel. The tenderness and care displayed in the audience—a young dating couple squirmed and took turns lightly blocking each other’s vision—produced an engrossing contrast with the scene of painstaking human slaughter and unfathomable maternal betrayal on the stage. That shared split reality between demanding allegorical art and humbly surviving audience was another highpoint of the festival and a trope of its lived and performed reality. The audience’s palpable concern for the experiences and futures of the real child actors on stage (and their peers more extensively), along with the realization that actual paramedics were racing through the city to help a patron who had fainted, produced a complex object for theater’s contemplation, though one somewhat aside from Rau’s cunning depiction of a society of over-inexperienced people learning to repeatedly, virtually investigate and enact real existential blasphemies of human extinguishment. The Children Act Out and Talk Back in Rau’s Medea’s Kinderen (© Michiel Devijver) With only a few minutes in between, I walked to the other main auditorium at the Schaubühne to see the Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s LACRIMA . That 3-hour drama also thematized a marital split and the difficult repercussions for a child. Here, though, the mode was tense, neoliberal realism, in which the overweening mythic violence of a harsh but supposedly personally liberating system disfigures the characters’ lives without the cathartic exaggeration of witnessed slaughter. Following the multiple suggestions of the title, LACRIMA is a distributed crime story, where the tears of the overworked choral protagonists materialize as sewed-in drops of sparkling organic embroidery within a luxuriously celebrated, complexly interwoven social fabric. In the end, the over-heaviness of all those choral pearl-lives only slightly diminishes the glittering, televisual perfection of the symbolic wedding dress worn by an English princess for the world to admire. The play’s unremitting, hard surface tells the hidden back-story of the production of that dress, throwing light into one small backstage corner behind the sumptuous festivities of the internet era’s plutocratic crème de la crème. In the society depicted, though not in Nguyen’s serious play, the overarching comic spectacle of a fairy-tale royal union glossily covers a crime whose moment, perpetrator, and location fugitively diffuse. The fictionalized, social documentary-drama exposes many acts of not-exactly-criminal domination and exploitation, but the only villains are distant and cartoonish, their dramaturgical remove suggesting that if we saw further into their lives, we might find privileged people also caught up in a systemic stress melodrama. A spoiled English princess—whose presence in the play is only manifested by a faraway voice giving a condescending, self-satisfied voiceover and briefly participating in a carefully arranged conference call—orders the elaborate dress that is the show’s centerpiece. In Nguyen’s feminist dramaturgy, the princesses’ cartoonishness stands in for the never- or not-yet-quite-realized, cross-gendered inheritance of the patriarchal Leviathan role: picture the kingly, absorbing figure of Hobbes’ frontispiece now replaced by the floating heroine of Super Mario Brothers, clad in virginal, virtuous white. The dress itself serves as the symbolic object for the drama’s finer gestures of reflection on artmaking in the professionalized cultural industry. The commercial plot shows the high-end costuming order gratefully received by a flamboyantly kowtowing, famous, and psychotically ambitious fashion designer (another cartoon systemic villain, played by Vasanth Selvam) whose small artisan shop in Paris must quickly deliver a real wearable object meeting the designer and the princess’s extreme imaginative wishes and demands. Everything is ethical, of course!ô, which leads to further layers of exploitation, strain, and plutocratic distance from the dirty work of transforming earthy material into shine. That is, any certifiably disavowed crimes are pushed deep into the lower muddy links of the neo-colonial supply chain, which, the play suggests, looks remarkably like the old (sometimes historically also perfectly ethical) pre-neocolonial supply chains. Marian and Her Atelier Ensemble Make the Dress in Nguyen’s LACRIMA (© Jean-Louis Fernandez) With so many people—spiritually collapsed by the pressure-religion of industrial careerism—competing for haute-couture jobs in the Paris of the real world, the central miracle of the show is Marion, the remarkably even-keeled and humane head of the Paris atelier. Nguyen’s martyr to eurosocialist achievement-productivity seems to honorably preside over a diverse workshop where everyone (except for the complexly acted but bad, resentful husband-employee, played by Dan Artus) cooperates and looks morally good doing it. In Marion’s benign, performing-to-death aura, the show’s Sorkin-esque realism reproduces the neo-moral, work-life championship’s banning of all but diminutive, fleeting shadows, or irrepressible “horrendous human complexity”, from its bright lights. Maud Le Grevellec plays Nguyen’s Snow White figure with compelling minimalism, breeding in the audience the show’s main suspense: will the actor ever get the chance to show Marion totally flipping out? The plot-spoiling answer is, no, this would be unprofessional. Nguyen has reinvented the Marian devotional mystery play for our moment of 21 st -century economic structures and feminism. As it is, Marion absorbs all the stress of the cumulative distributed crimes—some of which she may even commit—so that the evil consuming princess does not have to, since appearing stressed would also be unprofessional for an envied public actor leading a marvelously crowned life. When this too-isolated, too-rigidly-suppressing, working Snow White overdoses and enters a death-like sleep, she is rescued by the miracle of love, though not by the bad-employee/ex non-Prince Charming but by her intelligently empathetic daughter (Anaele Jan Kerguistel). We never see very far into Marion’s (or anyone’s) psyche in the rigorously paced play, but we are assured by various eye glimmers and in general by the skilled ensemble acting that psyches exist, although what the use of them is anymore only the LLMs can say. We catch the mostly unspoken admiration and loyalty of the Dwarves —respected international laborers—towards Marion as they work. Even the manager (Selvam) and the extraordinarily talented embroider (Charles Vinoth Irudhayarajof) the specialized shop in Mumbai with which Marion subcontracts do not really complain; everyone is so professional, except for bad husbands and school-age adolescents, who are still learning. As it turns out, then, even the exceptions that prove the rule are exceptionally completely functional. Several subplots partially unfold in this environment of tremendous work intensity, one of which closely documents the lives of a storied traditional lace workshop in Avençon. The overriding point is that no one has the time to challenge various forms of suppression and domination and to have a full personal life. The tight, moving-parts realism of the play formally mimics the world it seeks to portray, leaving the audience with a feeling of breathlessness inside of which fuller emotions are suffocated. The cast is kept busy with the clockwork of fast, choreographed scene changes and this and that and this and that (a dynamic set design by Alice Duchange). The pacing aspires to Mission Impossible, with miserable Zoom work calls and stagnant simmering structural conflicts replacing exciting M6 gadget debriefs and crashing, shooting, bombs-exploding airplane dangles. No one has a cigarette or a joke or a bout of world-melting sardonic depression. The persistent loud heartbeats of tense electronic tonal music keep the audience physically chained to the incessant tension, as if we are acoustically connected to the pacemaker of an unconsciously sadistic, overwhelmingly empathetic physician. Even during intermission, a loud announcement informed the audience that we only had a few minutes to perhaps stand up in place, we should not leave the room. The Schaubühne has a world-historically well-behaved audience in comparison with the bulk of theater history’s more balking audiences; one suspected in true horror that most of us were cultural workers with career anxieties. The play, in other words, was an allegory of cultural and artistic demand, the harshness of the overweening, perfectionist superego leading to a decision by the on-stage figure of the artist (Marion) to purposefully ruin a magnificent, collective cultural work. In Marion’s warped climactic vision, the dress—overwrought and misshapen by displayably “ethical” ambition—was already ruined and had to be salvaged, but of course it was not ruined: it was a realistic, distorted reflection of the culture and its structures, if only the artisan and the artist would let the princess be clothed faux-perfectly in the asymmetry of her blithe wishes and the heavy world, a true work of art. But the art of the play emerges when Marion unaccountably repeats her manic, high-stakes gesture to salvage the dress’s warped pearl embroidery. It is an entirely irrational repetition, the one that confesses her psyche: Snow White finally smothers the evil princess’s controlling spell in a mime-like bout of doubled, only slightly frenetic ironing. Not to worry, though, the princess holds her frame (being more than the dress, though figured just as flat), the televised wedding proceeds splendidly, and the play audience was released from the voiceover’s control—scurrying agreeably into the lobby for a drink. In some after-part of the fable, Marian may get fewer orders and will now consider taking Saturday afternoons off for a while, until her daughter goes to university to major in STEM. Perhaps a bit shy the next day, lest I should find myself again submersed under the princess’s acoustic persecution, I watched the festival’s edition of Streitraum (a periodic Schaubühne talk series) at home via a live public video feed. Carolin Emcke proved a very competent moderator, sitting with her two guests in plain chairs before the open nightmare beach-cave landscape of Medea’s Children to discuss government funding for the arts. With an unremarked-upon visual backdrop suggesting the obvious danger of too much reliance on political or state funding for artistic work, Gesche Joost, the relatively new president of the worldwide Goethe Institute (and professor of Design Research at Berlin’s University of the Arts), and Rau, wearing his hat as the Artistic Director of the Wiener Festwochen, traced certain edges and tarried conversationally square in the transparent middle of Overton’s window of current theater political discourse. Despite the talk series’ title, there was no fighting, though plenty of clubbing. Joost shared her experiences gathering and sharing cultural intelligence from Goethe Institute’s elaborate global root system, and Rau expressed genuine excitement-concern about a select collection of international political issues. Everyone affirmed that the limits of solidarity are definitely drawn when it comes to art and cultural institutions suffering cuts, expressing though not stating an apparently agreed-upon economic theory (I can’t say which one of a few that I have heard) in which more money should be produced by someone who is obviously evilly holding it back—perhaps that Princess again! Emcke drew perhaps the festival’s biggest laugh when she pointed out that queerness for her personal history/autobiography had to do not just with abstract political commitment but with fairly uncontrollable, undeniable, even at times unwelcome and very embodied sexual desire. In other not long-ago epochs, one could have expected artists and cultural producers in Berlin to pick up on the laugh and think about the economic problem of art funding drying up as linked to the current festival’s notable sexlessness. Out of the abyss, there at the festival’s midpoint, the professionally behaving audience really did laugh just a tad too much at Emcke’s irrepressible remark, a fact that temporarily raised the question whether the general festival’s Lehrstückey dispotif toward its audience gegenüber —as in most art productions these days—was not a sociological reversal. Two days later, Consolate’s confessional ritual-piece , ICIRORI , was playing at the festival. The audience arriving at the new “fringe” retail space of the Schaubühne campus was told to wait in the bar lobby of the main theater building. At the appointed start time, Consolate, a Walloon-Burundian actor and artist, appeared and invited anyone who had suffered under systemic racism to accompany her into the other new space across the courtyard, with anyone not so identified to wait behind for the invitation of the ushers. The bulk of the audience waited quietly, contemplating the gesture of inviting outreach that also surfaced assumptions of privilege, while a small group walked with the artist across the way into the playing space. Consolate’s ICIRORI (© Mathis Bois) In a few minutes, the ushers urged the large mass of us who had remained in the bar lobby to join the others in the theater. There in a large black box space we sat on cushions laid out on low risers that formed a square, with an open playing space before us and a tilted mirror above (an effective minimalist set design by Micha Morasse). Consolate began to perform a mixed personal and social ritual with narrative, audio, and video sequences describing what she remembers and what she has reconstructed and learned about her own infancy and childhood. The audience was held and honored by the bravery and generosity of the performer’s honesty about a lived traumatic past, but also by the strong dramaturgical sensibility of the piece’s alternating opacities and clarities, storytelling, documentation, and re-enactment. In 1993, Consolate’s parents were murdered after the outbreak of a civil war in Burundi, and the four-year-old Consolate, who had survived by hiding in the woods with her sister, was found and then brought to Belgium, where she was adopted by a white family. Nearly three decades later, Consolate—already a trained theater artist—received an unexpected notice from a surviving family member in Burundi and travelled back to meet the family with whom she had shared her earliest years. The reunion was partially documented in a moving video sequence that Consolate uses in the piece to show the warmth, humor, and real recollections shared by a family separated for decades after a sudden, chaotic outbreak of extreme violence. A word in Kirundi, Consolate’s original language, “ICIRORI” signifies a self-reflexive investigation of the past in order to move forward. The piece has the feel of a world-opening invitation from stranger—whom one might ordinarily see on the street or speak to at a restaurant— into their private room of meditation and autobiographical struggle to simultaneously overcome unimaginable early loss and still find, in the daily fast-ticking of contemporary urban European life, the existentially necessary balance between confronting larger violent, unjust systems and building up one’s own life and identity. Some of the most affecting moments dealt with Consolate’s recollection of attempting to commune with her deceased parents—to remember and hear their voices—as a child growing up in Belgium. These moments were a reminder that childhood and even infancy are not just an amnesia, neither in a general sense nor in the constructed sense of repressing exceptional early injury: that in the imposed “forgetfulness” of childhood live—and still live—languages, loved people, and crucial stories, utterances, and singing that bind us more firmly to larger fabrics than any subsequently experienced matrix can or will. A mood of surprising and shared strong gentleness, anger, perseverance, guilt, and respectful grief marked the hour-long piece. It concluded with the chance for the audience, if they wished, to recite in the name of Belgium a multilingual apology that Consolate had not received, in spite of a formal petition requesting recognition that adoptions like hers had been a form of human trafficking. As the play ended, Consolate left the space, and the audience was invited to leave some dried Burundian peas, which we had received along with a bandage upon entering the theater, next to an old outfit of children’s clothes that lay on the ground. Quietly, individually and in couples and small groups, the audience gave back an offering and a wish, some sustenance and encouragement to the living spirit of the child who had outgrown and left behind the outfit on the theater floor, the same clothes in which Consolate had originally traveled to Belgium. The immersive and deeply affecting group ritual—partially paying witness to an artist’s story and process and partially an exercise in group saying and doing—had a quick liturgical follow-up in the sermon-like quality of the Elevator Repair Service’s American revival re-performance of James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr.’s 1965 debate at the Cambridge Union Society. The 2021 ERS production based its verbatim dramatization on the first hour or so of the BBC-televised event at the traditional student debate club—including the opening speeches of two student debaters (played by Gavin Price and Christopher-Rashee Stevenson) as well as those following by Baldwin and Buckley. Greig Sargeant, who provided the concept for the piece, portrays Baldwin with a sympathetic, ghostly dignity, drawing the audience’s obvious sympathy, but it is a critic’s unloved duty to witness how much we depend on villains, and in this sense Ben Jalosa Williams’ playing of Buckley, the festival’s most concretized villain, merits praise for its consummate attention to detail and rhetorically nuanced, precise character study. Omitting the three final student debaters on each side of the proposed resolution, the production cuts to the announcement of the landslide vote of the 1965 audience in favor of the resolution that was proposed by the Baldwin side. One of the most important debates in the Civil Rights Era, the debate took up the resolution “The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” While the speeches by Baldwin and Buckley are the obvious centerpieces—and striking feats of rhetoric provocatively resonant with the contemporary polarized discourses in the US and elsewhere—the student speeches and the entire 1960s British university culture of formal debate add to the fascinating thought-piece that the reenactment play provides. As highlighted in the text of Baldwin’s speech, the discomfort of debating American race relations in a British setting suggested welcome cultural complexity for the central European audience, for whom facilely superior condemnations of immoral politics overseas are an everyday part of public life, as they are in most places around the world, presenting the paradox of moral hatred and xenophobia as practiced at times in the name of liberal and internationalist commitment. The First Student Debater on the Buckley Side in Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge (© Joan Marcus) In a common scenic trope of contemporary theater productions, the John Collins-directed production restaged the original debate using much colder and darker aesthetics than the 1965 version. This very popular mode of minimal, distanced scenography, which significantly predates the pandemic (by half a century), suggests analytical separation, scientific isolation, medical sanitation, and, overall, darkness, whatever that is when it is not just the absence of diffuse light or a lazy overuse of black paint. The production would have been very different if it had included the clubby coziness of the original debate setting with the speakers and the hearers crammed together in a basic bodily sociality that one rarely sees anymore in high cultural spaces, except for those that have been taken over by mass tourism. The audience (rather than leaning on each other’s shoulders to get a good look) sat in fixed black tiered seats at a good remove from the action, and the debaters themselves stood isolated from one another and anyone else at several yards of empty distance. The sense of danger created by such a theatrical arrangement was curious, given the overriding consensus both in the room in 1965 and certainly among the FIND audience. The message seemed to be that we had to learn to mistrust each other even more, which did have the effect that one heard the arguments and threats made on both sides of the debate with a certain icy clarity. The iciness of the main event was to a certain degree then reversed in a short closing, imaginary scene between James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry in the former’s living room. The two famous writers joked and commiserated warmly and informally about their experiences as Black Americans and public intellectuals reacting to outrageous events and trying to formulate the best ways forward for their lives, solidarities, and politics. The epilogue-like scene transitioned at times to a faux-unscripted conversation of the two actors (Sargeant and April Matthis) playing those characters, giving the audience some history of ERC and their own engagement with it. The actors related how they had become the company’s first African-American members after being hired to play (what they hilariously parodied as strange, stereotypical, and inhuman) Black characters in ERC’s 2008 production of The Sound and the Fury . The play ended with Hansberry/Matthis bemoaning the theater’s white liberal audiences and prescribing that they should all rather become white radicals. The moral was clear, though not specific, and then it was time again not for Battle Hymn of the Republic karaoke and rows of muskets but rather for orderly lines of patient patrons at the bar, scattered tapas in the lobby, network chatting, and unknown things clicked on eager smartphones. James Baldwin/Greig Sargeant and Lorainne Hansberry/April Matthis Catch (Us) Up After the Debate (© Joan Marcus) After the sermon, it was time for music, which Nguyen’s latest production—playing at the festival in the annex “Studio” space as a preview of its upcoming first run in Strasbourg—served up in welcome plenty. If Nguyen’s LACRIMA (discussed above) carried the perfectionist weight of being her debut production as the Artistic Director of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg, her Valentina showed signs of deft breakage and form-relaxation, suggestive of new directorial tracks and accomplishment. The genre was still contemporary stress melodrama, whose existentially symbolic situation is the busy working person on a long tense call (including unbearable, cramped-muzac-filled holds) with a powerful institution’s call center. The dosing of calculated, repetitive music as deployed emotional manipulation in that everyday situation merges into Nguyen’s realism, which characteristically keeps a steady, heart-beating soundtrack of minimal tones running over scenes that are hyper-realistic without ever being allowed to fall (or lift?) into the shadows and awkward dirty corners of naturalism. But in Valentina , the realism is shaped by the form of the vignette, putting Nguyen’s latest work more fully into conversation with the beguiling aesthetics of Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil. In terms of melodrama, a quintessentially 19 th -century form, Rau’s Medea’s Children communes with dark gothic melodrama, while LACRIMA transplants the melodrama of the desert into the dry, extremely well-lit urban working spaces in which a few stark professionals dance a battle of the wills (surrounded by a colorful but whirling and vanishing chorus) with only a small number of actual steps and a stereotypically schematic conflict, but plenty of rhythm, coordination, and sensory overload. Valentina , meanwhile, looks melodramatically from France not westward towards the new desert-to-be-conquered of high-on-supplements Silicon Valley, but eastward, to the “folk” melodrama and its nostalgic imagination of suffering Easten Europe, a place where time once existed. Valentina and Her Friend Learn to Navigate Contemporary France (© Théâtre national de Strasbourg) The thematic focus and genre work well with Nguyen and her company’s signature style of blending amateur and professional actors into a seamless ensemble. Chloé Catrin gave a pitch-perfect performance as the overscheduled yet caring-underneath French doctor, a character who could have been LACRIMA ’s Marion working her sneaked-in second job. The exuding warmth and dedication of the Franco-Romanian actors playing the fairy tale parts of the small struggling nuclear family—the grievously sick mother (Loredana Iancu), musician father (Paul Guta), and compassionately and resourcefully intelligent school-age heroine-daughter (Angelina Iancu/Cara Parvu)—carried the show and allowed it one of the widest emotional pallets displayed in the festival. There is something still to be said for charm and for love steadily maintaining and opening connection across the ravages of impersonal economic and societal structures, even though such a remark is usually greeted by a stern and humorlessly murderous look from a truer adherent to politically dedicated theater. Truly renewing charm and love may even still exist in majoritarian communities and contexts, but here it is the trope of the impoverished east that allows these priceless cultural, human values to break sonically and (a)rhythmically through the general Nguyen style of running-through heart-beat music and crowded screenal doubling on stage. One can take a breath when someone plays the violin because the musician (generally) must as well, and there one has something basic, an allowance to live, even if evil and manipulation and systemic villainy are everywhere. In Valentina , the father plays the violin, works, loves his child and wife, supports their urgent trip and long independent stay in France to seek medical care, and seems even to be a nice, charismatic person, salt of the earth. Maybe this was the most radical figure on Berlin’s stages all year, tucked away in an annex space, with an apparatus of ideological excuse about documentary theater and real sociological research ready at hand, just in case anyone filed a lawsuit about having heard a non-Brechtian, apolitical, organic gentle melody at the theater. Other very Nguyen tropes repeated in Valentina : a topography of fairy tale meeting documentary naturalism; the mother-saving Deus-ex-machina miracle-work of the young daughter, who in the new play can learn the language of modern bureaucratic France, medical science, and the world more quickly than her kind ailing mother; the “Gift of the Magi” pain of people falling into tragic silence in order to try to help, support, and shield others, or just do their jobs responsibly and sustainably; and the foregrounding of competent, creative, hard-working, and compassionate women, young and old, heroically absorbing abundant, more-or-less crushing systemic pressures with “exemplary” nuance, resolve, fortitude, sharpness, and—somewhat above all—steady, committed management, or quietly non-reactionary sovereignty. The long list of qualities and adjectives signifies the “stuff” inside Nguyen’s central dramatic figures, which generally has to be shown by extremely subtle acting, given that all of those feelings and conflicts inside are not given space to emerge more expressively or enunciate themselves at length verbally: hence, the so-far defining aesthetic tension between overlaid neoliberal stress and burgeoning-up melodrama, with the formal and thematic positionalities often reversed. Caroline Guiela Nguyen (© Manuel Braun) The chorality of the festival continued with a final performance of Уя (Nest) , a piece in Kyrgyz and Russian by Chagaldak Zamirbekov and his Bishkek ensemble. A select social portrait of modern Kyrgyzstan, the work is based upon interviews that Zamirbekov and the cast conducted with contemporaries hailing from diverse regions and groups around their country. A naked man (Zhusupbek uulu Emil) crouches in a large tin wash basin at the center of the small set, which opens in three directions to the audience, creating from the outset a sense of intimacy or privacy-invasion, of being brought into a tiny urban flat where a group of interconnected strangers live. The canny, engaging set was designed by Marat Raiymkulov and Malika Umarova and adapted for the Schaubühne space by Ulla Willis. The intimate feeling produced by the layout of audience and tiny set reproduces, to an extent, the sense of a play set in a private apartment—a situation the company often uses in their home city. Produced in a tucked-away box in Ku’damm 156, the piece proceeds as a sequence of six mostly confessional, autobiographical monologues, with some limited interaction between the disparate flatmates. The founder of an orphanage and shelter for young mothers—Tursunbaeva Gulmira, playing a split ancient and middle-aged Kyrgyz cousin to Mother Courage—presides over the flat and the scene, sometimes forcefully engaging audience members to sweep and hold various everyday objects as she gruffly keeps the flat in tidy shape and gets the other characters moving about. A Mother Bathes and Dries A Son in Уя (Nest) (© Ilya Karimdjanov) All of the characters are remarkable and passionately making their way through a complex life, but the play’s temporary spotlight on each of them sequentially also reveals the patina of urban invisibility that cloaks them in ordinary life. Even the militant nationalist (Zhusupbek), whose uniform and brash carriage seem violently out of place in the provisional community, fades and disappears again in the shifting constellation of actors using, fixing, abandoning, and returning to a questioned national home. That collective home and small-enough shelter of experience—of a mild lawyer and religious scholar whose exiled father was a radicalized Islamicist, a struggling but dancing Shisha-bar waitress, and a sometimes-activist and international worker—is threatened, as Asylbek kyzy Zeres’ cosmopolitan, politically discontent character puts it, both by Russian aggression and Western race-based non-solidarity. The aporias in the sequential monologue form repeat the aporias in the various national and international stories that the characters utilize to shape their identities: a useful reminder that even the glocally connected events that we call cities and nations, into which we were all spilled again after the festival, cohere also out of important remembered, forgotten, or never known excisions. So much tailoring for a planetary dress that wants to eat us all just a little stitch at a time or for the dreamy intricate today-costume of a still young and even forgetfully blithe world, whatever humans are or may have been. References References About the author(s) Dan Poston (PhD Theatre and Performance from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York) is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literatures at the University of Tübingen. His monograph, Joseph Addison: An Intellectual Biography , was published in 2023 by the University of Virginia Press. 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 The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria Varna Summer International Theatre Festival Mary Said What She Said The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Stephen Kuehler Harvard University 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 American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Stephen Kuehler Harvard University By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Ben Levi Ross as Nick in Gatsby at American Repertory Theater. Photo: Julietta Cervantes. The Half-God of Rainfall Inua Ellams (8 - 24 Sept.)  Real Women Have Curves Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez (music and lyrics), Lisa Loomer (book) (8 Dec.–21 Jan.)  Becoming a Man P. Carl (16 Feb. - 10 Mar.)  Gatsby Florence Welch (music and lyrics), Thomas Bartlett (music), Martyna Majok (book) (23 May - 3 Aug.)  In its third post-pandemic season, the American Repertory Theater signaled that it was looking confidently toward the future. On November 17, the company announced that its proposed “Center for Creativity and Performance” in the Allston section of Boston (across the Charles River from Harvard’s main campus) had received formal approval from the city. The new theatre complex, which would replace the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge as the A.R.T.’s home upon its projected opening in 2026, was described as a model of sustainable design for cultural buildings. Meanwhile, at the Loeb, the A.R.T. presented a season of four shows (down from its pre-COVID norm of five or six) with its now-familiar mix of cultural diversity, gender non-conformity, and Broadway ambition. In The Half-God of Rainfall, Nigerian playwright Inua Ellams wedded three pantheons: the West African spirits called orishas , the Greek gods of Mt. Olympus, and the superstars of the National Basketball Association. The deities clash when Zeus rapes a Nigerian girl, Modúpé, who is under the protection of the river orisha Oshun. Modúpé gives birth to Zeus’s son, a half-god named Demi, whose divinity reveals itself in his extraordinary skill on the basketball court. Although she is mortal, Modúpé defeats Zeus in an epic battle; her victory inaugurates a feminist utopia, with the Black orishas ascendant and the white European gods crushed. As dramatic as all this sounds, the play is more a declaimed recitation than an acted-out story; the characters simply narrate most of their actions in the third person. Stacey Derosier’s lighting and Tal Yarden’s projections supplied the theatricality that this mythic spectacle needed. The next production, Real Women Have Curves , used the format of a traditional book musical to examine contemporary concerns about immigration, xenophobia, generational conflict, and body positivity. Based on a play and film, the show centers on Ana, an 18-year-old Mexican American woman whose family runs a small sewing factory in East Los Angeles. Ana has been accepted into Columbia University, but she is conflicted about pursuing her educational dreams when the family business needs her help. She’s also vexed by her mother’s criticisms of her weight, although the young man she is dating assures her that she is beautiful. Offsetting Ana’s personal struggles are larger social and political problems, such as anti-Hispanic bias and the predicament of undocumented immigrants. One such migrant, a worker in the clothing factory, is caught in a raid and deported; her plight renews Ana’s determination to study law and fight for immigrants' rights. Lisa Loomer’s book sets up these multiple conflicts and issues broadly, simply, and efficiently, allowing plenty of room for tuneful ballads and comic numbers in a Latin pop style flavored with salsa and mariachi rhythms. However, the multiplicity of issues prevents the musical from having a clear thematic center; even body affirmation, which gives the show its title and title song, turns out to be a minor concern for the show as a whole. Nevertheless, the production benefited from strong, appealing performances by the whole ensemble, especially Lucy Godínez as Ana, Florencia Cuenca as her sister Estela, and Justina Machado as their mother Carmen. The show that followed Real Women , P. Carl’s autobiographical play Becoming a Man , also focused on the struggle to affirm what’s real in matters of body and gender. After decades of living as female, including a lesbian marriage, Carl makes the transition to masculinity—a rocky process that he presents as both harrowing and exhilarating. Most difficult of all is negotiating the effects of the change on his relationship with Lynette, his wife, as she grapples with the new realities of her spouse’s body and self-presentation. Carl’s jubilant, self-absorbed embrace of his male identity makes him somewhat oblivious to Lynette’s pain, leading to raw confrontations between them that are the most compelling and affecting moments in the play. The work’s non-chronological structure reflected the erratic process of transitions both in gender and in relationships; even the physical staging, with sets by Emmie Finckel and video by Brittany Bland, was characterized by fluidity and motion. Ambitious, pretentious, rich, good-looking, and doomed—these adjectives for the title character of The Great Gatsby might also describe Gatsby , the musical version that capped the A.R.T.’s 2023-24 season. Mimi Lien’s imposing set—a junkyard piled with the mangled corpses of luxury cars, from which gleaming Art Deco stairways and platforms emerged—captured the sense of an opulent era that was headed for disaster. The same pessimism, but not the same panache, characterized the pop-opera score by Florence Welch and Thomas Bartlett. Except for a couple of numbers that had compelling shape and character, the music was a tedious stream of semi-songs, one much like the others. Although the leading performers—especially Isaac Powell as Gatsby, Charlotte MacInnes as Daisy, Solea Pfeiffer as Myrtle, and Adam Grupper as Wolfsheim—sang attractively and with conviction, their occasional incandescence couldn’t lighten the prevailing gloom, or make it feel truly tragic. In its glumness, one could argue that the show was echoing the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, who doesn’t glorify the Jazz Age but rather regrets being seduced by its hollow glamor. But Nick responds to his disenchantment with the world of Gatsby by writing an elegy for it in lyrical prose. The bitter taste of disillusionment was all that Welch and Bartlett’s Gatsby had to offer, and there was nothing elegiac about it. Nevertheless, as Nick observes: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.” The A.R.T. seems to believe in that future too: as Gatsby continued a healthy summer run, with many shows sold out, Playbill.com reported that the company was considering a Broadway opening. At the same time, the organization announced that its next season would once again offer five shows, including world-premiere commissions by tap choreographer Ayodele Casel and playwright Kate Hamill (adapting Homer’s Odyssey , no less). The A.R.T. appears to be gathering energy for solid achievement in its final years at its Cambridge house, as it prepares to follow the green light of a gleaming new home across the river. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Stephen Kuehler is a librarian at Harvard University, serving as the Harvard Library’s main research contact for performing arts, especially for students and faculty in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Media. Steve received his master’s degree in theater history from Tufts University, and he also holds degrees in philosophy, theology, and library science. As a member of the Theater Library Association, Steve was a co-organizer of TLA’s 2011 symposium “Holding Up the Mirror,” which focused on the interplay of authenticity and adaptation in contemporary Shakespearean 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 Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Chinoiserie Redux by Ping Chong at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. Chinoiserie Redux is a multi media film by Ping Chong with historic arc touching on first encounter between Qianlong, the Celestial Emperor of China and Lord George Macartney, the trade emissary from King George III of England in 1793 and West relations including the events leading up to the Opium War, the European obsession and addiction to tea, the history of Chinese settlers in America, the murder of Vincent Chin in Detroit in 1982 and the continuing trade disputes between China and America. Chinoiserie Redux is inspired by Ping Chong’s earlier theatrical work of the same name. Chinoiserie Redux connects the present day and the personal with an historical past still being felt today. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Chinoiserie Redux At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Ping Chong Theater, Documentary, Film, Multimedia, Performance Art, Puppetry This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, as well as screened in-person on May 20th. About The Film Country United States Language English Running Time 78 minutes Year of Release 2023 Chinoiserie Redux is a multi media film by Ping Chong with historic arc touching on first encounter between Qianlong, the Celestial Emperor of China and Lord George Macartney, the trade emissary from King George III of England in 1793 and West relations including the events leading up to the Opium War, the European obsession and addiction to tea, the history of Chinese settlers in America, the murder of Vincent Chin in Detroit in 1982 and the continuing trade disputes between China and America. Chinoiserie Redux is inspired by Ping Chong’s earlier theatrical work of the same name. Chinoiserie Redux connects the present day and the personal with an historical past still being felt today. Conceived and Directed by Ping Chong; Written by Ping Chong and Michael Matthews; Assistant Director, Cinematographer, Editor, and Production Coordinator Kristina Varshavskaya; Costume Design Stefani Mar; Lighting Design Hao Bai; Sound Design Ernesto Valenzuela; Make-up Artist and Design Amanda Briskin-Wallace; Production Assistant Destiny Castro ;Shadow Puppet Creators Stephen Kaplin and Kuang-Yu; Animators Zakaria Khafagy and Jaime Sunwoo; Cast: Ping Chong, Christopher Caines, Hyunmin Rhee, Wale Adebiyi (Voice Over), Amaris Harney, Richard Chang, Valois Mickens, George Drance, Monique Holt Produced by Ping Chong and Company About The Artist(s) Ping Chong (Director) is an internationally acclaimed interdisciplinary artist, and founder and Artistic Director Emeritus of Ping Chong and Company in New York City. In his over 50-year career, he has created over 100 major works for the stage, as well as video and visual arts installations. He is the recipient of two BESSIE awards, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship, and the National Medal of Arts. In 2023, he received an OBIE award, his third, for Lifetime Achievement. Ping Chong and Company (Producer) creates theater and art that reveal beauty, invention, precision, and a commitment to social justice. Originally founded in New York City in 1975, today the company is a highly adaptive and supportive home base for multigenerational, interdisciplinary artists with generative theater practices. The company creates original interdisciplinary, community-specific work; and cultivates artistry through training and education programs. Get in touch with the artist(s) info@pingchong.org and follow them on social media www.pingchong.org @pingchongco (FB, Twitter, IG) Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Wu Wenquan with Chen Li and Zhu Qinjuan Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 3 Visit Journal Homepage Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China Wu Wenquan with Chen Li and Zhu Qinjuan By Published on November 19, 2015 Download Article as PDF Arthur Miller is one of the most influential contemporary American playwrights after Eugene O’Neill. In the 1940s and 1950s, he rose to fame with All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and other social problem plays. Since 1949, Death of a Salesman has been performed continually on Broadway and in many countries all over the world. Miller and his plays came to China when China reopened its door to the world after Mao’s reign, especially with the conclusion of “The Great Cultural Revolution” (“GCR”)[1] and when China was no longer producing powerful social plays. Chinese drama had fallen into crisis in both playwriting and performance, for it seemed to grow rigid and stagnant after so many years of restriction. In fact, these restrictions had been proposed by Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, and only a few so-called model plays were allowed to be performed during the GCR. Thus, the translations and performances of Miller’s dramas in China during the 1970s provided an enormous inspiration for and influence on Chinese playwrights, who later created many plays in a style that mixed realism and modernism. When referring to literary reception and historical relationship, Hans-Georg Gadamer says, “The literal meaning of scripture, however, is not clearly available in every place and at every moment. …all the details of a text were to be understood from the context and from the scopus, the unified sense at which the whole aims.”[2] Yue Daiyun, a well-known comparative literary critic at Beijing University, explains, “Literary influence is a sort of permeation, a sort of organic involvement presented in artistic works”[3], and “The emergence of the influence is often associated with social changes as well as the internal requirement within literary development. …Influence is usually a complex process of enlightenment, promotion or reinforcement, agreement, digestion, transformation, and artistic expression. This process tends to start when a certain writer is able to ‘tease’ another writer’s heart.”[4] Arthur Miller’s social problem plays are similar to those of Henrik Ibsen’s. Miller emphasizes the moral force and social critical function through drama in order to reflect the modern human being’s living conditions in a post-industrial and commercial society. Chinese spoken dramas, developed at the same time as social protest plays, bear a similar tradition with Miller’s drama, in the aspects of social criticism and human concerns. When China reopened its door after Mao’s era, Miller visited China, and his plays were soon introduced into China. Chinese audiences were attracted to Miller’s social tragedies as well as his modern dramatic devices. Since then, many of Miller’s plays have been translated into Chinese, performed, widely reviewed, and studied. In addition, influenced by Miller, many young Chinese playwrights and directors began to explore the modernist styles, powerful social criticism and keen insight into human life. The First Journey to China Arthur Miller’s first visit to China was in the autumn of 1978, immediately before the establishment of Sino-US diplomatic relationship. He was the first contemporary American dramatist to visit China, thus beginning the face-to-face interactions of the dramatists between the two countries. During his visit, Miller visited many Chinese dramatists, directors, actors, and other theatrical figures, watched Chinese spoken dramas, Beijing operas and Kunqu operas and at the same time, he got involved in extensive talks with Chinese scholars. After returning to America, Miller published some of his travel notes in an article entitled “In China,” published in The Atlantic Monthly, the 3rd issue of 1979. Later, he collected many beautiful pictures taken by his wife, Inge Morath, a photographer, and made them into a travelogue and published it with a new title: Chinese Encounters. As the development of dramas in America and China was unbalanced and there left a big gap between the two different cultures after so many years of separation, this imbalance was reflected clearly in the direct conversations between contemporary young writer Su Shuyang and Miller, “Talking with such a great American playwright who should be referred to as a master, I am more mentally disturbed as a fledgling and ignorant youth….”[5] This kind of nervousness preceded from his own ignorance of America and American drama as well as his shock from intercultural communication with foreign worlds and what’s more, it reflected Chinese literary men’s and artists’ uneasiness and disturbance for the incoming foreign culture. “People have lived under abnormal conditions so long that once life returns to normal, they are lost and stubborn, instead.”[6] Qiao Yu, a poet, and Su Guang, an interpreter who accompanied Miller, were more anxious when talking about their knowledge of American writers. However, little did Miller know about Chinese writers either and he called this separation from each other as “being covered with clouds and fog, separated from the world.”[7] Cultural differences were so great that collision and misunderstanding were inevitable. Miller was most surprised at Chinese writers’ working system that they were subordinate to government institutions and paid with monthly salaries. However, Su Shuyang was also perplexed that there was no Ministry of Culture in America. The consequences of these two different organizations were that Chinese writers “spare no efforts to maintain and establish a certain concept which our government exactly needs”[8] while those American writers such as Miller had to live on writing as his occupation and therefore serious American writers “are always unwelcomed as they are criticizing the society and moral values all the time.”[9] The difference between Chinese and American cultural concepts illustrates even more about thinking patterns since these two countries have undergone their own different historical progresses. For instance, China pays more attention to collectivism while America advocates individualism. When Su told Miller confidently that “we are optimistic and we believe that collectivistic spirit will make people warm forever,” Miller said with a smile, “I hope so.”[10] Hence, there seemed a great discrepancy which has been separating the two peoples for several decades. It is impossible to bridge the gap and to integrate to the harmonious realm. Moreover, Miller was still a “left and progressive writer,” compatible with Chinese perceptions in some respects. Beijing had been a glamorous place for Miller. As early as the 1930s, Miller was greatly concerned about Chinese Revolution (a communist revolution to overthrow Guomintang regime) and he knew some celebrated names like Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, etc. who “were like flares shot into sky out of a human sea.”[11] He learnt these from Edgar Snow’s reportage on the Long March of Chinese Red Army (a great withdrawal of Chinese communist army from south to north) “Red Star over China,” and later the Anti-Japanese War. However, the forthcoming cold war between the two countries isolated one another by demonizing each other. He considered that “no one knows a country until he can easily separate its merely idiosyncratic absurdity from its real contradictions.”[12] Therefore, when China exerted open policy and Sino-US relationship was normalized, he came to visit Beijing, Nanjing, Yanan, Xi’an, Shanghai, Guilin, and Hangzhou and many other places for trips and interviews. As to informal discussions with Chinese writers, he sighed, “the gap caused by our mutual ignorance of each other’s real rather than reported culture seemed limitless one morning when we sat down to talk with some ten writers, movie directors, novelists, and one actress in a Peking hotel. …I felt a far more deeply depressing sense of hopelessness that such isolation could actually have been structured and maintained. … we emerged from darkness to confront each other.”[13] Long-term indifference as well as cultural barriers made both sides unacceptable and this sense of abrupt fainting at the sudden collision was exactly the cultural shock when two different cultures began to communicate again after long intervals. Apart from his travel experiences in Chinese Encounters, Miller discusses mainly his impressions on China after the catastrophes of the GCR: so many artists were persecuted that only eight model operas were left and economy was withered all over the country. Miller’s keen interest in Chinese traditional opera was manifested in his reflections when watching Beijing Operas as A Woman General of the Yang Family (a famous legend of Song Dynasty about Mu Guiying, a heroine, leading an army fighting against the foreign invaders), Wang Zhaojun (a sad story about a beauty in Han Dynasty who was sent to marry a Mongolian king for peace) and Kunqu Operas as The Tale of the White Snake (a southern love story about a white snake loving a young scholar). His evaluations were pertinent when watching spoken dramas Loyal Hearts (a play by Su Shuyang about a devoted scientist fighting against the Gang of Four), Cai Wenji (a play by Guo Moruo about a Han Dynasty official’s daughter being captured by Mongolian troops for 12 years and later coming back after paying a ransom), The Other Shore (an early absurdist play by Gao Xingjian, a Nobel Prize-winner, about contemporary Chinese people’s spiritual pursuit), etc. And he talked with Cao Yu (author of famous Chinese play The Thunderstorm, an O’Neill-like tragedy of a woman loving her step-son who loves his half-sister blindly). He discussed with Huang Zuolin about the theory of “Freestyle Theater” (Zuolin’s theatrical idea involving Chinese culture of space, in Chinese “Xieyi”) and his recommendation of The Crucible to Zuolin.[14] This visit allowed Miller to learn current situations of Chinese spoken drama. First, he thought Chinese and American people could undertake cultural communications through drama, “Chinese people’s emotions in theater are the same. Although there are great differences between eastern and western cultures, the roots which produce the cultures are absolutely identical.”[15] He praised the brilliant Chinese civilization and traditional operas. However, he had a deep impression on the political and conceptual tendency in problem plays, “Clearly, Loyal Hearts was fashioned as a blow and a weapon, and its force as a social document seems undeniable; … The tone is that of An Enemy of the People; the impulsion being preeminently social and moral, there is little or no subjective life expressed and the people have characteristics rather than character. While the dialogue manages to ring in all the main current slogans—“Learning from the facts,” “Don’t forget that all reactionaries will come to a bad end,” and so forth.”[16] He pointed out the platitude and vapidity of Cai Wenji with classical American straightforwardness, “the story was told four and possibly five separate times in the first hour. The only difference is that new characters repeat it, but they add very little new each time.”[17] He also hit the point of actors’ overacting performance, “A remark that might call for smile causes its hearer to laugh; a mild chuckle becomes a guffaw accompanied by deep, appreciative nods. What should be a wave of recognition to an acquaintance turns into a bang of the palm on his back and plenty of ha-ha-ha thrown in.”[18] His critique for contemporary Chinese playwrights, directors, and performers was pivotal. After Cao Yu exchanged views with Miller in this respect, he invited Miller to come and direct his dramas in China and this was the cause that Miller came to China again in 1983. The Translation and Reviews of Arthur Miller’s Plays in China As early as in 1962, Miller’s work was introduced into China by Mei Shaowu (son of Mei Lanfang, famous Beijing opera actor who visited America in the 1930s) whose article introduced six of Miller’s plays but had limited reading circle for the restriction of western cultures in Mao’s times, while the Chinese version of his plays didn’t appear until the end of the GCR. In 1980, Chen Liangting translated Miller’s All My Sons and Death of a Salesman (published in Foreign Drama Resources, Issue 1, 1979, and later included in Selected Plays of Arthur Miller, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 1992). Chen had a high view on Miller in the afterword, “He [Miller] pursues meaning of human life contiguously, does well in analyzing humanity and rationality, shows solicitude for the whole humanity and takes it as his own mission to evoke audience and readers’ social awareness as well as people’s moral values and sense of responsibility.”[19] Mei Shaowu’s two articles introducing Miller and his eight plays were published Foreign Drama Resources (Issue 1, and 2, 1979). In 1981, Liao Kedui edited American Drama Collection (Chinese Drama Publishing House) including Yao Dengfo’s article On Arthur Miller’s Plays. The script of The Crucible (directed by Huang Zuolin in 1981) was interpreted by Mei Shaowu and published in Foreign Literature Quarterly (Issue 1, 1982) while Nie Zhengxiong translated it with the title of “Yanjundekaoyan” (Severe Trials, Chinese Drama Publishing House, 1982). Ying Ruocheng translated Death of a Salesman in 1983 and in 1999 it was reprinted by China Translation and Publication Corporation with a Chinese-English version. With the successful performance of his Death of a Salesman in China, other Miller’s plays entered China in succession. In 1986, The American Clock was translated by Mei Shaowu and was printed in Foreign Literature and Art (Issue 5, 1986). His completed collection was Selected Contemporary Foreign Dramas (Chinese Drama Publishing House, 1992) which included A View from the Bridge, A Memory of Two Mondays and After the Fall besides the above-mentioned three plays. His Death of a Salesman is compulsory in university courses as “Selected Reading of Foreign Literature” and “Selected Reading of English and American Literature.” There are two kinds of selected Chinese versions of essays written by Miller: The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (selected and translated by Chen Ruilan, et al, Shanghai Joint Publishing House, 1987) and Arthur Miller on Theater (translated by Guo Jide, et al, The Culture and Art Publishing House, 1988). In 1997, Ren Xiaomei translated Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and All My Sons (Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press). According 2000 China Reading Weekly poll, Sun Weixin and Wu Wenzhi edited Abstracts of a Hundred Famous Chinese and Foreign Literary Works Influencing China in 20th Century (Lijiang Publishing House) in which Death of a Salesman is chosen. In 2000, Death of a Salesman entered New Chinese Text Book of High School (People’s Education Press, Volume Six). The Ministry of Education wanted to “break through previous limitations on selection that merely emphasizes critical realistic works, and introduce some foreign literary works of great influence in different respects.”[20] It can be perceived from the transmutation of above translation and introduction, Chinese passion for Miller and his works has been on the increase and his influence in China is also gradually far-reaching. Soul-Hunting: The Crucible in China The Crucible was recommended by Arthur Miller to Huang Zuolin, director of Shanghai People’s Art Theater. This play, bearing many similarities with “the GCR,” was staged in Shanghai People’s Art Theater in 1981. The story of The Crucible was derived from the historical “witch trials” as a result of which some 20 innocent people were hanged (Miller increased the number to seventy) and more people were put into jail. At the beginning of the play, a group of girls, who were obsessed by asceticism, danced nakedly in the forest under the leadership of Abigail. But they were found and scared. These girls were said to be bewitched and influenced by evil supernatural beings (devils). They were forced to accuse their villagers of being devil’s spokesmen. This case gave rise to a chain of reactions and more and more people were accused. Abigail, the heroine, had been once a farmer John Proctor’s assistant and in deep love with Proctor. Later their affair was discovered and dismissed by the Proctor’s wife Elizabeth. She was always hateful and vengeful to Elizabeth. Therefore, Abigail accused Elizabeth of practicing witchcraft while Proctor admitted his improper relationship with Abigail in front of the public in order to save his wife. The court burst into an uproar and Elizabeth was immediately required to testify for her husband while she denied the testimony to save his fame. Proctor was faced with a trial: either to retract his statements to ruin his own reputation or insist his statements (regarded as perjury by the court) to be executed. Finally, he went straightforward to execution gallows. The Crucible was written during an era of white terror when McCarthyism was prevailing. Coincidentally, Miller himself was called in 1957 by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to force him name names of members of Communist Party. But he refused reasonably. Although the playwright always denied that The Crucible has direct connection with American McCarthyism in 1950s, we can infer their inner relationship clearly. First staged in America for 197 performances in 1953 and again for 633 performances in 1958, The Crucible has been always widely popular among audiences and has become part of the repertoire on Broadway. The first performance of The Crucible in Shanghai on September 4, 1981 raised great concerns immediately and got a big hit. Miller once said confidently before the Shanghai performance, “It (The Crucible) will obviously acquire Chinese audiences’ understanding.”[21] Cheng Yan said “it enormously shortens the distance brought by several decades’ gap as well as national difference”[22] The attention on history, politics, humanity as well as morality in The Crucible appealed to Chinese audiences after the GCR because they saw the similar situations as false-accusation, crime-involvement (innocent people being punished for their relatives’ crimes), persecution, under which everyone felt insecure and frightened. These feelings and experiences enabled Chinese audiences to understand and sympathize with characters in the play. Miller wrote in his autobiography Timebends: A Life, “The writer Nien Cheng, who spent six and a half years in solitary confinement and whose daughter was murdered by the Red Guards, told me that after she saw the Shanghai production she could not believe that a non-Chinese had written the play. Some of the interrogations were precisely the same ones used on us in the GCR.”[23] Chinese critics immediately expressed two different opinions on Abigail. Guo Jide said, “Abigail is the primitive evil power which causes the whole disaster, tells lies and creates a great deal of fraud. Proctor is the symbol of integrity and bravery as well as a heroic image which is standing erect and accepting ordeal in a fierce fire.”[24] However, the opposite opinion states, “although she is false to be deliberately mystifying, her sentiments towards Proctor are as real as true love.”[25] Another great significance brought about by the performance of The Crucible is the theatrical concept of “Freestyle Theater.” As early as in 1962, Huang Zuolin began to reform the then dominant theatrical idea of Stanislavsky style so he proposed “Freestyle Theater” concept which blended Bertolt Brecht’s theory and staging concept, emphasizing on the unreal scenes and presupposition of stagecraft rather than the reality of “illusionism.” The Crucible was the first American play after the GCR performed in China and directed with the idea of “Freestyle Theater.” “There are merely several wooden poles on the stage with all gloomy background under which crucifixes exist everywhere. These crucifixes give a sense of divinity. Although doors, windows, court, jail, etc. vary, crucifixes stand there all the time.”[26] Afterwards, other Chinese “Freestyle Theater” plays appeared on stage one after another such as The Chinese Dream (1985), Moth (1989), etc. When National Theater Company of China was established in May of 2000, it performed two foreign plays, one of which was The Crucible. Meanwhile, on the other shore it was also performed on Broadway. It more or less indicated both nations’ appealing to traditional dramatic culture of much historicalness and universal humanity. Many Chinese comment on the somber mise-en-scène atmosphere of this drama, “The director rendered the atmosphere of repression and distortion on the stage. Actually, entering into the theater, one could feel the ominous aura that ‘something’ would happen. ... The ropes, dangling overhead from the ceiling of the theater, were virtually questioning each of us, when we face the same situation that those people in the play face, how shall we choose?”[27] Soul-hunting in Chinese Drama After the GCR, searching for humanity became the main theme in plays as well as Chinese fiction and poetry. In the Chinese plays since 1980, honesty and trust were questioned and the persecuted victims experienced bloodier treatment than those in The Crucible. The representative among them is Sangshuping Chronicle (script by Zhu Xiaoping, born in 1952, who went to the border area as a student. The story is based on a titled novel by Chen Zidu and Zhu Xiaoping.), which was first performed in 1988, revealing northwestern Chinese peasants’ living conditions and feudal ideology precipitated from history and tradition in 1968. People at Sangshuping are both persecutors and victims. Caifang, a widow falls in love with a wheat reaper (like a seasonal migrant worker) who helps to do the seasonal harvest work. They are caught in elopement, lynched and beaten by the villagers. Caifang drowns herself in a well. In order to carry on the family bloodline, the parents of Fulin (an idiot) marry his sister in exchange for Qingnu as Fulin’s wife. Some youngsters put Fulin up to pull off Qingnu’s clothes in front of the public, which drives Qingnu mad. Wang Zhike is marginalized and persecuted by villagers after the death of his wife and finally is falsely charged with murder. He is driven away for his non-native identity. Their only farm cattle is reluctantly butchered by farmers who have raised it when some inspection officials want to eat it and they have to kill it themselves. Characters in this tragedy are all victims persecuted under feudal autocratic dominance. The Crucible expresses the destruction of human nature by rigid religious persecution and immorality while Sangshuping Chronicle shows the tragic life overburdened under traditional and feudal cultures and poverty. But people still show their brave pursuit for happiness. The vilification and persecution of virtuous human beings in The Crucible are fully embodied in Sangshuping Chronicle while the latter is more powerful than the former in many respects. And its exploitation of unenlightened humanity bears no difference from Miller’s calling for morality and justice. But both “hunting” scenes of Sangshuping and the Salem were rooted historically, relying on the similar events resulted from feudalism. Both of them criticize the human ignorance and backwardness, selfishness, narrow-mindedness and superstitious beliefs. Both plays employ wizard rituals to add supernatural and mysterious atmospheres. Dancing in the forest and exorcism ceremonies in The Crucible are the discourses of the middle ages. Sangshuping Chronicle exploits praying for rain, sacrificing cattle, man-hunting and other ceremonies as well as bass drum, chorus and other skills full of national characteristics that make the whole drama permeated with poetic significance just as Gao Huibin said, “association with poetic techniques and illusionary skills in artistic conception.”[28] Strong national characteristics, distinctive performance, and the mysterious mise-en-scène aura set up Sangshuping Chronicle as a banner of contemporary Chinese spoken drama. According to Xu Xiaozhong, its director, the staging of the play was a dramatic pattern of “combining Chinese and Western cultures. Reviewing the whole process, I clearly realize that no matter realism or romanticism, concrete or abstract, reproduction or expression, the artistic concepts and principles of drama may vary and the principal method of how to extract and abstract life may differ while all stage artistic creations come from life directly or indirectly.”[29] Selling Dreams in Beijing From March to May in 1983, invited by Cao Yu and Ying Ruocheng, Miller came to Beijing People’s Art Theater to direct his masterpiece Death of a Salesman. It got such a great success that it enters the theater’s repertoires. After returning home, he published his directing notes Salesman in Beijing (New York: Viking Press, 1984) which recorded the cultural and dramatic concepts and the conflicts as well as communication during the process of his directing Death of a Salesman. It also included all sorts of interesting episodes, anecdotes even disputes when transplanting this play in China. On the March 20, 1983, Beijing People’s Art Theater welcomed Arthur Miller, the ambassador of Sino-US cultural exchanges.[30] Miller obviously felt the atmosphere of China’s rapid economic development and the signs of social transformation. He was still fluttering with fear of the experience when he watched plays acted by Chinese actors in 1978: “How appalling it was to see actors made up with chalk-white faces and heavily ‘rounded’ eyes, walking with heavy, almost loutish gait as they think Europeans and especially Russians do, and worst of all, wearing flaxen or very red-haired wigs that to us seemed to turn them into Halloween spooks.”[31] Therefore, he began to utilize cultural transplanting principle of “adapting foreign things for Chinese use”. The first moment meeting the actors, he proposed that it should bear resemblance in spirit rather than in appearance, telling them to express common humanity instead of “specious acting”. He suggested, “The way to make this play more like American is to make it more like Chinese. … One of my main motives in coming here is to try to show that there is the same humanity. Our cultures and languages set up confusing sets of signals whuch prevent us from communicating and sharing one another’s thoughts and sensations, but that at the deeper levels where we are joined in a unity that is perhaps biological.”[32] Miller highlighted the cultural exchanging function of the drama, carrying on the comparison between Chinese and American cultures from different aspects such as the plot, characters, performing techniques, etc. Placed in a manifesting areas such as comparing Chinese salesmen, insurance, refrigerator, cars, family life with those of America’s; comparing father’s earnest expectation for his sons with Chinese father-son relationship, “great ambitions for one’s child” (Wangzichenglong in Chinese idiom),[33] discussing with actors about the character Charley, and Willy Loman’s mistress, scenes of kissing as well as the different understanding and expression of sex, etc. Through bilateral negotiations, Miller compromised in many aspects, for instance, the representation of sex with the Chinese actors dealing implicitly with their accustomed and traditional ways.[34] During the performances, conflicts and problems raised contiguously. Some officials were afraid that the favorable material conditions (refrigerator, car, house of Loman’s family) displayed on the stage would bring about negative effects for the then poor Chinese conditions while social critical significance of the play would be weakened for this. However, the fact that the performance of Death of a Salesman obtained a great hit proved that Miller’s practice of sinicizing his drama was the most successful interpretation of the original American work. It represented the essence of the Chinese culture, emphasized the resemblance in spirit more than in appearance, broke through the traditional realistic staging methods employed for decades in China and reflected the principles of integration of Chinese and Western cultures. The major newspapers published detailed reports on Miller’s direction of his own play in Beijing. Foreign Drama invited Miller to have a formal seminar, and published feature-length comments on the direction, acting and text analyses. All these made it rise to a hot trend of Miller and Death of a Salesman in China and the year of 1983 determinedly witnessed the successful cooperation between Miller and Beijing People’s Art Theater. Since then, cultural exchanges between China and America revived, breaking the ice of tight cultural relationship. From 30 tough years’ hostility and exclusion to face-to-face conversation, peoples of both countries could eventually open their mind and exchange as they like. When everyone was cheering for the great success of the performance, Miller said to himself, “America will need this country as an enrichment to our culture one day just as China needs us now.”[35] This reflected Miller’s modesty and wish for communication. Chinese people accepted and acknowledged this classical American drama. They speculated on human’s survival predicament brought about by modern society. Cultural misunderstanding was inevitable that there were many Chinese interpretations such as problems of the elderly, generation gap, problems of the rich and poor, success and failure and dream and reality. Many young people considered that Biff and Happy’s cynical values and philosophies were inadvisable. Although they lost much time for working in the countryside during the GCR, they could not be irresponsible for society and their country. Zhong Yingjie, a dramatist, said, “Chinese audiences can understand easily and resonate with love as well as hatred between parents and their children as expressed in the conflicts between Loman and his sons.”[36] Chinese audiences felt angry for Loman’s being dismissed and happy for China had no such unfortunate things then.[37] Afterwards, Miller recalled emotionally in his memoir Timebends, “Willy was representative everywhere, in every kind of system, of ourselves in this time. The Chinese might disapprove of this lies and his self-deluding exaggerations as well as his immorality with women, but they certainly saw themselves in him. And it was not simply as a type but because of what they wanted. Which was to excel, to win out over anonymity and meaninglessness, to love and be darling, and above all, perhaps to count.”[38] Many people thought the real purpose of China’s reform and opening up was to lead people to success and wealth as aroused in the play, “a young Chinese student said to a CBS interviewer in the theater lobby, ‘We are moved by it because we also want to be number one, and to be rich and successful.’”[39] Miller published his directing notes in a book, Salesman in Beijing, in America in 1983. Later he wrote his directing experience in his autobiographical memoir. Miller’s directing and the play’s performance were made into a documentary series by CBS which was broadcast in America, introducing the performance spectacle of Death of a Salesman in China. All these promoted Sino-US cultural exchanges forcefully.[40] Since 1983, the Chinese version of Death of a Salesman has been performed in Shanghai, Japan, Hongkong, Singapore and many other places, gaining a great popularity and an enormous success. Ying Ruocheng not only translated the script himself, but also acted the role of Willy Loman. He pointed out in his articles, “As an actor, I do my best to obtain the value of the person which I act.”[41] In Ying’s opinion, Loman remained in paradox of dilemma: affectionate but always breaking up in disagreement with his sons; alternately sober and absent-minded at whatever he does; his suicidal action was both passive and active, both terrified and conscious. In the end, the more delighted the deceased (Willy Loman) was, the more sorrowful the living people were. Zhu Lin, a renowned actress, starred a powerful and virtuous mother Linda. She represented Linda as a classical Chinese mother who was a obedient, hardworking, understanding wife and loving mother.[42] Zhu Lin recalled the cooperation with Miller, “Mr. Miller helped us continually enrich the understanding of the script and characters. ... He is one of the greatest directors whom I encountered and are good at enlightening actors. ... He is absolutely in the standpoint of the actors, respecting actors’ work and attaching great importance to the coordinating relationship between the director and actors. ... We established profound friendship with each other during the pleasant rehearsals.”[43] Zhu Xu, actor of Charley, discussed his cooperation and rehearsal with Miller from the perspective of understanding of the character as well as its sinicization during the whole processes of rehearsals and performances in an article in Theater Studies.[44] Zhu Xu thought of Charley as a sophisticated character. In his opinion, Loman didn’t understand the function of money but he believed such things like “popularity,” “personal loyalty,” “relationship” which showed his “innocence.” However, Charley lacked imagination and was pragmatic. Death of a Salesman has been most popular among the audiences and has become one of the most significant foreign repertoires of Beijing People’s Art Theater. As to the American culture reflected in Death of a Salesman, Miller thought Chinese cast’s “95% of the comprehension of the drama is right because they know American People’s lifestyles and customs.”[45] The audiences’ comprehension and appreciation of the play was due to these American cultural media, Ying Ruocheng and other crew members as “retransmitters.” They made great efforts to have this famous western play deeply rooted in Chinese soil. As Wang Zuoliang, a famous literary critic, commented, “Chinese translators have the good taste, Chinese actors have the ability and Chinese audiences have the spiritual sensitivity and expansive art interests. All these enable them to understand and appreciate all the excellent dramas from all over the world.”[46] Chinese Tragedy of "Stream of Consciousness" and "Success Dream" Since it was presented on Chinese stage, Death of a Salesman has always been drawing attention from all over the country. Its influence is mainly manifested in three respects. First, more and more Chinese tragedies began to deal with disillusioned dreams of common people. Secondly, realistic play-writing began to absorb the expressionist method of “stream of consciousness,” digging into characters’ inner worlds. Finally, all kinds of modernist techniques began to be widely used in performances rather than Stanislavsky method. The Success of Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana (written by Liu Jinyun, born in 1938, president of Beijing People’s Art Theater, first staged at Beijing People’s Art Theater) in 1986 was due to its realistic depiction of common people in the GCR. It was also a typical work of tragedy of success dream and realism integrated with modern expressionist techniques. The unsuccessful salesman in Miller’s commercial competition became a common Chinese peasant cherishing a dream for success in Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana. Uncle Doggie, two of whose wives either died or departed, often dreams of working hard to buy land and become a landowner. When the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, he got some land for a few years in the land reform. But more political movements (Cooperative 1953-55, the Great Leap Forward 1958-1960 and the GCR 1966-76) to come, his land was deprived and his hopes for success became slimmer and slimmer. Uncle Doggie’s dream of possessing land and becoming rich vanished and he was getting crazy. Meanwhile the landowner Qi Yongnian, his fellow villager, was charged as an exploiting landlord and was criticized, denounced, severely persecuted and eventually died in the GCR. When the play begins, those things in his earlier life constantly appear in his mind and they flash back continually on stage. He often talks with the ghost of the deceased landowner Qi Yongnian, even dispute. When China reopened its door in 1978, Uncle Doggie got his land again under the new reform policy. His joy lasts only a short time for he is no long young and needs his son Dahu’s help. But Dahu and his wife decide to set up a factory instead of plowing land. Uncle Doggie burns himself in the end. Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana and Death of a Salesman bear many similar characteristics in respect of themes and techniques. Both plays take social, familial and moral problems as their themes. The essence of tragedy is the disillusion of dream of obtaining success or of getting rich. The two protagonists are both common people with merits and demerits: Loman is industrious, loves his family and sons but he likes boasting and gets an affair with another woman, while Uncle Doggie is a dutiful and kind farmer who is hardworking and persistent but owns a small peasant’s consciousness and is selfish. Two plays both end with the suicides of the protagonists. Their tragedies are spiritual and moral ones with the disillusion of dream as the main cause. They both employ symbolism and expressionism as artistic techniques: the high buildings and sowing vegetable seeds in Death of a Salesman, the “small box” (with seals in it) and the high gateway in Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana are symbols of identity and power. The utilization of lighting is similar to that of Death of a Salesman. They both have a special time span: Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana jumps from one period to another: the Cooperative Movement, the Great Leap Forward, the GCR, the Reform and Opening-up, and together with the protagonist’s obsession with land as the clues, employing flashbacks to narrate the story, while Death of a Salesman narrates a story within two days during which many anecdotes are carried out through fantasies and recalls. The playwright Liu Jinyun once said at a conference, “In recent years, modern Euramerican plays and performances have impressed me strongly. This feeling is just like opening the window and breathing fresh air, offering suggestions to me. I set sights on something ‘new’ ... Any methods can be employed for me. For example, I have never thought of such methods before like symbolism, expressionism, stream of consciousness, etc.”[47] During a symposium on Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana, Wang Yusheng said, “The appearance of Qi Yongnian, the landlord’s ghost is similar to the emergence of Salesman’s brother ‘Ben.’”[48] In the chapter “Experiment Drama in Twentieth Century Chinese Literature and Modernism Trend” of a college textbook, Tang and Chen said, “The drama of Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana is strongly influenced by western expressionistic drama which takes characters’ stream of consciousness, emphasizing externalizing characters’ deeper minds to visualized stage images. The ghost’s appearance in Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana is close to that of Karel Capek’s Mother and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.”[49] Ding Chunhua’s “The Comparison Between Death of a Salesman and Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana” (Zhejiang Business Technology Institute Journal, 2002, Issue 1) and Wu Ge’s “Chinese Dream and American Dream: Death of a Salesman and Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana” (Artistic Drama, 2002, Issue 4) have stated their opinions from their themes and artistic expressions. Before and after the performance of Death of a Salesman in China, many other playwrights undertook experimental techniques. For example, Ma Zhongjun (an avant-garde playwright born in 1957), and Jia Hongyuan’s Hot Currents Outside (the 1980 best play about a brother and sister quarreling about their deceased elder brother’s pension), employing transparent stage from which the dead could break through the wall with freedom. “This technique obviously stems from Arthur Miller’s famous play Death of a Salesman.”[50] Besides, there are many other plays using ghosts such as Gao Xingjian’s Alarm Signal (1983, a play about train robbers involving many modern techniques as recalls, mental imaginations and symbolist method) and Wild Men (1985, a play about an archaeologist looking for wild men with modern skills of inner thoughts and multitrack), Liu Shugang’s (a playwright born in 1940, president of the Central Experimental Theater) A Deadman’s Call On the Living (1983, a play about a passenger killed on a bus and the ghost coming back to reality to pay visits to the living), Su Shuyang’s Taiping Lake (1986, a play about the deceased famous writer Lao She returning to witness the world), as well as Wang Zifu’s (a play born in 1947in Beijing) Red River Valley (1996, a play about a victim of the GCR coming back to invest a business to cut down trees but interrupted and haunted by a ghost), etc. Conclusion Miller’s "tragedies of common man,” offering criticism of society and exploring character’s psychology, greatly broadened the horizon of Chinese dramatic circle immediately after his plays entered China. His two visits to China brought about brand-new concepts and atmospheres to Chinese stage. He draws more attention to society and family with conscience and responsibility, reevaluates the essence of humanity, combines modern techniques like “stream of consciousness” with realistic drama creation, explores characters’ inner changes, and criticizes social inequality through the disillusion of dream. The consistency between Miller and Chinese dramatists’ interest in social problem drama makes his plays much easier to be performed, understood, accepted and influential in China. Integrating with their own dramatic concepts, Chinese artists have created Chinese-style expressionist plays (such as Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana and Sangshuping Chronicle). However, influence is not unidirectional. “The communicativeness within literary receptive activities reflects mainly in the ‘backflow’ or feedback to writers of readers’ aesthetic experience.”[51] Miller found a lot worth learning during his stay in China, for instance, supposition and stylization in classical Chinese operas. Zuolin helped Miller understand “Freestyle Theater.” He even utilized these techniques of opera into his own plays as soon as he returned home. While directing Death of a Salesman, he employed the technique of “similarity in spirit” of Chinese opera. Through the repeated performances of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible in 21st century and more scholars reviewing Miller and his works, Arthur Miller’s influence in China has become more and more extensive.[52] Wu Wenquan is a Professor and PhD of English literature at School of Foreign Studies, Nantong University, Jiangsu, China. He earned his PhD in Nanjing University in the study field of contemporary American drama in China. He has published in journals like Foreign Literature Studies, Contemporary Foreign Literature and Drama in China. His current study is on Tennessee Williams and his works. Chen Li is a graduate student of English literature at School of Foreign Studies, Nantong University, Jiangsu, China. Zhu Qinjuan is a lecturer of English literature at School of Foreign Studies, Yancheng Teachers’ University, Jiangsu, China. [1]The Great Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) is a political movement led by Mao Zedong to mistakenly criticize bourgeois mentality and culture. Lin Biao (a general, and Mao’s successor, later died in an air crash) and the Gang of Four (including Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, Yao Wenyuan, Zhang Chunqiao, and Wang Hongwen) assisted Mao to put China into a disorder. During these ten years of upheaval, millions of students joined great parades and followed Mao’s order to work in poor border areas and countryside. And millions of officials and intellectuals were persecuted and Chinese traditional culture was greatly damaged. [2] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garpett Barden and John Cumming (Beijing: China Social Sciences Publishing House, 1999. Reprinted from the English Edition by New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1975), 154. [3] Yue Daiyun, Comparative Literature and Chinese Modern Literature (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 1987), 44. [4] Ibid., 57. [5] Su Shuyang, “People Will Reach a Great Harmony: A Talk with American Playwright Arthur Miller,” Reading 1 (1979): 119-22, esp. 119. (Su Shuyang, born in 1938, is a Chinese writer who published his famous plays as Loyal Hearts and Taiping Lake and a novel Homeland.) [6] Ibid., 120. [7] Arthur Miller and Inge Morath, Chinese Encounters (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979), 13. [8] Su Shuyang, 120. [9] Ibid., 120. [10] Ibid., 121. [11] Miller and Morath, Chinese Encounters, 8. [12] Ibid., 7. [13] Ibid., 15. [14] Soon after, Sun Huizhu and Gong Boan wrote an article (“On the Free-style Drama of Zuolin Huang,” The Art of Drama 4 (1983), 8) to describe the different understanding and conflicts on the idea of “Xieyi (Free-style) Drama” between the two dramatists, “Huang Zuolin explained, ‘The Chinese character of ‘drama’ is made up of two parts of ‘vacant’ and ‘spear’, being real and false should both be suitable. Being real is not drama and being not real is not art. Acquiring emotion and meaning is both drama and art.’ On hearing this, Miller was at a loss. Huang continued, ‘We must find the inner truth, the essence of the real world, their connections and feelings. Then take it out from the superficial matters.’ To enable Miller to know the real meaning of Free-style Drama, Zuolin invited Miller to watch traditional Kunju opera The Tale of the White Serpent. Sure enough, Miller appreciated the play and said to Zuolin that the west realistic drama was much less colorful and exciting.” [15] Dong Leshan. “Arthur Miller Reviewing Loyal Hearts, Cai Wenji and The Other Shore,” Reading 2 (1979), 77. [16] Miller and Morath, Chinese Encounters, 93. [17] Ibid., 94. [18] Ibid., 95. [19] Chen Liangting, “Words after Translation,” Selected Plays by Arthur Miller (Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Press, 1979), 249. [20] Gu Zhichuan, “Replies on the New Senior High School Textbook of Chinese,” http://www.360doc.com/content/11/0328/05/503199_105231591.shtml (accessed 19 October 2008). [21] Cheng Yan, “The Appealing Art: On the Performance of The Crucible,” Shanghai Drama 5 (1981), 18. [22] Ibid., 19. [23] Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 348. [24] Guo Jide, “Arthur Miller and His The Crucible,” American Literature Special Issue (1981), 74. [25] Wu Peiyuan and Hu Chengyuan, “On The Crucible Directed by Zuolin,” Foreign Drama 2 (1982), 41. [26] Ibid., 42. [27] Liu Xiaochun, “The News in Spring,” Drama 2 (2002), 141. [28] Gao Huibing, “The Shangshuping Chronicles and the Mystery of Imagery,” in A Study of Xu Xiaozhong’s Directing Art, ed. Lin Yinyu (Beijing: Chinese Drama Publishing House, 1991), 188. [29] Xu Xiaozhong, “Changes in Combining and Connecting,” (Part I and II) Drama Journal 5 (1988), 43. [30] Ding Zhou, a journalist of China Construction reported on the visit of Miller, “The similar share of human feelings brought the aged American salesman from New York to Britain, Mosco, Rome, Oslo, Sydney, and Tokyo. And now, he comes to Beijing with heavy pace and same heavy case of commodity samples.” (Ding Zhou, “Review on the Spoken Drama Death of a Salesman,” China Construction 8 (1988), 25). [31] Ibid., 5. [32] Ibid. [33] The Chinese idea of Wangzichenglong (“high hopes for one’s child”) and the expectations for the sons in Death of a Salesman match each other. Miller often commented on this point, “What surprised me is that the parents’ expectations for the children are very Chinese way of thinking. They called it ‘high hopes for one’s child’, ie., hoping the children to succeed… Therefore, when Happy said life is a game, ie., to be No 1. Chinese audiences are the first to get the meaning of these words.”（See David Richards, “Arthur Miller, Survivor,” Manchester Guardian Weekly (Mar. 25, 1984), 17） [34] Yuan Henian expressed his counterviews on the sex scenes being too strict. He pointed out that the two sex scenes in the restaurant and hotel are restrained and sex is always a taboo in Chinese literature and art. (See: Yuan Henian, “ ‘Death of a Salesman’ in Beijing,” Chinese Literature (Oct., 1983), 108-9) [35] Ibid., 252-53. [36] “Stones Borrowed from Other’s Hills: A Forum on the Performance of Death of a Salesman,” Drama Newspaper 7 (1983), 42. [37] See: Tan Aiqing, “ ‘Death of a Salesman’ in Beijing,” China Reconstructs (August, 1983), 26. [38] Miller, Timebends: A Life, 184. [39] Ibid., 185. [40] Miller’s directing his Death of a Salesman in China and his Salesman in Beijing (a diary of his directing experience published in the US) received warm responses in the US. The Wall Street Journal reported Miller’s play and Miller’s Salesman in Beijing on April 26, 1984. Meanwhile, Broadway staged Death of a Salesman again, starring Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman. It was another big hit, bringing about more reviews and essays on the play. Next comes the 1998 performances of the play in Goodman Theater, Chicago, and the following year, it was moved to the Broadway. [41] Ying Ruocheng, “The Stage Image Creation of Willy Loman and Others,” Guangming Daily (June 3, 1983), 3. [42] Zhu Lin, “A Hard but Pleasant Performance: Experience of Acting Linda,” Drama Studies 1 (1984), 12-13. [43] Ibid. [44] See Zhu Xu, “I Act Charlie: Records of Rehearsing Death of a Salesman,” Drama Studies 1 (1984), 14-17. [45] Rui Tao, “Notes on Rehearsing Death of a Salesman,” The People’s Daily (May 8, 1983), 7. [46] Huang Zuoliang, “The Exciting Performance in May: After Seeing Death of a Salesman,” Drama Journal 6 (1983), 8. [47] “Exploring the New and Thriving the Drama Creation,” Literary Studies 1 (1988), 44. [48] “Five People on The Nirvana of Gouerye,” Drama Review 1 (1987), 9. [49] Tang Zhengxu and Chen Houcheng, 20th Century Chinese Literature and Western Modern Literature (Beijing: The People Publishing House, 1992), 609. [50] Wang Xinmin, The History of Contemporary Chinese Drama (Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press, 2000), 216. [51] Zhu Liyuan, Aesthetics of Reception (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 1989), 175-76. [52] Huizhu Sun and Bo'an Gong, "On the Free-style Drama of Zuolin Huang," The Art of Drama 4 (1983), 8. "Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China" by Wu Wenquan, Chen Li, and Zhu Qinjuan ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 27, Number 3 (Fall 2015) ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Jim Bredeson Editorial Assistant: Kyueun Kim Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Bill Demastes Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “Twisting the Dandy: The Transformation of the Blackface Dandy in Early American Theatre” by Benjamin Miller “West of Broadway: the Rockefeller Foundation and American Theatre in the 1930s” by Malcolm Richardson “Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China” by Wu Wenquan, Chen Li, and Zhu Qinjuan www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Twisting the Dandy: The Transformation of the Blackface Dandy in Early American Theatre West of Broadway: the Rockefeller Foundation and American Theatre in the 1930s Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Roger Tang 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 Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Roger Tang By Published on May 23, 2022 Download Article as PDF Artistic Statement Roger Tang has been an advocate and champion of Asian American theatre ever since he found himself a dormmate of noted playwright David Henry Hwang. Not being able to match him in talent, he decided through sheer persistence to match him as a promoter of Asian American theatre: as the creator of the Asian American Theatre Revue , one of the foremost Asian American information resources on the web, as the founder of the aa-drama listserv, a forerunning email list linking Asian American artists across the country, as a producer introducing new Asian American works to the Pacific Northwest, and as a board member for the Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists. Throughout all this, his guiding principle is to see what exists out there and what doesn’t. If something doesn’t exist, then he will fill the gap, whether it’s humor, legendary heroes, or Asian American bodies themselves. All photos in this essay except for Figure 3 are by Roger Tang. Figure 3 used with permission from the Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists (CAATA). Section I Arising at the same time as the Black Power and Third World movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the Asian American theatre movement was part of the political formation of a pan-ethnic Asian American coalition on the West Coast. Asian American theatres demand recognition of Asian Americans as inherently valuable and allow Asian American perspectives, values, and art to flourish in a way that would not be possible at primarily white institutions. As institutions, Asian American theatres meet community needs for solidarity, advocacy, and artistic expression, particularly for artists early in their careers. Still, having a home of our own is just the beginning for Asian American artists. In my work with the aa-drama listserv and the Asian American Theatre Revue , I created forums where people gather to learn what other artists were doing and meet kindred souls. Emails crisscross the country as artists network to brainstorm solutions to common problems. The Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists (CAATA) similarly began as a way to create these homes on a larger scale, using the listserv and the Revue to track down and assemble previously unknown artists and groups. In 1999, there was a convention in Seattle that brought together Asian American artists from Los Angeles, New York City, and other parts of the country. Then, in September 2003, six Asian American theatre companies attended a gathering sponsored by Theater Communications Group. These companies were the largest and most stable of the dozen companies that existed at that time: Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, East West Players, Ma-Yi Theater, the National Asian American Theatre Company, Second Generation, and Mu Performing Arts. These six groups began discussions to hold the first national Asian American theatre conference, which younger groups such as Los Angeles’s Artists at Play and Chicago’s Silk Road Rising were able to attend. Spearheaded by Tim Dang of East West Players, “Next Big Bang: The First Asian American Theater Conference” took place in Los Angeles in June 2006, followed by the first national festival in New York City in June 2007. This was the genesis of CAATA, a collective of Asian American theatres, leaders, and artists who collaborate to inspire learning; share resources; promote a healthy, sustainable artistic ecology; and work toward social justice, artistic diversity, cultural equity, and inclusion. Each ConFest (Conference Festival) features a wide array of offerings that include academic panels, artists’ roundtables, staged readings, and full productions, often one-person shows. This palette of offerings assured Asian American artists that they were not alone and that their feelings were valid. There were also opportunities to discuss solutions to common problems, such as combatting yellowface and diversifying a previously all-white talent pool. Conferences and festivals have since been hosted in Minneapolis (2008), New York City (2009), Los Angeles (2011), Philadelphia (2014), Ashland with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (2016), and Chicago with DePaul University (2018). These have proven to be especially popular among young and emerging artists who seize on the opportunities ConFests create to connect with established theatres and artists from across the country. A welcome byproduct was the formation and strengthening of new, local networks that carried on the grassroots organizing ConFest promotes. Chicago began a regular series to present new works by local playwrights. Philadelphia saw the formation of the Philadelphia Asian Performing Artists group, which has now presented its own multi-day regional conference, complete with a slate of readings, panels, and festival offerings. This sense of connection is cultivated and expanded upon by attendees after the physical ConFest moves to other cities. Section II ConFests enable Asian American theatre makers and scholars to connect with and reflect on history, whether directly with canonical playwrights or thoughtfully with the constituency of an ever-evolving Asian America. In the most obvious sense, leaders in the field (like David Henry Hwang, Rick Shiomi, and Rajiv Joseph) come to speak and attendees get to pick their brains about their work and the history created. Here, in Figure 1, from the 2008 ConFest in Minneapolis is a panel of longtime figures in Asian American theatre: David Henry Hwang ( M. Butterfly , Soft Power ), Lloyd Suh ( American Hwangap , The Chinese Lady ), and Chay Yew ( A Language of Their Own , Question 27, Question 28) . Nothing beats hearing from the source that 75% of the material in Yellow Face was true events that occurred around M. Butterfly and Miss Saigon . Figure 1. Photo by Roger Tang. This sense of connection extends to more individualized exercises that link the personal to the larger events of Asian American theatre history. For example, a regular exercise at ConFest is to line up attendees by which decade they entered Asian American theatre; the groupings tend to show that most of the attendees joined very recently (leaving me and other CAATA board members in the outskirts with other “old-timers”). Another interesting exercise in the 2006 ConFest in Los Angeles saw attendees generating The Timeline, a record of events in Asian American theatre history, both in general importance and personal importance (Figure 2). This timeline is now available online (and updated) at the CAATA website and the Asian American Theatre Revue . Figure 2. Photo by Roger Tang. Finally, these connections have broadened in recent years. Asian American theatre originally centered on Japanese American, Chinese American, and Filipino American artists. Over the years, that focus has expanded to Korean Americans and Southeast Asian Americans, as immigration policies and histories changed and new artists emerged. As a matter of policy, the CAATA Board maintains the organization as a big house, welcome not only to those who want to be in coalition but also to those who choose not to be. This harkens back to the origins of the creation of Asian American identity, where Filipino Americans, Japanese Americans, and Chinese American formed coalitions that emphasized shared experiences and politics. This also reflects the voluntary nature of this identity, with each group entitled to self-determination to join or to focus on their own needs. ConFest backed this up by organizing regular pre-conference activities aimed at specific groups with whom to form connections. In 2007, pre-conference events were aimed at South Asian American artists. In 2016, the pre-conference was devoted to Middle Eastern and North African artists. For the current ConFest, CAATA is focusing on Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders as groups needing an uplift and whose issues are distinct from Asian Americans as a whole; for example, in Hawai‘i, various Asian American groups are actually settlers on indigenous land. Section III Another current that runs through CAATA and ConFest is social justice, both on stage and off. In the industry towns of Los Angeles and New York City, much of the impetus for Asian American theatres stemmed from employment issues—casting (or lack thereof) and stereotyping on film, television, and stage. In cities such as Seattle and San Francisco, where Asian American political identity was born, issues of racial injustice were also prominent; representation on stage was seen as both a political and artistic statement. This made Asian American stages a natural home for plays like Paper Angels and Gold Watch , which dealt with the injustices inflicted on Asian Americans throughout history such as racist immigration laws and the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans. Theatre artists in all cities easily navigated the stage and the streets in matters of social justice, as many had day jobs as activists and advocates for housing and employment while taking the stage at night. Recent ConFests have seen a return to this call for social justice. In 2016 (Figure 3), ConFest attendees replicated the 1921 march in downtown Ashland Oregon by the Ku Klux Klan but replaced the Klan members with Asian Americans, African Americans, Indigenous people, and other marchers from the global majority. This was an optimal blend of the theatric and the activist. In 2018 in Chicago, ConFest attendees acted more directly and joined Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) at their invitation in a protest against the Aloha Poke chain and their attempt to trademark “Aloha” as its intellectual property (Figure 4). Figure 3. Photo by the Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists (CAATA). Figure 4. Photo by Roger Tang. Section IV ConFest attendees form a sense of community (that is too often denied in their home bases) that blossoms into something fuller once there is face-to-face contact. There is a substantial uptick in social media following meetings, as members make Facebook friends and exchange Twitter handles. Pockets of more specialized groups such as the Mixed Asian American Artists Alliance begin to sustain specialized interests, and existing geography-based groups such as the Bubble Tea group for Chicago activities and the Network for Asian American Theatre Professionals – L.A. get an influx of out-of-area members (possibly to check out potential areas where they might move). Children and families form a consistent part of the ConFest scenery (gotta start them young in theatre!), as seen in this shot (Figure 5) from the 2011 Los Angeles gathering. Discussions of theatre life with children have been consistently part of the conversation at ConFests, and of course, food always plays a part in bringing people together and bonding (Figure 6, also from the 2011 ConFest). Figure 5. Photo by Roger Tang. Figure 6. Photo by Roger Tang. Section V ConFests present fully realized works on stage, allowing Asian American artists chances to see works that have yet to reach their part of the country. With careful consideration, delegates of the CAATA Board through the ConFest Committee select a variety of work that span forms (from solo works to large casts), ethnic groups (East Asian and South Asian to Western Asian and Pacific Islanders), and subject matter (remounted Western classics to Hawaiian dance pieces to reflections on September 11, 2001). These works act as test labs for the future, not only for Asian American theatre but for drama in general. Playwrights network with each other and other ConFest attendees. Here in Figure 7, in 2011 in Los Angeles, we see playwrights Qui Nguyen ( Vietgone, Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon ) and Lauren Yee ( Cambodian Rock Band , King of the Yees , The Great Leap ) on the panel with director Jeff Liu to discuss their work. A decade later, they have gone on to win major awards and become some of the most produced playwrights in the United States. From Minneapolis in 2008, we see SIS Productions in Figure 8 produce an episode from their 20-part Sex in Seattle romantic comedy that was a smash hit running from 2000 to 2012, a clear harbinger for the success of the movie Crazy Rich Asians in 2018. Leah Nanako Winkler’s Two Mile Hollow , a parody of dysfunctional white family dramas, received its first reading in 2016 and has now played in dozens of theatres from coast to coast; Figure 9 is the cast photo of the reading in Ashland, Oregon. Figure 7. Photo by Roger Tang. Figure 8. Photo by Roger Tang. Figure 9. Photo by Roger Tang. What is presented is unpredictable but often signals new pathways for the field. Here in Figure 10, in New York City in 2009, we see Soo-Jin Lee and perennial ConFest artist Kristina Wong perform in APACUNTNY. And in Figure 11, we have Asian Steampunk Cowboys from 2016, as we see May Nguyen Lee and Denny Le perform a scene from The Tumbleweed Zephyr. Both of these works defy conventions of mainstream American and conventional Asian American theatre. APACUNTNY attacks the idea of the model minority by embracing enthusiastic, frank Asian American female sexuality, and The Tumbleweed Zephyr seizes tropes like the lone wolf bandit and the Wild West train robbery and reshapes them to place them squarely in the Asian American theatre canon. Shows such as these point to new directions, themes, and genres for Asian American theatres to pursue. Figure 10. Photo by Roger Tang. Figure 11. Photo by Roger Tang. Section VI ConFests remain a vital part of the future of Asian American theatre. Due to the continuing waves of the COVID–19 pandemic, ConFest has chosen a virtual presentation again in spring 2022, but the focus remains on the work of Kānaka Maoli and how Asian American artists can work with them. To fill the need for connection, there will be virtual happy hours set up to link Hawaiian theatre artists with their counterparts in the continental United States. Future ConFests remain on the agenda (perhaps ConFest will again return to Hawai‘i to learn about the lands of Indigenous artists), and CAATA will move forward to highlight different parts of the North American continent, less visible aspects of Asian America, emerging artists, and other pressing new concerns. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Roger Tang is Executive Director of Pork Filled Productions (Seattle, WA), the Pacific Northwest’s oldest Asian American theatre. He has introduced the region to such authors as Qui Nguyen and Carla Ching and has presented the Pacific Northwest and world premieres of nearly a dozen plays, including his own She Devil of the China Seas . He is also Secretary of the Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists and the editor of the Asian American Theatre Revue ( www.aatrevue.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 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.

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

Watch Making of The Money Opera by Amitesh Grover at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. The film documents the making of Amitesh Grover’s THE MONEY OPERA, an immersive theatre production staged in an abandoned building produced by the Serendipity Arts Foundation, India. The show — performed by actors and real-life experts — plays out stories that reflect on the historical workings of money and capital in relation to the fragile performance traditions and ecology in India. Audiences discover several characters in the building including a child goddess, a ghost, a billionaire, a thief, a poet, a banker, a cross-dresser and several others, who tell real and unreal stories about the extent to which they go to survive in the system. In this 3hr. show, the audience chooses what they watch in this multi-storeyed space with multiple performances and installations. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Making of The Money Opera At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Amitesh Grover Theater This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, as well as screened in-person on May 20th. About The Film Country India Language English, Hindi Running Time 15 minutes Year of Release 2023 The film documents the making of Amitesh Grover’s THE MONEY OPERA, an immersive theatre production staged in an abandoned building produced by the Serendipity Arts Foundation, India. The show — performed by actors and real-life experts — plays out stories that reflect on the historical workings of money and capital in relation to the fragile performance traditions and ecology in India. Audiences discover several characters in the building including a child goddess, a ghost, a billionaire, a thief, a poet, a banker, a cross-dresser and several others, who tell real and unreal stories about the extent to which they go to survive in the system. In this 3hr. show, the audience chooses what they watch in this multi-storeyed space with multiple performances and installations. Produced by Serendipity Arts Foundation, India. Directed by Vaibhav Raj Shah About The Artist(s) Amitesh Grover (born 1980) is an award-winning theatre director and artist. His body of work includes more than 20 productions, which range from global performances connecting performers and spectators across continents to the most intimate pieces. His creations have been commissioned, co-produced, and presented internationally by renowned festivals and theatres. His work is driven by the desire to understand the workings of power in societies controlled by the logic of techno-capital and increasingly authoritarian political forces. He is based in New Delhi, India. Get in touch with the artist(s) amiteshgrover@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://amiteshgrover.com , https://www.facebook.com/amitesh.grover?mibextid=LQQJ4d, https://www.instagram.com/amitesh.grover?igsh=MWpmaDZubHprNDR2cw%3D%3D&utm_source=qr Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

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Erith Jaffe-Berg Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. Erith Jaffe-Berg By Published on April 8, 2021 Download Article as PDF Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative , edited by Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, presents a powerful, multifaceted record of historical and contemporary casting practices from leading American artists and scholars. The book casts an intentionally wide net, reflecting on how various communities, including Middle Eastern, Native American, African American, Latinx, as well as multilingual and disabled communities, have been impacted by the politics of casting. The book is relevant for theater artists, critics, administrators and educators of institutions that fund and produce theater. In Casting a Movement , the writers offer incisive analysis of the ways race and representation define meaning in the theatre, aiming to understand how race and racism have been reinforced and institutionalized through casting practices. Casting a Movement intentionally includes both theatre practitioners and scholars and opens with three introductory essays by Liesl Tommy, Syler, and Banks, respectively, which offer a framework and language for the subsequent 21 contributions. Reflecting on an award-filled career of directing on and off Broadway and television, Tommy underscores the importance of language in articulating social and political nuances that inform questions of casting. Syler emphasizes that “casting is inherently a political act” that is never neutral because the decision about which bodies to include already communicates information that “evokes cultural assumptions associated with skin color, gender, sexuality, and ability” (4). Banks revisits the metaphor of “the welcome table,” present in both a Spiritual and James Baldwin’s unfinished final play, as an aspiration for an inclusive space (both physical and ideational) in which artists of various backgrounds are invited to engage in each other’s art-making. In this essay originally written in 2012, Banks interrogates such terms as “nontraditional” or “color-blind casting” that anticipate the powerful expressions of “We See You, White American Theater” ( www.weseeyouwat.com ) published in 2020. Following these introductory essays, the book’s first part traces a trajectory from the language of “colorblind casting” to “color conscious casting.” Appropriately, this first part begins with Ayanna Thompson, whose writing about Shakespeare and classical productions has exposed the persistent falsity of “colorblindness” in theatre pedagogy (34). Next, Justin Emeka traces his own journey as a director: “[b]y reimagining the presence of Black and Brown life within the context of Eurocentric plays, I use theater as a tool to teach people to look for Black and Brown life where they have been trained by omission to ignore it” (47). In the third essay Brian Eugenio Herrera discusses the persistence of “whitewashing,” or the use of white actors in casting when the roles were originally written for non-white characters as a pernicious mechanism of erasure (51). In the volume’s second part, Arab-American playwright Yussef El Guindi, artistic Director Torange Yeghiazarian (Golden Thread Productions), and scholar Michael Malek Najjar consider challenges for Middle Eastern American/North African American actors in the academy, in training programs, and in the professional setting (72). As Najjar puts it in reference to August Wilson’s touchstone essay “The Ground on Which I Stand:” “Wilson’s view on African American theatre [about the pernicious effect of colorblind casting] is a helpful guide for other minoritarian theater communities” (76). Aptly, since actor Christine Bruno points out, “[d]isabled people are America’s largest minority, representing twenty-five percent of the population,” the book’s third part focuses on issues of casting and disability. Bruno, Carrie Sandahl, and Victoria Lewis consider efforts by advocacy groups on behalf of actors of color and those with disabilities (85). Sandahl makes a clarion call for those in the academic and professional theatres to take shared “responsibility for improving opportunities for theater artists along the whole pipeline”—from educational programs to the theatre, film and television industries (94). The book’s fourth part widens its perspective even further to address casting and multilingual performance, an often-neglected topic. This part, opens with a poetic rumination on storytelling and cultural ownership by playwright Caridad Svich. Next Eunice S. Ferreira and Ann Elizabeth Armstrong argue the benefits of multilingual theater for developing an audience attuned to and welcoming of difference. Reflecting the growing role of Native American theatre in the last decade, the fifth part highlights the pluralism of Native American theater voices. Ojibwe and Oneida performance artist Ty Defore (Gilzhig), echoes the previous section and offers a poem, “Journey,” that suggests paths for greater connection across diverse communities. This is an especially important chapter symbolically and ideationally for a book that calls for the imperative of intersectionality in addressing world challenges. Jean Bruce Scott and Randy Reinholz (Choctaw) discuss the evolution of the Native Voices at the Autry as a theatre that places Native narratives centrally to create “a more inclusive dialogue about what it means to be ‘American’” (147). Courtney Elkin Mohler articulates decolonial practices in contemporary Native theater. In the sixth part, the book turns to questions of stereotype in casting processes. Mei Ann Teo, for instance, acknowledges in our historic moment “a sea change” when “Asian American and Asian heritage stories are finally being told in the mainstream” (173). In powerful affirmation of intersectionality, Dorinne Kondo analyzes what she calls the “reparative creativity” of artists of color who use “multiracial collaboration and cross-racial casting” as strategies of resistance to exclusion in the theater industry and society (177). “Refusing a neat ending,” in her words, Donatella Galella sees an ongoing process of fighting for improved conditions of people of color and “cross-racial casting as a struggle over power—representation and the redistribution of roles” (191). The book’s final part reverberates with many of the themes across essays, asserting a politics of inclusion and visibility evoked by Canadian/American playwright Elaine Ávila’s title “Reaparecer” (reappear). The section ends with Priscilla Page’s essay on Collidescope: Adventures in pre- and Post-Racial America and Brandi Wilkins Catanese’s further analysis of the ongoing performance project— juxtaposing it with Daniel Banks’s working through of the welcome table. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative is a timely work whose significance goes beyond the discipline of theater to add to the national conversation on institutionalized racism. Read alongside recent political, social and artistic developments, including the Black Lives Matter movement, theatre closures precipitated by COVID-19 and the political upheavals of the Trump presidency, it remaps the field. How we want to return to theatre-making, how we will address questions of equity, diversity and inclusion in the face of persistent racism and institutionalized white supremacy are driving issues for the artist-writers in this important anthology. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ERITH JAFFE-BERG University of California, Riverside Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf 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 "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.