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Donatella Galella Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 1 Visit Journal Homepage Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity Donatella Galella By Published on November 6, 2019 Download Article as PDF Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity . Dorinne Kondo. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018; Pp. 376. Using dramaturgy, autoethnography, psychoanalysis, and critical race theory, Dorinne Kondo argues that performance shapes race in Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity . She stakes a claim to creativity as work that can imagine new ways of existing, but also reify the status quo and drain minoritarian life force. She builds on her previous book, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater , by theorizing racialized reception; restructuring the normative form of academic manuscripts; and examining plays by Anna Deavere Smith, David Henry Hwang, and herself. Kondo critiques how liberal humanism evacuates the uneven power dynamics of theatre, yet she ultimately insists on possibilities for progressive change. Worldmaking resembles a drama that demystifies theatrical and academic labor. In the Acknowledgements, Kondo considers the embodied, emotional conditions of writing this book. She shows the work. She organizes her theoretical interventions, dramaturgical analyses, and personal stories into an overture, chapters within three acts, and three entr’actes, culminating in her own original play, Seamless . Early on, Kondo defines an array of key terms. Taking seriously Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s understanding of racism as group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, Kondo theorizes “ racial affect , which enlivens some and diminishes others, and affective violence , especially in sites assumed to be far from racial violence,” like the theatre (11, italics in original). The unequal distribution of emotions accords with racial hierarchies. For instance, white spectators might laugh uproariously at Clybourne Park , Bruce Norris’s white reframing of A Raisin in the Sun , while spectators of color might shudder. Kondo cites psychoanalytical thinkers like Melanie Klein and Hanna Segal to theorize reparative mirroring, reparative criticism, and reparative creativity. In the first case, audience members of color can feel invigorated seeing representations of themselves on stage. Dramaturgs and other artists can enact reparative criticism and creativity by making plays more progressive and composing their own feminist, anti-racist artworks. Stressing collaboration, Kondo further offers the terms politics of affiliation and politics of agonistics to convey solidarity and struggle toward a more equitable world in and beyond the theatre. As Kondo lays out the field of theatrical production, she does not presume that readers already know details like how little playwrights earn for playwriting as opposed to screenwriting. She provides statistics and interview excerpts to demonstrate how resources go disproportionately to white men. Kondo speaks to scholars from a wide range of fields—Theatre and Performance Studies, Anthropology, Ethnic Studies—as well as practicing artists and students. In Act Two, Kondo applies her terms to her case studies, primarily Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993) and Yellow Face (2007). She contextualizes Anna Deavere Smith’s and David Henry Hwang’s careers as well as her relationships with them; she served as dramaturg for three of Smith’s plays— Twilight , House Arrest (1997), and Let Me Down Easy (2008)—and she has dialogued with Hwang in person and in her scholarship. Kondo devotes one chapter to Smith’s artistic process and political project. Smith interviews and performs as subjects involved with a particular event or theme, in this case, the Los Angeles uprisings after police assaulted Rodney King and were mostly exonerated for their anti-black violence. By embodying subjects across various identities, Smith grounds their experiences, demonstrates their relationality, and represents minoritized voices too often silenced in the theatre. Because Twilight presents different perspectives and no easy solutions to systemic oppression, the play models a nuanced history. At the same time, Kondo recognizes that some critics praised Twilight due to their interpretation of the play as celebrating power-free, individual-based common humanity. A highpoint of Worldmaking is when Kondo details her experiences as one of four dramaturgs for Twilight . Her behind-the-scenes account distinguishes various versions of the text, from the premiere at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, to the transfer to Broadway, to the adaptation for television; she also explains how dramaturgs gave feedback on Smith’s performances of the interviews. For example, she discusses how they switched the play’s last monologue to avoid letting audiences presume racial equity to be inevitable. Exemplifying a politics of affiliation and politics of agonistics, Kondo describes how she fought for the inclusion of Asian Americans to disrupt the black-white binary, represent Korean Americans, and challenge stereotypes. She even brought Smith to tears. But what she greatly admires about Smith is her willingness to be challenged. Another distinct pleasure of Worldmaking is Kondo’s style of storytelling. She recalls unexpectedly seeing Smith perform as herself (Kondo) and voluntarily handing dramaturg-director-producer Oskar Eustis five single-spaced pages of notes on Yellow Face . And the book reproduces these notes! The book underscores the major contributions of dramaturgs. For Kondo, “Dramaturgical critique deploys research, theory, and scholarship for reparative ends” (197). In her chapter on Yellow Face , Kondo articulates how David Henry Hwang makes and unmakes race, and she suggests that she might have influenced the final script for the Public Theater. Set against the 1990s Miss Saigon protests and U.S. yellow peril, the comedic docudrama follows playwright DHH dealing with his immigrant father, who longs for the American dream, and his own accidental casting of a white man to play an Asian American character. In the original East West Players staging, the play ended with a melding of the Chinese father and white actor, evoking an ethereal racial equality. After Kondo offered critiques of this power-evasive liberal fantasy, the revised Yellow Face underlined that fantasy as such and firmly connected anti-Chinese persecution with the father’s death. Kondo concludes the book with reparative creativity: her play Seamless and a chapter covering her journey with the play, including the racialized challenges of trying to persuade a professional theatre to produce it. The play centers on Diane Kubota, a lawyer grappling with the extent to which she can know her parents and their experiences of Japanese American internment, and, too, how gendered generational traumas affect her. Combining realism, direct address, fantasy sequences, and flashbacks, Seamless draws from Kondo’s life and raises questions about Asian American epistemology and ontology. Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity joins new, necessary scholarship reflecting on the work of minoritarian art such as After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, and the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization by Judith Hamera. In reading this book, I felt the reparative mirroring that Kondo theorizes, from her experiences of spectatorial affective violence to her centering of an Asian American woman in her play. Like DHH at the end of Yellow Face , Kondo reminds us, “And I go back to work, searching for my own face.” References Footnotes About The Author(s) Donatella Galella University of California, Riverside Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Devika Ranjan 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 Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress Devika Ranjan By Published on May 20, 2022 Download Article as PDF Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress. Elizabeth Son. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2018; Pp. 267. Elizabeth Son’s Embodied Reckonings focuses on activism by and around “comfort women” in disparate settings in South Korea and internationally. Through four case study chapters, Son’s empathetic ethnography depicts how reparations need not be institutionalized but can thrive in the hands of everyday people—namely, the survivors of military sexual violence and their supporters. The first study of the embodied practices of “comfort women,” Son’s award-winning book demonstrates the power of performance to enact presence, protest, and acts of care as a means of social healing. Son’s interdisciplinary perspective draws on cultural studies, performance theory, and intersectional feminist analysis to create a powerful, multifaceted portrait of restitution. Between 1932 and 1945, the Japanese military enslaved about 200,000 girls and young women; the majority were between 14 and 19 years old. The girls and women were trafficked to rape camps to serve the Japanese military, where they were sexually abused by between 10 to 40 men daily. Even after the war, survivors faced shame, ostracization, chronic injury, and lifelong trauma. Son holistically analyzes the redress movement in Korea and survivors’ complex post-war identities as “victim, survivor, living witness, halmeoni, history teacher, and peace protestor” (17). Many “comfort women”—Son uses this term in quotes to indicate its euphemistic and problematic nature—advocate for the “Japanese government’s acknowledgement of Japanese military sexual slavery, an official apology, and reparations” (xviii). The survivors’ demand for apology goes beyond monetary reparations; they have committed to donating any money to international survivors of sexual violence (18). Rather, their advocacy works to resolve “han, the Korean concept for the knotted feelings of resentment, sorrow, indignation, and injustice that built over years of hardship and oppression” (11). Son argues that activist-survivors’ “redressive acts,” or embodied practices, center their self-narratives within public space for multiple audiences, restoring their social status and commemorating their history. Chapter 1 provides an in-depth ethnography of the Wednesday Demonstrations in Seoul, the “longest running political demonstration in South Korea and one of the longest ongoing protests in the world” (28). The Wednesday Demonstrations, which take place in front of the Japanese Embassy, enact a weekly protest to uplift the survivors and their demands for apology from the Japanese government. Although there has not been official redress since the protests started in 1992, Son argues that the Wednesday Demonstrations meaningfully allow survivors an “opportunity to express their visceral feelings of han and to join others in calling for justice (29)”; they also counteract societal shame around “comfort women” by providing a visible platform for recognizing the victims of sexual slavery in intergenerational settings. Through sonic and physical disruption, the Wednesday Demonstrations provide “redressive acts,” staging protest, education, release, rejuvenation, critique, and international solidarity. In Chapter 2, Son discusses the Women’s Tribunal, a “symbolic international human rights tribunal” (71) created by feminist and human rights organizations. Held in Tokyo in 2000, the Women’s Tribunal aimed to restore survivors’ political and social status and dignity by giving them a legitimized day in court. Centering the testimonies of 33 survivors from North and South Korea, Taiwan, China, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Indonesia, and East Timor, international judges created a “legal case against Japan and produced a more complete history of Japanese military sexual slavery” (68). During the Tribunal, survivors challenged existing and limited legal frameworks through their embodied reactions such as fainting, revelations of scars, demonstrations of physical pain, and tears; their vulnerability and embodied practices prompted the court to consider “how to honor victims and their needs while judging guilt via traditional court processes that are not always friendly to victims” (68). The Women’s Tribunal attracted thousands of attendees who bore witness to the stories of the survivors, presenting redressive measures outside of normal state jurisdiction in legitimizing survivors’ experiences. It also created a model for a culture of public accountability for sexual violence during armed conflict, directly inspiring the 2010 Tribunal of Conscience for Women Survivors of Sexual Violence during the Armed Conflict in Guatemala (1960-96). In Chapter 3, Son compares three theatrical productions that focus on “comfort women” around the world. In Comfort Women / Nabi / Hanako (the name depends on the place and time of production), a grandmother must confront her repressed memories of being a “comfort woman” when her granddaughter introduces her to two survivors in New York. The play encourages transnational identification, indicates the ongoing nature of shame around “comfort women,” and suggests multiple survivors: some who hide their history from their own families, some who are public advocates. Trojan Women, a play by Bosnian-born director Aida Karic, brings Euripides’ tragedy in conversation with the “modern history of sexual violence against women and girls by the military of Imperial Japan” (121). The play used pansori, survivor testimony, movement, Euripides’ classic text, and ritualistic elements to invite European audiences to identify patterns of sexual violence throughout history. Finally, Bongseonhwa directly critiques Korean society for its silence, shame, and abuse of “comfort women” through its intergenerational story. Each performance emphasizes different aspects and cultural contexts of survivors’ experiences, yet all invite audiences to witness, reflect, and connect to how sexual violence against women recurs in wars and ripples across society. Chapter 4 analyzes international memorials to the survivors of military sexual slavery. The Bronze Girl, a statue that sits in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul highlights the age and vulnerability of the survivors who were abused in “comfort stations.” It also commemorates survivors’ years of activism for the Wednesday Demonstrations. The Bronze Girl is cared for by visitors who dress the statue for the weather, leave her gifts like shoes, flowers, and food, and touch her in reassurance. Son describes similar acts of care at memorials in the United States, including the Bronze Girl in California and a memorial in New Jersey, where visitors leave bouquets, tidy the lawns, or water shrubbery. These acts of care demonstrate international support, carrying on the protests against sexual slavery after the survivors pass away. While official apology from the Japanese government may never come to fruition, Son’s Embodied Reckonings demonstrates how redress can extend beyond state or institutional acts. This book’s transpacific lens considers how activism and performance, education, memory and community-building can teach subsequent generations about sexual violence, restore survivors’ dignity, and reimagine reparations, more broadly. In a world in which international politics often offers symbolic gestures in response to systemic and personal injustices, I am inspired by the embodied actions of “comfort women” to advocate, educate, and heal locally and internationally. 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 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.

Rachel E. Bauer and Kristen M. Kalz Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the “Toxic Mound Tours” Rachel E. Bauer and Kristen M. Kalz By Published on May 21, 2020 Download Article as PDF On a chilly day in early April 2018, a group of sixteen people and one lovable dog met at a coffee house in St Louis, Missouri, in anticipation of the “Toxic Mound Tour.” Online, the tour was advertised as a performance art piece and an “educational field trip” to “see the realities of the landfill and other contaminated places west of the city.” [1] When our tour guide, performance artist Allana Ross, arrived, she was easy to spot in her khaki colored park ranger clothing, even without the “Toxic Mound Tours” sign she held. As we gathered around, she quickly introduced herself, then introduced her assistant and their dog, both of whom were outfitted in matching green jackets for the occasion. Before the tour began, the performer passed out tour brochures and white face masks to the group gathered around her. Most of us in the audience looked at each other with slightly worried expressions before she admitted that we did not need to wear masks for our safety, as our stay in each of the five locations would be brief. Even still, they served as a constant reminder of where we were going and the gravity of the area’s toxic legacy. As the contaminated areas we planned to visit were spread out across the greater St. Louis area, we were encouraged to introduce ourselves to one another and carpool. And just like that, we traveled to the first destination on our toxic tour. In her book, Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States , Jan Cohen-Cruz states, “A community-based production is usually a response to a collectively significant issue or circumstance. It is a collaboration between an artist or ensemble and a ‘community’.” [2] The source is not the artist, but the community that surrounds the artist. [3] For Ross, community is defined in two ways: the people and the environment. In part, the community is defined by the suburban areas south and west of St. Louis and the residents who lived or live in/around the areas affected by contamination. Ross’s community-based work is “less about homogeneous communities and more about different participants exploring a common concern together,” [4] the common concern being the past, current, and future impacts of the toxic sites on the people who reside nearby. However, Ross’s performance not only elevated the significance of place/environment but also stressed the importance of being in each space—to explore it and experience it—as central to her approach. In her artist statement, she writes: I am questioning our relationship to nature itself—the culture of nature that we teach to each other through museum diorama, through titillating landscape calendars and all-expense-paid eco-adventures. A public tour of the mounds is a method of activating the viewer outside of the gallery setting as a participant in the re-invention of the culture of nature. [5] Ross grounded her performance in place, reaffirming Cohen-Cruz’s definition of community-based performance as “a local act in two senses: a social doing in one’s particular corner of the world and an artistic framing of that doing for others to appreciate.” [6] Ross privileged the environment itself and the lasting effect(s) that humans have had on the ecosystem(s) of the area. Her piece worked within the realm of environmental activism, which brought attention to the human consumption of nature and its subsequent contamination. [7] Additionally, she questioned notions of the “individual” in communities, as the environment affected people in different ways. Seemingly separate individuals become connected through location and the sense of belonging in a community. To explore toxic places, we are asked to think about the surrounding community and to consider what it must be like living there. In this essay, we explore how Ross’s performance uses place and environment, as well as a historical understanding of the sites, to illuminate the lasting impacts of environmental contamination and the very real effects it has had on local communities through the five sites on her Toxic Mound Tour. Since the 1960s, performance scholars including Richard Schechner, Una Chaudhuri, Elinor Fuchs, Wendy Arons, Stephen Bottoms, Ric Knowles, and Theresa May, among others, have theorized the practice of performance known as environmental theatre and site-specific performance, as one rooted in the place, and perhaps even the community, in which the performance occurs. [8] Tim Cresswell describes place as: constituted through reiterative social practice—place is made and remade on a daily basis. Place provides a template for practice—an unstable stage for performance. Thinking of place as performed and practiced can help us think of place in radically open and non-essentialized ways where place is constantly struggled over and remained in practical ways. [9] Furthermore, as Nick Kaye writes, site-specific art is the “exchange between the work of art and the places in which its meanings are defined.” [10] “Key to this,” as Baz Kershaw states, “becomes understanding how performance is an integral part of global ecology and eco-systems.” [11] Looking at the scholarship of Nicola Shaughnessy and Laura Levin as lenses through which to examine toxic tours allows us to further contextualize the importance of each tour site as both the set and setting. Shaughnessy looks at the possibility of “place as an event” through which the “[s]ite and place are also integral to visual and live arts practices which have moved beyond the quiet curbs of gallery spaces, to question who art is for, where it can be staged and to explore the experience of spectatorship.” [12] Ross’s attempt to “[activate] the viewer outside of the gallery setting” [13] is thus attempting to “contribute to the process of making space meaningful through practices which explore (and challenge) how we experience the environment we inhabit.” [14] Ross’s work can be also interpreted through Laura Levin’s concepts of “environmental unconsciousness” and her discussions of camouflage. Levin’s discussion of place-based, environmental performance engages with the idea that environment becomes a part of the performance that cannot be overlooked: “recognizing the independence of the non-human is not simply a philosophical project but also a political one … This framing of site-specificity provides access to … ‘environmental unconscious,’ rendering perceptible those aspects of environment that we habitually engage but routinely overlook.” [15] As such, Ross’s tour invited us into these spaces that are overlooked, whether because they have been remediated into consumable spaces or because they were so unassuming that no one realizes their significance. In recent years, there has been greater public interest in ecoadventure and ecotourism, which seek to counteract or eliminate the wastefulness of traveling by combining experiences with environmentally friendly and/or sustainable practices. [16] From a performance perspective, Scott Magelssen’s scholarship highlights recent trends in the tourism industry that “[implement] attractions that privilege explicitly performative participation by immersing tourists in living, fictive scenarios.” [17] This move towards more “authentic” experiences of tourism includes participants taking on a character and getting into the action, a move away from the passive tourism experiences that ask visitors to see and observe and then to depart without much interaction with the location. [18] For a group of strangers to take a toxic tour, we had to be willing to confront and interrogate our own ideas of health and safety, and take on, even for a few hours, the environmental risk that others are asked to undertake every day. Here, the place is central, and rather than being given a part to play, people on toxic tours are not in simulated environments; they are asked to navigate action as it comes. Contaminated places are most often found in low income and minority communities, existing away from and outside of the dominant culture, and as such, they have been referred to as sacrifice zones where both people and waste are pushed to the margins and seen as dirty, undesirable, contaminated, and/or not valuable. [19] Phaedra Pezzullo argues toxic tours typically “are noncommercial expeditions into areas that are polluted by toxins,” and are often led by community members, many of which may be sick, in hopes that doing so will raise awareness and lead to social change. [20] By willingly entering places that may be harmful, toxic tours not only challenge traditional notions of tours and/or being a tourist, which is most often associated with travel, beauty, pleasure, but they also blur the lines between “nature” and “culture,” acknowledging the ways in which each influence one another. [21] To take Ross’s toxic tour, then, is to use performance to subvert existing ideas of toxic tours as well as place and location. First, Ross did not take on the persona of someone who was sick, but instead took on the role of an authoritative outsider. She took on the dress and authority of a park ranger or nature guide, a figure generally understood as one tasked with expertise, but also one with knowledge of historical significance of place and the importance of the connection between humans and the land that sustains them. Assuming the role of expert was a particularly meaningful move in part because of our culture’s reliance on experts to help define what is safe/unsafe. Her character acted as our guide not only in traveling to each location, but also in guiding the audience through the experience: where to walk, where to look, the important features worth noting, and the site’s historical background, as it was often difficult to determine the significance of each place without her expert eye. Her character was, in fact, the only “artificial” part of the performance; the audience and the locations we visited were very much real. Second, the tour took us to sites in various stages of remediation; in some cases, the very notion of toxicity and contamination remained contested, as there were widespread disagreements about the safety of the sites, but in other cases a former contaminated site had been transformed into a park for public enjoyment. At each location she interwove local history into her performance, gathered from both official government documents and the stories of residents. Finally, rather than being in marginalized communities and spaces, the tour stops were in predominately white and/or working-class neighborhoods. This is notable because unlike typical cases of environmental uncertainty, these sites have gained greater attention simply because these communities are thought about as safe, clean, and respectable places. Almost all in attendance were from the greater St. Louis area and most lived in communities relatively close to a specific site and attended the tour because they had not actually physically visited the sites. Everyone learned about the tour through an advertisement in a local Facebook group that discusses issues of community, toxicity, health, and safety, so attendees brought with them varying degrees of knowledge. The stops on the tour are public and can be visited independently, but Ross provided the background and historical significance of place which is so often hidden. Additionally, her performance as an expert, which was informative as much as it was paternalistic, provided a feeling of protectiveness, as the group explored these largely unknown to them sites. OUR GUIDE Unlike the audience members who wore basic, contemporary clothing, bundled in coats and scarves for the chilly, rainy day, Ross donned a wide-brimmed hat and an olive-khaki button-up shirt tucked into khaki pants. A wide brown belt and hiking boots completed her ensemble. While not exact in its replica, it was culturally recognizable as a costume reminiscent of those worn by park rangers in a US context. However, Ross called herself an “urban ranger” because it was not the vast wilderness or sprawling desert she guided us through; it was the suburban space around us. Instead of the park insignia or flags that adorn the uniforms of federal park workers, Ross’s “uniform” had only two embroidered patches: a colorful taco in front of a variation of the nuclear atom symbol and a skull with a ranger’s hat similar to the one worn by Ross herself. Given the hazardous and dangerous history that surrounded the sites on the tour ahead, the patches spoke not only to the macabre reality of touring such locations, even if for the purpose of raising environmental awareness, but also to Ross’s personality. As a ranger is tasked with the protection and preservation of lands for public use, Ross tasked herself with raising local awareness “[b]y inviting the audience to consider the history of these sites in a safe space removed from their threats—to peruse a brochure, to grab a postcard, to plan a visit.” [22] In doing so, she asked that we “reconsider [our] consumption of nature,” both in terms of the way these sites were contaminated by human interference and now, as nature had reclaimed, albeit artificially, the land for parks and recreation. [23] As there was considerable distance between sites, Ross created a Spotify playlist for the drive, entitled “Atomic Musical Collection.” The playlist, which played in the background, served as an intermission of sorts where the audience could reflect on the tour as it progressed. [24] Like a true guide, Ross provided a map with the “attractions” clearly marked, and we started an approximately five-hour tour organized in a caravan, all following Ross’s white SUV with a large sign on each side emblazoned with “Toxic Mound Tours” and the signature atomic star that adorned all of her materials. STOPS ALONG THE WAY Like many industrial cities in the U.S., the greater St. Louis area has a long and contested history of sites contaminated from a wide breadth of industrial activities. Four out of the five sites on the tour corresponded to St. Louis’ involvement with WWII and Cold War weapons production. Site #1 : Times Beach, MO The first stop on our tour was Route 66 State Park, formerly Times Beach, MO, a small resort town about thirty miles outside of St. Louis. In the early 1970s, the entire town became contaminated when its twenty-three miles of roads were sprayed with dioxin-contaminated waste oil, and it later became one of the nation’s first Superfund sites. [25] In the early 1980s, Congress passed “The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act” (CERLA), most commonly referred to as the “Superfund,” which created a tax on the chemical and petroleum industry. [26] The money generated by this tax was then used to clean up abandoned hazardous waste sites across the nation. In 1982, Times Beach was evacuated and residents were permanently relocated due to the high-level of contamination. Just a few short years later, the city was deemed uninhabitable and disincorporated by the state. As remediation was underway, all houses and buildings in the town were demolished and buried under a large mound at the park. Now, all that is left of this once thriving community is a large grassy mound, the faint outline of streets and roads hardly visible in parts of the park, and the last remaining building which now serves as the park’s visitor’s center. [27] The Superfund program has been met with widespread criticism since its inception from both industries and communities. As a result, in 1995, the tax was not renewed and “significant limits were put on EPA’s [Environmental Protection Agency] ability to perform cleanup work itself, and an increasing percentage of cleanups [were] being performed by PRPs [Potentially Responsible Parties]. EPA focused activity during this period and onward on ensuring that PRPs perform most of the cleanups, thus, saving dwindling public funding for government oversight of private actions.” [28] The former Times Beach town is now Route 66 State Park, and visitors use it as a recreational space for biking, walking, and running, among other activities. Save for a few informative signs at the entrance of the park, the history of this location and community has mostly been erased. Upon arrival, we laughed nervously in the safety of the parking lot, struggling to reconcile the location versus our safety: it did not look harmful. From where we stood, we could see a bathroom building near the park entrance and a wooden sign with site information, including guidelines for dogs on leashes and a map of the “Inner Loop Trail.” Ross gathered us around to give an overview of the site before we officially visited the mound. The mound was to our left as we entered, but Ross had to point it out to the tour. It was an unassuming hill covered in the shoots of early-spring grass, not as we expected. It could be easily ignored by visitors who were unaware that the contents of a town were buried underneath. Our guide instructed the group to walk to the top of the small hill, which turned out to be deceptively long. We gathered there as Ross provided information on how the dioxin-contaminated waste was introduced into the area and the amount of waste that was under our feet. On the far end, Ross pointed out a small fenced-in area with various pipes coming out of the ground, which many of us missed and/or did not know what it was. Ross explained that it was a gas extraction well for the buried waste at the site. Here, Ross’s performance speaks to Levin’s idea of the “environmental unconscious,” which “[renders] perceptible those aspects of environment that we habitually engage but routinely overlook.” [29] It was easy to overlook our environment and the significance of a location like Times Beach, as it was the oldest site and had been nearly completely erased into its new form: a park. The mound that contains the Dixon-contaminated town is just a hill. Thus, Ross’s performance, retelling of the history, and authoritative approach as “urban ranger” reconstructed the town for her audience, so that we engaged with the location as more than its park exterior. She brought our environmental unconsciousness to the fore in order to restore the site, in our imaginations, and challenge our initial perceptions of the space. The site is open to visitors daily from dawn to dusk, and many visitors take advantage of the trails, many of which are parts of the old roadways, the same ones that were once sprayed with dioxin. Many may not recognize that the uninhabitable nature of this area for day-to-day community life resulted in its transformation into a park which poses little risk for temporary visitors. Instead, we were faced with nature as it has been remade, as Ross said, as all evidence of the contamination was buried, out of sight, in the mound. [30] What was once a place where people lived is now a place for visitors to walk their dogs, gawk at the history of the town if they happened to stop by one of the parks signs, and then leave, almost without a trace. As such, we had to be taught to see the park for both what it once was and what it is today. Site #2 : Coldwater Creek The second stop on the tour was a combination of several sites with ties to Cold War era weapons production. Radioactive material made its way to the St. Louis area during the 1940s when Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, a downtown company, was commissioned to be a part of the top-secret Manhattan Project. [31] The project’s ultimate aim was to create the world’s first atomic weapon, and Mallinckrodt was tasked with purifying uranium. The project was unlike any task undertaken by the State, and to complete the work quickly and away from prying eyes, it had a top-secret security clearance which circumvented typical democratic decision making mechanisms by merely removing the project from public scrutiny. [32] Many of the workers themselves were unaware of the material they were working with and many would later develop cancer and other related diseases. [33] As the project was underway, a great deal of radioactive and/or hazardous materials were used, and much waste was generated. With limited space to store the materials and waste downtown, a property west of the city was used. [34] The property, referred to today as the St. Louis Airport Site (SLAPS), was a twenty-one acre tract of land near the St. Louis Lambert International Airport. [35] The western edge of the property bordered Coldwater Creek, a fifteen-mile creek that snakes through the backyards of various neighborhoods, before emptying into the Missouri River. [36] The site stored “mountains” of radioactive and hazardous waste in open air conditions for almost two decades. [37] As a result, radioactive waste made its way into the creek before it was later sold to a company from Colorado, which dumped whatever materials were deemed not valuable enough to transport into the local West Lake Landfill. [38] Our second tour location was near the airport and the creek. However, on the way, Ross brought us to the building housed by government officials of Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP). In 1974, the federal government created FUSRAP, which was tasked “to identify, investigate and clean up or control sites throughout the United States that became contaminated as a result of the Nation’s early atomic energy program during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.” [39] In addition to the creek, landfill, and Weldon Springs location, there are over 100 identified contaminated sites around the St. Louis Area recognized by the Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA. [40] While the EPA and Army Corps have remediated many of the sites, there are still some that either still need remediation and/or are contested. Regardless, the EPA maintains that these sites are safe, [41] including the landfill, but many residents believe they are experiencing negative health impacts and have created a Facebook group to share information and contest expert claims of health and safety. It was in this Facebook group that our “toxic tour” was advertised. Once arrived, we parked our caravan of cars along the side of the road, which was lined mostly by warehouse buildings in proximity to the St. Louis Airport. Here, Ross spoke about the significance of FUSRAP in the area and provided details on what became of the creek’s cleanup operation. While there, a Hazelwood police officer approached in a car. The arrival of a law enforcement officer made the audience members nervous; this was an unplanned portion of the tour. Keeping with her character, Ross introduced herself as an urban ranger to the officer, who was curious why a group such as ours was in the area. The officer seemed interested, told us to be safe, and left the scene without causing a disruption to the audience. Here, the location of the FURSAP building is reminiscent of Cresswell’s concept of place, where we can “think of place in radically open and non-essentialized ways where place is constantly struggled over and remained in practical ways.” [42] The location of the FURSAP building is indeed a place made and remade by history and perception. With the creek remediation considered complete, the weathered steel building that houses FUSRAP seemed to blend into the warehouse buildings surrounding it. Our perception was altered, remade, by Ross’s expert navigation of the site, however the building’s history had not been erased as with the previous site, and thus it was easy for our group to see and understand the significance as Ross directed our attention and shared the history of the location. The meaning of the place is, as Cresswell argues, “performed and practiced” [43] through our interaction with the guide outside of the chain-link fence that surrounds it. As such, without being on the tour with us, the Hazelwood officer had a different concept of the place’s significance than those of us who listened intently to Ross’s guidance, even though we were just down the road from the mouth of the infamous Coldwater Creek. However, the presence of authority outside of the FUSRAP location felt significant, as it was a reminder that the place we inhabited during the performance is also a part of the larger ecosystem of the area. Figure 1. FUSRAP site, April 8, 2018, (Photo by author) Soon after this interruption, the audience members were back in their cars, as we traveled—briefly this time—to our next location: Coldwater Creek. Like the FUSRAP location, this site had not been reimagined and fully transformed into a park or something else. This space was not inviting; there were no sidewalks, no facilities, and nowhere to park, and the mouth of the creek was unassuming and littered with garbage. We would not have known it was a location of significance without our guide to inform us of such, but it was easy to imagine it as a contaminated space. As with the FUSRAP building, the meaning of place is “constantly struggled over and remained.” [44] Those living along the creek have a clear perception of place while those simply driving may not upload that same definition of place. However, the performance at this location is pushed further when applying Shaughnessy’s lens of location-based performance. Shaughnessy argues that approaches such as Ross’s tour, “engage in the making of place and spatiality … Thus in site responsive work, where space is made meaningful as place through encounters between performers and spectators/participants, there is a potential to transform our perceptions of the performed environment.” [45] Ross’s interactions with the audience at this site—encouragement to explore accompanied by careful warnings of caution that pointed out debris and her now established convention of beginning with the historical significance of the site—assisted in solidifying the meaningful nature of the site for the group gathered around. Thus, Coldwater Creek was indeed transformed into a place made meaningful through Ross’s responsive performance. Large cement barriers, like those used to direct traffic on highways during construction, guarded the creek, prohibiting us from getting too close. There was a sense of nervousness among participants while approaching the creek. We were all aware of the historical contamination of the area, but did not expect to come into contact with the discarded things of today, like broken glass, scraps of paper, and discarded plastic bags. We peered into the murky water, knowing that it had been decontaminated, but the lasting uneasiness was still there for the audience members. Some climbed over the barriers, but not for long, before coming back over to the side that felt “safe.” Once gathered around, our guide talked about how it looked like a place to avoid, though it borders many people’s backyards and was once a place where children played. Before people knew it was contaminated with radioactive waste, the creek, which was prone to flooding, was thought of as a nuisance when rising water entered basements and yards. Now both former and current residents worry, and in some cases believe, that they were exposed to harmful contaminates which have negatively impacted their health. Under FUSRAP, the creek underwent, and continues to undergo, remediation, but cleanup was not extended beyond the creek into the private properties along the creek’s edge. While seemingly unremarkable, the location exudes a negative atmosphere, so much so that this was the only stop on the tour that audience members whispered to each other and refrained from openly talking at the site. While the town of Times Beach was given renewed purpose after the cleanup project was completed—an opportunity for renewed recreation—the same could not be done for the miles of this creek that remained mistreated and contaminated, at least in this area, hidden from sight unless you know where to look or were/are affected by it. Site #3 : Carrollton The next stop on our tour was the former Carrollton subdivision in Bridgeton, MO. Once one of the largest subdivisions in the area, the community was bought out in the 1990s to make room for a new runway at the airport. [46] However, the airport expansion fell through and the community was demolished anyway. Former residents now question if there were other explanations as to why their homes were destroyed, as it is now known that the subdivision was located between a radioactive creek and a radioactive landfill. Entering the area that used to be Carrollton was surreal. The tree-lined streets of the community were inhabited not long ago, and the remnants of human consumption of the land were everywhere. The roads that moved through the area were complete with turnoffs, driveways, and sidewalks, as if the homes were lifted from the earth without a trace. The area was also littered with trash, mattresses, furniture, and beer cans, showing that people had been there recently and/or used Carrollton as a dumping ground. After driving deep into the once-vibrant community, we parked just on the other side of a steel gate, complete with a sign that read, “Road Closed. No Trespassing. Property of the City of St. Louis.” Once we stepped out of our cars, the evidence of human intervention was even more present. We were careful not to step too near an open, uncovered sewer. Telephone poles and electric wires still stood along the street. Ross led us on foot to a clearing, which once was a yard, where the group took a break to talk and to decompress after the first half of the tour. Here, we gathered around a blanket for snacks of cookies, clementines, and hot tea that she prepared. We spent the time talking with the other audience members and walking around the general area; we were especially struck by the non-native plants clearly planted as landscaping, including a wall of bamboo, yucca plants that decorated the ends of what used to be driveways, and carefully placed evergreens that had outgrown their hedge-like purpose. By this point in the tour, we had developed a level of comfort with Ross and the rest of the audience members present. We had existed in “dangerous” spaces together and embodied a shared experience with each other and with our host, reflecting Shaughnessy’s idea that environmental theatre’s exchange between performer and audience allows for “a transfer of bodily sensations … which affects the participants, creating a felt exchange, an embodied experience.” [47] We had shared the experience up to this point, and that experience lead to trust, not simply assumed authority, in our guide. Figure 2. Picnic at the Carrollton Subdivision site, April 8, 2018, (Photo by author) After a bit, Ross stood up and talked to the group about Carrollton, which included a discussion of some of the rumors as to why the subdivision was evacuated. The space transformed for us, as we imagined the homes that once stood on this land, not too long ago. After all, “in site responsive work … there is a potential to transform our perceptions of the performed environment,” [48] as this too was a location that needed a bit of reconstruction through Ross’s guidance. While the driveways and sidewalks still existed, the outlines of residences that once were, Ross’s expert perspective helped us to reimage a space that was once a bustling community not that long ago. Our perspective shifted from viewing the area as a dumping ground to recognizing the lives that once centered on the suburban streets of the Carrollton subdivision. Unlike the historical distance between ourselves and the residents of Times Beach, it was easy to imagine the homes, the gardens, and the cars in the driveways. Thus, the meaning of this location was much easier to grasp than some of the others. Perhaps most ominous was a solitary light pole, long disconnected from its electric source. Ironically, Ross pointed out a current public park, built directly adjacent, that could be seen from our resting place. No fence or structure divided the park from the property where we sat, save some overgrown bushes. There was nothing to keep us in, or out, or to delineate the danger, real or fabricated, of the area of Carrollton from the recreational space next to it. Site #4 : West Lake Landfill The second to last stop on the tour was by all accounts the most well-known site on the itinerary: the West Lake Landfill. In 2010, the West Lake Landfill became the focus of national attention when it was discovered that a portion of the site was experiencing what experts called a “subsurface smoldering event,” referred to locally as an “underground fire.” [49] To make matters worse, the landfill was already known to contain illegally dumped radioactive waste. In 1973, a local company mixed 8,700 tons of radioactive waste, containing seven tons of uranium, with 3.5 times as much soil, and illegally dumped it into a local, unlined landfill. [50] In the 1990s, the landfill became a Superfund site and was added to the National Priorities List, and anti-nuclear activists had been fighting for the complete remediation of the site since the early 1970s. [51] Today, the landfill contains both radioactive waste and an underground fire. While the EPA maintains that the site is safe, residents believe they have been experiencing a variety of different health problems. [52] While much is known about this site, many residents, even those who live relatively close and those curious, have not physically gone to it. For many of the residents in the surrounding communities, the first indication that something was amiss and that they even lived near a landfill, was the presence of a chemical-like odor in the air. [53] The landfill’s existence likely went unnoticed by residents, in part by design, as landfills and industrial sites are strategically placed away from typical routes and neighborhoods. [54] But in this case, the waste was illegally dumped in a landfill in a densely populated area, and unlike many cases of toxic dumping, [55] the landfill is surrounded by predominantly white, working class neighborhoods. With greater access to resources, residents have in many ways garnered more media attention than other sites of toxicity. We felt great anticipation as we drove our car to a stop along a road that ran parallel to the edge of the landfill. Right away, we were met with a warning: “Posted. No trespassing. Keep out.,” informing us to remain on our side of the chain-link and barbed wire fence that ran the perimeter of the site. There were cameras along the fence offering constant surveillance of the area, which alerted the site’s security that our group of tourists was in the area. As we stood gazing across the expanse of the landfill, a pick-up truck pulled up just on the other side of the fence and while it never stopped, it crept slowly by us; clearly, we were being watched. Unlike Pezzullo’s definition of toxic tours that invite people into these spaces to educate the public, the operators at the landfill wanted us to keep out. [56] Here, we did not struggle with Levin’s environmental unconscious of the more unassuming sites, as the location was current and alive: we actually experienced it firsthand. This was the only point in the trip where we felt wearing the cheap, white masks may actually be necessary. While the smell was not apparent at first, it soon wafted our direction. Group members remarked on the smell and asked if it was safe to breathe the air. Our guide led the audience along the fence, providing the history of the mound we were here to explore. Not many people would go there given its status as an active landfill, even without the smoldering event that has attracted public attention. From a performance perspective, Levin argues: In environmental performance, the perspectivalism of the proscenium stage ostensibly falls away, the action no longer enframed within the confines of a single scenic picture; the staging takes place throughout a found or transformed environment. While the traditional spectator is positioned outside of the stage’s pictorial field, s/he is now placed inside of the theatrical picture. [57] Being there, we were inserted into the location and could grasp what it would be like to live at the border of the landfill, gaining an understanding of the community’s plight. Ross positioned the tour attendees in the frame of the performance by carefully “staging” the place through dictating where to stand and directing the audience’s attention through the added element of past and present knowledge, thus allowing the audience to engage fully in the setting of her performance. We felt safer in this place under her guidance and because of the authority of the character she curated. We were all fascinated by the visceral experience of standing next to the landfill. The mound seemed to breathe as if it was a living organism, given the pipes and mechanisms that allowed for the release of gasses from beneath its surface. It was hard not to be distracted by the seemingly living mound next to us, and we commented to one another that we were almost waiting for it to move. At this the fourth stop on Ross’s tour the impact of human consumption was palpable. This location is still “alive;” it has not yet faced the remediation efforts of the U.S. government and other forces. It was hard to believe that this site exists in the middle of suburbia, with residences on all sides. Figure 3. Allana Ross Overlooking the Landfill Site, April 8, 2018, (Photo by author) Before we left, Ross led the audience back up the road, past our cars, to a higher point in elevation that overlooked the landfill. Here, even though we could not see the landfill in its entirety, Our tour guide pointed out different features at the site to help us more fully grasp the gravity of the situation. Ross talked more specifically about the smoldering event, pointing to an area in the landfill where the “fire” is believed to be. We stood looking over the vast expanse of the mound, the green tarp and grass covered areas, and a seemingly endless system of pipes running in and across the surface. As Ross pointed out, it may be jarring to think of this site as alive, but that is part of the issue: the earth is alive, we just do not always treat it as such. Site #5 : Weldon Springs Most of our group left the tour after the landfill, leaving only about a third of the original participants. Pulling into a largely empty parking lot, save for only one other car, we had the final stop mostly to ourselves. While the West Lake Landfill gave the impression that every inch of the place was being closely observed and managed, the Weldon Springs site had the effect of being a world set apart, desolate, and otherworldly. Unlike the other sites of the day, which largely blended into their local environments and felt mundane, this site was intended to be a spectacle. Rising out of the largely flat terrain sat what can only be described as a mountain, covered in white-grey boulders. This mound is also a burial site of sorts, but in this case, it contains hazardous and radioactive waste. After WWII, the U.S. expanded its nuclear weapons programs. In St. Louis, production was moved to a 220-acre facility thirty miles from downtown. [58] The plant was in operation from 1957-1966, and in that time, it too generated an expansive amount of radioactive and hazardous waste, which was often stored in pits and quarries on the 17,000-acre property. The site was later remediated by the Department of Energy, and like Route 66 State Park, it was deemed uninhabitable but safe for recreational visitors. [59] For our tour group, the mound was immediately visible, rising high out of the earth. Today, the forty-five acre and seventy-five foot high mound is a tourist attraction that contains roughly “1.48 million cubic yards of PCBs, mercury, asbestos, TNT, radioactive uranium and radium, and contaminated sludge and rubble.” [60] The site includes a single story metal building which houses the “Weldon Springs Interpretive Center,” a museum and “exhibition hall preserving the legacy of the site, cleanup activities, and natural environment.” [61] Additionally, the site includes the “Nuclear Waste Adventure Trail,” which consists of a path leading to steps to climb the mound. The mention of nuclear waste is the only major connection to its past. Visitors to the mound are invited to explore, to climb to the peak and oversee their surroundings. Weldon Spring has become a local attraction, and it is now the highest peak in St. Charles County. Unlike the West Lake Landfill from where we had just come, this location invited visitors. Even though it was getting late in the day and the cold was starting to settle in past our coats, we noticed one other person in the park biking along the nature trail that wound its way around the large mound at the park’s center. In this act of bringing environment into the fore, Levin argues that the concept of camouflage of the environment engages “the spatial process by which we engage with and adapt to our material surroundings.” [62] Performance that engages the environment in which it is taking place uses camouflage to “[highlight] the non-human site as itself a performing entity, reminding us that the communication between self and setting is rarely unidirectional.” [63] Here, at Weldon Springs, the mound became the central character of the performance. It was quite a hike up a long staircase built into the side of what seemed like an endless mound of boulders. Just when we thought we were at the top, the path kept going to a central area. Ross encouraged us to walk the strange terrain, and we spent some time traversing the boulders, looking out over the edge, before heading to the highest peak. At the top, there was an area with benches and metal plaques describing the location, the history, and the cleanup of the area. There was also a diagram of the mound and details as to how it was constructed, including its dimensions. Again, this park is located within a highly populated, residential area with a local high school visible in the distance, closer than one would hope. Yet, with expanses of trees on all sides interrupted only briefly by buildings, it felt like the mound was secluded in nature. This unnatural place houses such potential danger, and yet we consumed it, temporarily, by being there. Figure 4. The surface of the Weldon Springs mound, April 8, 2018, (Photo by author) Both Shaughnessy and Levin highlight an important distinction in Ross’s performance: Ross does not engage her audience with a traditionally staged and scripted performance in these chosen spaces. On the tour, she evoked the sites of contamination, but still framed her performance as a tour of these locations, which could change based on the day, time, and audience present in creating her community. Thus, it is important to revisit Magelssen’s discussion of tourism when considering Ross’s performance. He observes that immersive tourism experiences “are tapping into the potential energies offered by inviting the audience to step through the fourth wall.” [64] Magelssen’s exploration of tourism and second-person interpretation [65] explores the ways spectators inherently become a part of the performance for the purpose of partaking in an immersive experience outside of their own lived experience. With Ross, however, we did not become a character in her performance through the means of Magelssen’s second-person interpretation. Rather, we became a part of the community built through performance and empowered by a renewed commitment to the environment/community, as we were not, in fact, complete outsiders to begin with. We said goodbye to our guide, and kept the knowledge of our experience at the forefront of our minds during the almost two-hour drive home. For a little more than five hours, a group of strangers gathered for Ross’s performance as she challenged our perception of these sites as they were consumed, and then reified, after human impact had contaminated the land. Through her tour, Ross asked us to engage with parts of our community that are outside of our everyday experiences, to know “the history of these sites in a safe space removed from their threats,” the unassuming danger that sits silently in the open among the housing developments, quiet streets, schools, and strip malls of suburban St. Louis. [66] Ross encouraged us to confront these lands: I think that it is important to repurpose the land because we depend on it and are connected to it. There is a limited amount of land and we can’t just trash it and abandon it … if we abandon these places we don’t feel the consequences, we don’t see that this is a repetitive pattern of behavior that comes from thinking we are separate from the land…so I think reckoning with the disastrous, contaminated, places that we have created is ultimately more beneficial than abandoning them for short term safety. [67] Part of our tour, then, was to confront the historical legacies of place and to see how some of these properties are now being used. Ross’s performance connected her audience to places within our community but that are still distant to many residents. Her performance brought attention to the issue of contaminated sites in the areas west of the city. Ross still hosts tours, advertised on local St. Louis-area Facebook groups, that focus on the landfill, Coldwater Creek, and current cleanup efforts. While she carried a brochure and notes containing historical facts and details on each location, Ross did not have a set script. Thus, the performance can change based on the community members present for the experience, guided by where they are able to go, how long they want to stay, and even the weather. The impact of the tour is lasting, as the sensory experience encourages participants to hold onto the images, smells, and sounds of each of the five sites, allowing Ross to achieve her goal of bringing awareness to the contamination of land in the place she too calls “home.” References [1] Allana Ross. 2017. “West Lake Landfill Facebook Page.” Facebook , March 26, 2017. https://www.facebook.com/groups/508327822519437/. [2] Jan Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 2. [3] Ibid., 2. [4] Ibid., 3. [5] Allana Ross, “Artist Statement—Allana Ross,” Allana Ross, 2017, https://allanaross.com/Statement-1. [6] Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts , 13. [7] Ibid., 5. [8] Richard Schechner, “6 axioms for environmental theatre.” ( The Drama Review: TDR 1968): 41-64.; Richard Schechner, Environmental Theater . (Hal Leonard Corporation, 1994).; Una Chaudhuri, Staging place: The Geography of Modern Drama . (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997).; Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri, eds., Land/scape/theater . (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002).; Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May, eds., Readings in Performance and Ecology . (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).; Stephen Bottoms and Matthew Goulish, eds., Small acts of repair: Performance, ecology and Goat Island . (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013).; Ric Knowles, The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning . (Montreal, CA: ECW Press, 1999). [9] Tim Cresswell, Place: An Introduction , 2nd ed. (Chichester, UK: J. Wiley & Sons, 2015), 39. [10] Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation . (New York, NY: Routledge, 2000), 65. [11] Baz Kershaw, Theatre ecology: Environments and performance events . (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 14. [12] Nicola Shaughnessy, Applying Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre and Affective Practice. (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 114; 102. [13] Ross, “Artist Statement — Allana Ross.” [14] Shaughnessy, Applying Performance , 113. [15] Laura Levin. Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage, and the Art of Blending In. (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 105-6. [16] David A Fennell and Ross Dowling, Ecotourism Policy and Planning , 3rd ed. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003), 1; 4. [17] Scott Magelssen. “Tourist Performance in the Twenty-first Century.” In Enacting History , edited by Scott Magelssen and Rhona Justice-Malloy. (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2011), 174.; Scott Magelssen. Living History Museums: Undoing History through Performance . (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007). [18] Magelssen, “Tourist Performance,” 177. [19] Robert Bullard, ed, Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots . (Boston MA: South End Press, 1993).; Steven Lerner, Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure . (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). [20] Phaedra Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice. (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 5. [21] William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England . (New York, NY: Hill & Wang, 2003). [22] Ross, “Artist Statement — Allana Ross.” [23] Ibid. [24] Allana Ross, Interview of Allana Ross of Toxic Mound Tours, interview by author, May 17, 2018. [25] U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “TIMES BEACH Site Profile,” EPA’s Superfund Site Information for TIMES BEACH, n.d., https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.cleanup&id=0701237. [26] OLEM US EPA, “Superfund: CERCLA Overview,” Overviews and Factsheets, US EPA, 9 September 2015, https://www.epa.gov/superfund/superfund-cercla-overview. [27] Jennifer Sieg, “General Information: Down the ‘Mother Road’ Route 66 State Park,” Text, 6 February 2011, https://mostateparks.com/page/54997/general-information. [28] Thomas Voltaggio and John Adams, “Superfund: A Half-Century of Progress” (EPA Alumni Association, 1 March 2016), 6, https://www.epaalumni.org/hcp/superfund.pdf. [29] Levin. Performing Ground , 105-6. [30] Ross, “Artist Statement — Allana Ross.” [31] Fleishman-Hillard, Inc., “Fuel for the Atomic Age: Completion Report on St Louis- Area Uranium Operations, 1942-1967,” 30 September 1967, Environmental Archives, http://environmentalarchives.com/download/1967-09-30-mallinckrodt-fuel-atomic-age-report-st-louis-area-uranium-processing-operations/. [32] Seantel Anais and Kevin Walby, “Secrecy, Publicity, and the Bomb: Nuclear Publics and Objects of the Nevada Test Site, 1951-1992,” Cultural Studies 30, no. 6 (2016): 949–68. [33] Cheryl Wittenauer, “Woman Crusades for Ailing Nuclear Workers, Families,” Los Angeles Times , 29 February 2004, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-feb-29-adna-daughter29-story.html. [34] U.S Atomic Energy Commission, “1959-04-11 – AEC – Manhattan Project – History of the St Louis Airport Site” (U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 11 April 1959), Environmental Archives, http://environmentalarchives.com/download/1959-04-11-aec-manhattan-project-history-of-the-st-louis-airport-site/. [35] Ibid. [36] Ray Hartmann, “The Poisoned Children of Coldwater Creek Finally Get a Break,” St. Louis Magazine , 3 August 2018, https://www.stlmag.com/api/content/3f24000c-975f-11e8-b5a5-12408cbff2b0/. [37] Robert Alvarez, “West Lake Story: An Underground Fire, Radioactive Waste, and Governmental Failure,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 11 February 2016, http://thebulletin.org/west-lake-story-underground-fire-radioactive-waste-and-governmental-failure9160.; Keith Schneider, “Mountain of Nuclear Waste Splits St. Louis and Suburbs,” New York Times , 24 March 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/24/us/mountain-of-nuclear-waste-splits-st-louis-and-suburbs-888.html?pagewanted=all. [38] James Allen, “1974-05-16-AEC- Investigation of Cotter Corporation Illegal Dumping at Latty Avenue,” 17 May 1974, Environmental Archives, http://environmentalarchives.com/download/1974-05-16-aec-investigation-of-cotter-corporation-illegal-dumping-at-latty-avenue/.; Mary Freivogel, “Confusion Over Dumping of Radioactive Waste in County,” St Louis Post Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), 30 May 1976; Mary Freivogel, “Radioactive Materials Checks Called Faulty,” St Louis Post Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), 1 June 1976. [39] U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, “FUSRAP,” n.d., 1, https://www.usace.army.mil/Missions/Environmental/FUSRAP/ [40] U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, “St. Louis District > Missions > Centers of Expertise > Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program,” FUSRAP, n.d., https://www.mvs.usace.army.mil/Missions/Centers-of-Expertise/Formerly-Utilized-Sites-Remedial-Action-Program/. [41] Karl Brooks, “EPA Is Working toward a Remedy at West Lake Landfill,” Stltoday.Com , 20 February 2014, http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/epa-is-working-toward-a-remedy-at-west-lake-landfill/article_ff60744d-2c35-5439-b857-111705da97d5.html. [42] Cresswell, Place, 39. [43] Ibid. [44] Ibid. [45] Shaughnessy, Applying Performance , 113. [46] Carolyn Tuft, “Carrollton Was Once a Quiet Subdivision but Now It’s a Noisy Community in Limbo,” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), 7 July 1995. [47] Shaughnessy, Applying Performance , 113. [48] Ibid. [49] Véronique LaCapra, “There’s A Burning Problem at The Bridgeton Landfill – It Stinks but Is It Unsafe?,” St. Louis Public Radio, 29 March 2013, http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/theres-burning-problem-bridgeton-landfill-it-stinks-it-unsafe. [50] Carolyn Bowers, Louis Rose, and Theresa Tighe, “A Miracle with A Price,” St Louis Post Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), 12 February 1989. [51] Inc. Republic Services, “Bridgeton Landfill Timeline,” Website, 2014, http://www.bridgetonlandfill.com/bridgeton-landfill-timeline. [52] Brooks, “EPA Is Working toward a Remedy at West Lake Landfill.”; Veronique LaCapra, “Confused about the Bridgeton and West Lake Landfills? Here’s What You Should Know,” St. Louis Public Radio , 2 March 2014, http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/confused-about-bridgeton-and-west-lake-landfills-heres-what-you-should-know. [53] Jeffrey Tomich, “Hot Spot and Fumes Prompt Concern at Bridgeton Landfill,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), 30 October 2012. [54] Andrew Hurley, “From Factory Town to Metropolitan Junkyard: Postindustrial Transitions on the Urban Periphery,” Environmental History 21, (2016): 3–29. [55] Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality , 3rd ed. (Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 2000).; Melissa Checker, Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2005). [56] Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism, 5. [57] Levin, Performing Ground, 68. [58] Fleishman-Hillard, Inc., “Fuel for the Atomic Age: Completion Report on St Louis- Area Uranium Operations, 1942-1967.” [59] Susan Davis and Puro, Steven, “Patterns of Intergovernmental Relations in Environmental Cleanup at Federal Facilities,” In Publius 29, no. 4 (1999), 33–53. [60] Doug Kirby, Ken Smith, and Mike Wilkins, “Nuclear Waste Adventure Trail, Weldon Spring, Missouri,” Roadside America, 1, accessed 25 October 2019, https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/14614. [61] DOE – Office of Legacy Management, “Weldon Spring Site Interpretive Center and Educational Opportunities,” Energy.gov, August 2019, 1, https://www.lm.doe.gov/Weldon/Interpretive_Center/. [62] Levin, Performing Ground, 97. [63] Ibid. [64] Magelssen. “Tourist Performance,” 174. [65] Ibid., 175. [66] Ross, “Artist Statement — Allana Ross.” [67] Ross, Interview of Allana Ross of Toxic Mound Tours. 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 Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography Introduction: Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship “La conjura de Xinum” and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the “Toxic Mound Tours” Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Amy Mihyang Ginther 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 Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Amy Mihyang Ginther By Published on May 19, 2022 Download Article as PDF “I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling.”—Saidiya Hartman [1] Using theatre to generate empathy for characters and narratives has been a longstanding goal in Eurocentric drama and a strong argument for this medium to be a tool for larger social change. In the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, sparked largely by the unjust deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd, theatre makers are exploring alternative ways to represent Black, brown and other historically excluded narratives, which are too often exploited as trauma porn. In this essay, I offer dramaturgy of deprivation, or 없다, as an alternative to dramaturgy of empathy. I contextualize this concept theoretically and practically, and use examples from my own practice to illustrate how 없다 is potentially effective in dramatizing narratives from my own positionalities as an Asian American and as a transracially adopted person from South Korea. Critique of trauma porn and sentimentalized narratives While white representation is afforded abundance and complexity, “ethnic and racial others live in an economy of narrative scarcity.” [2] Theatre has long had the power to disrupt this scarcity but often only in the form of providing the previously invisiblized or marginalized narrative for an audience to elicit empathy. Performance studies scholar/ethnographic theatre maker Nikki Yeboah asks in our current moment, “is empathy enough, or does our work reify power more than disrupt it?” [3] Particularly in relation to Black and brown suffering, how can we dramatize characters’ experiences in ways that do not re-traumatize people of color or leave white audiences feeling passively satisfied for having empathy, therefore perpetuating the white and colonial gaze of surveillance, voyeurism, fetishism, and possession, [4] something Yeboah critiques as “not an inherently radical act”? [5] Theorists from Black and decolonial studies indicate that highlighting the historiographical absence of people or obfuscation of narratives illustrates how forces such as white supremacy and colonialism have dehumanized or invisiblized them. Tapji Garba and Sara-Maria Sorentino argue that metaphoricity is a crucial part of Black enslaved identity and that its “political indecipherability … exemplifies the violence of slavery itself.” [6] If “what slavery-as-metaphor offers is an opening to tarry with unknowing, to increase frustration,” [7] then what impacts can this type of depiction have on a theatre audience? Can frustration and unknowing provoke stronger actions that will result in social justice after the performance? Yeboah argues for dramaturgy that leaves the audience with the kind of frustration Garba and Sorentino refer to because “collective action requires agitation. Collective action is fueled by feelings of unrest, anger, and dissatisfaction so strong that they cannot be contained. It emerges out of turbulence. It draws strength from a people unsettled.” [8] Saidiya Hartman seems to agree: “the loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them. So it is tempting to fill in the gaps and to provide closure where there is none. To create a space for mourning where it is prohibited.” [9] Hartman’s idea of narrative restraint as a way to “respect the limits of what cannot be known” [10] contrasts with the dramatic urge to present such narratives with explicit specificity and detail for contemporary white audiences as a way to compensate for their invisibilization. Although greater representation and embodiment of these stories and characters are still important, is there a dramaturgical alternative that complicates these depictions and denies audiences satisfaction? These questions inspire me to think about the Korean verb 없다, which roughly translates to “there are none; (to be) lacking; (to be) nonexistent,” [11] not dissimilar to faltar in Spanish. [12] How do we create dramatic experiences of loss or absence for an audience so they feel the grief and rage needed to take action towards a more just world, instead of feeling passively good about themselves for empathizing with victims/survivors of oppression? Rather than working to perform and prove my humanity for the audience, how can I compel them to feel the irreconcilable loss of self and/or history so we can be inspired to make collective change? Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview and Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop are excellent recent examples that engage with more complex representations around racialized trauma. As an audience member, I felt the unrest, anger, and hunger that Yeboah and Hartman hope to evoke in their work; both shows created strong desire within me to experience their characters and narratives more fully, and I felt a renewed urgency to fight for them offstage. In the next section, I will argue that the uniqueness of transracially adopted Asian American identity is suited for 없다 and provide examples from my own work. Racist Love : Asian American and adopted Korean representation This essay takes inspiration from a performative response on Zoom that I gave to Leslie Bow’s working introduction to her book, Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy . [13] Bow argues that the US’s racialized relationship with Asian American identity can be illustrated through its abstracted affection or desire for nonhuman proxies (such as objects) and that this partly stems from a “deliberate absence of Asian people.” [14] This resonated with me as both an Asian American and a person who was transracially adopted from South Korea. “Transracial” does not mean white women trying to pass as Black or brown. In this context, it means being adopted into a family whose race differs from theirs (often Black/brown folks being adopted by white folks), and it has been an established term in adoption studies for decades. [15] Directly following the Korean War in the 1950s, a time when the US was strengthening its anti-Asian immigration policies, [16] adoptions from countries like South Korea increased. I argue that this is because US society and its adoption industrial complex viewed adopted children as dehumanized objects that allowed them to project the same kind of abstracted affection and longing that Bow highlights. White US families often adopted South Korean children because they were deemed acceptable as a model minority [17] in ways that are consistent with Bow’s assertions that the US looks “outward to Asia for its ‘bit’ of the other, for the object that makes satisfaction possible while imperfectly concealing racial anxiety.” [18] The larger AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) immigrant community often fails to be in solidarity with transracially adopted people from Korea [19] (who make up 10% of the Korean-US diaspora) while their white parents disregard their racial identity often with the intention to assimilate them. [20] Because “adoption is a series of transactions—legal, social, and financial [and] … those with the most power get to define the terms and create the policies and practices that most benefit them,” [21] white parents as major actors in these transactions tend to further objectify adopted people as nonhumans. The Korean government and its counterparts in countries like the US that make up the adoption industrial complex commodify adopted people; they were a literal export, because “US adoptive laws were designed in the context of free market capitalism and based on children as property.” [22] Agencies duplicated, interchanged, and manipulated our records to make us more marketable/adoptable. I was one of likely thousands of adopted people whose status was changed to orphan on my paperwork, a lie to appease the US government’s scant overseas adoption policies at the time. Instead of wanting to prove my humanity as an Asian American and transracially adopted person, my impulse was to move in another direction: to depict myself as literal Asian objects. Utilizing the Zoom format, I used Snapchat filters that stir Western desire such as food, toys, and appropriative clothing/costume. I leaned into my own objectification and used filters that intentionally obscured most of my face in the hopes that the audience would strain to see more of my personhood and be present to this less comfortable sensation. Fig. 1. Screenshots of Ginther (taken by the author) during her Zoom performance, using Snapchat filters. Clockwise from left to right: 1. As a dumpling, 2. As an old-fashioned Orientalist doll, 3. As a Geisha in full makeup, 4. As a boba tea. As I presented using a boba tea filter, for example, I talked about how experts estimate that South Korea made somewhere between 15-20 million dollars a year at the height of Korean adoption. [23] Using my own birth year, 1983, and adjusting for inflation and the pricing for my favorite bubble tea place in Santa Cruz, I shared with the audience that I cost about 1,315 boba teas. I hoped that in highlighting the loss of my story and personhood through anti-Asian American racism and the international adoption industrial complex that I would generate hunger, agitation, and unrest in ways that Yeboah and Hartman imagined. Attendees described my performance as “playful,” “incisive,” and “disorienting.” Another reflected, “Mainstream representations of ‘Asian-ness,’ like dumplings, ‘Geisha’ makeup, and boba tea, seen all together in aggregate made for a compelling visual argument of how we consume and project, literally on our faces, cultural iconography and object.” These responses suggest that I effectively performed alienation and objectification. My work: between and No Danger of Winning My first solo show, between , explored Korean adopted identity through multiple characters that centered my search for my first family. [24] Many adoption narratives use reunion as a form of climax, [25] but I intentionally deprived the audience of this dramatic moment, telling them: There was no grand moment that led me to my family in Korea.Perhaps that’s what you were hoping to find here.Meeting my family in Korea did not complete me.Reunions are not ends. They are middles. [26] I did not consciously know it at the time, but I was exploring ways we can withhold representation from audiences for sociopolitical reasons. I remarked that I had intentionally resisted this type of resolution scene because “I think this dilutes the complexity and richness of the experience that the continuously progressing relationship demands and deserves.” [27] In addition to depriving my audience of a realistic depiction of my reunion, I realized that my inability to “authentically” portray a Korean woman also deprived Korean audience members in Seoul of the ethno-national identity that was taken from me through the trauma of my transnational adoption. This is particularly important because transracially adopted people “are seen as suspect in their communities of origin or seen as not authentic,” [28] so a more supposedly “accurate” depiction potentially misses an opportunity to convey a more complex truth. I reflected: I want the audience to fully believe that I am this Korean mother before them, but I have accepted the fact that, to a Korean-fluent audience, there really is no amount of voice work I can do to achieve this. … you’re not the only one to intimate that part of what is moving about this performance of Ki-Bum is how hard and perhaps how imperfectly I, as an adoptee, am trying to portray this character to audiences here in South Korea. [29] Being unable to achieve this character’s accent with believable mimesis originally felt like a failure in my performance. With between , I am interested in the impact of my inability to fully embody Koreanness for Korean audience members. In feeling deprived of this more authentic portrayal, perhaps they will be moved to support policies such as family preservation so as to not perpetuate this discomfort they feel. The theory I cite in this essay, my previous work like between , and pieces like A Strange Loop and Fairview have inspired the ways I am writing and dramaturging my current project, the book for No Danger of Winning , a verbatim musical based on my interviews with ten former contestants of color who were eliminated on The Bachelor/ette . It is a meta-musical where a character, Joy, based on me as the playwright, navigates the complex ethics of trying to represent the people she interviews in ways that are more humanizing than the reality television depictions. In some ways, she is exploring the same questions as this essay through a more dramatic, embodied medium. Originally, one of our major dramaturgical goals was to humanize the contestants in ways that the reality TV did not and to illuminate the ways they suffered as a result. When one Black audience member commented at our first workshop reading, “I don’t need an entire musical to tell me that these reality shows are racist,” [30] it became clear to me, the composer (Thomas Hodges), and our developmental director (Lisa Marie Rollins) that providing literal/mimetic depictions of the characters’ experiences simply to replace the racist televised versions was not sufficient representation. The musical needed to disrupt the conditioned white gaze of the audience. After six Asian/Asian American women were killed in a mass shooting in Atlanta in March 2021, the stakes of representation and its deadly consequences resonated with me in a deeply personal way, adding to the heightened despair and fear so many of us in the AAPI community were feeling since the pandemic and its racist consequences emerged. [31] I wanted to depict the way this event shifted my (Joy’s) making of our musical—but how? How can I represent the responses of my Asian American and transracially adopted Asian communities through my theatre making in ways that do not reify trauma or leave a white audience feeling sated with their empathy for us? There is a moment where my character, Joy, seeks comfort after the tragic news by having an intimate and romantic moment with the presumed Asian male contestant she interviewed from The Bachelorette. I offer this staging as a possibility of something because the scenario of two Asian people experiencing romantic love does not happen often on The Bachelor/ette . However, it becomes increasingly apparent through his lines that this Asian actor is actually playing Joy’s white boyfriend; along with Joy, the audience experiences this possibility of romantic love dissolve. No matter how much agency Joy has as a playwright, she is unable to generate this narrative in her real life. Using this reveal, I aim for the audience to feel deprived of what a romantic love story between Joy and an Asian American partner may look like and the ways whiteness can feel insufficient in supporting partners of color during/after racist trauma. Conclusion Adopted writer Mary Kim Arnold reminds us: “being visible is not the same as being seen.” [32] Too often, audiences leave shows “feeling good about feeling bad” [33] for a character of color who experienced oppression or trauma as part of the dramatic narrative. While representation is important, and this may be arguably better than continuing to exclude these narratives from our canon, I believe there are ways we can reimagine dramaturgy that can move audiences beyond a passive experience of empathy that does little to change power dynamics and the world at large. In my theatre making, I aspire to deprive the audience of my full personhood and its related narratives in an effort to generate feelings and experiences of irreconcilable loss: a traded commodity through cute Snapchat filters; a yearned-for reunion scene; an “authentic” Korean character; or a loving, healing, romantic relationship between two Asian Americans. I dream of emancipatory ways Korean adopted people and other people of color will be seen onstage. Perhaps one of the ways to do this is to deprive an audience of what could have been, to compel them to experience our grief, our losses, our irreconcilability, so they rage with us, fight for us, and do something in the world that generates actual justice. References [1] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 11. [2] Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 203. [3] Nikki Owusu Yeboah, “‘I know how it is when nobody sees you’: Oral-History Performance Methods for Staging Trauma,” Text and Performance Quarterly 40, no. 2 (2020): 132. [4] Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 2003), 6. [5] Yeboah, “Oral History Performance Methods,” 149. [6] Tapji Garba and Sara‐Maria Sorentino, “Slavery Is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,’” Antipode 52, no. 3 (2020): 776. [7] Garba and Sorentino, 777. [8] Yeboah, “Oral History Performance Methods,” 46. [9] Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 8. Hartman’s essay is known for laying the foundations of critical fabulation, the praxis of filling in the gaps of historical data with creative, semi-fictive accounts, particularly in relation to Black trauma in the US. This is already being referenced in dramaturgical processes in productions. See Calley N. Anderson and Holly L. Derr, “Using Critical Fabulation for History-Based Playwriting,” Howlround, 3 March 2021, https://howlround.com/using-critical-fabulation-history-based-playwriting. [10] Hartman, 4. [11] “Google Translate,” Google, https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=%EC%97%86%EB%8B%A4&op=translate. [12] “Google Translate,” Google, https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=faltar%20&op=translate. [13] Bow’s remarks and my response to them were part of the Writing for Living: Helene Moglen Conference in Feminism and the Humanities, sponsored by University of California: Santa Cruz, 2021. [14] Leslie Bow, Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 10. [15] For more on this, see: JaeRan Kim, “Race and Power in Transracial and Transnational Adoption: Historical Legacies, Current Issues, and Future Challenges,” in The Complexities of Race: Identity, Power, and Justice in an Evolving America , ed. Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe (New York: New York University Press, 2021), 104-125; Eleana J. Kim, Adopted Territory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Andy Marra, “An Open Letter: Why Co-opting ‘Transracial’ in the Case of Rachel Dolezal is Problematic,” Medium, 16 June 2015, https://medium.com/@Andy_Marra/an-open-letter-why-co-opting-transracial-in-the-case-of-rachel-dolezal-is-problematic-249f79f6d83c. [16] Kim, “Race and Power in Transracial and Transnational Adoption,” 109. [17] Kim, Adopted Territory , 28. [18] Leslie Bow, “Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy” (presentation, Writing for Living: Helene Moglen Conference in Feminism and the Humanities, Santa Cruz, CA, 19-20 February 2021). Bow said this as part of the draft she presented at the conference. It was later deleted for the final version of her book’s introduction. [19] Kim Park Nelson, Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 96. [20] Kim, “Race and Power in Transracial and Transnational Adoption,” 110. [21] Ibid., 104. [22] Ibid., 112-113. [23] Kim, Adopted Territory , 33. [24] I wrote between as part of my undergraduate thesis at Hofstra University in 2005. Its World Premiere was at the Edinburgh Fringe (Gilded Balloon) in 2006. Because of its themes and production locations, audiences were predominantly white and/or had some personal/professional interest in adoption. There were more Korean attendees when the show premiered in Seoul in 2011, but still many white audience members because the show was co-produced by an expat theatre company. [25] Family reunion is commonly used to resolve many media narratives in general that are not adoption related, spanning from Finding Nemo to Avengers: Endgame . One adoption-focused example of reunion being used as a resolution is the Netflix documentary, Found (2021). [26] Amy Mihyang Ginther, between (unpublished script, Club After Mainstage, Seoul, 9-17 April 2011). [27] tammy ko Robinson, “Korean Adoptee Explores Roots In One-Woman Show,” Imperial Family Companies, October 2011, https://charactermedia.com/october-issue-korean-adoptee-explores-roots-in-one-woman-show-2/. [28] Kim, “Race and Power in Transracial and Transnational Adoption,” 115. [29] Robinson, “Korean Adoptee.” [30] No Danger of Winning talkback , book by Amy Mihyang Ginther, music and lyrics by Thomas Hodges, Shetler Studios, New York, 11 July 2019. [31] Anti-Asian racism, violence, and xenophobia has a long history in the US; this has intensified significantly since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. [32] Mary-Kim Arnold, Litany for the Long Moment (Buffalo, NY: Essay Press, 2018), 29. [33] This phrases references Lisa Nakumura, “Feeling Good about Feeling Bad: Virtuous Virtual Reality and the Automation of Racial Empathy,” Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 1 (2020): 47-64. This piece critiques the goal of empathy in virtual reality (VR) documentary work specifically, and is impacting my current VR project, Mountains after Mountains (산 넘어 산), which is about my illegal abortion in South Korea. Details about this are beyond the scope of this essay, but I anticipate publication about it in the future, along with its VR release in exhibition space. Footnotes About The Author(s) Amy Mihyang Ginther (she/they) is currently an assistant professor within the Department of Performance, Play & Design at UC Santa Cruz. She is a queer, transracially adopted theatre maker and accent designer who publishes and performs around themes of identity, embodied trauma, power, and representation. Ginther’s edited volume, Stages of Reckoning: Antiracist and decolonial actor training , is due 2023 (Routledge) and she is currently working on a musical, No Danger of Winning . Ginther is a Master Teacher of Acting and Singing with Archetypes, and is a certified teacher of Knight-Thompson Speechwork and Tectonic Theater Project’s Moment Work™ devising method. 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.

Jenna Gerdsen 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 Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Jenna Gerdsen By Published on May 23, 2022 Download Article as PDF When I left Hawaiʻi for college on the continent, I was in for quite a shock. As a mixed Asian woman born and raised in Hawaiʻi, I was used to being a part of a dominant majority. When I arrived in Washington, I lost the comforts that came with being a part of a majority and was eager to find an Asian community. I hesitantly joined the Asian American Student Association. Though I had never identified as Asian American, I assumed the group could replicate some of the comforts of home. Yet I did not feel at ease. I felt distant from the other students. My Hawaiian Pidgin and love for Hawaiian plate lunches set me apart. When someone suggested I check out the Hawaiʻi Club, I began to realize that Asianness looked and sounded differently outside of Hawaiʻi. I share this personal anecdote to illustrate that stories have triggered discussions around categorical schemas, representation, and historical fissures between Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. In The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University, Mark Chiang asserts Blu’s Hanging, the controversial novel by popular Japanese writer Lois-Ann Yamanaka, challenged fundamental assumptions of Asian American Studies and demanded new theorizations of Asian American cultural politics. [1] At the 1998 Association for Asian American Studies conference, Yamanaka received a fiction award, but a motion to revoke the award was initiated due her stereotypical depictions of Filipinos. The novel demonstrated the dominance of East Asians in Hawaiʻi and the prevalence of an ethnic hierarchy. In Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaiʻi, Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura assert that East Asians of Hawaiʻi often use “Local,” the pan-ethnic label unique to Hawaiʻi, to build a Pan-Asian nationhood and obscure Native Hawaiian history. [2] In less dramatic fashion, plays by Asian and Hawaiian playwrights of Hawaiʻi have reignited the urgency to reconceptualize Asian Americanness. Eager to assimilate in the continent, I turned to Esther Kim Lee’s A History of Asian American Theatre . Before reading her work, I assumed that theatre of Hawaiʻi would be a part of her study. I learned that merging theatre of Hawaiʻi with Asian American theatre comes with complications, just like my attempts to blend in at student gatherings. Lee made the strategic decision to limit her foundational study to the continent. She stated, In my view the inclusion of Hawaiʻi would necessitate a shift in the paradigm of Asian American theatre history, and the nature of this shift would hinge on whether Asian American theatre is considered as part of the larger Asian diaspora of theatre. Indeed, as Josephine Lee points out, the inclusion of Hawaiʻi in Asian American theatre history would “illuminate the fault lines” in how we, as theatre historians, have imagined Asian American culture. [3] Just as I was surprised that Esther Kim Lee’s study on Asian American theatre excluded theatre of Hawaiʻi, undergraduate students are often disappointed when Asian American theatre classes do not include Pacific Islander theatre. For instructors of Asian American theatre, the question becomes how to represent equitably both Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders without making them a monolith. Pedagogy should follow the recommendations of scholars such as J. Kehaulani Kauanui and Lisa Kahaleole Hall who argue that the label “Asian American Pacific Islander” privileges the experiences of Asian Americans over Pacific Islanders. [4] Despite its use in social justice conversations, “inclusion” in this context is an act of settler colonialism. The absorption of the Hawaiian Islands within the US empire and Americanist scholarship has obscured the identities, cultures, and histories of the various peoples of Hawaiʻi. Due to the illegal overthrow of Queen Lili’uokalani that led to the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands in 1898, Hawaiʻi has long been associated with the United States, been regarded as a strategic military base, and been a profitable appendage to the empire. The Hawaiian Islands have also been an appendage in a scholastic context. Information regarding theatre in Hawaiʻi has historically been included within Asian American theatre. The inclusion of theatre of Hawaiʻi in Asian American theatre demonstrates that the United States has played a large role in how we have come to understand Asianness. In the early 1960s, the label and genre “Asian American” were created as a way to assert that Asians have been essential members of the United States and replace the problematic descriptor of “Oriental,” which reduced Asians to foreign objects. [5] While many Asians of the continent were determined to demonstrate a sense of belonging in the United States, other Asians in Hawaiʻi were determined to demonstrate a sense of alienation from the United States. Plays written by Asians from Hawaiʻi that explore the realities of living in Hawaiʻi should be separate from but in conversation with Asian American theatre. My work is a direct response to Lee, and is also informed by the dissertations of Hawaiʻi-based scholars and theatre practitioners Tammy Haili’ōpua Baker, Sammie Choy, and Stefani Overman-Tsai that call for theatre of Hawaiʻi to be recognized as its own form and examined outside of an Asian Americanist lens. [6] I interviewed Asian and Hawaiian theatre artists and educators born and raised in Hawaiʻi to determine why theatre of Hawaiʻi should be studied separately from Asian American theatre. I concluded that it is debatable whether Hawaiʻi can be considered a part of the larger Asian diaspora considering its indigenous history and cross-racial alliances developed on sugarcane and pineapple plantations. I assert that dramatic literature of Hawaiʻi, particularly the work of Hawaiian-Samoan playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, makes these fissures visible and audible. Her large body of work dramatizes interracial alliances and conflicts of Hawaiʻi. This essay features an excerpt of an interview I conducted with Kneubuhl on July 22, 2019. Our conversation about her work and its categorization demonstrates that the foundations and future of Asian American theatre rest on and are guided by understanding the nuances of Asian and Pacific Islander identities. I use my conversation with Kneubuhl to claim that it is possible and necessary to separate Asian American and Pacific Islander dramaturgies while still keeping them in conversation. Because some of Kneubuhl’s work has represented both Hawaiians and Asian settlers and their alliances and conflicts, her work has been categorized under several labels, including Asian American theatre and Pacific Islander theatre. In our conversation, Kneubuhl revealed that she embraces all of the labels assigned to her work because that allows her to more accurately characterize individual plays. Kneubuhl’s body of work resists exclusive characterization because each play’s themes, setting, and characters vary greatly. With Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in both Hawaiian culture studies and theatre, Kneubuhl bridges Hawai‘i state archives, community theatre, and the Hawaiian Renaissance movement. Kneubuhl’s work has been locally, nationally, and internationally recognized. She won the Hawai‘i Award for Literature, and her plays have been commissioned and performed in Hawai‘i, the continental United States, Asia, and Britain. When Kneubuhl emerged as one of Hawai‘i’s representative playwrights during the 1980s and 90s, she was one of the only Native Hawaiian playwrights active in Hawai‘i’s theatre scene. Today, she continues to represent Native Hawaiians and produces work that teaches Hawaiian history and celebrates Hawaiian culture from a Hawaiian perspective and advocates for Hawaiian sovereignty. Kneubuhl has been a major contributor to the repertoire of Kumu Kahua Theatre, the institutional home of Local theatre. The genre demonstrates how those who identify as Locals, a wide umbrella term unique to Hawai‘i that includes Native Hawaiians and other ethnic immigrant groups who descended from sugarcane and pineapple plantation workers, regard themselves vis-à-vis Hawai‘i’s plantations. Her work is informed and inspired by both the Hawaiian Renaissance movement and the plurality of Local culture. Inspired by those in the Hawaiian community who were reclaiming and reviving Hawaiian culture during the early 1970s, several of Kneubuhl’s plays retell Hawaiian women’s history through a contemporary, retrospective lens. Kneubuhl’s highly regarded historical pageant play January 1893 replays the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and allowed the Honolulu community to revisit a pivotal moment in Hawai‘i’s history. Written, produced, directed, and sponsored by Hawaiian activists and artists, January 1893 represented the mission of the Hawaiian Renaissance to revive Hawaiian history and culture on a state and national level. The play debuted in 1993 to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the overthrow. Staged as an elaborate parade, January 1893 is still considered to be one of the most theatrically ambitious nonprofessional productions ever staged in Hawai‘i. January 1893 was performed on and around the grounds of ‘Iolani Palace, the home of the Hawaiian monarchy and the site of Lili’uokalani’s house arrest after the overthrow. As an anniversary event, the production exemplified all that remained after the annexation: ignorance and amnesia around the event, a pan-ethnic solidarity between Hawaiians and other ethnic groups in Hawai‘i, and a desire to reinstall a sovereign Hawaiian monarchy. The production reinforced the bonds between Hawaiians and other ethnic groups formed during the early days of Hawai‘i’s plantations, and rallied people in support of Hawaiian sovereignty. The play is an act of redress that fortifies Hawai‘i’s history as a legitimate, sovereign nation and challenges hegemonic interpretations of Hawai‘i’s history that characterize US imperialism as a positive force that shaped Hawai‘i into a utopic multicultural paradise. [7] Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl was one of the very first people I interviewed. Her words guided my research and offer tremendous insight for instructors and students who are eager to engage with both Asian American and Pacific Islander theatre. JG: How did you find your way to theatre? VNK: The Hawaiian Renaissance. At the time people were really interested in Hawaiian history and culture. We were attracted to the theatre because it allowed us to express who we are and where we came from in different ways. When hula and all kinds of traditional Hawaiian practices made a huge comeback, there were better plays and bigger audiences. Theatre, performance, history, and the street all came together for me. In the ’80s I participated in and wrote some of the early living history theatre in Honolulu. Now that performance type has really taken off in Hawai‘i. There’s all kinds of places and groups that are doing living histories now. When we started, a lot of academic historians were frowning on what we were doing. But the truth was that living history got people interested in Hawaiian history, in their personal history. People in Hawaiʻi need to be more aware of the colonial history. I don’t think enough people know. JG : Can you tell me about your involvement with Kumu Kahua Theatre? VNK: . I was in the right place at the right time. Kumu Kahua was new and I was new. They were hungry for scripts. I invested myself in Kumu Kahua because I really wanted to produce things that were written locally. Kumu Kahua didn’t always produce Local theatre because there just weren’t enough scripts. Sometimes they did Asian American plays that were written by Asian people who aren’t from Hawaiʻi. I was invested in a kind of theatre that was by and for the Local community and didn’t reflect the larger American theatre, popular theatre scene. I was hungry for things that reflected who I am and where I came from. I am still supportive of and invested in giving voice to our island stories or things that are relevant to our island communities. Now, there’s a whole bunch of young people and a much larger community that is invested in Local theatre. Other theatres are now just starting to do productions that have Local themes and are looking for really good locally written plays. There’s so many more people interested in our theatre. It is really rewarding to see that. JG : What would you call what you write? Would you call that Local theatre or Hawaiian theatre? VNK: People used to call my work Asian American theatre because when I started writing there was no Pacific Island theatre. I was really conflicted about that. You want people to read your plays and that was all that mattered to me. I wanted my plays out there. Some of my plays could be called Hawaiian theatre, but some are not. I’ve never quibbled over labels. I want the freedom to write whatever really touches and interests me and whatever I feel passionate about. I like to think of myself as a Pacific Island writer. Some of my plays could be categorized as Hawaiian theatre and some of them could be Local theatre and some could be neither. JG : I’ve seen your plays in anthologies by women of color. But I’ve also seen them in postcolonial anthologies. The label I’ve seen most often is either Asian American or Hawaiian. VNK : I think that people in academia need categories. Labels make it easier for them to teach. But as a writer, you’re not sitting at home thinking, “Am I a Hawaiian writer or am I a Local writer?” You’re just writing. You’re writing what comes into your head. And so I just kind of leave the labels to other people. I’ll just write the plays and they decide what they are. JG : How would you define Local theatre? VNK : That’s hard because Local theatre includes Hawaiian theatre, but Hawaiian theatre doesn’t necessarily include Local theatre. I guess you could say Hawaiian theatre is anything that has Hawaiian characters or Hawaiian issues as its main theme. Local theatre includes Asian and Asian American theatre. But out of all the labels out there, I like Pacific Island theatre the most because it’s so inclusive. Labels are hard because there’s always something left out and there’s always a gray area. It is really tricky because all these questions have come up for me for a long time. And so what I’m trying to do is not necessarily make hard and fast boundaries between things because that’s just impossible. JG: So would you say there are multiple, overlapping genres at play here? VNK: Yeah. The Local, Hawaiian, and Western. They overlap. They are not really separate from each other. I do think that there are certain kinds of colonial undertones and attitudes and certain dynamics that play out between the three. Colonialism permeated the arts in Hawaiʻi. When I was first involved with Kumu Kahua, I was just starting out in theatre. I remember I was at a party and I was talking to this woman. I said I was a theatre major, and she goes, “Oh, have you been in plays?” I said, “I’ve been in a few Kumu Kahua plays.” She looked at me and she said, “No, I mean, a real play.” Theatre in Hawaiʻi is something really special. But the problem is people have a certain idea of what Hawaiʻi is. I don’t think our island theatre really fits into that. [8] When we look at Hawaiʻi, particularly its contemporary theatre scene, we see insightful tensions that arise from the distinct yet overlapping categorical schemas of “Asian American,” “Asian,” “Pacific Islander,” “Local,” and “Hawaiian.” Kneubuhl’s remarks echo J. Kehaulani Kauanui’s essay “Asian American Studies and the ‘Pacific question’” that calls upon Asian American Studies to actively engage Indigenous and Pacific Islander Studies rather than passively absorb Hawaiian and Pacific Islander history and culture into Asian American culture. [9] Kneubuhl’s embrace of the label “Pacific writer” signifies the ongoing transpacific turn of Asian American Studies and a way to recognize holistically the many voices that make up Asian and Pacific diasporas. Decentering the United States highlights the inherent liminality and multidimensionality of Asian identities and cultures that exist across the Pacific. A transpacific, rather than a US-centric approach, can help us understand how theatre of Hawaiʻi and Asian American theatre are related but distinct from each other. Transpacific Studies, which draws from Asian American Studies, Asian Studies, Indigenous Studies, Pacific Island Studies, and American Studies, illuminates the flow in peoples, cultures, capital, ideas, and labor across the Pacific. [10] Theatre of Hawaiʻi and Asian American theatre are distinct representations of the people, cultures, and histories of the Pacific that directly inform each other and provide a model on how the field of Asian American Studies can produce new theorizations on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Kneubuhl’s work is a model for how to create equitable representation out of tremendous cultural plurality. References Footnotes [1] Mark Chiang, The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University (New York: New York University Press, 2009). [2] Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds. Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai’i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008). [3] Esther Kim Lee, A History of Asian American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3. [4] Lisa Kahaleole Hall, “Navigating Our Own ‘Sea of Islands’: Remapping a Theoretical Space for Hawaiian Women and Indigenous Feminism,” Wicazo Sa Review 24 no. 2 (2009): 15–38; Kauanui, J. Kehaulani, “Where are Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders in Higher Education?” Diverse: Issues in Higher Education , 7 September 2008. [5] Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989). [6] Tammy Haili’ōpua Baker, “The Development and Function of Hana Keaka (Hawaiian Medium Theatre): A Tool for Empowering the Kānaka Maoli Consciousness” (Dissertation, University of Waikato, 2019); Sammie L. Choy, “Staging Identity: The Intercultural Theater of Hawai‘i” (Dissertation, University of Hawai‘i, 2016); Stefani Overman-Tsai, “Localizing the Islands: Theaters of Place and Culture in Hawaii’s Drama” (Dissertation, University of Hawai‘i, 2015). [7] Craig Howes, “Introduction,” in Hawai’i Nei: Island Plays (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002); Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, January 1893 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i at Manoa Press, 1993). [8] Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, interview by Jenna Gerdsen, June 2019. [9] J. Kehaulani Kauanui, “Asian American Studies and the ‘Pacific question,’” in Asian American Studies After Critical Mass , ed. Kent A. Ono (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 121-143. [10] Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen, Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014). About The Author(s) Jenna Gerdsen is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the School of Theatre at Florida State University. She is an emerging scholar whose work examines the racial formation of contemporary theatre of Hawai‘i and investigates how settler colonialism and immigration shape this theatre tradition vis-à-vis Indigenous and Asian American cultural production. Her research was featured in the curated panel “New Directions in Theatre and Performance” at the 2021 American Society for Theatre Research conference. 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.

L. Bailey McDaniel Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States L. Bailey McDaniel By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF CRACKING UP: BLACK FEMINIST COMEDY IN THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY UNITED STATES. Katelyn Hale Wood. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2021; Pp. 204. Cracking Up by Katelyn Hale provides a worthy addition to Humor Studies and an invaluable contribution to scholarship that explores Black feminist performance and comedy. Although often marginalized in performance archives, Black women comedians are “integral in the trajectory of stand-up comedy” (4) and occupy a vital cultural and political role as “storyteller, truth-teller, protest leader, and critical historiographer” (148). Wood’s four central chapters illuminate the ways that Black feminist comics have advanced feminist, Queer and queered expressions of joy and opposition to anti-Black racism & a vital act of social critique that is at once liberatory, recuperative, and agency-building. Beginning with a telling juxtaposition of stand-up pioneer Jackie “Moms” Mabley and concluding with comic Wanda Sykes’ 2019 portrayal of Mabley in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel , Wood demonstrates the “politic of joy” that defines Black feminist stand-up. The contributions of the artists she explores perform necessary cultural and political work, generating a productive nexus for the “pleasures, communities, and spiritual experiences that thrive in the face of, and in spite of, legacies of racialized grief.” Wood points out how these performances offer “both visceral and epistemological” insights that are facilitated not merely by performer, but audience as well (4). The text’s methodology bolsters its impressive rigor as well as its readability. Incorporating issues central to and lenses employed by canonical Black feminists (e.g. Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins), Wood also integrates (and at times, critiques) theoretical frameworks from humor scholars (e.g. Henry Bergson, Sigmund Freud), while at the same time making astute use of queer scholars who conspicuously consider intersectional issues of race and power (e.g. José Esteban Muñoz, E. Patrick Johnson). This interdisciplinarity offers a worthwhile resource to scholars of Black Feminism, Humor Studies and African American Performance. Wood incorporates a materialist historiography that gainfully attends to specific cultural and political realities; performer and character identities; performance implements such as costume, props, set design, marketing, make-up, and sound; and, of course, content. Wood’s archival labor is buttressed by analyses that integrate considerations of spectatorship, both original and subsequent, with the latter nodding to video and digital spectators after the live event & what Wood terms “mediated” audiences. These live and mediated audiences, whether incarcerated women watching Mo’Nique’s 2007 stand-up live and in person at the Ohio Reformatory for Women, or the consumers who view the same performance (and its editorial choices) after the fact, always exist as a requisite component of performance in Wood’s examination. Cracking Up also maintains an investment in contextualizing and acknowledging the multivalent connections shared by what initially and wrongly appear as disparate and/or disconnected performers and performance strategies. Not unlike Cracking Up ’s subjects, Wood repeatedly reveals (and celebrates) the political, Black feminist, and often queer throughlines of performers and performances over multiple decades. In a kind of “meta” technique, the text practices the Black feminist and queer methodologies that Wood brings to light in the individual performers/performances themselves. Wood’s first chapter supplements the still-under-researched figure of stand-up and Black feminist icon Jackie “Moms” Mabley. Initiating what she terms an “archival intervention” (23) into the overlooked achievements of Mabley, Wood expounds on Mabley’s rhetorical and performance-related innovations that lay the groundwork for the intersectional and radical Black feminist subjectivity that will benefit Black/Queer women comics and their audiences into the next century. Despite the limitations of Mabley’s performance archive to date, Wood fruitfully situates “Mabley’s dynamic civil rights comedy within Black feminist and Black queer performance aesthetics” while also “re-contextualiz[ing] histories of stand up” itself (27). As she does throughout, here Wood advocates for a productively fluid archive of Mabley that “centers [her] comedy as decidedly Black, feminist, and queer,” making sure to “read against histories that attempt to quiet or make mutually exclusive such identity markers and performative strategies of resistance” (32). Focusing on actor and comedian Mo’Nique’s 2007 stand-up special I Coulda Been Your Cellmate! , chapter two skillfully invokes José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of “disidentification” and concretizes the multiple ways that Cellmate! builds queer- and Black-feminist-informed communities while simultaneously establishing opposition to the carceral state. More than just Black, queer, feminist dissent, Mo’Nique’s stand-up event and subsequent/mitigated performances of it achieve a “cracking up” of the racist and heteropatriarchal status quo, often through a reclamation and celebration of Black/queer women’s erotic power. This chapter also presents a valuable offering to the field of Prison Studies, as Wood shrewdly explores the matrix of the audience’s (1) “Black feminist elsewhere” that is both “imagined and material” alongside (2) an “imaginary release from imprisonment and surveillance” that accompanies the literal “physical release of laughter" (54). Chapter three investigates what Wood describes as the queer temporalities that exist in the comedy of Wanda Sykes. For Wood, Sykes’ stand-up prompts a productive subversion of linearly-organized temporalities and myths of American progress. Looking specifically at Sykes' repertoire from 2008-2016, Wood unveils the ways that Sykes’ Black feminist comedy challenges more than just white supremacy and homophobia, but in fact cracks up notions of citizenship and progress that are invested in heteronormative, homoliberal taxonomies. Said another way, beyond its initial mocking of white supremacist and homophobic history, Sykes’ work advocates a disruption of restricting (and false) temporality as experienced by queer bodies of color. Wood’s final chapter contemplates Black feminist comics’ articulation of collective and individual mandates for equality and justice within the twenty-first century landscape of misogynist, anti-Black, anti-trans, and homophobic violence. Wood considers how the stand-up of Amanda Seales, Sasheer Zamata, Sam Jay, and Michelle Buteau advocates a specific kind of Black feminist agenda whereby comedy functions as critique of “the new racism” of the twenty-first century. Incorporating recent cultural phenomena (and resistance strategies) such as #MeToo , Wood effectively unpacks the post-Obama/Trump-era appeal for “new waves of stand-up comedy” that gainfully “combine[s] comedy and a desire for social justice” (110). Cracking Up reveals how Black feminist stand-up shapes Black subjectivity, while also disrupting modes of oppression that inspire discrimination and violence. Making expert use of her foundational concept of “cracking up,” Wood concretizes the ways that Black feminist comedians successfully and queerly influence national character and identity. Indeed, as they facilitate and celebrate embodiment, these truth-tellers breach anti-Black and heteropatriarchal narratives through performer and audience, alike. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Wood, Katelyn Hale. Cracking UP: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States . Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2021. Footnotes About The Author(s) Professor McDaniel is a Michigan native who grew up in and around Wayne County. After earning an undergraduate degree in Economics at the University of Michigan, she spent five years in New York City studying acting and performing. She earned her graduate degrees in English at Indiana University. She is thrilled to be back home, doing the work that she loves with students she deeply appreciates and respects. The undergraduate and graduate courses she teaches typically investigate issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and physical abilities as they are engaged in modern drama, US ethnic literature, and postcolonial literature and drama. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

​The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) is an annual event showcasing films drawn from the world of theatre and performance. ​​ The Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) is an annual event showcasing films drawn from the world of theatre and performance. Film Festival 2025 9th edition View Festival Lineup Film Festival 2024 8th edition View Festival Lineup Film Festival 2022 7th edition View Festival Archive About The Festival The festival presents experimental, emerging, and established theatre artists and filmmakers from around the world to audiences and industry professionals. From its inaugural edition in 2015 to its present-day hybrid avatar, The Segal Film Festival for Theatre and Performance (FTP) has served as a platform for recorded works that span the length and breadth of the performing arts. Festival Founder and Executive Director of the Martin E. Segal Theater Center, Frank Hentschker shares his inspiration for creating the festival: “Film and digital media are an integral part of theatre and performance. I am surprised that there is not a film festival out there right now focusing on theatre and performance. I thought ‘why not create one’?” In the time before Corona, the Segal Film Festival had evolved into the premier US event for new film and video work focusing on theatre and performance. Its mission was to invite experimental and established theatre makers to present work created for the screen – not filmed archival recordings – to audiences and industry professionals from around the world. Now, after a year and a half of digital and hybrid theatre offerings, the festival must take on a new meaning. The festival has held on to its mission of being a free and open-to-all event accessible to everyone. The 7th edition of the festival was held digitally in March 2022, and featured 80 films from 30 countries, whilst the 8th edition was held in a hybrid format in May 2024 with in-person screenings in NYC and digital streaming.

Jaclyn I. Pryor Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 1 Visit Journal Homepage Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202. Jaclyn I. Pryor By Published on January 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg’s Ensemble-Made: A Guide to Devised Theater (2019) is a valuable resource for theater educators and practitioners, particularly those who wish to deepen their knowledge of the craft variously known as devised theater, ensemble-based performance, and collective creation. Each short chapter of the book focuses on a distinct Chicago-based theater company (15 in total)—which range from large, nationally-renowned companies such as Lookingglass Theatre and The Second City to smaller, community-based collectives. Each chapter includes a brief history of the company alongside descriptions of games and exercises emblematic of their process and pedagogy. The co-written book also includes an Introduction which places the field of devising in its larger cultural and historical context, as well as a Time Line of the field and List of Exercises By Type, which function as the book’s conclusion. The authors’ methodologies are informed by their own relationship to devised theater in Chicago: Johnson is an ensemble member of the Neo-Futurists and Paz Brownrigg is the Artistic Director of Free Street Theater and cofounder of Teatro Luna—both of which are featured in the book. In this regard, they write as scholars and practitioners of devised theater but also as colleague-critics within the expansive but close-knit network of the Chicago theater community. (Colleague-criticism is a term developed by Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, Jill Dolan and me to describe the queer and feminist practice of writing criticism from a place of love, respect and mutual aid, as articulated in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies in 2009.) As Ensemble-Made Chicago’s introduction makes clear, Chicago theater has deep roots in ensemble-based creation methods, and, in turn, the field of devising writ large has a great debt to pay in this neighborhood-based, immigrant-rich town that propagated the craft of ensemble-based theater and performance. Johnson and Paz Brownrigg effectively detail how this history can be traced to the late 19th century emergence of the field of modern social work in the city of Chicago—which was made possible, in large part, through the establishment of the Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr Hull House on Chicago’s West Side in 1889. The Hull House was an early settlement house focused on direct services for new Americans; as the authors duly note, “very early on, Jane Addams discovered the profound effect theater had on the children who attended” (xii). The Hull House Players, as they came to be known, were part of the contemporaneously burgeoning Little Theatre Movement in the U.S. (1912-1925) which distinguished itself by its break from commercial theatre and its focus on theatre as civic good. Guided by the pivotal contributions of sociologist Neva Boyd and social worker Viola Spolin—who brought their respective skills and interests in theatre as a catalyst for play, collaboration, and issue-driven exploration to the Hull House—the authors demonstrate how the Hull House paved the way for this contemporary community of devised theatre makers to thrive. Through both its introduction as well as its body chapters, Ensemble-Made also makes a compelling case for considering devised theatre’s relationship not only to social work and arts education, as previously noted, but also to the history and methods of physical theatre. Although not always explicitly cited, many of the games and exercises featured in the book bear obvious ties not only to the pedagogy of Boyd and Spolin (and Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, who founded Second City), but also to the pedagogy of 20th century French theatre maker and educator Jacques Lecoq who developed a codified system of actor training grounded in embodiment. Featured companies, such as 500 Clown, Albany Park Theater Project, Every house has a door, and Walkabout Theater, among others, draw from physical theatre games and exercises in their creation process, resulting in work that resembles experimental performance as much as it does community-based theater. What also becomes clear, as the reader moves their way through the book, is the fact that the Chicago devised theater community is hardly confined by its midwestern geography. Dell’ Arte International (Blue Lake, CA), Third Rail Projects (Brooklyn, NY), Double Edge Theatre (Ashfield, MA), Sojourn Theatre (Portland, OR), and Pilobolus Dance (Hanover, NH and Washington, CT) all receive honorable mentions in descriptions of exercises. In other words, the artists who comprise Johnson and Paz Brownrigg’s case studies cite not only one another but also those companies from around the country (and world) whose creation methods have circulated through a vast and interlocking network of theater educators and practitioners. In this regard, Ensemble-Made tacitly provides a compelling genealogy of contemporary performance traditions, making evident the ways in which “something as simple as a warm-up has a history” (xi), and revealing the complex ways in which embodied practices circulate across changing times, places and social contexts. While Ensemble-Made ’s explicit focus is more practice than theory, the authors productively place their book in conversation with the field of performance studies—specifically, Diana Taylor’s foundational The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003). Taylor’s work is useful to Johnson and Paz Brownrigg’s project because it provides them with a key rationale: citing Taylor, Johnson and Paz Brownrigg situate ensemble-based performance as a “repertoire event.” They elaborate, “it lives in performance and process, not necessarily in text” (xi). Because the creation process for devised theater breaks from traditional theater methods in which “the script” precedes the rehearsal process (and, relatedly, often from clearly delineated roles such as “playwright,” “director,” “performer,” and “audience”), both the devised theater event as well as the process of making the event do not always leave a clear archive for the historian to later interpret. As the authors succinctly put it, “all of [the companies under consideration] have developed a way of creating performance that is predicated on collective, rather than individual, agency. Their work starts in a room, rather than on a page, building a show bit by bit, together” (x). As such, Ensemble-Made Chicago is all the more indispensable: like the field of devising itself, it privileges process over product, while also serving as an accessible guidebook for the history, methods and practices of devised theater—making it a volume to be used in the present and future of the field. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JACLYN I. PRYOR Pennsylvania State University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue "Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here": Romanticizing Grifters in American Musical Theatre Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero: The Mark of the Marketplace in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1-3 Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202. Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec; Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Thomas H. Arthur Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Thomas H. Arthur By Published on June 6, 2024 Download Article as PDF Color him black And count the bruises He was tough and slender Chiseled in bronze He died too young And he smiled too little But his dreams were the dreams of a man. --Sydney Hibbert (1986) This article investigates the career of Jamaican American theatre practitioner, Sydney Hibbert (1932-1990), who worked in Jamaica, London and the United States as an actor, teacher, and poet, and wrote meaningfully about these experiences. (1) Hibbert emerged from a colonized place and culture and was, in many ways, a postcolonial subject who negotiated the differing and often conflicting demands of values and structures created by the British, while also struggling to maintain his identity or connection with his home culture and sense of self. Educated in Kingston and London, he returned home in 1965 and, with other Jamaican students who had studied in London, attempted to establish an indigenous theatre for popular audiences of Black Jamaicans. At first this initiative failed, and Hibbert turned to the American Black Power Movement in Harlem for inspiration. Moving to New York to teach at the Harlem School of the Arts, he found frustration and rejection in the theatre world. When his agent suggested he get rid of his Jamaican accent, he refused. His struggles to preserve his Jamaican identity and find a voice among African American people reveal the challenges and complexity of postcolonial experience. Nevertheless, he managed to have a substantial career as a teacher and performer in the United States and helped start the National Black Theatre Festival of the North Carolina Black Repertory Company that exposed audiences to Black classics and new works. Hibbert was sometimes disillusioned but never idle in his pursuit of artistic accomplishment along with racial justice. (2) Black Jamaicans and the Colonial System Hibbert’s Jamaican, enslaved roots helped shape his personality and professional ambitions. Columbus landed in Jamaica on his second voyage in 1494, an arrival that was a disaster for Jamaican residents who were killed, sent to Spain as slaves, or became slaves in their native land. (3) In 1645, England captured Jamaica from the Spaniards, and in 1670, the slave trading Royal Africa Company was formed using Jamaica as its chief market and a center of their activities in the West Indies. (4) Between 1647 and 1838, British settlers imported between one and two million slaves from West Africa for plantations and estates that produced sugar, cocoa, indigo, and later coffee, with tens of thousands dying on the passage to the Caribbean. (5) Many Black Jamaicans inherited their surnames from plantation owners such as the English merchant Thomas Hibbert who immigrated to Kingston in 1734. The Hibbert family subsequently held interests in sixty estates and controlled almost half of the Jamaican slave trade. They profited from British colonialism’s triangular trade routes which began in the mother country with sugar and rum transported to Africa that was exchanged for slaves transported to the Caribbean, after which the ships were reloaded with sugar for a passage home to England. (6) By virtue of his surname, Hibbert was metaphorically part of this triangle of people, culture, and influence. Along with slavery and trade, the British brought their theatre culture, which became part of the Jamaican heritage. The first professional company to perform on the island presented John Gay’s The Beggars’ Opera in 1733 . (7) Throughout the Pre-Emancipation period, whites-only audiences were exposed to Shakespeare plays, farces and melodramas performed by European and American professional companies. (8) In 1775, the Old American Company—the first fully professional theatre group to perform in North America—staged Shakespeare’s Romeo and Julie t. In 1807, the British Parliament abolished the slave trade, and in 1834, slavery in Jamaica, but this had little cultural effect. Even after Kingston’s formerly whites-only theatres began admitting patrons on segregated and then mixed-color bases, these audiences still saw standard classics and a few current English-originated works. (9) For instance, in 1912 the new Ward Theatre opened with Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance . (10) Later, in 1941, under the aegis of the Little Theatre Movement, the Ward Theatre became the home of Boxing Day pantomimes that grew popular for a wide audience, although according to one observer, there were a “token few” black performers—the musicians and a school teacher—in the first Jack and the Beanstalk performance. (11) The next decades saw the “Jamaicanizing” of the British pantomime. (12) Perhaps more significant in the history of Jamaican theatre is the body of African-Caribbean musical and performance traditions associated with folklore, religious rituals and seasonal festivals. (13) These enactments involved storytelling, idiomatic speech, movement, gesture, personification, choreography, audience participation, and pantomime. There are parallels between the techniques of this informal theatre and formal drama which the colonial system defined as “real theatre.” The folk theatre went underground during colonialism, but re-emerged in the 1940s, forming the essential basis, sources, and techniques for a new generation of playwrights and actors seeking to define their Jamaican identity and create an indigenous theatre. Sydney Hibbert (b. 1932) grew up during the early decolonization period when Jamaicans gained universal suffrage in 1944 and full independence in 1962. (14) He had sharp words for Black voting rights: “Universal Adult ‘Sufferage’ (sic), Man to man wid’ a(n) equal X! Count the papers and forget them. Keep some pedigree and class!” (15) He became interested in theatre through a small role in a secondary school production of The Pirates of Penzance which, even though its distinctly British character had nothing to do with his own life experience, settled his goal of acting as his future occupation. “You enter into another world” doing theatre, “you’re the center of that world” he later recalled. “I knew I was always going to do this.” (16) The contrast between the world of Pirates and his own could not have been sharper. He was raised with two siblings by a widowed mother in the “lanes” (back alleys) of the Cross Roads section of Kingston with sanitary conditions so bad that residents petitioned the town council to build sewers. (17) He described it as “a heaven and a hell—a home and a prison.” (18) In a poem entitled “Actor Boy” he writes, “Boy, you come from Cross Roads/ Mek some money man!” Shame at the end of my smile/ Screaming inside my head like voices, Run, boy, run! There’s no inheritance here…” (19) A poem “Morning Call” reflects Hibbert’s disillusionment with the school curriculum: “Hiding inside the sounds change/ London bridge is falling down, Falling down… And the Lane is paved with gold, But the gingerbread houses are scarce/ And Red Riding Hood never plays here.” (20) Opportunities for education were limited because grammar schools charged fees, but Hibbert received a scholarship intended for disadvantaged Black youth at Excelsior College, recently founded by young educator A. Wesley Powell. (21) When Hibbert attended the school, it had outstanding music, speech and drama programs including performance opportunities at the Ward Theatre. While Hibbert was a student. one of Excelsior’s most famous graduates, Louise Bennett (Coverley) taught there from 1946-48. (22) Coverley, who as a student had written poetry in Jamaican patois, became a national icon in theatre, radio and TV, and champion of Jamaican folklore and indigenous literature. Later in his own poetry, Hibbert referred to “Miss Lou” in explaining his use of poetic dialect. After graduation from secondary school, he explored his interest in theatre by attending classes at the private Continental Academy, which offered tutoring in music, dance and drama. During this period, he supported himself with a low-paying civil service position in the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands. (23) Because of its colonial past Jamaica was believed to have a racial blending that created a homogeneous creole multi-racism. Martin Luther King Jr. visited Jamaica in June 1965 and was impressed that so many different nationalities seemed to be combined into one Jamaican identity. (24) However, recent studies indicate that “shadeism,” or colorism, was an open secret in Kingston. In “Examining Race in Jamaica,” Monique Kelly finds that both race category and skin color affected opportunities for schooling and access to household amenities. (25) As another researcher describes it, children acquired a sense of social differences based on skin color at home or in school. Sydney’s dark skin complexion was less desirable than lighter mixed-race skin, so he was considered to be lower class. In a poem describing his childhood, he wrote “your father is not backra (white)/ not even high brown skin.” (26) Perhaps the most important Black influencer in Hibbert’s early life was Jamaican-born activist Marcus Garvey (1887-1940). (27) Garvey established the “Universal Negro Improvement Association” (UNIA) in Kingston in 1914, aiming to achieve Black nationalism through the celebration of African history and culture with a Back-to-Africa message. In 1916, he moved to Harlem, New York where UNIA eventually established 700 branches in thirty-eight states, spreading to more than forty countries in Africa, Australia, Europe, and the Americas. (28) Garvey was deported from the US for possible fraud and lived in Kingston 1927-1935 where he continued to articulate ideas of Black pride and racial success. Though Hibbert was too young to understand Garvey’s message in the 1930s, when his body was brought back for burial at the National Heroes Park in 1964, Jamaica boiled with debates over Garvey’s significance and concepts of Jamaican nationhood. (29) Living in Harlem became a goal and when Hibbert finally moved there, he heard Garvey’s ideas reechoed by Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. Playing ‘the Outsider’ in London Seeking to better themselves in London with professional qualifications was standard practice for Commonwealth citizens. In 1962, Hibbert received a bursary scholarship to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Royal Academy of Drama (RADA). At the Guildhall, one of his most important roles was in John Gay’s Polly , a classic play rife with racial satire against the British planters and colonization. The actor was likely cast for his Jamaican identity since the story takes place in the West Indies. Instead of white men wearing black makeup, Hibbert was playing a main role as a Black actor in his own skin without makeup. He received critical acclaim for his interpretation of “Cawwawkee,” the West Indian prince who in the story eventually marries Polly. According to historian Richard Dryden, this ballad opera (a sequel to The Beggar’s Opera ) “condemns the British planter, the British soldier, the British slave trade, the transportation of British criminals, and the pirate,” thus labeling all characters as being either fools or knaves except for the heroine, Polly, and the native Indians.” (30) The West Indians were the “good guys” and the white British merchants and planters the “bad guys,” setting up a racial role inversion within a safe, comedic format. Gay’s Polly has been understood as both a superficial satire and/or an early radical anti-colonial statement. Hibbert’s Shakespearean roles also fall into the outsider category, from the title part in Othello, to Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream , to Feste in Twelfth Night . Othello the Moor is a Black man in a white Venetian society. Oberon is the king of the fairies and a magical being, outside ordinary human limitations. Feste is a licensed fool, free to observe and comment on the foibles of the play’s authority figures. All three characters were thought suitable for a Black actor. Hibbert received Guildhall’s characterization prize for his Feste, interpreted with humor, satire and menace, in the Shakespeare 400th anniversary celebrations. (31) His success with Shakespearean roles demonstrates his ability to “mimic the colonizer” while still honoring his love of Shakespearian language. When he returned to Kingston in August 1965, he was celebrated in the press, and promoted to the Ministry of Development and Welfare. (32) In the 1970s, Hibbert used his London training at the Colorado and Alabama Shakespeare Festivals. (33) At Colorado, his Othello moved critic J. H. Crouch to compare his portrayal with actors like “the sun-tanned Walter Huston, a liver-lipped Lawrence Olivier and a magnificently bullish Paul Robeson.” The critic wrote, “I had contemplated Othello as an exotic, a stranger, a pantaloon, a victim, a fool, even a black hero in a white melodrama, but he had not been prepared for “the pagan gentility, the curtailed, then unleashed barbarousness of Sidney Hibbert’s Othello.” Kari Howard notes, “The actor was devoted to the detail of character construction— from modest storytelling, through quiet authority, through steely authority through laughing security through rational security, through genuine dilemma, through a disintegration of personality which commands the trance (the most real I have seen).” (34) Hibbard later played Othello at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, where a critic commended the contrast between the actor’s soft-spoken delivery at the beginning and tension of a man maddened by jealousy at the end of the play. (35) Creating Jamaican-centered Theatre Returning to Kingston in August 1965, Hibbert was caught up in the attempts to identify and define indigenous Caribbean culture. His first Kingston project was 1865—A Ballad for Rebellion , written by Jamaican playwright and novelist Sylvia Wynter who had returned from London to teach at the University of West Indies and form “a truly indigenous theatre.” (36) In an interview, she explained the problem: local drama needed more serious audiences than pantomime attendees, as well as fresh, realistic scripts by West Indies playwrights. In addition, new professional standards should be developed. Wynter and her then husband Jan Carew wanted to establish The Jamaican Folk Theatre, starting with a production of her script A Child is Born . (37) This was delayed because the Ministry of Development commissioned her to write an epic historical drama about the Morant Bay Rebellion.” (38) After a year’s intensive research, it was ready in October 1965. Directed by Jamaican Lloyd Reckord, with Hibbert as his assistant and production manager, it featured over a hundred players. Reviewer Norman Rae described it as an elaborate production that ran three and a half hours and contained much “speechifying,” while missing opportunities for dramatic expression. He thought that the basic concept of the play was confused with no point of view and stereotyped character development. (39) It is difficult to assess the impact of this event, already highly politicized because the “Tercentenary of English Colonization” celebrated in 1955 was followed by “Emancipation Day” in 1965. (40) Ballad may not have been an artistic success, but Wynter’s approach to rewriting history more inclusively, from the Jamaican people’s viewpoint, marked a fundamental step in decolonizing the story. (41) Almost all local working Black actors were involved and thereby exposed to her humanization of the Black characters and the shift in collective memory. This predates Wynter’s theoretical writings, but reveals the germinal stages of her decolonial thinking. One concrete result of the performance was that the Ministry of Development promised to commission new West Indian scripts at future festivals. Within a month, Hibbert led a group of young theatre practitioners (five of whom had been in Ballad ) in establishing a new theatre company that aimed to attract audiences “beyond the Europhile elite.” (42) They selected the name “Theatre 77” reflecting their goal, “to establish a fully professional theatre company in twelve years: sixty-five plus twelve makes seventy-seven.” (43) They could not agree on any Jamaican scripts for their first performances, so they chose Edward Albee’s Zoo Story and Miss Julie by August Strindberg. According to company member Yvonne Jones (Brewster), they reasoned that both plays concern the struggle between the “haves and have nots, between the lower classes and those they serve.” Social inequality was “examined so brutally by both playwrights,” they believed that “audiences would see the parallels with their own society, which would make the double bill a sure winner.” (44) Without financial backing or public relations experience, the group nevertheless pushed forward arranging for performances in the Old Library/Dramatic theatre at the University of West Indies Mona campus. Hibbert directed Miss Julie , performed in Zoo Story , and was the producer and stage manager. The review by Harry Milner (a lead actor in Ballad ), published two days after the opening, was mixed: entitled “Promising Start” he praised some acting, but found the production “a bit melodramatic, old-fashioned, and slow.” (45) The show closed early, and the company was left with a large debt in part because of expensive programs ordered by Hibbert. Brewster later wrote that “we all were to blame for the fiasco” due to “over-optimistic audience projections, inflated egos, and a complete absence of financial and logistic planning.” (46) The group soon acquired a new performance space, “The Barn,” and staged the British playwright Roger Milner’s comedy How’s the World Treating You with Hibbert in the lead role. Norman Rae’s review was positive and Hibbert received special praise for his deadpan comedic delivery. (47) Still, the script was not written by a Jamaican and did not deal with the island’s political and social concerns. The company attempted to remedy this by next presenting recital/performances by four Jamaican writers, On the Off Beat , along with Afro-American Harlem Renaissance leader Langston Hughes’s jazz poem Ask Your Mama . (48) These pieces, billed as happenings with the audience bringing their own cushions to sit on the floor, were directed by George Carter, already one of Jamaica’s most established theatre practitioners. (49) Still seeking subjects more relevant to their audience’s lives, the company began to hold improvisational “devising workshops” that were recorded, transcribed with scenes marked for further workshopping. These innovative activities led to Trevor Rhone’s first play Look Two in 1967. During this time, Hibbert was working with the Jamaica Festival Office as a theatre lecturer and drama tutor. (50) Theatre 77, now renamed The Barn Theatre, endured for forty years becoming an important chapter in Jamaican theatre history. Encountering Black Power in America By early 1968, Hibbert had been transferred to the Jamaican Embassy in Washington, D. C. as the cultural attaché, but he soon abandoned the Civil Service to move to Harlem. It was in Washington that Hibbert first encountered the South African playwright Athol Fugard whose work was so important to him in future years. Hibbert studied after hours at the Stage Studio, a method acting school founded by Louise Brandwen (1932-1974), a Russian-born émigré who had trained at the Moscow Art Theatre and worked with Lee Strasberg in Los Angeles. At the Stage Studio, he studied the Stella Adler technique and the teachings of Grotowski, Artaud, and Meyerhold. He was now cast in Blood Knot , one of Fugard’s first plays written as a statement against the South African racial laws. (51) The play premiered in Johannesburg on October 23, 1961, after which it was banned in the city. The American premier of Blood Knot opened Off-Broadway with James Earl Jones playing Zacharias in 1964. (52) The plot concerns two half-brothers who share the same Black mother, but one of them passes for white while the other cannot. In the Stage Studio production Hibbert, a Black Jamaican, played the darker-skinned brother Zach. This was an especially compelling story given the young actor’s experience of racism and shadeism. The significance of Fugard’s influence on Hibbert’s career cannot be overstated. He played a variety of parts created by many playwrights, but often returned to Fugard’s plays and Blood Knot . At Illinois State University in 1970, his training included non-traditional reverse casting such as a class in which white students worked on Black playwright Ron Milner’s Who’s Got His Own while Black students performed Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf . Milner’s play had been a great success at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem in 1967 and represented the trend among the Black Arts Movement’s cultural nationalists to create “Black theatre for the advancement of Black people.” (53) Hibbert also arranged a staged reading of Fugard’s Blood Knot in which he played Zachariah with a white faculty member playing his lighter-skinned brother. In 1982 Hibbert played Zachariah again at California’s South Coast Repertory Second Stage, and in 1986 he played the teacher/servant, “Sam,” in Fugard’s anti-apartheid Master Harold, and the Boys . (54) Los Angeles Times critic Lawrence Christon calls Hibbert a “forceful, compelling figure” in a Master Harold review. (55) The Santa Ana Orange County Register ’s reviewer, Jeff Rubio, focuses on the relationship between the actor’s work, playwright Fugard and South Africa. “The playwright brings apartheid into focus,” writes Rubio, “Fugard demands an identification that is beyond most performers, but Hibbert disappears into Sam.” (56) In 1987 while teaching at the North Carolina School for the Arts, Hibbert played Zachariah again in the university production of Blood Knot , receiving stellar reviews. (57) Studying Fugard, playing his roles, and thinking about racism was becoming a central concern in Hibbert’s lifework. Hibbert was drawn to Harlem in his quest to perform plays written by Black writers about their own identity. Earlier Afro-Caribbeans had been key figures in the international Harlem Renaissance. (58) In the late 1960s Harlem was alive with militant activist ferment due to the turmoil of the Civil Rights movement and assassination of Malcolm X. Black culture was fostered by the New Lafayette Theatre, the short-lived Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School, the New Heritage Repertory Theatre, Harlem Dance Theatre, the journal Umbra and the Harlem School of the Arts among others. (59) Hibbert wrote a short prose piece, “Harlem Adagio: Part of a Symphony for Black Men Uptown,” which describes the urban scene. At first, the mood of the essay is upbeat: “at the New Lafayette, there were sold-out houses of people wearing dashikis and afros you couldn’t see around!” Hibbert noticed “Black men were looking each other squarely in the eyes for the first time in their generation’s memory. Malcolm’s words were pouring out of the most unlikely mouths in word-for-word accurate quotes; Stokely Carmichael was upfronting it all over the university campuses; and the Panthers were going to lead this revolution to kingdom come.” (60) Yet Broadway was still difficult for Black actors except for superstars, and local roles were not easy to win for a newly emigrated West Indian actor. (61) After Hibbert’s fifth unsuccessful audition in one day, ranging from Equity Principals Only to Off-Off-Broadway, his agent, who had previously respected Hibbert’s Jamaican identity, urged him to lose his Caribbean accent, something the actor refused to do. His desire to keep his linguistic culture alive was certainly influenced by Louise Bennett-Coverley who, as aforementioned, had taught in Hibbert’s secondary school. In his poem “For Those in Exile,” he wrote, “Talk bad-talk with pride/ For Louise is dictionary now!” (62) At the end of “Harlem Adagio” Hibbert talks about fighting poverty, dodging bill collectors and disrespect, and becomes furious, “Jesus Christ! I gon’ kill somebody if this go on much longer…DAMN!” (63) But then Hibbert was hired as the director of the drama workshop at the Harlem School of the Arts (HAS). After his experience in Jamaica both teaching and working with cultural development, this position was a perfect fit. The school was founded in 1964 by singer Dorothy Maynor, and offered children and adults opportunities to study music, visual arts, and theatre. She wanted children to be exposed to beauty within their community and to develop their talents from an early age. Maynor selected teachers who, like Hibbert, were professional but also adaptable to people coping with deep poverty and racial prejudice. (64) HAS hired five theatre faculty and inaugurated a new performance space in a converted garage in 1969. They presented Aimé Césaire’s A Season in the Congo that told the story of Patrice Lumumba's rise to power and assassination in 1961. Césaire, poet, writer and political figure from Martinique had been one of the founders of the French literary movement Négritude . Césaire advocated for acceptance of blackness in order to free or decolonize the mind. For his part, Hibbert directed a Nigerian play Akowawe with Afolabi Ajayi and the Moari-Moayo [Mbari Mbayo] Players, which included African music and lyrics in English, Swahili, and Yoruba. (65) Variant spellings of Yoruba names have obscured its relationship with the Mbari Mbayo clubs founded by Yoruban playwright Duro Adipo in Nigeria. Adipo’s theatre company produced performances heavily infused with Yoruba rituals, poetry, dance and theatre using authentic, historical instruments. (66) These two events show how Hibbert and the Harlem School of the Arts were instrumental in bringing contemporary pan-African culture to local audiences. Hibbert’s book of poetry, Anansi and Muntu , published in 1986, grew from free-form lyrics performed with musicians in Harlem and Los Angeles in the 1970s. (67) The explosive mid-1970s reception of Jamaican singer-songwriter Bob Marley may have bolstered the appeal of Hibbert’s performance pieces. (68) But the actor’s work had roots in the jazz poetry performed at Theatre 77 in Kingston, particularly Langston Hughes’ Ask Your Mama—Twelve moods for Jazz , which derived from the Harlem Renaissance. Hibbert writes that “Beyond the meaning of Caribbean words and their color is the rhythm of the language,” a kind of music. (69) He hoped to communicate, “clearly and succinctly, in short staccato sentences” pulsing “like the real jazz” with the “shouts of gospel” when it was “newborn, warm and supine, splendidly cathartic and holy.” (70) An especially notable poem, “A Requiem,” commemorates Paul Robeson’s death in January 1976. It begins, “Paul Robeson left today/With dignity,” and ends “Maybe you and I, small dedication/ Living best the Force we know/For another unsung prophet/ In this Black race, against Time.” Hibbert may have attended Robeson’s funeral held in Harlem at the AME Zion Church and was deeply moved by his life struggles. Another section, Somewhere a Third World, contains poems on South Africa. “Bloodbath: for Six High School Students Shot in Soweto,” decries police brutality in the Soweto riots that protested using only English or Afrikaans in all schools. From the Black point of view, this was the language of oppression. Hibbert writes, “Robbery of a people’s native right/Their chess game of securities and power/ And the UN didn’t even notice/ Black blood dripping/Between the fingers of corporate handshakes….” (71) In a section on going home, he reflects on his exile and identity: “ We climbed over fences to larger fields/And schoolhouse places relearning/Three-hundred years’ curriculum of self. And Britons, never, never, never shall be slaves.” (72) When Hibbert revisited his mother’s house after her death in 1984 he wrote, “Dreams come solid, incessant/ Through long nights remembering/ Where I keep my pain locked up/ Hollowing out my chest.” (73) Anansi and Muntu is a journal defining his Jamaican birthright and identity in the wider international world. Teaching a Postcolonial discourse for future generations Hibbert had personal experience of cultural imperialism in British control of educational curricula as a strategy for handling colonized subjugated people. Sub-par education for African Americans was also a significant problem in the United States. While earning a graduate teaching degree at Illinois State University, he directed the Black Fine Arts Festival. In an interview he said, “We have temporarily lost track of our true cultural heritage and one of the functions of this festival will be to help us reunite this lost past with our present.” (74) He displays a Postcolonial awareness of the need to educate and excavate the African American cultural heritage as an independent story that contradicts the traditional colonial narrative. Hibbert’s teaching embodied these principles in the 1970s. His first full-time teaching job was head of the newly formed Drama department at Rutgers University, Livingston campus. This was six years after the riots in Newark, New Jersey when Black protestors took to the streets to stand against the discrimination, lack of representation and working opportunities in the city. (75) Though Rutgers had created new departments and curricula “to serve the needs of the multi-ethnic community,” Hibbert observed that Blacks had little place or input in a white power structure, which seemed to be less concerned with issues than appearances. (76) While at Rutgers, Hibbert ventured into the American South, lured by a visiting artist opportunity to play “King Lear” at a Virginia university. In this setting Hibbert experimented with delivering his lines in the rhythm and patterns of Jamaican patois (patwa). By this time a formidable teacher, white student cast members remember him “beating a drum and leading us around the room to changing rhythms while vocalizing to the movements.” (77) Rehearsals ended in discussions of how each actor’s movement synched with the lines. “It was an amazing piece of work,” writes the costumer. “Sydney would be speaking quietly and then, suddenly near the end of the play, would burst into an eloquent fury, ripping off the clothing I had put on his back.” (78) In 1983, Hibbert joined the faculty of the North Carolina School for the Arts in Winston-Salem. (79) As one of only three Black NCSA faculty members, Hibbert believed that minority students should be taught survival skills because they would go into the drama world as pioneers. (80) His efforts to get Black actors cast in the same roles as Whites were termed “heroic” in a Winston-Salem newspaper. (81) Hibbert’s approach to teaching was shown in a workshop he offered using an integrated approach to drama, dance, movement, music, poetry, and dramatic literature, while his “Putting Your Best Voice Forward” class dealt with voice production and speech as applied to the “extension of personality.” (82) Hibbert also worked with the Winston-Salem based North Carolina Black Repertory Company, the first showcase for Black theatre professionals in the state and one of the first in the nation. (83) Founded in 1979 by entrepreneur/performer Larry Leon Hamlin and fueled by the same forces that had motivated Hibbert to travel from Jamaica to the United States, the missions of the organization were to “engage, enrich and entertain” with innovative programming of a high quality that “resonates across the community and challenges social perceptions,” to expose “diverse audiences to Black classics,” as well as to develop and produce new works.” (84) Of special importance to Hibbert, the company sought to sustain Black theatre internationally and provide a space in which theatre professionals could earn a living through their craft. (85) Hibbert brought broad experience to the NCBRC and the first Black Theatre Festival, where he performed well-received pieces from Anansi and Muntu and was a guest artist at an “Evening of Aesthetic Ambience,” organized to recognize officers and board members. (86) In the first year of the National Black Theatre Festival that established it as a national force, Hibbert was a special consultant to Hamlin, the artistic director of the company, helping to organize events and influencing the productions of Fugard’s The Island and Sizwe Bansi is Dead . (87) He was in contact with Maya Angelou, his previous director who became the first national chairperson for the Festival. In recognition of his work, Angelou presented him with the 1989 Conference Award for Outstanding Service. (88) After Hibbert’s death in 1990, commemorative articles refer to his accomplishments as an actor, director, writer, and theatrical entrepreneur. (89) His evocative poetry and prose as well as his “exuberance, and demanding nature as a teacher” are noted. (90) Students remember Hibbert’s voice carrying “the heavy flavor of his native accent” combined with his “rich sense of humor” reflecting “the joy he took in life” and “in the practice of his life’s work.” (91) Hamlin summarized Hibbert’s contributions saying, “Sydney believed that no matter the amount of adversity, there was always a way to overcome that. Not only could one dream the impossible dream, but one could make that dream a reality” adding, “One of the things I most liked about him was that his growing up in Jamaica had a lot to do with who he was and how he saw things.” (92) Sydney Hibbert, a man who grew from a rigid colonial education and culture as a child to a postcolonial theatre professional pushed against the racial and cultural barriers of his day, may have longed for respect for his homeland, his home culture, and himself. A choice to earn that respect for self and nation by showing the colonizer’s culture, writ large, that he could accomplish significant things on the field that those colonizers had created, is understandable. His experience surely led him to realize the value of teaching a younger generation to do better and his own Black students to be more empowered and aware. His anti-colonialist drive emerged in his powerful performances of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, now re-envisioned, as much as in roles in Fugard’s plays that brought social and racial inequities and questions about humanity to the fore. The battle that Theatre 77/Barn colleagues fought at home and in Britain, he fought in the United States. Hibbert’s choice, however, seems to have meant walking a lonely path in a culture or society where he may never have felt completely at ease. In his poetry, he displayed a sense of anger and displacement or, as Homi Bhabha has termed it, “unhomeliness.” (93) Hibbert moved from Kingston, Jamaica, to London, to Washington, D. C., Harlem, Los Angeles, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, but he never have found a physical space or social reality that was compatible with his Jamaican identity. As African American journalist Sam Fulwood III writes, animosity often clouds relationships between Caribbean immigrants and native-born African Americans citizens because of competition for jobs and differences in their dealings with whites.(94) In Hibbert’s lifetime people of West Indian descent, a minority within a minority, occupied lofty positions in American life and culture, including former United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, Harvard historical/cultural sociologist Orlando Patterson, Caribbean American writer Jamaica Kincaid, and entertainer Harry Belafonte among others. Though Hibbert’s career and life accomplishments are less well-known, attention is merited because of the breadth and quality of his work as well as his passion for changing the racial discourse in Jamaica and the United States. In an age of reclaiming the histories of People of Color and seeking to understand the experiences of people growing up in a colonial setting, this work reconstructs the life of a “Caribbean soul” who successfully negotiated the changes from Jamaican colonial life to a decolonized life in the United States. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Sydney Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu: A Caribbean Soul in Exile , (Rural Hill, NC: Independent Publishing Company, 1986), 44. See also, Gerald McDermott, Anansi the Spider: a tale from the Ashanti , (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1972). Anansi is a folktale character in the shape of a spider, often considered a god of all knowledge and stories, a trickster, one of the most important characters of Caribbean folklore and the genesis of the later Brer Rabbit in the American South. Muntu embraces living and dead, ancestors and deified ancestors. The author wishes to thank Dennis C. Beck, Professor of Theatre: Theatre History/Dramatic Literature at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA and Kathleen Giles Arthur, Professor emerita of Art History, for their invaluable assistance and editorial comments. For general history, see Clinton V. Black, The History of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Longman Publishing & Collins Educational Press,1958); Errol G. Hill, The Jamaican Stage, 1655-1900: Profile of a Colonial Theatre , (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Philip Sherlock and Hazel Bennett, The Story of the Jamaican People (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Rundle Publishers,1998); Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020). Sherlock and Bennett, Jamaican People , 77-98. Sherlock and Bennett, Jamaican People , 116-127. Rachel Manley, Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood, (Key Porter Books, 2009), Prologue xi. For specific information on slavery and the processing of sugar see “Sugar’s Revolution” in Ada Ferrar, Cuba: An American History , (New York: Scribner, 2021), 69 -77. Ferrar, Cuba pp. 73-74. Marlis Schweitzer calls these theatrical gatherings “sites that facilitated collective alignment with the “ideals and aesthetics of the ‘mother country,’” as quoted in Susan Valladares’ The Review of English Studies , Vol. 73, no. 309, April 2022, 322. Hill, Jamaican Stage , p. 237, n. 2, also credits Richardson Wright, Revels in Jamaica, 1682-1838 , (New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1937). By the early nineteenth century, segregation had become commonplace in the Kingston Theatre, though not many years later the “caste system,” white sailors and educated blacks, was “overriding racial lines.” Hill, Jamaican Stage , 36-37. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva suggests in Racism Without Racists , “Since theatre is based in storytelling” and “its ability to lie in the realm of the given,” it can “help [spectators] make sense of the world but in ways that reinforce the status quo,” in Rowman & Littlefield, sixth edition, 96. Hundreds of people saw costumes that were identical to those used earlier at London's Savoy Theatre, in https://old.jamaica-gleaner.com/pages/history/story0010.html . Yvonne Brewster, Vaulting Ambition: Jamaica’s Barn Theatre, 1966-2005, (Leeds, England: Peepal Tree Press Ltd., 2017), 23. Wycliffe and Hazel Bennett, The Jamaican Theatre: Highlights of the Performing Arts in the Twentieth Century , (Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2011), 55-78. Hill, Jamaican Stage , 272-289. On folk elements (dance and music) in African-Caribbean plays, see Osita Okagbue, Culture and Identity in African and Caribbean Theatre , (London: Adonis and Abbey Publishers, 2009), 191-201. Sherlock and Bennett, in Jamaican People , p. 368, hypothesize that rejection of Nazism at the end of World War II influenced Britain’s abandonment of concepts of Empire and trusteeship. “Echoes Still Heard,” Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu , 16. He played on the spelling of suffrage to change its meaning to suffering. “Wid a(n) X” show the lines are written in Jamaican patois. Lil Thompson, “Sydney Hibbert: The Discipline Pays Off,” Winston-Salem Journal , July 31, 1986, 26. They lived at 4 Hart Lane behind Lismore Street, running off of Old Hope Rd. See https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1934-06-05/page-5/ Hibbert, “The Lane, Tempo Mystique,” Anansi and Muntu , 9. Hibbert, “Actor Boy,” Anansi and Muntu , 13. Hibbert, “Morning Call,” Anansi and Muntu , 12. Black, History of Jamaica , 137-140; A. Wesley Powell, The Excelsior-EXED Story , (Kingston: The Methodist Church in the Caribbean and Americas, Jamaica District), 1989. Powell, 27-28, 41-47. Louise Bennett was awarded a British Council scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) in London, and returned to teach at Excelsior 1946-48. By writing in dialect, Bennett-Coverley was following in the footsteps of Jamaican poet Claude McKay. “Local Dramatist Returns,” https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-08-04/page-6/ https://www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-133/out-of-many . King said, “Here you have people from many national backgrounds: Chinese, Indians, so-called Negroes, and you can just go down the line, Europeans, and people from many, many nations. Do you know they all live there and they have a motto in Jamaica, “Out of many people, one people.” And they say, “Here in Jamaica we are not Chinese, we are not Japanese, we are not Indians, we are not Negroes, we are not Englishmen, we are not Canadians. But we are all one big family of Jamaicans.” Monique D.D. Kelly, “Examining Race in Jamaica: How Racial Category and Skin Color Structure Social Inequality,” The Journal of Race and Social Problems , Vol. 18 (2020), 300-312. Hertice Altink, Public Secrets: Race and Skin Colour in Colonial and Independent Jamaica , (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019). Hibbert, “Actor Boy,” 13. The term “high-brown” was used in Harlem in the 1920s and found in Black women’s face powder sold as “High Brown” by the Overton-Hygienic Company, Chicago. Sherlock and Bennet, Jamaican People , 292-315, 362-63. Rupert Lewis, “Jamaican Black Power in the 1960s,” in Black Power in the Caribbean , ed., Kate Quinn, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 55-56. Rex Nettleford, Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica , (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 19-37. Robert G. Dryden, “John Gay's Polly: Unmasking Pirates and Fortune Hunters in the West Indies,” Eighteenth-Century Studies , Vol. 34, No. 4, (2001), 539-557. Stoney Lloyd, “Local Dramatist Returns,” Daily Gleaner , August 4, 1965, 6. Besides those listed above, he played in the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman and Patrick Hamilton’s psychological drama The Duke in Darkness , and four separate characters in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood . He produced Jean Anouilh’s Antigone and Chekov’s Uncle Vanya , which placed on the honor list of productions in the Student Repertory Theatre. “Local Dramatist Returns,” Daily Gleaner. August 4, 1965, 7-8. Hibbert took acting classes from Kingston teacher, Violette de Barovier Riel at her Continental Academy workshop and acted with the Repertory Players, Caribbean Thespians, and the Coke Drama Group. He was married and his wife joined him. Gleaner , August 10, 1963, 19 and Gleaner, August 15, 1965, 20. He portrayed what one reviewer called an elegant Thane of Cawdor in Shakespeare’s Macbeth . Carol McGinnis Kay, “The Alabama Shakespeare Festival,” Shakespeare Quarterly , Vol. 30, No. 2 (1979), 205-208. J. H. Crouch, “The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare Quarterly , Vol. 21 (1970), 465-467. This critic used racial stereotypes that would be considered inappropriate today. Kari Howard, Kaleidoscope , “Drama Review: Othello a Mellow Fellow,” September 29, 1983, University of North Carolina at Asheville, 7. “First Novel Wins Acclaim,” Daily Gleaner , August 9, 1962, p. 24. See Imani D. Owens, “Toward a Truly Indigenous Theatre: Sylvia Wynter Adapts Federico García Lorca,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , 4:1 (2017), 49-67. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1962-11-25/page-9/ The Morant Bay Rebellion broke out on October 11, 1865, when several hundred black people raided the police station and stole weapons stored there. Two planters were killed, and several others were threatened. With the disturbances spreading, the Jamaican authorities put down the rebellion so brutally that direct rule from London was established, which ended representative government in the island for decades. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-10-17/page-18/ ; https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-10-26/page-18/ Veronica M. Gregg, “Commemorations in Jamaica: A Brief History of Conflicts.” Caribbean Quarterly 56, no. 1/2 (2010): 23–67, especially 28-29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654952 . Carole Boyce Davies, “From Masquerade to Maskarade,” in Sylvia Winter, On Being Human as Praxis , ed. Katherine McKittrick, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 203-225 https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-03-02/page-7/ ; Members who had been involved in Ballad were Sydney Hibbert, Billy Woung, Trevor Rhone, Grace Lannaman, and Munair Zacca. Bennett, The Jamaican Theatre , 90-94; Brewster, Vaulting Ambition, 16-20. Sydney was fresh from acting and management training in London. Trevor Rhone and Yvonne Brewster had studied at the Rose Bruford College in Kent. Rhone became a well-known playwright and was presented with the Institute of Jamaica Musgrave Gold Medal. Brewster founded the Talawa Theatre Company, London and, after a long career acting, directing and producing was awarded an Order of the British Empire. Brewster, Vaulting Ambition , 16-17. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-03-06/page-17/ ; As Brewster tells the story, there was no review. For the post mortem, see Trevor Rhone, Bellas Gate Boy , (Oxford, England: MacMillan Caribbean Writers, 2008), 29-32. Brewster, Vaulting Ambition, 17-19. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-07-20/page-26/ Daily Gleaner, “Merry-go-round,” June 14, 1966, Brewster, Vaulting Ambition , 33. George Carter had been a pioneer theatre director and lighting designer in Kingston since the 1940s. He was lighting designer for the musicals, pageants, dance and pantomimes in the Little Theatre Movement. In 1961 he received an Arts Council award to study in London at Sadler Wells Ballet and the Shakespeare Memorial theatre at Stratford. Hibbert’s post-Theatre 77 lecturing and teaching activities in Jamaica were extensive, as documented in Daily Gleaner, “Trends in Theatre,” October 06, 1965, 26; “New Slants to Known History,” October 14, 1965; “Drama workshop opens today,” April 25, 1966, 16; “Jamaica Festival Kingston and Saint Andrew Training courses,” April 26, 1966, 5; “Continental Academy Drama Course,” April 8, 1967, 18; “Festival Seminar, Drama Seminars,” April 25-29,” 1967, 26; May 11, 1967, 26. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2416/the-art-of-theatre-no-8-athol-fugard It toured to Cape town and other locations until June 1962. Soon after the show closed, laws were passed prohibiting racially mixed casts or audiences in South Africa. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095512988 and https://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/ fugard.html/. The Blood Knot starring J. D. Cannon as Morris and James Earl Jones as Zachariah at the Cricket Theatre in 1964, as noted in “Blood Knot' Lists American Premiere,” New York Times , Friday, January 31, 1964, 16. Milner's most significant contribution to African-American letters was Black Drama Anthology (1972), the earliest and most respected anthology of Black plays. It included works by Milner, Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, and Langston Hughes https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100158957 ) Winston-Salem Chronicle , “Hibbert honored by LA drama critics,” March 27, 1986, A-12. The Drama-Logue newspaper, a weekly west-coast theatre trade publication, gave Drama-Logue Theatre Critics Awards for theatre work done in Los Angeles and Southern California. See https://www.abouttheartists.com/award_groups/184-drama-logue-awards/year/1988 . Lawrence Christon in “Stage Review: Playwright as Exorcist in Master Harold and the Boys ' South Coast Repertory,” Los Angeles Times May 25, 1985, in https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-05-25 -ca-25 15632-story.html. Jeff Rubio, Santa Ana Orange County Register, May 24, 1985, 148. Robin Barksdale, “Group bound by ‘Blood Knot’” in “Close-Up,” Chronicle, April 30, 1987, A6. The Jamaican poet Claude McKay (1890-1948) settled in New York City in 1914 and wrote about Black life in Jamaica and challenges faced by Black Americans, often in the influential Pearson’s Magazine and Liberator . Marcus Garvey, founder of the UNIA, had lived in Harlem from 1916 until 1924. See the excellent film with photos and interviews by the Community Works N.Y.C. and the New Heritage Theatre Group, ( https://www.harlem-is.org/videos ) at https://youtu.be/vGG0LMPlf_Y Hibbert describes the whole Harlem scene, Ananzi , 30-31. See also James E. Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s , (Raleigh, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Encyclopedia of the Black Arts Movement , Vernon D. Mitchell, Cynthia Davis, editors (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). African-Americans Pearl Bailey ( Hello Dolly ) and James Earl Jones ( The Great White Hope) were playing starring roles on Broadway, but the Caribbean American Repertory Theatre (CART) was only founded in 1975. See Olivier Stephenson, Visions and Voices (Leeds: Peepal Press, 2013), and http://southernworldartsnews.blogspot.com/2015/03/caribbean-playwrights-converse-and.html Hibbert, Ananzi , 49. Bennett-Coverley brought recognition to the Jamaican Creole dialect through her poetry and Jamaica Radio series “Mis Lou’s Views” that ran 1965-1982. Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu , 29-34. He was divorced from his first wife and married Jamaican Claire Gutzmore in Manhattan in 1969. See https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1969-06-02/page-4/ and https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/903708390:61406?tid=&pid=&queryId=df594283-1d04-45d8-83aa-de0675f898fa&_phsrc=SVt1380&_phstart=successSource . William F. Rogers, Jr., “The Establishment of the Harlem School of the Arts,” Black Music Research Journal , Vol. 8 (1988), 223-236. Negro Digest (later Black World), Vol. 18, August 1969, 50. Spelled two different ways in the same article. See Genevieve Fabre, “A Checklist of Plays, Pageants, Rituals and Musicals by Afro-American authors performed in the United States 1960-1973,” Black World/ Negro Digest, April 1974, 95. Afolabi Ajayi is recorded a as Nigerian recipient of a scholarship to Pomona College where he graduated in 1964; he was deceased by 1975. See https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDAAU440.pdf Okeke-Agulu, Chika. “Rethinking Mbari Mbayo: Osogbo Workshops in the 1960s, Nigeria.” In African Art and Agency in the Workshop , edited by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir and Till Forster, 154–79. Indiana University Press, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gh6fp.11 . This is a new discovery that needs to be explored. Reported in “Studies in Caribbean and South American Literature: An Annual Annotated Bibliography, 1989.” Callaloo 13, no. 3 (1990): 564. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2931339 . Anansi “is the ‘spiderman’ in Caribbean folktales who “survives by adopting a role” and “guarding his sense of humor that pricks pretension—especially his own,” whereas, “Muntu,” the Bantu word for soul, spirit or otherness, goes with Anansi on his journeys providing stability, an unshakable inner identity. He sees two worlds, past and present clearly though he often chooses to remain quiet and detached,” in Hibbert, Anansi “Introduction.” The actor’s pointed observations are a long way from the “One Love!” sensibilities in Marley’s work. For more on Marley, see Timothy White, Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley, (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000) and Roger Steffens, So Many Things to Say; the Oral History of Bob Marley , (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017). Hibbert, Anansi “Introduction,” p. x. Hibbert aspires to “taste, philosophize, and one day even write the answers clearly, succinctly in short staccato sentences” that will be “hailed as a new style,” pulsing “like the real jazz,” blooming with “the colors and textures of the blues,” and mounting “crescendos like the shouts of gospel when it was just newborn, warm and supine, splendidly cathartic and holy, in “Harlem Adagio,” Anansi, 29. Hibbert, “Bloodbath,” Anansi , 61. Hibbert, “For Those in Exile,” Anansi, 49. Hibbert, “Visit ’84,” Anansi , 53. “The Black Fine Arts Festival,” Illinois State University, The Vidette , Vol. 82, n. 54, April 17, 1970. The theme was “The Meaning of Blackness,” with films and prominent lecturers; The Vidette Vol. 83, no.47, March 9, 1971; Vol. 84, n.39, February 8, 1972; The Vidette , Vol. 84, n. 55, March 21, 1972. The unrest from July 12-17, 1967 “came during a period when racial tensions were exploding into violent conflagrations across the country.” Over several days in Newark, “twenty-seven people were killed — many of them black residents, as well as a white firefighter and a white police detective — and more than 700 were injured,” Rick Rojas and Khorri Atkinson, “Fifty Years After the Uprising: Five Days of Unrest That Shaped, and Haunted, Newark,” New York Times, July 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/nyregion/newark-riots-50-years.html Daily Gleaner , “Jamaican Dramatist Returns for a Visit,” May 23, 1973, 5. On the Rutgers/Livingston situation, see Paul G.E. Clemens, “The Early Years of Livingston College, 1964–1973: Revisiting The “College of Good Intentions” in The Journal of The Rutgers University Libraries , Vol. 6-7, 71-114, in http://dx.doi.org/10.14713/jrul.v68i2.1987 . Pat Woodson, “Hibbert Accepts Lead—First Reading Inspires Cast,” The Breeze , September 24, 1974, pp. 3, 6; Jeffrey Alan Dailey, Communication with author, August 2, 2021. Pat Woodson, “Lear Costume Designs,” The Breeze , October 11, 1974, 3; Pamela Johnson, Communication with author, September 30, 2021. According to the Winston-Salem Chronicle , December 6, 1990, B10, Hibbert had already lectured and done university-level workshops on the Los Angeles, Northridge and Pomona California State University campuses while performing in Southern California in the 1980s. Robin Barksdale, “Group bound by ‘Blood Knot’” in “Close-Up,” Winston-Salem Chronicle, April 30, 1987, A-6. Winston-Salem Chronicle , “The Actor as Instrument,” June 21, 1984,16, and Glenda E. Gill, “Schertzer racially biased,” in “Forum,” Chronicle , Thursday, January 21, 1988, A-5. Winston-Salem Chronicle , “The Actor as Instrument,” June 21, 1984, 16; Winston-Salem Journal , December 22, 1985, 40. These organizations included The Flonnie Anderson Theatrical Association and Nell Lite Productions, see Felecia Piggot McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory Company —Twenty-five Marvtastic Years, (Greensboro: Open Hand Publishing, LLC,2005) 22. McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory , 5, “The black self-affirmation fueled by the Civil Rights Movement carried over to the Black Powers Movement and, consequently, to its cultural wing – the Black Arts Movement.” https://www.ncblackrep.org/about-us/html . Winston-Salem Chronicle “Looking Back on 1986,” “Sydney Hibbert performs a mixture of humor and pathos in his Anansi and Muntu ,” Feb. 5, 1987, C-4; McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory, 41, 61; Winston-Salem Chronicle , “Can We Talk?” September 24, 1987, A-8. McMillan, 61; The Island and Sizwi Banzi is Dead written by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona were originally performed in 1972 in Cape town, South Africa. McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory Company , 46-50. Other celebrities were Oprah Winfrey, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Lou Gossett, Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones, and Roscoe Lee Brown. Mabel Robinson, former NCBR Artistic Director, Winston-Salem Chronicle, December 6, 1990, B-9; Winston-Salem Chronicle , January 10, 1991, A-8. Daily Gleaner , Tuesday, January 15, 1991, 27. Patricia Smith Deering, “Renowned local dramatist remembered,” Winston-Salem Chronicle , December 6, 1990, 25. John Hoeffel, “Drama Professor Sydney Hibbert Dies of Cancer,” Winston-Salem Journal, November 30, 1990, 12; Nathan Ross Freeman wrote and directed a play based on Hibbert, Your Side Mine , that was performed at the Montage Showcase Ensemble in November 1997. See https://www.greensboro.com/ensemble-gives-playwrights-a-chance/article_68b7d190-97d4-5e5b-b6ea-891a97f0c19f.html . Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” Social Text , 31/32 (1992), 141-153. Hibbert experienced the “unhomeliness” in the sense of his exile and itinerant life style. Though he became a US citizen in 1978, he was constantly moving from the East to West Coasts. In “Sermon in a Dream-Mass: Port Elizabeth, South Africa,” the lanes of Kingston where he grew up haunted his imagination becoming metaphors for danger and death. Sam Fulwood III, “U.S. Blacks: A Divided Experience,” November 25,1995, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-11-25-mn-6855-story.html . Footnotes Sydney Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu: A Caribbean Soul in Exile , (Rural Hill, NC: Independent Publishing Company, 1986), 44. See also, Gerald McDermott, Anansi the Spider: a tale from the Ashanti , (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1972). Anansi is a folktale character in the shape of a spider, often considered a god of all knowledge and stories, a trickster, one of the most important characters of Caribbean folklore and the genesis of the later Brer Rabbit in the American South. Muntu embraces living and dead, ancestors and deified ancestors. The author wishes to thank Dennis C. Beck, Professor of Theatre: Theatre History/Dramatic Literature at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA and Kathleen Giles Arthur, Professor emerita of Art History, for their invaluable assistance and editorial comments. For general history, see Clinton V. Black, The History of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Longman Publishing & Collins Educational Press,1958); Errol G. Hill, The Jamaican Stage, 1655-1900: Profile of a Colonial Theatre , (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Philip Sherlock and Hazel Bennett, The Story of the Jamaican People (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Rundle Publishers,1998); Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020). Sherlock and Bennett, Jamaican People , 77-98. Sherlock and Bennett, Jamaican People , 116-127. Rachel Manley, Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood, (Key Porter Books, 2009), Prologue xi. For specific information on slavery and the processing of sugar see “Sugar’s Revolution” in Ada Ferrar, Cuba: An American History , (New York: Scribner, 2021), 69 -77. Ferrar, Cuba pp. 73-74. Marlis Schweitzer calls these theatrical gatherings “sites that facilitated collective alignment with the “ideals and aesthetics of the ‘mother country,’” as quoted in Susan Valladares’ The Review of English Studies , Vol. 73, no. 309, April 2022, 322. Hill, Jamaican Stage , p. 237, n. 2, also credits Richardson Wright, Revels in Jamaica, 1682-1838 , (New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1937). By the early nineteenth century, segregation had become commonplace in the Kingston Theatre, though not many years later the “caste system,” white sailors and educated blacks, was “overriding racial lines.” Hill, Jamaican Stage , 36-37. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva suggests in Racism Without Racists , “Since theatre is based in storytelling” and “its ability to lie in the realm of the given,” it can “help [spectators] make sense of the world but in ways that reinforce the status quo,” in Rowman & Littlefield, sixth edition, 96. Hundreds of people saw costumes that were identical to those used earlier at London's Savoy Theatre, in https://old.jamaica-gleaner.com/pages/history/story0010.html . Yvonne Brewster, Vaulting Ambition: Jamaica’s Barn Theatre, 1966-2005, (Leeds, England: Peepal Tree Press Ltd., 2017), 23. Wycliffe and Hazel Bennett, The Jamaican Theatre: Highlights of the Performing Arts in the Twentieth Century , (Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2011), 55-78. Hill, Jamaican Stage , 272-289. On folk elements (dance and music) in African-Caribbean plays, see Osita Okagbue, Culture and Identity in African and Caribbean Theatre , (London: Adonis and Abbey Publishers, 2009), 191-201. Sherlock and Bennett, in Jamaican People , p. 368, hypothesize that rejection of Nazism at the end of World War II influenced Britain’s abandonment of concepts of Empire and trusteeship. “Echoes Still Heard,” Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu , 16. He played on the spelling of suffrage to change its meaning to suffering. “Wid a(n) X” show the lines are written in Jamaican patois. Lil Thompson, “Sydney Hibbert: The Discipline Pays Off,” Winston-Salem Journal , July 31, 1986, 26. They lived at 4 Hart Lane behind Lismore Street, running off of Old Hope Rd. See https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1934-06-05/page-5/ Hibbert, “The Lane, Tempo Mystique,” Anansi and Muntu , 9. Hibbert, “Actor Boy,” Anansi and Muntu , 13. Hibbert, “Morning Call,” Anansi and Muntu , 12. Black, History of Jamaica , 137-140; A. Wesley Powell, The Excelsior-EXED Story , (Kingston: The Methodist Church in the Caribbean and Americas, Jamaica District), 1989. Powell, 27-28, 41-47. Louise Bennett was awarded a British Council scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) in London, and returned to teach at Excelsior 1946-48. By writing in dialect, Bennett-Coverley was following in the footsteps of Jamaican poet Claude McKay. “Local Dramatist Returns,” https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-08-04/page-6/ https://www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-133/out-of-many . King said, “Here you have people from many national backgrounds: Chinese, Indians, so-called Negroes, and you can just go down the line, Europeans, and people from many, many nations. Do you know they all live there and they have a motto in Jamaica, “Out of many people, one people.” And they say, “Here in Jamaica we are not Chinese, we are not Japanese, we are not Indians, we are not Negroes, we are not Englishmen, we are not Canadians. But we are all one big family of Jamaicans.” Monique D.D. Kelly, “Examining Race in Jamaica: How Racial Category and Skin Color Structure Social Inequality,” The Journal of Race and Social Problems , Vol. 18 (2020), 300-312. Hertice Altink, Public Secrets: Race and Skin Colour in Colonial and Independent Jamaica , (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019). Hibbert, “Actor Boy,” 13. The term “high-brown” was used in Harlem in the 1920s and found in Black women’s face powder sold as “High Brown” by the Overton-Hygienic Company, Chicago. Sherlock and Bennet, Jamaican People , 292-315, 362-63. Rupert Lewis, “Jamaican Black Power in the 1960s,” in Black Power in the Caribbean , ed., Kate Quinn, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 55-56. Rex Nettleford, Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica , (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 19-37. Robert G. Dryden, “John Gay's Polly: Unmasking Pirates and Fortune Hunters in the West Indies,” Eighteenth-Century Studies , Vol. 34, No. 4, (2001), 539-557. Stoney Lloyd, “Local Dramatist Returns,” Daily Gleaner , August 4, 1965, 6. Besides those listed above, he played in the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman and Patrick Hamilton’s psychological drama The Duke in Darkness , and four separate characters in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood . He produced Jean Anouilh’s Antigone and Chekov’s Uncle Vanya , which placed on the honor list of productions in the Student Repertory Theatre. “Local Dramatist Returns,” Daily Gleaner. August 4, 1965, 7-8. Hibbert took acting classes from Kingston teacher, Violette de Barovier Riel at her Continental Academy workshop and acted with the Repertory Players, Caribbean Thespians, and the Coke Drama Group. He was married and his wife joined him. Gleaner , August 10, 1963, 19 and Gleaner, August 15, 1965, 20. He portrayed what one reviewer called an elegant Thane of Cawdor in Shakespeare’s Macbeth . Carol McGinnis Kay, “The Alabama Shakespeare Festival,” Shakespeare Quarterly , Vol. 30, No. 2 (1979), 205-208. J. H. Crouch, “The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare Quarterly , Vol. 21 (1970), 465-467. This critic used racial stereotypes that would be considered inappropriate today. Kari Howard, Kaleidoscope , “Drama Review: Othello a Mellow Fellow,” September 29, 1983, University of North Carolina at Asheville, 7. “First Novel Wins Acclaim,” Daily Gleaner , August 9, 1962, p. 24. See Imani D. Owens, “Toward a Truly Indigenous Theatre: Sylvia Wynter Adapts Federico García Lorca,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , 4:1 (2017), 49-67. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1962-11-25/page-9/ The Morant Bay Rebellion broke out on October 11, 1865, when several hundred black people raided the police station and stole weapons stored there. Two planters were killed, and several others were threatened. With the disturbances spreading, the Jamaican authorities put down the rebellion so brutally that direct rule from London was established, which ended representative government in the island for decades. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-10-17/page-18/ ; https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1965-10-26/page-18/ Veronica M. Gregg, “Commemorations in Jamaica: A Brief History of Conflicts.” Caribbean Quarterly 56, no. 1/2 (2010): 23–67, especially 28-29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654952 . Carole Boyce Davies, “From Masquerade to Maskarade,” in Sylvia Winter, On Being Human as Praxis , ed. Katherine McKittrick, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 203-225 https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-03-02/page-7/ ; Members who had been involved in Ballad were Sydney Hibbert, Billy Woung, Trevor Rhone, Grace Lannaman, and Munair Zacca. Bennett, The Jamaican Theatre , 90-94; Brewster, Vaulting Ambition, 16-20. Sydney was fresh from acting and management training in London. Trevor Rhone and Yvonne Brewster had studied at the Rose Bruford College in Kent. Rhone became a well-known playwright and was presented with the Institute of Jamaica Musgrave Gold Medal. Brewster founded the Talawa Theatre Company, London and, after a long career acting, directing and producing was awarded an Order of the British Empire. Brewster, Vaulting Ambition , 16-17. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-03-06/page-17/ ; As Brewster tells the story, there was no review. For the post mortem, see Trevor Rhone, Bellas Gate Boy , (Oxford, England: MacMillan Caribbean Writers, 2008), 29-32. Brewster, Vaulting Ambition, 17-19. https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1966-07-20/page-26/ Daily Gleaner, “Merry-go-round,” June 14, 1966, Brewster, Vaulting Ambition , 33. George Carter had been a pioneer theatre director and lighting designer in Kingston since the 1940s. He was lighting designer for the musicals, pageants, dance and pantomimes in the Little Theatre Movement. In 1961 he received an Arts Council award to study in London at Sadler Wells Ballet and the Shakespeare Memorial theatre at Stratford. Hibbert’s post-Theatre 77 lecturing and teaching activities in Jamaica were extensive, as documented in Daily Gleaner, “Trends in Theatre,” October 06, 1965, 26; “New Slants to Known History,” October 14, 1965; “Drama workshop opens today,” April 25, 1966, 16; “Jamaica Festival Kingston and Saint Andrew Training courses,” April 26, 1966, 5; “Continental Academy Drama Course,” April 8, 1967, 18; “Festival Seminar, Drama Seminars,” April 25-29,” 1967, 26; May 11, 1967, 26. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2416/the-art-of-theatre-no-8-athol-fugard It toured to Cape town and other locations until June 1962. Soon after the show closed, laws were passed prohibiting racially mixed casts or audiences in South Africa. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095512988 and https://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/ fugard.html/. The Blood Knot starring J. D. Cannon as Morris and James Earl Jones as Zachariah at the Cricket Theatre in 1964, as noted in “Blood Knot' Lists American Premiere,” New York Times , Friday, January 31, 1964, 16. Milner's most significant contribution to African-American letters was Black Drama Anthology (1972), the earliest and most respected anthology of Black plays. It included works by Milner, Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, and Langston Hughes https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100158957 ) Winston-Salem Chronicle , “Hibbert honored by LA drama critics,” March 27, 1986, A-12. The Drama-Logue newspaper, a weekly west-coast theatre trade publication, gave Drama-Logue Theatre Critics Awards for theatre work done in Los Angeles and Southern California. See https://www.abouttheartists.com/award_groups/184-drama-logue-awards/year/1988 . Lawrence Christon in “Stage Review: Playwright as Exorcist in Master Harold and the Boys ' South Coast Repertory,” Los Angeles Times May 25, 1985, in https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-05-25 -ca-25 15632-story.html. Jeff Rubio, Santa Ana Orange County Register, May 24, 1985, 148. Robin Barksdale, “Group bound by ‘Blood Knot’” in “Close-Up,” Chronicle, April 30, 1987, A6. The Jamaican poet Claude McKay (1890-1948) settled in New York City in 1914 and wrote about Black life in Jamaica and challenges faced by Black Americans, often in the influential Pearson’s Magazine and Liberator . Marcus Garvey, founder of the UNIA, had lived in Harlem from 1916 until 1924. See the excellent film with photos and interviews by the Community Works N.Y.C. and the New Heritage Theatre Group, ( https://www.harlem-is.org/videos ) at https://youtu.be/vGG0LMPlf_Y Hibbert describes the whole Harlem scene, Ananzi , 30-31. See also James E. Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s , (Raleigh, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Encyclopedia of the Black Arts Movement , Vernon D. Mitchell, Cynthia Davis, editors (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). African-Americans Pearl Bailey ( Hello Dolly ) and James Earl Jones ( The Great White Hope) were playing starring roles on Broadway, but the Caribbean American Repertory Theatre (CART) was only founded in 1975. See Olivier Stephenson, Visions and Voices (Leeds: Peepal Press, 2013), and http://southernworldartsnews.blogspot.com/2015/03/caribbean-playwrights-converse-and.html Hibbert, Ananzi , 49. Bennett-Coverley brought recognition to the Jamaican Creole dialect through her poetry and Jamaica Radio series “Mis Lou’s Views” that ran 1965-1982. Hibbert, Anansi and Muntu , 29-34. He was divorced from his first wife and married Jamaican Claire Gutzmore in Manhattan in 1969. See https://gleaner.newspaperarchive.com/kingston-gleaner/1969-06-02/page-4/ and https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/903708390:61406?tid=&pid=&queryId=df594283-1d04-45d8-83aa-de0675f898fa&_phsrc=SVt1380&_phstart=successSource . William F. Rogers, Jr., “The Establishment of the Harlem School of the Arts,” Black Music Research Journal , Vol. 8 (1988), 223-236. Negro Digest (later Black World), Vol. 18, August 1969, 50. Spelled two different ways in the same article. See Genevieve Fabre, “A Checklist of Plays, Pageants, Rituals and Musicals by Afro-American authors performed in the United States 1960-1973,” Black World/ Negro Digest, April 1974, 95. Afolabi Ajayi is recorded a as Nigerian recipient of a scholarship to Pomona College where he graduated in 1964; he was deceased by 1975. See https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDAAU440.pdf Okeke-Agulu, Chika. “Rethinking Mbari Mbayo: Osogbo Workshops in the 1960s, Nigeria.” In African Art and Agency in the Workshop , edited by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir and Till Forster, 154–79. Indiana University Press, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gh6fp.11 . This is a new discovery that needs to be explored. Reported in “Studies in Caribbean and South American Literature: An Annual Annotated Bibliography, 1989.” Callaloo 13, no. 3 (1990): 564. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2931339 . Anansi “is the ‘spiderman’ in Caribbean folktales who “survives by adopting a role” and “guarding his sense of humor that pricks pretension—especially his own,” whereas, “Muntu,” the Bantu word for soul, spirit or otherness, goes with Anansi on his journeys providing stability, an unshakable inner identity. He sees two worlds, past and present clearly though he often chooses to remain quiet and detached,” in Hibbert, Anansi “Introduction.” The actor’s pointed observations are a long way from the “One Love!” sensibilities in Marley’s work. For more on Marley, see Timothy White, Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley, (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000) and Roger Steffens, So Many Things to Say; the Oral History of Bob Marley , (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017). Hibbert, Anansi “Introduction,” p. x. Hibbert aspires to “taste, philosophize, and one day even write the answers clearly, succinctly in short staccato sentences” that will be “hailed as a new style,” pulsing “like the real jazz,” blooming with “the colors and textures of the blues,” and mounting “crescendos like the shouts of gospel when it was just newborn, warm and supine, splendidly cathartic and holy, in “Harlem Adagio,” Anansi, 29. Hibbert, “Bloodbath,” Anansi , 61. Hibbert, “For Those in Exile,” Anansi, 49. Hibbert, “Visit ’84,” Anansi , 53. “The Black Fine Arts Festival,” Illinois State University, The Vidette , Vol. 82, n. 54, April 17, 1970. The theme was “The Meaning of Blackness,” with films and prominent lecturers; The Vidette Vol. 83, no.47, March 9, 1971; Vol. 84, n.39, February 8, 1972; The Vidette , Vol. 84, n. 55, March 21, 1972. The unrest from July 12-17, 1967 “came during a period when racial tensions were exploding into violent conflagrations across the country.” Over several days in Newark, “twenty-seven people were killed — many of them black residents, as well as a white firefighter and a white police detective — and more than 700 were injured,” Rick Rojas and Khorri Atkinson, “Fifty Years After the Uprising: Five Days of Unrest That Shaped, and Haunted, Newark,” New York Times, July 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/nyregion/newark-riots-50-years.html Daily Gleaner , “Jamaican Dramatist Returns for a Visit,” May 23, 1973, 5. On the Rutgers/Livingston situation, see Paul G.E. Clemens, “The Early Years of Livingston College, 1964–1973: Revisiting The “College of Good Intentions” in The Journal of The Rutgers University Libraries , Vol. 6-7, 71-114, in http://dx.doi.org/10.14713/jrul.v68i2.1987 . Pat Woodson, “Hibbert Accepts Lead—First Reading Inspires Cast,” The Breeze , September 24, 1974, pp. 3, 6; Jeffrey Alan Dailey, Communication with author, August 2, 2021. Pat Woodson, “Lear Costume Designs,” The Breeze , October 11, 1974, 3; Pamela Johnson, Communication with author, September 30, 2021. According to the Winston-Salem Chronicle , December 6, 1990, B10, Hibbert had already lectured and done university-level workshops on the Los Angeles, Northridge and Pomona California State University campuses while performing in Southern California in the 1980s. Robin Barksdale, “Group bound by ‘Blood Knot’” in “Close-Up,” Winston-Salem Chronicle, April 30, 1987, A-6. Winston-Salem Chronicle , “The Actor as Instrument,” June 21, 1984,16, and Glenda E. Gill, “Schertzer racially biased,” in “Forum,” Chronicle , Thursday, January 21, 1988, A-5. Winston-Salem Chronicle , “The Actor as Instrument,” June 21, 1984, 16; Winston-Salem Journal , December 22, 1985, 40. These organizations included The Flonnie Anderson Theatrical Association and Nell Lite Productions, see Felecia Piggot McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory Company —Twenty-five Marvtastic Years, (Greensboro: Open Hand Publishing, LLC,2005) 22. McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory , 5, “The black self-affirmation fueled by the Civil Rights Movement carried over to the Black Powers Movement and, consequently, to its cultural wing – the Black Arts Movement.” https://www.ncblackrep.org/about-us/html . Winston-Salem Chronicle “Looking Back on 1986,” “Sydney Hibbert performs a mixture of humor and pathos in his Anansi and Muntu ,” Feb. 5, 1987, C-4; McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory, 41, 61; Winston-Salem Chronicle , “Can We Talk?” September 24, 1987, A-8. McMillan, 61; The Island and Sizwi Banzi is Dead written by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona were originally performed in 1972 in Cape town, South Africa. McMillan, North Carolina Black Repertory Company , 46-50. Other celebrities were Oprah Winfrey, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Lou Gossett, Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones, and Roscoe Lee Brown. Mabel Robinson, former NCBR Artistic Director, Winston-Salem Chronicle, December 6, 1990, B-9; Winston-Salem Chronicle , January 10, 1991, A-8. Daily Gleaner , Tuesday, January 15, 1991, 27. Patricia Smith Deering, “Renowned local dramatist remembered,” Winston-Salem Chronicle , December 6, 1990, 25. John Hoeffel, “Drama Professor Sydney Hibbert Dies of Cancer,” Winston-Salem Journal, November 30, 1990, 12; Nathan Ross Freeman wrote and directed a play based on Hibbert, Your Side Mine , that was performed at the Montage Showcase Ensemble in November 1997. See https://www.greensboro.com/ensemble-gives-playwrights-a-chance/article_68b7d190-97d4-5e5b-b6ea-891a97f0c19f.html . Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” Social Text , 31/32 (1992), 141-153. Hibbert experienced the “unhomeliness” in the sense of his exile and itinerant life style. Though he became a US citizen in 1978, he was constantly moving from the East to West Coasts. In “Sermon in a Dream-Mass: Port Elizabeth, South Africa,” the lanes of Kingston where he grew up haunted his imagination becoming metaphors for danger and death. Sam Fulwood III, “U.S. Blacks: A Divided Experience,” November 25,1995, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-11-25-mn-6855-story.html . About The Author(s) Thomas Arthur received his PhD in American Studies from Indiana University and is a Professor Emeritus of Theatre at James Madison University (JMU) in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He has written extensively on theatre performance and film practitioners and co-authored See You at the Movies , a book on Melvyn Douglas’s acting and political activities. Arthur has led acting workshops internationally, including in the townships of South Africa as apartheid ended. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Lynn Deboeck 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 Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900 Lynn Deboeck By Published on December 11, 2023 Download Article as PDF BEYOND TEXT: THEATER AND PERFORMANCE IN PRINT AFTER 1900. Jennifer Buckley. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019; Pp. 278. Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900 challenges the historiography of print media as we have known it and brings together text and performance practices as symbiotic, rather than mutually exclusive. Taking on the rich and contradictory history of “killing off the Book,” Beyond Text calls out anti-textual artists and their use of print media—not to emphasize hypocrisy, but rather to illuminate text’s enduring life in and around the performance art worlds. Jennifer Buckley highlights that the evolution of text has largely been recorded within essentialist narratives that have made trouble by assuming text to be the opposite of performance because it“ precedes, in time, the process of theatrical production; because writers accord it artistic precedence over production; and because its traditional medium is durable and static while performance is ephemeral and mutable” (10). The physical book of Beyond Text is hard-covered, with the image of Carolee Schneemann on the front, perusing a book with her cat, Kitch, on her lap. The binding of this tome creaks at its initial openings, almost as if it has the first line in our interactions. The nine-inch by six-inch pages, with their copious open margins, allow the reader easier access and a bountiful opportunity for note-taking—indeed, it seems to be encouraged. Rather than simply negating what has been documented about print media’s history and its relationship with performance, Buckley’s deep analysis of each performance artist or group she covers allows us as readers to make the journey beyond text with her by taking up how theatre makers have interacted with and made bookworks or engaged with text-based formats. Her arguments include that the avant-garde anti-textualist movement that is often brought forward in discussions of late twentieth century performance is not just limited but is actively limiting what we can know about our own histories because it has not“encompass[ed] the book arts, which are experiencing yet another boom in yet another era when print is supposed to be dying” (24). The book is divided into five chapters with an introduction and a coda. In her introduction, Buckley uses Big Dance Theater’s bookwork Another Telepathic Thing as an entry point for how we have understood the relationship (or, perhaps more accurately, disdain) between performance art mediums and print matter (she bristles at the exclusionist term ‘the book’). In so doing, she simultaneously calls out those of us who have historically ignored print practices and their role in performance and reveals that in fact, bookworks are experiencing yet another explosion in the here and now (one of many since 1900). Each chapter addresses, in chronological order, the evolution of performance-makers’ relationship with text and print. In chapter 1,“A Place for Seeing,” Beyond Text takes up Edward Gordon Craig’s vision of what the theatre could be and the bookworks he created. Buckley establishes the trajectory of text as non-linear with Craig’s banishment of playwrights and his contradictory use of much older media, such as wood engraving. She examines Craig’s written intentions to “exhibit" and “show” actors what he wanted in performance, rather than resort to speech since he saw words as having only “technical” status—though perhaps useful for notation. Chapter 2, “Scoring Theatre,” takes the notation idea from Craig and connects it to Lothar Schreyer’s ideas around how to score theatre in a way that others could reasonably emulate. Schreyer’s system, Spielgang , was an attempt to do this and Buckley dissects the technique, revealing how it was used in specific performances and how it affected art writ large in its elevation of the notation-system’s use to a spiritual endeavor intended to help create reproducible community works ( Gemeinschaftswerk ). Chapter 3 shifts forward in time yet again, but in this instance, Buckley pulls the thread of community works forward to look at a theatre collective in lieu of individuals. The Living Theatre and their publication negotiations are detailed in this chapter, highlighting how ironically Julian Beck and Judith Malina used the printed works they published commercially to establish their agenda of anti-texualist and anarchist performance principals. Chapter 4 returns to an individual, Carolee Schneemann, and is titled “The Body in the Book” for her ability to“see and articulate the conceptual and material intersections between her visual artworks, performances, and publications” (126). From Schneemann’s Interior Scroll to her work with the Beau Geste Press, Buckley traverses the evolution of print media through the microcosm of a single performer/art-maker to demonstrate a collaborative kinetic aesthetics that invites participation from the reader/viewer. Chapter 5 also investigates the use of participation of spectators in the immersive work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Códices . Buckley considers how his codices serve as border sites and kits for participants to encounter the “other” in “participatory identity rituals” as “good bordercrossers” and as “models for the usefully creative appropriation of others’art” (195). In her Coda, Buckley firmly asserts (which, by this point, she no longer has to) that print matter will have a future relationship with performance, the shape of which she does not wish to speculate about. It is telling that a full 15% of the book—the remainder after the Coda and before the bibliography—is notes. For those with the intention, time, and appetite to delve into this printed work further, Buckley provides fodder from her extensive archival research. Beyond Text teaches that text work and live performance are“no longer locked in a Darwinian struggle for precedence, [but] coexist under the rubric of the performatic...” (197) This monograph provides a valuable contribution to the fields of Performance Studies, Print Media and disciplines that straddle the two. As I closed this book, my thoughts drifted back to one of Craig’s performance descriptions:“‘And then a pause... a perfect balanced thought is poised before us, and all is still... All is accomplished. Silence. All rests...’” (36) Revelatory and well-researched, Beyond Text ends with so much potential energy vibrating within and beyond its covers and performance histories—waiting to be experienced again and again. References Buckley, Jennifer. Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. Footnotes About The Author(s) Dr. Lynn Deboeck is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Gender Studies at the University of Utah. She earned her PhD in Theatre and a Graduate Certificate in Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies from the University of Kansas. Her research interests include reproductive women on stage, gender and representation in performance, pedagogy in higher education and feminist theatre. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. 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Patrizia Paolini Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 2 Visit Journal Homepage How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK Patrizia Paolini By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF In April 2023, my work became the object of censorship—both indirectly and a posteriori . The precipitating incident involved a late middle-aged male performer appearing in a vest, a pair of cowboy boots, and a slightly grubby yet arguably innocuous pair of Y-fronts. The body reveal of such a character had been carefully constructed. It was informed by an aesthetic I share with my ensemble Jesus Paolini Park (JPP), and which makes satirical and critical reference to the biased perception of female versus male and young versus senior bodies. I am a theatre and live performance practitioner who has been based in the UK since 1997. Since 2016, my practice has been linked to Hoxton Hall, an original music hall in the East End of London. At Hoxton Hall, JPP and I developed Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret , a “deconstructed cabaret” and the focus of my doctoral research on “Post-Variety & Cabaret,” a theoretical, self-made term describing what I do: a form between genres. Extracts from that work, including the “Y-fronts,” were chosen by the artist and producer Margot Przymierska for inclusion in a programme designed to animate an evening in April 2023 at the Polish Cultural Institute in London. The adverse reaction of The Polish Cultural Institute (“a part of Polish diplomatic mission, dedicated to nurturing and promoting cultural ties between the United Kingdom and Poland”) to the material contrasted strongly with Margot’s judgment and with the work’s reception at numerous showings in Hoxton Hall. It was described by the event’s organizers as “obscene.” It was claimed, by the same organizers, that it had triggered a “recurring nightmare.” The sight of a mature male in Y-fronts was labelled as indecent. As a consequence, Margot was banned from the Institute and her fee significantly reduced. The ramifications of this night, a detailed account of which appears in Cabaret and Decency: How Contemporary Definitions of Cabaret are Shaped By Censorship have not just landed me in the thick of a continually evolving debate on censorship and propelled me into wider-ranging research on the correlation between contemporary censorship and the perennial “high versus low” cultural divide in the UK,(1) but have also caused me to reflect on how the experience may resonate globally, more particularly with the readership of JADT , as well as with the wider theatrical community of the U.S. Philip Fisher’s remark that “excessive behaviour [in the U.S.] is likely to be mirrored by equivalent extremists [in the UK] before too long” prompts the question as to whether the two countries could be mirroring each other, and therefore potentially learning from each other.(2) As Arjun Appadurai’s concept of “global cultural flows” has taught us, the phenomenon of globalization means that theories and ideas are spreading worldwide, from one place to another, with ease.(3) We are both countries where free expression is supposed to be enshrined in law. As a slew of recent articles in the British press point out, in both countries, censorship is creeping in and disturbing arts and artists, causing them to wonder how, or if, to act.(4) What, if anything, can the U.S. learn from the UK? Perhaps the relevance and potential usefulness of my own experience for the American artistic community is to be found in the insights that my reflection offers and the ensuing conversations that were held, rather than in a particular strategy or solution that should be immediately adopted by artists and scholars in the U.S. Any reaction to censorship, it could be argued, is particular to the context and may be dependent on a specific funding situation. Can we afford, in other words, to speak out? As Nicholas Serota told the Financial Times , “the role of Arts Council England is to act as a protector of artistic freedom, and if we don’t have that freedom, then we move towards living in a country where liberty of both thought and voice is constrained,”(5) adding that “we see plenty of places – look at the US now – where direct funding can be withdrawn as a result of a change of government.”(6) The unexpected reaction to what I call “the Y-fronts episode” has led me, both as a researcher and practitioner, to reflect on the current dynamics of censorship in all societies and how: “What we believe about censorship often reveals how we understand society and the self.”(7) In this regard, it would be useful to summarize at the outset the salient aspects of contemporary censorship discourse centered around New Censorship Theory (NCT). In Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After , Matthew Bunn offers a critical analysis of NCT. Emerging in the latest decades of the twentieth century, NCT’s central objective has been “to recast censorship from a negative, repressive force, concerned only with prohibiting, silencing, and erasing, to a productive force that creates new forms of discourse, new forms of communication, and new genres of speech.”(8) Bunn argues that in this way the controlling effect of censorship [conceived to prevent offences] has been shifted from state control of production and distribution [of speech], onto self-censorship and its dependence on the “market.” It is my hope that by raising questions and offering reflections, the conversations that follow with fellow practitioners and professionals will draw attention to the current censorship discourse and its significance to practitioners and the wider sector. The interviewees introduced below were each asked about censorship as part of the process of my questioning about what actually happened on that April evening in 2023.(9) TESTIMONIES The interviewees responded identically to two aspects of the subject.(10) Firstly, the word “censorship” itself provoked a whole series of hesitations: “Oh! Umm…”, “Oh, dear!”, “Umm!”, “Well... in which sense?”, “Really?”, “Hemm!” and “What do you mean?” This unanimous reaction to the term suggests censorship is not an appealing subject for discussion. Secondly, none of the interviewees were familiar with NCT. Both these reactions seem to indicate that arts professionals in the UK are reluctant to engage with notions of contemporary censorship. While leaving it to the reader to consider the questions that could follow on from this initial observation, it seems significant to note that, before proceeding with the interviews, I received the distinct impression that censorship was not their favourite subject. Interviewees were all asked identical questions. Rather than transcribe the full interview of each interviewee, I report each interviewee’s most distinctive approach to the issue. I have grouped together those who shared the same approach and highlighted similar and contrasting views. Benevolent Approach Expressed no concerns about censorship. John Callaghan British musician, writer, and performance artist. PATRIZIA: Have you ever been censored? JOHN: I don't think my stuff is susceptible to censorship, particularly because…I'm not swearing. I'm not attacking any particular government. I'm just being me.(11) Kieron Jecchinis Classically trained English actor. Graduated from Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1979. Film: Full Metal Jacket (1987). Theatre: West End. Member of JPP ensemble, played Y-front character. PATRIZIA: What do you think about censorship? KIERON: When I go and see some theatre I just find it so refreshing. You just think. Oh, ****. They can say that! And to be able to say that…it's just so affirming. PATRIZIA: …And the Y-Fronts? You’ve become a recurring nightmare to some staff. KIERON: I think there must have been some misunderstanding between the Institute and Margot.(12) Sarcastic Approach Approached the conversation with sarcasm. Margot Przymierska Performer, writer, facilitator and creative producer born in Białystok (Poland) and based in London (UK). Producer of PolBud Cabaret, commissioned by Polish Cultural Institute, leading up to the indirect and a posteriori censorship April 2023 . PATRIZIA: Do you think it makes sense to implement censorship in whatever capacity? MARGOT: …it makes complete sense to have censorship if you want to own the narrative or perspective on a particular thing. And if you want to silence the artist, maybe all the voices that disagree with your point of view. So it's a very useful tool. And, less sarcastically, MARGOT: I think if you want to have censorship, you have to put in place a clear mechanism. As Margot, was the direct recipient of the Y-fronts a posteriori censorship, our conversation expanded: PATRIZIA: What do you think about how the Polish Cultural Institute treated you? MARGOT: A real exercise of power and authority…they needed to appear like they're taking the complaints from the audience members seriously and they have to show to them that they have punished the person who's responsible … They told me – “You breached the contract…if I went to you and I've ordered something and you gave me a different product, you wouldn't have a leg to stand on. We would then refer to that contract. Like we didn't order this.” – Yeah, but, I don't make sausages in Tesco.(13) You cannot order something off the shelf because it doesn't exist. I'm making it fresh, fresh performance and it's not as finite as a sausage.(14) Reactionary Approach Strongly disapprove of censorship. Claire and Roland Muldoon Artists, entrepreneurs, partners in work and in life. Core members of CAST (Cartoon Archetypical Slogan Theatre), UK counterculture and alternative comedy pioneers. PATRIZIA: NCT sees censorship as a positive tool to be used in society, as it facilitates the best way of expressing something without offending anyone… CLAIRE (in a gentle yet direct manner): It can hurt…It hurts people who are the right people to hurt. It is important to express what has to be expressed. ROLAND: I can't imagine it [NCT] working, really. Referring to their long career: PATRIZIA: So, you really were quite troublemakers? ROLAND and CLAIR (finishing each other’s sentence): Oh yeah, usually yeah. Performing, I mean, what else is there? Otherwise there is no point … that's the function (of performing) otherwise…You know, it turns into Hollywood.(15) Subtle, Necessary Approach The following interviewees are both heads of arts and cultural organizations. Stuart Cox Current director of Hoxton Hall, the music hall in Shoreditch, London, originated in 1838, and which has hosted my work since 2016 . PATRIZIA: Since state censorship had been abolished (in the UK), in 1968, who should decide how to control expression these days? STUART: You have to do it….Or the audience will let you know…the artist has to be cautious and question very honestly what might be the impact of their work. PATRIZIA: How do you approach circumstances related to censorship in your role as chief director of Hoxton Hall? STUART: … that basically is my role, in every aspect. So like you know … Do I pay this person this amount of money? What's the impact of that? Do I take this piece on? What's the impact of that? I'm looking at this piece and I see something that had caused me a worry about whether that is right…I have to really think about the decision around things, and that includes why you're telling a person they can't do that at this stage and just be very…true to who you are and those decisions…And I think I would hope that always when I'm facing those decisions, I try to do it with thought. And consider everyone in that process. Inspired by the Muldoon’s opposing view, I say: PATRIZIA: Maybe, rightly or wrongly, I'm sure, it may happen that there may be the need to…or maybe the feeling that it would be right… like we need and want to “break” something. They, the artist wants to do something that…it is a risk because it could…in fact, offend somebody, because it may be important to do so… STUART: You know, I get what you're saying. But…I still think that you have to kind of talk to everyone. You kind of like involve the artists themselves in this conversation…There has to be, I think…to move on something in the centre…and then make the kind of decision about that … In a positive way…(16) Karena Johnson Former Artistic Director and CEO of Hoxton Hall. Since 2022 Head of Creative Collaboration & Learning at the Barbican.(17) PATRIZIA: What’s your thought about current censorship? KARENA: I think it's a tricky time … the Internet and all that … although we might be in a live performance space, actually we still work within a digital landscape and the digital world allows you to say anything you want uncensored. And so the idea that you can behave as you would digitally in real life is not really … A tenable thing to do. PATRIZIA: Did you ever have to enforce censorship? KARENA: I think no, I've never really had to censor anything. Because, I think the work finds the audience that it speaks to… no one is going to come and pitch me something that’s going to be, like racist or sexist or homophobic, because all the organisations I've ever worked in are very clear about that and my politics have aligned very clearly with those institutions. However, it's only in bigger institutions … It's because of visibility. It has other things to deal with like, you know, like funders, like sponsors, like patrons ... Yeah. And I think that conversation, comes up when you have to deal with the bigger institutions... PATRIZIA: Who exercises control, censorship these days? Institutions or culture itself? KARENA: Yeah … big institutions, maybe are controlling or looking after or leading their culture, having different level of responsibility than you do when you've got a fringe venue … Also, I think that there's a very big difference between what an institution and what and artist might think is censorship or not. Is censorship saying you can't do that thing? Maybe, … or … It's not for me. I would say that's just a choice. But for the individual artist … [it] is important … that nobody should ever say no, and that if you're saying no, it's censorship. But I don't think that is actually censorship.(18) Within the industry, Cox’s and Johnson’s professional roles differ from the other interviewees (all artists), in that they operate in a realm between artists and institutions. This seems to influence their similar approach to censorship. To counterbalance the Cox-Johnson approach, we’ll look at another professional in a leading role at a cultural organization: Will Gompertz. The former artistic director of the Barbican Cantre and a former BBC arts editor clarifies his position on censorship by identifying “cancel culture as the greatest challenge facing the arts.”(19) In an interview in Prospect magazine, he responds to the question “What is the greatest challenge facing the arts industry today?” by saying: … it has to be cancel culture. The purpose of the arts is to question, challenge, reflect and enlighten. Great art reveals a truth, and debate and disagreement about the nature of that truth is a function of art. But such is the rallying power of social media, debate is being stifled by self-censorship and fear of disagreeing with the prevailing orthodoxy. Previous generations have fought hard for free speech; so must we.(20) Gompertz held his position as director of the Barbican Centre, from 2021 to autumn 2023. His appointment and resignation were surrounded by controversy. The beginning of his time at the Barbican, when the Centre was dealing with serious accusations of racism within the organization coincided with the need of a “long journey of cultural change at the Barbican”(21) as indicated by The City.(22) Dex reports: “The Centre’s director of Arts and Learning, former Tate and BBC man Will Gompertz, has been hastily elevated to ‘joint interim managing director’”, which lead to Gompertz’s final appointment as artistic director. Shortly before his departure, the Barbican cancelled Resolve Collective’s exhibition in the wake of “anti-Palestinian censorship.”(23) As reported, collective artist Yto Barrada’s statement, “We cannot take seriously a public institution that does not hold a space for free thinking and debate, however challenging it might feel to some staff, board members, or anxious politicians,”(24) indicates the complexity of the event. In a joint statement with Claire Spencer, Gompertz said: “During the run of their exhibition, Resolve Collective and their collaborators have been subject to a number of unacceptable experiences...…we are taking this situation extremely seriously and are currently working with the broader Barbican team to understand the details of what happened.”(25) A few months later Will Gompertz left the Barbican Centre for a much less prestigious position. Official declarations on the reasons for his sudden departure are unavailable. Gompertz’s relevance to this observation is his clear position on censorship, as reported by Prospect in 2023, a position not commonly shared or expressed by people of his profile. Coincidently, Will Gompertz, with the aim of making the Barbican a more inclusive and diverse center for art, education and enterprise, created the position of Head of Creative Collaboration & Learning at the Barbican to which the last interviewee, Karena Johnson, was appointed. Conclusion By bringing together the interviewees’ testimonies, this piece has raised several questions. On the one hand, we have The Muldoons encouraging a self-censorship that aims to protect the “trouble making” nature of the material; “otherwise there is no point.” On the other hand, we have Cox insisting on the importance of self-censorship as a way of being in control of the impact of what the practitioner says, in respect of all involved. Consequently, self-censorship could promote or have an adverse effect on what would be expected to be a controlled outcome. Is it possible, then, contra NCT, that what is called self-censorship could promote unwanted reactions? As a practitioner, it seems necessary to remark on the noticeable division between the Cox-Johnson approach and that of the other interviewees. The preoccupations and responsibilities of heads of arts and culture organizations seem closely correlated with the person in charge of these organizations. Gompertz’s case is a good example of the complexity of control at that level. The Y-fronts episode has unveiled artists’ inability to predict all possible reactions to their work. Also, applying self-censorship could paralyse the artist’s practice altogether if all possible offences should be considered by the artist. The vivid testimony of the final interviewee would perfectly elucidate my thinking. Factual Approach Ridiculusmus A multi award-winning theatre company led by David Woods and Jon Haynes that has been producing seriously funny theatre since 1992. PATRIZIA: What do you think about the Y-fronts episode? And what about censorship currently defined by NCT? JON: It makes me think about a walkabout act David and I did in Dublin in the 1990s. I think he’d nicked the idea from somewhere else. We walked through the streets following each other, joined by a rope tied in a noose around each of our necks. It seemed to be going well. Then a woman sidled up to me and said, “I find what you’re doing offensive because my brother committed suicide the other week.” How could you have applied NCT to that? Just not to have done the act, I suppose. One has to go about one’s practice under the assumption that with anything you do there is always going to be someone somewhere who will find what you do offensive (“And not in a good way,” as the saying goes). But then, following on from that, there will always be someone somewhere who finds the watered down, safe and possibly more insipid version of your original (or nicked) idea offensive as well. Which means that in the end you’re frozen and can’t do anything.(26) References Patrizia Paolini, “How Contemporary Definitions of Cabaret are Shaped by Censorship,” Comedy Studies 16, no. 1 (2025): 118-133. Philip Fisher, “Censorship Rears its Ugly Head”, British Theatre Guide , February 17, 2023, accessed June 4, 2025. https://www.britishtheatreguide.info/features/censorship-rears-its-ugly-head-592 . Arjun Appadurai. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”. Theory, Culture & Society 7, no. 2-3 (1990): 296. Natasha Tripney, “Cancel Cultures: Theatre Censorship Around the World”, The Stage , March 8, 2024, accessed June 3, 2025, https://www.thestage.co.uk/long-reads/cancel-cultures-theatre-censorship-around-the-world ; Lyn Gardner, “How Will Artistic Freedom Endure as Political Tides Shift?” The Stage , April 28, 2025, accessed June 3, 2025, https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/how-will-artistic-freedom-endure-as-political-tides-shift-arts-council-lyn-gardner ; Kate Maltby, “Artistic Freedom in our Theatres is Being Lost to Fear and Self-Censorship,”’ The Guardian , October 12, 2024 accessed June 3, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/12/artistic-freedom-in-theatres-lost-to-fear-self-censorship . Arts Council England is a UK government-funded body. Founded in 1994, it is dedicated to promoting the performing, visual and literary arts in England. Nicholas Serota, quoted in Franklin Nelson, “Axing Arts Quangos Risks ‘Liberty of Thought’ Says Nicholas Serota,” Financial Times , April 18, 2025, accessed June 4, 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/4229bcfe-80a4-4a62-b5f8-ec8f11d99976 . Matthew Bunn, “Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After,” History and Theory 54, no. 1 (2015): 29. Bunn, “Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After,” 26. The interviews were conducted in accordance with the ethical requirements put in place by the University of Kent. The interviews included in this essay were conducted with ethical approval through the University of Kent, UK. Each participant provided written consent for their names and interview contributions to be published in this essay. John Callaghan, interview by Patrizia Paolini, August 27, 2024 Kieron Jecchinis, interview by Patrizia Paolini, December 7, 2023 A renowned UK superstore. Margot Przymierska, interview by Patrizia Paolini, October 8, 2023. Claire and Roland Muldoon, interview by Patrizia Paolini, August 28, 2024. Stuart Cox, interview by Patrizia Paolini, November 3, 2023. The Barbican Centre is a performing arts centre in the Barbican Estate of the City of London. It is owned, funded, and managed by the City of London Corporation. Karena Johnson, interview by Patrizia Paolini, February 2, 2024. Harriet Sherwood, “Will Gompertz to Become Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum,” Guardian , August 4, 2023, accessed November 20, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/aug/04/will-gompertz-to-become-director-of-sir-john-soanes-museum . Prospect Team, “Will Gompertz: Cancel Culture is Stifling the Arts,” Prospect , May 10, 2023, accessed November 19, 2024, https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/music/61326/will-gompertz-barbican-cancel-culture-arts . Robert Dex, “Racism Row at the Barbican - How Did It Start and What Happens Next?,” Evening Standard , November 15, 2021, accessed November 19, 2024, https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/racism-row-barbican-centre-what-happens-next-b966025.html . The City of London Corporation is the governing body of the Square Mile, dedicated to a vibrant and thriving City. The Barbican Centre is in part of this governing body. Garreth Harris. 2023. “Barbican Exhibition Cancelled in Wake of 'Anti-Palestinian Censorship' Row,” The Art Magazine , June 23, 2023, accessed November 19, 2024, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/06/22/barbican-exhibition-cancelled-in-wake-of-anti-palestinian-censorship-row . Lanre Bakare, “Two Artists Withdraw Work from Barbican Show in Row Over Gaza Talk,” Guardian, March 8, 2024, accessed November 19, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/mar/08/two-artists-withdraw-work-from-barbican-show-in-row-over-gaza-talk . Garreth Harris, “Barbican Exhibition Cancelled in Wake of ‘Anti-Palestinian Censorship’ Row,” The Art Magazine , June 23, 2023, accessed November 18, 2024, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/06/22/barbican-exhibition-cancelled-in-wake-of-anti-palestinian-censorship-row . Ridiculusmus, Jon Haynes, and David Woods, interview by Patrizia Paolini, November 28, 2023. Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”. Theory, Culture & Society 7, no. 2-3 (1990): 295–310. Bakare, Lanre. “Two Artists Withdraw Work from Barbican Show in Row Over Gaza Talk.” Guardian , 8 March 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/mar/08/two-artists-withdraw-work-from-barbican-show-in-row-over-gaza-talk . Bunn, Matthew. “Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After.” History and Theory 54, no. 1 (2015): 25-44. Callaghan, John. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 27 August 2024. Cox, Stuart. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 3 November 2023. Dex, Robert. “Racism Row at the Barbican - How Did It Start and What Happens Next?’. Evening Standard , 15 November 2021. https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/racism-row-barbican-centre-what-happens-next-b966025.html . Fisher, Philip. “Censorship Rears its Ugly Head.” British Theatre Guide . 17 February 2023. https://www.britishtheatreguide.info/features/censorship-rears-its-ugly-head-592 . Gardner, Lyn. “How will artistic freedom endure as political tides shift?” The Stage . 28th April 2025. https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/how-will-artistic-freedom-endure-as-political-tides-shift-arts-council-lyn-gardner . Harris, Garreth. “Barbican Exhibition Cancelled in Wake of ‘Anti-Palestinian Censorship’ Row.” The Art Magazine , 23 June 2023. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/06/22/barbican-exhibition-cancelled-in-wake-of-anti-palestinian-censorship-row . Jecchinis, Kieron. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 7 December 2023. Johnson, Karena. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 2 February 2024. Itzin, Catherine. “CAST (Cartoon Archetypical Slogan Theatre).” In Stages in the Revolution , Routledge, 1980 Maltby, Kate. “Artistic freedom in our theatres is being lost to fear and self-censorship”. The Guardian . 12th October 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/12/artistic-freedom-in-theatres-lost-to-fear-self-censorship . Muldoon, Claire, and Roland Muldoon. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 28 August 2024. Nelson, Franklin. “Axing Arts Quangos Risks ‘Liberty of Thought’ Says Nicholas Serota.” Financial Times , 18 April 2025. https://www.ft.com/content/4229bcfe-80a4-4a62-b5f8-ec8f11d99976 . Paolini, Patrizia. “Cabaret and Decency: How Contemporary Definitions of Cabaret are Shaped by Censorship.” Comedy Studies 16 (2024): 118-133. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2040610X.2024.2404298?src= Prospect Team. “Will Gompertz: Cancel Culture is Stifling the Arts.” Prospect , 10 May 2023. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/music/61326/will-gompertz-barbican-cancel-culture-arts . Przymierska, Margot. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 8 October 2023. Ridiculusmus, Jon Haynes, and David Woods. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 28 November 2023. Sherwood, Harriet. “Will Gompertz to Become Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum.” Guardian, 4 August 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/aug/04/will-gompertz-to-become-director-of-sir-john-soanes-museum . Tripney, Natasha. “Cancel Cultures: Theatre Censorship Around the World.” The Stage , 8 March 2024. https://www.thestage.co.uk/long-reads/cancel-cultures-theatre-censorship-around-the-world . Footnotes About The Author(s) PATRIZIA PAOLINI (she/her) is a theatre maker and live performance practitioner with over twenty-five years’ experience. Currently, she is working on a practice-based research PhD project, ‘Post Variety & Cabaret,’ at The University of Kent. Her broad career includes many original productions and collaborations. Since 1999, she has been an associate of Ridiculusmus, the award-winning theatre company that has produced, among other acclaimed works, The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland . Since 2016, her deconstructed cabaret, Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret, has been regularly programmed at Hoxton Hall, London. Her practice is the invaluable, rich terrain, base of her research which focuses on popular performance, the ‘high - low’ cultural divide, and social class dominance’s dynamics. 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 Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Fauci and Kramer Our Town Frankenstein Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Frank Hentschker, Jane House | A story of basic and perverse family dynamics, the play is an all-female human comedy in three acts. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, please contact us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu or find it on Amazon. New Plays from Italy Vol 1: The Origin of the World Frank Hentschker, Jane House Download PDF The Origin of the World: Interior Conversation Piece by Lucia Calamaro. Edited by Frank Hentschker. Translated by Jane House. A story of basic and perverse family dynamics, the play is an all-female human comedy in three acts. The Mother Daria lives with her Daughter Federica among bulky modern appliances, godlike monumental figures; they confront reality as they eat, chat, and get dressed. Sometimes other characters in the family constellation, such as the Analyst, join them. The womb of domestic life is staged in chapters, which lead not towards an ending but towards an origin. The play portrays the indifference, rage, and helplessness of those who live with depression. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Eileen Curley Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 1 Visit Journal Homepage Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison Eileen Curley By Published on December 11, 2020 Download Article as PDF In 1901, David Belasco sued Harrison Grey Fiske and Minnie Maddern Fiske over the Manhattan Theatre’s production of Mrs. Burton Harrison’s play, The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch. Harrison, an established novelist and essayist by 1901, had worked with Belasco in the 1880s on amateur and professional productions of her plays, and she consulted with him on this play as well. After publishing a successful short story by the same title, Harrison revised the script and shopped it around, quickly reaching an agreement with Belasco’s rivals, the Fiskes, after months of dallying by Belasco. Shortly before the Fiskes’ production was to open, Belasco sued, arguing that he was “the sole and exclusive owner and proprietor of the play.” [1] The injunction to stop the production simultaneously seeks to disrupt the Fiskes’ production and undermines Harrison’s authorial power. Belasco claimed that the idea was his and the script was his property, even though Harrison wrote it, but instead of simply and easily disproving these claims, materials produced by the Fiskes, Harrison, and their lawyer speak at length and rather defensively about the nature of collaborative writing. These extant archival documents suggest that they feared Belasco might have a case for unremunerated collaboration, and they focus on what was then, and still sometimes is, a hazy area of copyright law. The dynamics in the case also speak to the nature of theatrical collaboration between playwrights and producers and competition between producers. Woven amid these legal and theatrical concerns is the familiar story of a woman’s labor being co-opted by a man and a woman’s capacity for professionalism being questioned by all around her. At base, Belasco claimed a woman’s work as his own and appears so confident in his right to her labor that he sued. Profit distribution from a collaboration is a legal matter, but the erasure of women’s voices from collaborations was and is so routine that this case was not immediately thrown out despite the glaring lack of a contract between the pair. Accordingly, this article analyzes the legal implications of this play’s collaborative writing and revision process, while situating that process and the resulting lawsuit in the competitive world of early twentieth-century New York producers and exploring the impact of these production conditions on aspiring female playwrights. The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch’s Ongoing Evolution through Collaboration The archival materials and press at the time often describe Harrison as an amateur playwright, but by the turn of the century, Constance Cary Harrison’s writing career seemed decidedly no longer amateurish; writing under the name Mrs. Burton Harrison, she had established herself as a novelist and essayist, publishing novels, memoirs, advice books, short stories, and columns on contemporary society. Harrison had been publishing for over two decades and was working with the agent Alice Kauser when she began work on The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch at the turn of the twentieth century. Harrison published three different versions of The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch : as a short story in Smart Set magazine in March 1901, as a play which was first produced by the Fiskes in November 1901 and also published later that year, and as a short novella in the Novelettes De Luxe series in 1903; Daniel Frohman also later produced the story as a silent film in 1914. Thus, while the papers may have credited Kauser, “the introducer of unknown playwrights,” as having launched Harrison’s career, [2] it is difficult to conceive of an author with more than 15 published novels or short story collections as an amateur. Certainly, she had not had many plays professionally produced, but the rhetorical use of “amateur” in this case seem designed to disempower her when used by Belasco, to play up her feminine naiveté for benefit when employed by the Harrisons and the Fiskes, and to gender and exploit the situation for good press by the newspapers. Harrison had worked with David Belasco in the past, notably in the 1880s when she translated a number of plays, including short French comedies for amateur productions and an adaptation of a Scribe play that was produced by amateurs and professionals under the title A Russian Honeymoon . These plays were also produced under Belasco’s guidance; Harrison, notably, is the uncontested author. At the time, Belasco had recently arrived back to New York from California and was working as the stage manager at the Madison Square Theatre. Belasco assisted Harrison and the amateurs mounting these and numerous other plays at the Madison Square, which rented its facilities to amateur theatrical groups with some regularity. Belasco and Franklin Sargent also directed the professional debut of A Russian Honeymoon in April 1883, and Harrison speaks positively enough about their working relationship on this show in her 1911 memoir, Recollections Grave and Gay . She acknowledges that “largest portion of our success was owing to his training and extraordinary skill in devising pictures and effects from material that lent itself readily to lovely grouping and vivid color.” [3] Clearly, she also credits her own writing here as giving him a good foundation. The overall style of this sweeping memoir renders it difficult to tell whether there was lingering resentment ten years after the lawsuit or if she just chose to focus elsewhere; regardless, Minnie Maddern Fiske warrants a longer and much more obviously glowing recollection. [4] After their successful collaborations in the 1880s, it is perhaps no surprise that in 1900, when Harrison began working on The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch , she once again turned to Belasco as she and so many others had done, looking for his assistance with staging and plot development, as well as potential production opportunities. The ensuing work resulted in the lawsuit. Some elements are clear: the two did communicate and collaborate on the drafting of an early version of the play. Belasco did work with Harrison on the script in the spring of 1900, at the Harrison’s house on East 29 th Street in New York, before the short story version was published in 1901. Harrison communicated with Belasco repeatedly, and yet she did not always incorporate his suggestions. Belasco seems to have been a much more reluctant communicator, particularly throughout 1901. Indeed, Belasco’s interactions with the script seem to have stopped in 1900, and there is little disagreement that the script, as it stood at that time, had some significant weaknesses. Letters submitted to the court from both Harrison and Belasco reveal that she attempted to contact Belasco repeatedly between the spring of 1900 and the fall of 1901 to make progress, set a contract, and get her draft manuscripts returned. Her husband, the lawyer Burton N. Harrison, also began contacting Belasco in summer 1901. Throughout, Belasco would occasionally reply directly or via his business manager, Benjamin Roeder, but significantly fewer responses from Belasco and Roeder were submitted into evidence. The extant evidence, while contradictory and at times subject to spin and to charges of being fabricated or heavily edited by Belasco, shows that the pair worked together on a script with the unwritten understanding that Belasco might produce it in the future. There was, however, no contractual agreement to do so. As the months passed in 1900 and early 1901 with no contact from Belasco, Harrison seemed to realize that she needed to finish the play, fully sever ties with Belasco, and get him to return her manuscript. Indeed, the Harrisons sent a significant number of requests to Belasco and Roeder requesting the return of various manuscripts that Harrison sent for his perusal, including but not limited to The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch . In part, the success of the short story sparked her renewed attempts to contact Belasco, attempts which appear to increase with frequency in the spring and summer of 1901. His silence clearly aggravated her, and she seemed to be demurring by claiming that she wanted to work on it, even though she still had a copy. [5] Underneath her feigned desire to just finish the project, Harrison seems, at long last, to have realized the danger that Belasco presented to her intellectual property. In May 1901, Harrison lacked any concrete commitment from Belasco. Her agent, Alice Kauser, sent the script to the Fiskes, who worked with Harrison to revise it and finally offered her a contract in October 1901. It appears that the review, acceptance, and offer process transpired quite quickly, despite the play needing and receiving revisions. Kauser confirmed receipt of the play from Harrison on the 15 th of May and Harrison Grey Fiske replied to her on the 18 th with his critique. [6] He asked to keep the manuscript to show it to Minnie Maddern Fiske, who then decided to work with Harrison throughout the summer on revising the piece before putting the script under contract, just as Belasco had done in early 1900, minus the contract. [7] The letter announcing the contract for the now revised play contract is dated 12 October 1901, two days before rehearsals began and approximately six weeks before the show opened. [8] In the intervening months between first reading and opening night, the Fiskes and Harrison continued working together on the script. When advance press for the production appeared in the papers in late October, Belasco contacted Harrison Grey Fiske, claimed ownership that he could not prove, and requested an injunction against the production, suing the Fiskes – but notably not Harrison. The Fiskes, in their amended answer to the injunction, also clearly saw that Belasco’s complaint – be it ownership, contractual, or collaborative – was with Harrison: “Constance C. Harrison is a necessary party defendant for the complete determination of the questions involved in this action.” [9] This curious decision is never addressed by Belasco in extant documents. By arguing that he owned the piece, Belasco logically would have sued the Fiskes for producing it without his approval. Given his ongoing producers’ battle with the Fiskes and others, one reasonable interpretation for why he was going after the Fiskes is that, financially, he could wound the Fiskes by interrupting rehearsals and obtain royalties from their production if it continued under an agreement. Indeed, Harrison Grey Fiske estimates the amounts the company spent preparing the production to be “about sixteen hundred dollars ($1600) a week” in salaries for the 51 company members, $8,000 in scenic and costume investiture, and “the gross expenses per week of the company and the Manhattan Theatre aggregated nearly $5,000.” [10] Yet, the omission of Harrison from the injunction also suggests that Belasco did not give credence to her work or input, a perception reinforced by his discussion of her throughout his affidavit as an employee in need of his supervision rather than as a creator or equal: “Mrs. Harrison immediately took a fancy to the story and told me that she would be able, under my supervision and in collaboration with me, to make a good play out of it.” [11] Indeed, his argument that the play was his own idea and property relies upon his presentation of Harrison as little more than someone who “molded these ideas of mine into shape and wrote out the dialogue under my supervision;” [12] the gendered bias towards and discounting of her skills is necessarily intertwined with his refusal to grant her ownership of her ideas, much less active participation in the creation of the script. Responses to the suit counter this perception thoroughly – with the Fiskes, Harrison, her husband, and Charles Lydecker, the Fiskes’ lawyer, giving Harrison credit for her work; yet, they, too, traffic in gendered perceptions of her naivete to make their case. While Belasco ultimately withdrew the suit after the Fiskes’ production had opened under a cloud of ironically profitable publicity, this overall timeline is vital for establishing that there were at least two collaborative writing relationships which produced this play, and that reality becomes a key point in the legal case. Harrison and the Fiskes worked on the piece for at least four months in 1901, through visits and letters, prior to contracting the piece for production in October. They also continued working on the piece during rehearsals. This method of writing paralleled how Harrison had been interacting with Belasco in the spring of 1900, including uncontracted jointly undertaken revision work, but the key difference is that Belasco never signed a contract with Harrison, despite communications between Roeder and the Harrisons about a potential contract. Manuscripts and Authorial Control At the time of the Belasco suit, copyright and theatrical law in the United States was still governed by the Copyright Act of 1790 and being solidified through court cases, but the type of collaboration which produces theatrical scripts was not well addressed by this law; the US legal system is still grappling with theatrical collaboration in its various permutations. Indeed, in 2012, Ryan J. Richardson remarked that “[a] few notable scholars in the legal community, however, have alleged a more systemic problem-the inability of American copyright law to adequately reward and protect the uniquely collaborative expression that is live theatre.” [13] Richardson traces through how writing and production collaborations present conundrums which parallel some of those raised in this case. Throughout her affidavit, [14] Harrison argues for ideas that Douglas Nevin also notes are the cornerstones of contemporary and historical copyright law – originality and creativity, [15] treating collaboration as merely part of the single author’s creative process. Belasco chose to focus on contracts and ownership – despite having no supporting material to suggest a claim to ownership nor any signed agreement with Harrison which permitted him to produce her play. Seemingly, the Fiskes and Harrisons feared there was sufficient grey area on the nature of collaboration and its impact on authorship – and by extension, on ownership – that they created a substantial counter-argument to this point. Indeed, Harrison may have potentially created an ownership conundrum by providing Belasco with manuscript copies of her plays. The volume and intensity of documentation about the physical manuscript suggests a deep concern regarding physical control of the manuscript versions, for a variety of possible reasons. As Derek Miller discusses, in this period where nuances of copyright law were still being actively developed in the courts, “[m]anuscripts – or in later decades, scripts printed for private use – remained important for controlling uncertain rights, particularly for playwrights whose work was valuable on both sides of the Atlantic.” [16] Belasco’s injunction notice was delivered to the Fiskes, informing them that “on the hearing of the motion for an injunction in this action, we will hand up to the court the original manuscript of ‘The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch,’” [17] which certainly seems to validate the Harrisons’ concerns. Further, the Complaint notes that the play has not yet been published or performed in public, [18] relying upon nineteenth-century notions that publication, performance, and copyright were means by which ownership could be established. [19] By submitting an original manuscript of the still unpublished text, he could argue ownership of the play. The copyright registration process at the time also complicated matters; as per typical process, Harrison sent in the title page on 8 October 1901 to copyright the title, but two copies of the script, published by the printer CG Burgoyne, were not submitted until 26 November 1901, which was the day after the show opened. [20] The title, thus, was the only part of the play that was under copyright when the injunction was issued, although Belasco seems unaware of this as the 8 November 1901 Complaint argues that “said play and title are original and […] no other play has been written or produced having said title”; [21] the play was still being revised. As will be discussed later, this timing may well have given Harrison and the Fiskes sufficient warning to alter any elements they may have attributed to Belasco. The materials also include extensive discussion of the typist, which Belasco submitted as part of an argument that since he paid to have the piece typed, he owned it. [22] Harrison does not dispute the copy of Harrison’s letter that Belasco submitted into evidence detailing these arrangements, so it is clear that the script was typed and that Belasco paid for it. Harrison’s letter reveals that she asked the typist to charge Belasco for the “Hatch” script and charge Harrison for typing another of her scripts, “His Better Half;” she also asked the typist whether the original copies of the last acts had been sent to Belasco or not because they had not been returned to her. [23] Belasco argues that this payment clearly indicates his ownership of the manuscript. Meanwhile, Harrison claims that: “Belasco expressed an eager desire to have the work of typing this play, so as it had been then finished in a rough way, done in a hurry, so as to enable him to take it with him on the voyage to Europe, sailing at the end of March [1900] – and so he requested me to send it to his typewriters (as he called them) who, he said, were very familiar with that kind of work.” She also remarks that she usually uses the “typewriters down town employed by my husband” for her own work and that she had not sent the text to them because it was not yet ready. [24] The posturing by both here is clear: Harrison is laying the groundwork to argue that the script wasn’t finished, as she does throughout her affidavit, and that it was only typed because Belasco demanded it before leaving for Europe. Belasco, meanwhile, is claiming that the fact that he paid for the Hatch script and Harrison paid for the other script clearly indicates perceived ownership of the individual scripts on the part of both parties. A third interpretation, however, is possible, when the typing note is read alongside another letter Harrison wrote to Belasco, submitted by Belasco as Exhibit 3: “Here is ‘Mrs. Hatch,’ and I send her to you with a goodspeed for her, and for you, upon your voyage!” She also included “His Better Half,” the other play that was typed. And, Harrison continues, “My husband thinks you had better send me a memorandum about the play to-morrow, so that we can look over it, before I sign anything.” [25] Harrison does not dispute this letter, either, but she also does not directly reference it in her affidavit. She does, however, acknowledge that she and her husband met with Roeder in April 1900 to discuss terms, but no contract was ever signed. Given that Harrison clearly assumed that Belasco would be producing her play at some point in the future, his decision to pay for the typing seems, perhaps, logical for a future producer who wished a copy of the play to continue their collaborative writing. The sheer number of times Harrison points out that this March 1900 encounter was the last active engagement between the two about the script suggests a strategy to establish a collaborative relationship that failed and was never solidified under contract. After all, by mid-May 1901, the Fiskes had a version of The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch , and Harrison may have been feeling pressure to get revisions fully underway to ready the script for possible production by them and to be clearly and fully in control of her work, physically and intellectually. Throughout the court documents, reference is made to how much work the May script needed, which may again have been a legal maneuver as well as a statement of fact. Harrison admits, for instance, in a 23 May 1901 letter that the play “is deficient in the elements of success in its present form,” [26] and her husband notes on 4 October 1901 that “the play was left unfinished a year ago last spring.” [27] The latter, presumably, is an attempt to discredit any claim Belasco may have made by establishing the length of time that had passed since his active participation in the collaboration. This 23 May letter, however, is peculiarly timed and indicative of some of the documentation challenges in this case. The Fiskes expressed interest in the script a week prior to when Harrison pleaded “I can’t bear to lose that I have already done, and I therefore appeal to your kindness to send me back your copy of the play, also my two other plays “Bitter Sweet” and “His Better Half,” which I asked you to read.” [28] On the surface, she writes in a manner which exploits numerous gendered tropes, undermining her own “deficient” work and fawning over Belasco who has his “hands full of important and successful ventures.” Given that the Fiskes are now working with her on the script and considering a production of it, however, it seems clear that Harrison’s desire to “make it better for my own satisfaction, if with no other result” is overt gendered cover for her real intent: to have the script produced by the Fiskes with no intervention by Belasco and to get the manuscript returned. Harrison claims in her affidavit that this letter was written in 1900, which does not make sense since it clearly mentions that she has “now waited for a whole year with patience and courtesy,” which correctly dates the letter as 1901. She also accuses him of changing her words in a letter submitted into evidence to be “projected collaboration” instead of “proposed collaboration,” but does not take issue with the rest of the language in the letter, leading readers to assume her date of 1900 is perhaps a typo or perhaps an attempt to obfuscate the timing of her relationship with the Fiskes. [29] Devaluing Women’s Labor Belasco’s reputation for suing competitors and being generally obstreperous was well known publicly and professionally at this point. This characterization seems to have to been accepted by all involved in this case from the very start, except for Mrs. Harrison, who appears naïve throughout the extant documents, though she is presumably playing at that gendered obliviousness by the time of the 23 May 1901 letter discussed just above. Jeannette Gilder, co-editor of The Critic and publisher of Harrison’s work, told her that she was “having the same experience with Mr. Belasco that many others have had.” [30] Her husband reports that he “was apprehensive” about Harrison’s initial contact with Belasco, “warning her of his reputation of unscrupulous dealing and for general inveracity.” Yet, Harrison reportedly “replied by reminding [him] that she had seen much of him long ago, had put him under obligations in her dealings then with him, had received repeated expressions of his gratitude, adding that she did not think he would act towards her otherwise than uprightly and with consideration.” As he notes, “[t]his sequel tells its own story.” [31] Throughout the legal materials, the Fiskes and Burton N. Harrison appear to be carefully, though not overtly, pointing towards Constance Harrison’s naiveté in dealing with Belasco. The narrative suggests that Harrison still chose to view him as the younger man who had been so helpful early on in her career; she is depicted as a trusting and ultimately exploited amateur female playwright. Clearly, other producers were willing to work with her, but it is unclear whether she was meek and trusting, or whether the legal documents wished to depict her as meek and trusting in order to play upon the judge’s sympathies. After all, it seems entirely reasonable that Harrison went to Belasco in hopes of getting her play produced by him because of their past connection; he was now in a position to make her a successful playwright. During the whole Mrs. Hatch episode, she sent him two other plays and also some sketches, about which she asked: “Can you suggest to me how I can get them produced in vaudeville or otherwise without my name? I should be so glad of an opportunity to see them played.” [32] Such decisions may reflect a calculated agency and desire to expand her writing career into the professional theatre, but they also can play into the narrative the Harrisons and the Fiskes created. This manipulation of her gendered position of power, or lack thereof, also extends into some of Belasco’s more problematic claims and her defense against them. He argued that one of the reasons why he supposedly worked with Harrison was her class and gender: “Being a society woman, familiar with the ways of society, that fact was one of the considerations that influenced me to give her the work.” [33] In doing so, Belasco could have capitalized on contemporary trends to appeal to audiences by employing society women, a strategy successfully deployed by his competitor Augustin Daly. Author’s Rights, Contracts, and Co-Authorship Belasco’s ownership concerns form the starting point for Charles Lydecker’s arguments in his “Memo in Opposition to Motion for Injunction,” which include four main points about authors’ rights and co-authorship, which he details in varying degrees and supports with citations to case law and practice. First, he notes that authors should be able to benefit from their work; he also points out that Belasco admitted that Harrison contacted him to ask for advice, implying that she was the author. For Lydecker, “[t]he turning point in all cases rests upon the rights of the author. If Mrs. Harrison is the author of the play, the right on injunction rests with her.” [34] The issue, then, becomes one of authorship and authors’ rights. The parties do not appear to be at odds on this particular point. Lydecker expands upon the issues of manuscript possession and authorship in a structured counterargument which begins with an acknowledgement that rights can be assigned by the author to another party, as in the case of Harrison granting production rights to the Fiskes. Here, Belasco is called out for clearly understanding that this is how rights work and for having no contracts to support his claims. Indeed, Lydecker notes that Belasco’s professed desire “to make arrangements to bring out the play in 1902 is a subterfuge and shows abandonment;” [35] by claiming that future plans should prohibit the Fiskes from producing the play immediately, Belasco reveals an acceptance that Harrison is the author, a desire to relate to the play as a producer in the future, and a general goal to prevent the Fiskes from profiting off of the piece. Nothing would prevent Belasco from obtaining the rights to produce the show later; indeed, he did so in 1903, where Alice Kauser reported that it “played the first week to very large business. They are going to continue it for this week (the second week) and may be for a third week if the popularity of the play continues on.” [36] Lydecker and Fiske both argue that Belasco’s failure to obtain any kind of contract with Harrison at any point during 1900 or 1901 as a key element of his lack of standing in the case. Belasco’s arguments conveniently skate past any acknowledgement that there is no signed paperwork, but they do provide another fascinating window into the complex performance of gender which floats just beneath the surface of the case. Ironically, Belasco appears to grant Harrison more agency to enter into a contract than anyone on her side of the courtroom, even though he is simultaneously trying to claim that she couldn’t possibly have written the piece herself. In some documents, Belasco claims that the Harrisons were stalling on writing an agreement, [37] but he also attests that Constance Harrison, Belasco and Benjamin Roeder, his business manager, came to terms on a contract on their own, in the Harrison’s house, while Burton Harrison was in another room. [38] The Harrisons staunchly deny his claim that they were to draw up the contract and even moreso vociferously contest that Constance had negotiated a contract without her husband’s input. [39] Extant letters from Harrison’s agent about her publishing support the Harrisons’ claim that Burton handled her contractual matters. For instance, all correspondence about the production contract was between Burton, the Fiskes, and her agent Kauser, even though later letters about the weekly grosses are addressed to Constance. This arrangement enables the defense to present an image of Mrs. Harrison as a woman unschooled in business matters, but it also undercuts the logic of Belasco’s claims. Societal expectations may well have provided a convenient defense, no matter any degree of guilt, and the Fiskes and the Harrisons appear to have exploited these social constructs when convenient. Ultimately, Lydecker argues for the same interpretation of the relationship between contract and copyright law as the Second Circuit eventually does in 1991 in Childress v. Taylor, 945 F.2d 500, 502 (2d. Cir. 1991), which notes that “In the absence of a contract, the copyright remains with the one or more persons who created copyrightable material.” [40] Lydecker notes early in the memo that “[n]o facts alleged sustain the claim that the plaintiff is an assignee of the author’s property” [41] and then returns to this point later while remarking that the contemporary case law supports the notion “that copyright vests in the employer only by agreement.” [42] Recall that at the time of the suit, Harrison had filed the title with the copyright office on 8 October 1901, [43] but the script was not submitted until after the injunction was filed and the show opened. Thus, Harrison was left to prove that she was the sole author of the piece. The legal precedents regarding joint authorship, working relationships, and collaboration are the areas which may have provided the most potential for Belasco to have a winnable argument, even if his affidavit does not make these points particularly clearly or effectively. While it should be noted that Belasco claimed full ownership rather than joint authorship, a detail which perhaps speaks more to his intention to shut down the production and a general megalomania, the case still raises numerous issues with regards to how authorship and collaboration are defined, and thus rewarded, through copyright protections and ensuing potential profitability. Lydecker establishes that if the piece were “the joint product of the minds of the plaintiff and Mrs. Harrison,” then “under a proper agreement,” the two would be legally bound to provide rights to both authors. [44] Belasco, again, has no such proof of such an agreement, but their collaboration certainly was treated as a potential problem due to this concept of “joint product.” This notion of co-authorship gets expanded further in Lydecker’s final point, which quite extensively cites case law for the various nuances of his arguments about authorship, ownership, and injunctions. After acknowledging that there was a collaboration, he argues based on contemporary understanding of copyright that “[t]o constitute joint ownership there must be a common design.” [45] Joint authorship requiring intent to create a joint work remains a hallmark of US copyright law through much of the twentieth century, though it gradually becomes complicated by questions about the degree of contribution, “work for hire” rights, and related concerns, [46] many of which are visible in this case as well. Lydecker continues by expanding on the notion of “common design,” citing a case between Levi and Rutley, wherein a playwright hired to write a play retained authorship rights. [47] This explication quite clearly responds to Belasco’s claim that Harrison worked for him. [48] Harrison’s presumption that she could receive feedback from Belasco without incorporating all of it casts further doubt on Belasco’s claims that she was working for him, rather than he providing advice to her; he did not control the content. Belasco’s own claims that he hired Harrison to write for him also undermine any potential argument about joint authorship, based on the case law Lydecker raises as well as simple logic. Harrison quite clearly believed their collaboration to be one where Belasco was to help her with her writing, presuming that Belasco would then produce the play; the Amended Answer from the Fiskes notes that Harrison was willing to pay Belasco for any consulting expenses incurred. [49] A contract to that effect might well have helped Belasco, insofar as it would have proved that Harrison had agreed to write jointly with him or for him, while also clarifying whether he had the rights to produce the play. The Confusion of Collaborative Writing Processes In addition to the confusion about establishing theatrical rights at a time when the legal systems are still responding to production developments, [50] the theatrical scripts under consideration did not come into existence in a clean process, a reality which underpins much of the legal consternation and debate around collaboration in this case. The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch followed standard procedures then as now as ever in a collaborative art: Harrison brainstormed, wrote, and revised over the course of many months with input from a wide variety of parties including potential producers, and by the time the Fiskes offered her a contract in October 1901, none of these collaborators made any claims for co-authorship. As was normal for their publishing relationship, Harrison received input from her agent, Alice Kauser, throughout the process. She also consulted her lawyer husband, Burton N. Harrison, for advice on the legal aspects of the play. Furthermore, as Fiske and Harrison both note in their affidavits, a stage manager would often provide advice to a playwright in advance of staging a play; indeed, that is how Belasco and Harrison had worked in the 1880s on plays that were considered her works, despite his input and assistance. Harrison’s correspondence archive at the NYPL does contain numerous exchanges with producers about a wide variety of her works, including The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch . [51] Kauser notes that when she sent the play to her agent in London – after the Fiskes’ production was already running – the response was positive but included a request for a happy ending and a different title. [52] And, given the collaborative work that occurred with the Fiskes both before and after their contract had been signed, it appears that pre-emptive work on a rough script was the norm. For instance, Fiske’s first reply about the play expressed some interest but noted specific revisions that would need to be made, namely that “the predominating motive of the play as found in its leading character would require, it seems to me, some relief in the amplification of the subordinate interests as they are at present. The element of maternal love is dwelt upon so continuously now that it may be monotonous.” [53] Likewise, a 1902 letter from William H. Kendal, wherein he declines to produce the play in London, also offers feedback to Harrison, suggesting that she “[reconstruct] the play giving equal prominence & interest to the man” and noting that he would look at it again if those changes were made. This letter, notably, was written after the play had already been successfully produced in New York; such notes speak both to the collaborative nature of the profession and the assumption that texts can always be updated as needed for successful production. [54] Harrison’s engagement in a collaborative writing process is not cast as any critique on her skills; indeed, the normalcy of such an approach appears to be a given. Yet, much of the discussion of the process and her naivete enables the defense to cast Belasco as a bully and her as the innocent victim. Harrison Grey Fiske, in particular, points towards Harrison’s unimpeachable moral character and naivete as a woman while taking numerous opportunities to insult Belasco as he explains the collaborative writing process. The amended answer to the injunction moves quickly from a statement of facts into a barbed gauntlet “deny[ing] on information and belief that the plaintiff [Belasco] is an author and writer of plays,” though Fiske does “admit that plaintiff has been manager of various dramatic enterprises.” [55] The slights appear throughout the affidavit, too, where Harrison Grey Fiske depicts Belasco as an unskilled man who takes credit for others’ work: “I know Mr. Belasco’s capabilities and limitations with respect to play writing, and that I know how he engages people to write plays for him and then presents them to the public as his own.” [56] This line of defense calls into question Belasco’s veracity, but it also enables Fiske to imply, throughout, that Belasco assumed he could manipulate Harrison in this fashion as well. Fiske demotes Belasco, claiming he only “rendered her certain aid and assistance as a dramatic manager and as a stage manager.” Further, he argued that Harrison was “a woman of social position and high personal character” whereas “Belasco’s claims to authorship [have] frequently been questioned in the press and through legal proceedings.” [57] Harrison’s accomplished writing career is overshadowed by her class and gender here, rhetorically, to simultaneously attack Belasco and gain the sympathies of the court. Collaboration and U.S Law While plays are often the result of this type of collaborative process, collaboration resides, then and now, in a vague legal territory, particularly as pertains to this case. Indeed, the state of current case law and legislation underscores how dependent the parties in Belasco v. Fiske were on their own argumentation and evidence. Nevin, in his argument that current copyright law should be expanded to better accommodate theatrical production processes, notes that “copyright law lacks a proper mechanism to acknowledge the single most defining characteristic of the form—collaboration.” [58] Richardson concurs, describing “a more systemic problem–the inability of American copyright law to adequately reward and protect the uniquely collaborative expression that is live theatre.” [59] He notes, however, that proposed current solutions in legal discussions insufficiently address the concerns of theatrical collaboration because of their attempts at universality and that they may indeed hinder creativity. [60] Protections afforded through joint authorship were added to the 1976 Copyright act as a result of “a series of notable cases n156 following the enactment of the Copyright Act of 1909, which conspicuously contained no express provisions governing joint authorship.” [61] In their defense documents, thus, Harrison and the Fiskes addressed legal debates which the courts still have yet to fully resolve. Additionally, Anne Ruggles Gere’s assessment of collaborative writing in women’s groups at the end of the nineteenth century provides another potential, and gendered, avenue for considering Harrison’s approaches to collaboration and concerns about the intersection between collaboration and authorship. As copyright law was being solidified, women’s groups, Gere argues, were working in various ways which “resisted dominant concepts of intellectual property and authorship. Collaboration played a major role in writing.” [62] The processes of sharing, receiving feedback, adapting texts from other sources, and generally collaborating on writing products parallels the processes used in theatrical script development. Harrison’s prior theatrical experiences included developing scripts with a group of amateur performers and, notably, Belasco; those productions appear to followed some of the models of collaborative development that Gere discusses. Many of her scripts, including The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch , draw on or overtly adapt other texts in a manner which, while legal at the time, reveals a more fluid approach to writing, authorship, and ownership than the law would eventually settle upon. Gere argues that the clubwomen were subverting norms through a variety of literacy activities including collaborative writing and adaptation, [63] and while Harrison is not obviously working with a club, Gere’s presentation of alternate views of authorship and the impact of collaboration thereon provide another potential avenue for understanding Harrison’s focus on collaboration in her affidavit. These practices question the fixed nature of authorship and textual development that copyright law relies upon for clarity. 6[64] Little in Lydecker’s memo directly cites case law specifically about collaboration, but the avenue that he took – the need to establish authorship and the nature of the rights granted to authors – may well have inspired Harrison to expend a great deal of time in her affidavit discussing their collaboration and possibly make some late changes to the text. Taken as a whole, the defense materials reveal concerns that Belasco would and could argue collaboration and thus, perhaps, joint authorship as a means of arguing co-ownership. Interestingly, Belasco only raises collaboration twice – once while describing the initial idea for the project and later while discussing the work that they did on the piece. Harrison, conversely, discusses the nature of collaboration endlessly in her affidavit, directly countering the belittling presumptions in Belasco’s affidavit by keeping the focus on her authorial power, positioning Belasco as her assistant at times and as a potential producer at others. She explains “I said to him that I had sent for him because I thought he could, and perhaps would, assist me by collaborating and staging and bringing out the play I might write.” [65] Throughout, the dispute again comes down to contracts and input on the script. Harrison points out that “[i]t is not true that, at that interview or at any time, an arrangement for collaboration with him was suggested, except as I have here above stated – collaboration with him having been suggested only as part of a suggested entire arrangement which included staging and production by him.” [66] Collaborative Writing Processes Harrison’s assessment of Belasco’s contributions to the piece as a means of collaboration form the bulk of her counter-argument and shed further light on the collaborative writing process. Belasco claims in his affidavit that “I would sometimes remain at her house from six to seven hours collaborating with her.” [67] In addition to denying the length and number of times they met, Harrison pointed out the many months between his departure for Europe in March 1900 and the suit in October 1901, “during all of which time he had utterly failed and neglected to do anything whatever in the way of collaborating.” [68] She defines collaborating as having a “share or participation in the creation of the story or in the design or plot or general structure or construction of the play,” and goes on to classify Belasco’s involvement with the script as akin to that of a stage manager. [69] While demoting Belasco here, she also neglects to mention in this section that the input he seems to have given her was quite similar in type and perhaps scope as the input given by the Fiskes. She further remarks that he had “the opportunity” to collaborate on the script since he had requested the typed version in March 1900, but that he had chosen not to do so. [70] Indeed, their descriptions of the collaborative process they used provide a fascinating look into how they both viewed each other and the work. Belasco, throughout his affidavit, discusses how he “gave her the story and the plot” and similarly dictated other elements. [71] The notes on the script which he submitted are, indeed, quite dictatorial in their presentation: the pages are merely new pieces of text with no context or elaboration. Minnie Maddern Fiske, by contrast, explained and contextualized her suggestions and requests in the extant notes. Both Belasco and Harrison acknowledge sessions where lines were read. Belasco claimed he would read the lines and Harrison would take notes. Harrison, however, describes these meetings in a way that can best be described as a thinly veiled excoriation of his talents: though it is true that, whilst I wrote he sometimes walked about the room and pulled his hair in apparent excitement, sometimes with his hands before him and trembling, as he said, in a low and agitated voice, in real or assumed emotion over what I had read him. “Ther-rills (thrills) – ther-rills, I can see the audience in their ther-rills” – and though it is true that I remember, he once sat at my desk and did the dumbshow of the “business” he said would be appropriate for the detective […] As to Mr. Belasco’s speaking a “dialogue,” he always was difficult and slow of utterance – appeared to be unable to articulate except with effort and very tediously, and in mere explosives.[72] Where neither side disputes that work was completed on the play with both parties in attendance at Mrs. Harrison’s house, the challenge then becomes establishing degree of collaboration, which even the courts still struggle to determine. Curiously, Harrison appears to have been proactively asking about collaboration – seemingly before the lawsuit even occurred. The archive includes a tantalizingly incomplete letter to Harrison which was clearly written in response to Harrison reaching out to ask if the illegibly named correspondent remembered exchanging letters about the play and about collaboration. The letter’s author replies to her inquiry: “So – my recollection of that correspondence upon matters dramatic is extremely vague. However, your statement of it seems entirely accurate. I think you wanted to know out my experience what the relations and TERMS were between collaborating dramatists, and I was obliged to confess that what should have been my experience was lodged in the bosom of THE CENTURY COMPANY who had made all the arrangements.” The letter writer continues: “I do not remember that you mentioned the name of the play, for, it seemed quite fresh to my recollection when I saw the story in the ‘The Smart Set;’” [73] the short story version of The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch appeared in March 1901. While the letter writer claims to be unsure of many details, if we trust that that the conversation occurred, as implied, before the publication of the short story, then Harrison was asking about how collaborations worked in the spring of 1901 or in 1900 – long before the lawsuit and before the Fiskes became involved. Whatever sparked the original conversation, the inquiry which prompted this particular reply seemingly was meant to establish a defense – Harrison wanted to know if her correspondent had kept any of their initial set of letters, presumably to use them at trial. Tests of Originality and Plot Machinations In this particular case, the multiple collaborations may have enabled Harrison to better prepare to counter Belasco’s claims of originality, which may well have been problematic and hard to disprove legally. Originality is a key component of United States copyright law since the Copyright Act of 1790, which drew on similar ideas in English law. Belasco’s main points of contention in his often-rambling affidavit are that the plot and the storyline were his original idea and that he hired Harrison to write that particular story with significant oversight and supervision by him. Harrison claims that the story is her version of a Sardou play, Seraphine , where a father is reunited with his daughter. [74] While establishing provenance is impossible, it should be noted that some in the press claimed a third source, as they saw the story as a loose adaptation of the hit East Lynne . [75] The storyline draws on popular narratives of the time, no matter the initial inspiration. The plot, in brief, concerns a young married woman who learns that her husband is having an affair; she leaves him and has a short dalliance with a male friend in retribution, is sued for divorce and loses; she moves to California, leaving behind her young daughter, and sets up shop making lampshades as Mrs. Marian Hatch. Just as her new love interest proposes, Mrs. Marian Hatch learns of her daughter’s upcoming marriage, and so she sells everything, spurns her suitor, and moves back to NY to see her daughter, pretending to be a stitcher working on her daughter’s wedding dress to gain access. She continues to nobly suffer in silence, and after the daughter returns from her honeymoon, she learns the true identity of the stitcher, just in time for her long-lost mother to die of a weak heart. The short story was published during Harrison’s period of work with Belasco, providing Belasco with the plot and dialogue to compare to the draft manuscript which he had in his possession. What should have helped him potentially prove part of his case, however, also gave Harrison and the Fiskes a clear roadmap of what they might want to change. And changes, they made. While early drafts of the play have not been located, the major differences between the play and the short story appear to have been written in collaboration with the Fiskes rather than with Belasco. And, the substantive nature of those alterations between short story and play may well have undercut any claim of joint authorship of the play that Belasco might have made. Numerous major and minor changes were made during the process of adaptation from short story to play, and little of Belasco’s input seems to have survived the revision process, which may well have continued after the injunction was filed. Extant correspondence about the revisions is generally brief and undated, limiting our ability to parse which changes might have been happening when. Additionally, numerous short undated letters from the Fiskes request her presence at the theatre and notify her of their visits to her house, some specifically mentioning the play and others simply confirming times and dates. [76] Quite a few letters between Harrison and the Fiskes discuss the play and its development, in particular the last act, which is significantly changed from the short story version, as well as the Paul & Lina scene, the Paul & Marian scene, and Mrs. Hatch’s character. Paul Trevor, Mrs. Hatch’s love interest, is an entirely new character for the play, and the plot alterations necessary to accommodate him were quite substantial; this love interest permits Mrs. Hatch to be more sympathetic, perhaps accounting for the character imperfections which Burton Harrison recommended so that the judge’s decision is believable. Belasco and Harrison had considered making Mrs. Hatch purely innocent, but Burton Harrison objected because a judge would never have taken away an innocent society woman’s child. Harrison followed this advice, telling Belasco: “my husband says our latest scheme to make Marion innocent, except of rash impulse, has simply robbed the play of all of its strength, and made it a tissue of improbabilities. He says no judge or referee in New York would ever have condemned a woman upon such a letter […] the matter of innocence simply takes the backbone out of the play, and makes it inverterbrate.” [77] Yet, given that the Fiskes and Harrisons had nearly a month between the notice of the lawsuit and opening night, it is possible that some of the minor details that survived the short story-to-play revision process were cut, just in case. Indeed, Belasco’s complaint gave them a map of potential changes to make by submitting a typed copy of feedback on the first three acts with his affidavit as Exhibit 13; the press also ran the contents of the suit in great detail, with at least one paper reprinting the letters entered in as exhibits. [78] Remarkably few of those suggestions were in the final version of the play, perhaps because of artistic differences, but perhaps to assist with the defense. Numerous minor differences exist between the play and Belasco’s notes – instead of Adrian’s parents visiting, it’s his sister; when the lawyer enters, Mrs. Hatch says “I haven’t forgotten you” rather than Belasco’s suggested “Yes… I remembered you;” a boy is replaced by a telephone; etc. In one noticeably awkward substitution, a young boy at a May festival who had a balloon in the short story was instead given a toy boat in the play and told, “Hold fast Johnny boy. If Bobby gets it away from you, you’re gone.” The short story version was “Take care Johnny boy. […] Hold very fast to your string. If it gets away from you, you’re gone.” Belasco wrote a whole bit about balloons going up, one child losing one and crying, and Mrs. Hatch talking to the child, saying, “You can get another! My balloon went up, long ago; and I couldn’t!” None of that remains – balloons aren’t mentioned at all. [79] Johnny’s illogical need to hang onto his boat rather than his balloon seems to suggest the Fiskes and Harrison either were not quite so innocently being attacked by Belasco or were unsure of their legal standing and decided to make sure that play was sufficiently different to withstand scrutiny. One tantalizingly unclear letter from Minnie Maddern Fiske to Harrison suggests that they might have been editing out parts which might give Belasco grounds to argue for collaboration, unless, of course, they were worried about the critics. Fiske writes, “Do you not think it would be well to cut, in Gladys’ 2 nd Act scene – all reference to her mother so that the nasty and unfriendly ones won’t have a chance to say that we are forcing a situation!” [80] In the published version of the script, Gladys remarks periodically about her mother (Mrs. Hatch) in Act 2, but there’s only a brief reference to the off-stage Mrs. Lorimer, who is introduced as far more of the stereotypical social-climbing wicked stepmother in the short story pages which parallel Act 2. Belasco’s script notes, meanwhile, advise that an abbreviated version of the short story’s stern conversation between Mrs. Lorimer and Gladys remain, complete with the carriage arriving upstage. [81] Whether or not the Fiskes and Harrison are guiltless in this endeavor or simply covering their bases is unclear, muddied by the paper trail and the long-standing animosity between the producers. The Fiskes do seem to have been playing a little fast and loose with the truth at times, for Harrison Grey Fiske’s affidavit implies a distant, past, notion that “a collaboration with Mr. Belasco and a production of the play by him was once contemplated” [82] and he tells the press “I knew that in some sort of a way Mr. Belasco had known of the writing of the play.” [83] Yet, Minnie Maddern Fiske’s correspondence suggests that she knows the backstory and its implications. She tells Harrison in an 8 th September 1901 letter “Do not let Mr. Belasco know that I wish to present the play. The little man would hold to it with his last gasp if he thought that. I shall be so glad when it shall be finally in our hands.” [84] Whether Fiske expects a competitive battle from Belasco or whether she understands that Harrison had been working with him and was attempting to extricate herself from that relationship is unclear. Belasco was at a serious disadvantage while building his lawsuit because he did not have access to this latest version of the script, nor did he appear to know that Harrison had been working with the Fiskes since May. He reportedly told her – in July 1901 — that he wouldn’t be able to produce the show in the 1901-1902 season; [85] this document’s authenticity is questioned by Harrison, who denies ever receiving it. [86] Regardless, it still does not constitute a contractual agreement to produce the play, and in reality, by July she was already substantially revising the play based upon suggestions from the Fiskes; accordingly a whole section of Belasco’s argument falls apart. [87] His silence and failure to obtain a written contract enabled her to go elsewhere with the script, be it due to busyness or a devaluation of Harrison’s work until it was deemed stage-worthy by a competitor. He was fond of suing his competition, so it simply may be that he had no legal case and was on a deadline; he had less than a month to shut down the production, so ownership was the only logical power play that might result in a production delay and payout. Whether Harrison and the Fiskes would have been able to make a case about theatre’s collaborative writing history not constituting ownership, authorship, or joint authorship remains unknowable. The Predatory Producer and the Female Playwright The difficulties of establishing the extent of a collaboration, and thus of being able to make a case for joint authorship, rest in part on intent, as Lydecker discusses, and in part on contributions to outcome, which has become a foundation for modern legal interpretations. While the law was not settled then (or now), [88] all sides spent a significant amount of time presenting the case for their contributions to the piece in a messy and protracted collaborative process – Belasco claiming ideas and inspiration, Harrison denying his input was used in the piece, and Fiske and the Harrisons both, seemingly, working to remove any remnants of Belasco’s imprint on the piece. Layered atop this was Belasco’s bravado and the willingness of the entire defense team to cast Constance Harrison as a somewhat gullible woman for their benefit. In the end, the suit was dropped, without clear explanation, but the extensive legal archive and press coverage certainly suggest that all parties were concerned that Belasco might well have had a case despite not having a written contract with Harrison and that the rhetorical positioning of Harrison as a naïve and manipulated woman might not have been sufficient as a defense. The complexities and legal uncertainty surrounding extent of and intent to collaborate continue to appear in contemporary case law. The playwriting process of the early nineteenth century, particularly when a predatory producer encounters a female “amateur” playwright with enough skill to write a hit and a willingness to trust him despite others’ concerns, was a messy enough collaboration that the law may have granted Belasco some compensation for his input, if the script sufficiently resembled the earlier version. One wonders if Belasco’s obviously thin evidence was taken seriously simply because Harrison was a woman and “amateur” playwright and Belasco was granted immediate authority and credence as a professional man. While the case is rooted in the competitive turn-of-the-twentieth century world of producers who were fighting to establish themselves and resist the Syndicate, the implications of this case and the historical outcomes for women and their labor remain all too familiar. The legal system still grapples with defining collaboration, but women’s contributions to work products are ignored or undermined with the same unquestioned ease seen in Belasco’s affidavit. Harrison, doubly challenged as a woman and a wrongly perceived amateur author, spends years trying to work collaboratively with Belasco in a playwright-producer relationship. Belasco, who cannot be bothered to reply to her letters despite their working relationship, appears in his affidavit to be incapable of imagining that a woman would collaborate with him rather than work for him. Harrison’s capacity to function in a professional realm without male input is quite obvious in her archive – Harrison, Minnie Maddern Fiske, and Kauser are the three women who make this production happen through negotiation and collaboration. And yet, throughout the legal and press archives, Harrison’s skills and professional capacity are constantly questioned. A century later, women’s voices in collaborative work are still continually ignored, discredited, and questioned. Actual amateurs are systematically exploited for their labor through an industry that relies on underpaid positions, while experienced women are presumed amateurish, their work products and ideas claimed and turned into profit opportunities by men. That the law struggles to define collaboration reflects the messiness of creative processes; that teams still erase women’s contributions to collaborations is symptomatic of a pernicious societal ill that led Belasco and Harrison to court. References [1] Abram J. Dittenhoefer, et. al., Complaint Belasco v. Fiske . Para 4. Lydecker Family Papers 1860-1983, SC 19048. Box 155 Case Files Belasco V. Fiske 1901-1903, Folder 9. Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections. [2] Mary A. Worley, “Alice Kauser, Playwright, A Woman of Ideas,” Los Angeles Herald , 8 Feb 1903, 7. See also “Interview with Alice Kauser, 1904” excerpted from “Alice Kauser: A Chat with the Woman who Presides over the Largest Play Business in the World,” New York Dramatic Mirror , 31 December 1904, in Theatre in the United States: A Documentary History. Volume 1: 1750-1915 Theatre in the Colonies and the United States , ed. Barry B. Witham (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 188. [3] Mrs. Burton Harrison, Recollections Grave and Gay , (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), 333. [4] Harrison, Recollections , 325-327. [5] “Exhibit 11.” Copy of Letter from Constance Cary Harrison to David Belasco, 23 May 1901. In Affidavit of David Belasco . Lydecker Family Papers 1860-1983, SC 19048. Box 155 Case Files Belasco V. Fiske 1901-1903, Folder 9. Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections. [6] See, Letter from Alice Kauser to Mrs. Burton Harrison, 15 May 1901; Alice Kauser to Mrs. Burton Harrison, 17 May 1901; Letter from Harrison Grey Fiske to Alice Kauser, 18 May 1901; among others, in: Mrs. Burton Harrison, Correspondence re Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch, 8-MWEZ x n.c. 19,567 [Cage], Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library. [7] See, among others, Letter from Minnie Maddern Fiske to Constance Cary Harrison, 8 September 1901. Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [8] Letter from Alice Kauser to Mr. Burton Harrison, 12 October 1901. Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [9] Amended Answer , 2/3 Dec. 1901, Para. 11. Lydecker Family Papers 1860-1983, SC 19048. Box 155 Case Files Belasco V. Fiske 1901-1903, Folder 7. Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections. [10] Affidavit of Harrison Grey Fiske , 15 Dec. 1901. Para. 26. Lydecker Family Papers 1860-1983, SC 19048. Box 155 Case Files Belasco V. Fiske 1901-1903, Folder 7. Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections. [11] Affidavit of David Belasco , 8 Nov. 1901. Para. 4. Lydecker Family Papers 1860-1983, SC 19048. Box 155 Case Files Belasco V. Fiske 1901-1903, Folder 9. Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections. [12] Affidavit of David Belasco , Para. 8. [13] Ryan J. Richardson, “The Art of Making Art: A Narrative of Collaboration in American Theatre and a Response to Calls for Change to the Copyright Act of 1976,” Cumberland Law Review , 2011/2012. 42 Cumb. L. Rev. 489. Lexis-Nexis Academic. 492. [14] It also should be reiterated that her husband was an experienced lawyer by the time of the suit. [15] Douglas M. Nevin, “No Business like Show Business: Copyright Law, the Theatre Industry, and the Dilemma of Rewarding Collaboration,” Emory Law Journal , Summer 2004: 53.3, 1537. [16] Derek Miller, Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1790-1911 . (Cambridge University Press: New York, 2018), 195. [17] Injunction . 6 November 1901. Box 155 Case Files Belasco V. Fiske 1901-1903, Folder 6. Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections. [18] Dittenhoefer, et. al., Complaint Belasco v. Fiske , Para 10. [19] See Miller, Copyright and the Value of Performance, 195-235, for an in-depth discussion of the intellectual traditions surrounding manuscripts, copyright performances, and related ways of establishing ownership in the nineteenth century. [20] Library of Congress, United States Copyright Office. Dramatic Compositions Copyrighted in the United States, 1870-1916. Vol. 2. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1918), 2448. Copyright number 48453. Issued October 8 1901, 2c Nov 26 1901. D: 935. [21] Dittenhoefer, et. al., Complaint Belasco v. Fiske , Para 10. [22] Whether or not he did submit the manuscript to the court is unclear. The draft script is in neither Lydecker’s nor Harrison’s files on the case. [23] “Exhibit 4.” Copy of Letter from Mrs. B. Harrison to Mr. Nash, 2 April. Affidavit of David Belasco . [24] Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison , Para. 38. 13 November 1901. Lydecker Family Papers 1860-1983, SC 19048. Box 155 Case Files Belasco V. Fiske 1901-1903, Folder 8. Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections. [25] “Exhibit 3.” Copy of Letter from Constance Cary Harrison to David Belasco, Sunday. Affidavit of David Belasco . [26] “Exhibit 11.” Affidavit of David Belasco . [27] “Exhibit X.” Copy of Letter from Burton N. Harrison to David Belasco, 4 October 1901. In Affidavit of Burton N. Harrison . 13 November 1901. Lydecker Family Papers 1860-1983, SC 19048. Box 155 Case Files Belasco V. Fiske 1901-1903, Folder 6. Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections. [28] “Exhibit 11.” Affidavit of David Belasco . [29] Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison , Para. 44. [30] Letter from Jeannette L. Gilder to Mrs. Burton Harrison, 10 October 1901. Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [31] Affidavit of Burton N. Harrison , 13 November 1901, Para 5. [32] “Exhibit 1,” Copy of letter from Constance Cary Harrison to David Belasco, Wednesday. Affidavit of David Belasco . [33] Affidavit of David Belasco , Para. 8. [34] Charles Lydecker, Memo. in Opposition to Motion for Injunction , 15 Nov. 1901, Part 1. Lydecker Family Papers 1860-1983, SC 19048. Box 155 Case Files Belasco V. Fiske 1901-1903, Folder 7. Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections. [35] Lydecker, Memo. , Part 2. [36] Letter from Alice Kauser to Constance Cary Harrison, 14 September 1903. Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [37] Affidavit of David Belasco , Paras. 12-21. [38] Affidavit of David Belasco , Paras. 13-14. [39] Affidavit of Burton N. Harrison , Paras. 6-10; Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison , Paras. 47-53. [40] Qtd. In Richardson, “The Art of Making Art,” 517. [41] Lydecker, Memo. , Part 2. [42] Lydecker, Memo. , Part 4. [43] United States Copyright Office, Catalogue of Title Entries of Books and Other Articles , Fourth Quarter 1901, Volume 29 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), 1470. [44] Lydecker, Memo., Part 3. [45] Lydecker, Memo. , Part 4. [46] For a general assessment of the complications and history of notions of joint authorship in US Copyright law, see Edward Valachovic, “The Contribution Requirement to a Joint Work under the Copyright Act,” Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review , 12.1 (1992): 199-219. [47] Lydecker, Memo. , Part 4. He cites Levi v. Rutley, Law Reports 6 C.P., 523, Smith J. Later cases and updates to the copyright law on joint authorship move towards a clearer definition of “work for hire” rights residing with the employer. [48] Again, these are issues with which contemporary copyright cases still grapple, though Richardson notes that work-for-hire has generally been settled as inapplicable now for contemporary production conditions: “Courts, more or less, have embraced this narrow definition of authorship, holding that because playwrights and composers initiate (and occasionally complete) the vast majority of their work before a producer is solicited to fund a production, they are considered “independent contractors” and are not subject to the work-for-hire doctrine.” Richardson, “The Art of Making Art,” 510. [49] While this claim is made in the Amended Answer , Para. 10, Harrison herself avoids explicitly mentioning remuneration in her affidavit. [50] See Miller throughout. [51] See Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [52] Letter from Alice Kauser to Constance Cary Harrison, 10 December 1901. Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [53] Letter from Harrison Grey Fiske to Alice Kauser, 18 May 1901. Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [54] Letter from William H. Kendal to Mr. Day, 1 July 1902. Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [55] Amended Answer , Para 2. [56] Affidavit of Harrison Grey Fiske, Para 20. [57] Amended Answer , Para 4. [58] Nevin, “No Business like Show Business,” 1534. [59] Richardson, “The Art of Making Art,” 492. [60] Richardson, “The Art of Making Art,” 493 [61] Richardson, “The Art of Making Art,” 508. [62] Anne Ruggles Gere, “Common Properties of Pleasure: Texts in Nineteenth Century Women’s Clubs,” in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature , eds. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 391. [63] Gere, “Common Properties of Pleasure,” 397-399. [64] For a general assessment of the historical development and complications of collaborative work, see Peter Jaszi, “On the Author Effect: Contemporary Copyright and Collective Creativity,” in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature , eds. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 29-56. [65] Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison , Para. 10. [66] Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison , Para. 16. The lack of an agreement on collaboration also appears in Para. 45, where she also accuses him of changing her words in a letter submitted into evidence to be “projected collaboration” instead of “proposed collaboration.” [67] Affidavit of David Belasco , Para. 8. [68] Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison , Para. 20. [69] Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison , Para. 28. [70] Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison , Para. 41. [71] Affidavit of David Belasco , Para. 7. [72] Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison , Paras. 29-31. [73] Letter from Unknown Author to Constance Cary Harrison, [1901]. Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [74] Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison , Para. 7. [75] See, for example, J. Ranken Towse, “The Drama,” The Critic 40 no. 1 (January 1902): 39-40; “The Stage,” Town Talk 11 no. 575, (5 September 1903): 21. [76] See Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [77] “Exhibit 2.” Copy of letter from Constance Cary Harrison to David Belasco, Thursday Evening, Affidavit of David Belasco . [78] Clipping. Robinson Locke Scrapbook. Volume 203 Reel 18, page 61. Robinson Locke collection, NAFR+. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. [79] Mrs. Burton Harrison, The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch (New York: C.G. Burgoyne, 1901): 22; Mrs. Burton Harrison, “The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch,” The Smart Set (March 1901): 14; “Exhibit 13.” Note 2, Affidavit of David Belasco . [80] Letter from Minnie Maddern Fiske to Constance Cary Harrison, undated. Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [81] Harrison, Unwelcome , 32-33; Harrison, “Unwelcome,” 25-37. “Exhibit 13.” Note 7, Affidavit of David Belasco . [82] Affidavit of Harrison Grey Fiske , Para. 11. [83] Clipping. Robinson Locke Scrapbook. Volume 203 Reel 18, page 61. BRTC. [84] Letter from Minnie Maddern Fiske to Constance Cary Harrison, 8 September 1901. Harrison Correspondence, BRTC. [85] “Exhibit 12.” Copy of letter from David Belasco to Constance Cary Harrison, 15 July 1901. Affidavit of David Belasco . [86] Affidavit of Constance Cary Harrison . Para. 56 [87] Affidavit of David Belasco , Paras. 29-31. See also Abram J. Dittenhoefer, Complaint Belasco v. Fiske , Para. 9. [88] The current standard is that “the independent contributions of each putative joint author must be independently copyrightable; it is not enough that only the finished product be copyrightable.” Richardson, “The Art of Making Art,” 516. Footnotes About The Author(s) DR EILEEN CURLEY is Chair and Associate Professor of English at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she teaches a wide range of theatre and drama courses. She is also the Editor in Chief of USITT’s quarterly journal Theatre Design & Technology. Her research on nineteenth-century amateur theatre has appeared in Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, Popular Entertainment Studies, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Theatre Symposium, Performing Arts Resources, and edited collections. Dr. Curley has also designed props, scenery, or projections for more than 50 productions in Indiana, New York, and Iowa. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Theatre History, Theory, and Literature from Indiana University and a B.A. 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 "Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here": Romanticizing Grifters in American Musical Theatre Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero: The Mark of the Marketplace in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1-3 Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202. Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec; Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Heather S. Nathans, Javier Hurtado, Benny Sato Ambush, Henry Bial, Kristoffer Diaz, Kim Marra, Harvey Young 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 What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre Heather S. Nathans, Javier Hurtado, Benny Sato Ambush, Henry Bial, Kristoffer Diaz, Kim Marra, Harvey Young By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF A Roundtable with the College of Fellows of the American Theatre Participants: Benny Sato Ambush, Henry Bial, Kristoffer Diaz, Kim Marra, and Harvey Young Curated by: Heather S. Nathans (Tufts University) and Javier Hurtado (Saint Mary’s College) Three times a year, the College of Fellows of the American Theatre hosts a Roundtable on current issues facing artists and educators. When The Fellows Gazette announced its theme of “What’s at Stake” for the spring 2025 issue on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in U.S. theatre, could we have imagined that the stakes would be this high? Could we have imagined that the individual words—diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice—would become so weaponized that organizations and educational institutions would scrub them from their websites as though they were obscenities scrawled by vandals, rather than words that have graced some of the nation's most historic speeches and treasured monuments? And we must acknowledge that even since our Roundtable discussion seven months ago, the landscape for DEIJ work in many colleges and universities has contracted in ways that will impact teachers and students for years to come. Additionally, many dance and theatre artists across the U.S. have lost funding for work that seems too “woke” to an administration intent on silencing dissent and rewriting history. In such a moment what does it mean to try to return to the core values of DEIJ represented in each of those individual words? As part of the commemoration of its sixtieth year, the College of Fellows Roundtable explored how the organization understands what diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice mean to a community of artists and scholars who have dedicated their careers to telling the stories of marginalized communities. In this Roundtable conversation, we share the reflections of theatre artists and scholars on the past, present, and future of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in U.S. theatre. Theatre people have always understood that survival requires collaboration. It also demands building a “Welcome Table” that uplifts all voices and identities. A note on the structure of the essay : For each Roundtable, we conduct a series of interviews with artists and scholars, inviting each to respond to the same five questions. We then blend their voices into a larger conversation. Can you describe the impact that you’ve seen DEIJ activism have on U.S. theatre over the past 10-20 years (this might include major milestones or important trends you've seen, or it might include communities represented, voices uplifted, etc.)? Henry Bial , Professor at the University of Kansas, observes, “What we are seeing is a radical expansion of the kind of stories and identities that are getting produced.” As Bial argues, Black theatre, Latinx, LGBTQ+ theatre, Women’s Theatre, Asian American theatre, Indigenous theatre, didn’t suddenly manifest in the 2000s, but “mainstream” theatres often seemed reluctant to produce art that, “expressed the whole range of human experience.” Bial notes that this was once particularly true in university theatre, where institutions might allocate a “slot” for a so-called DEIJ show, without imagining that every show in a season could engage with the university’s values around diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. Bial marks the important shift from seeing the exploration of DEIJ topics as “optional” to them becoming part of the core mission of educational institutions. Bial adds, “I think a really healthy thing that's happened in the last ten or twenty years has been moving the conversation past the kind of counting game of ‘This is how many actors of a certain demographic we've put on the stage,’ or ‘This is how many playwrights of a certain demographic have been represented,’ and we're moving towards a kind of qualitative understanding of the stories that we're telling.” He points to the importance of student activism in this shift, as new generations of performers reject narratives and types of representation that don’t do the kinds of cultural labor they want to see. Picking up on Bial’s theme of representation, award-winning director, Benny Sato Ambush , reflected on his first trip to the annual gathering of LORT theatres in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. “It was the early 1980s and there was one person of color there, me, and one woman.” Ambush’s comment raises the question of what it means to be “the only” in a space that might be majority white or majority male-identifying. Ambush describes, “I first started seeing a difference in representation especially racially and culturally during the 1980s when Equity was sponsoring regional, nontraditional casting symposiums,” as a result of a prior four-year study about representation in the American theatre. He recalled one symposium in San Franciso which explored what he then called the “hot topic” of “multicultural and non-traditional casting in different categories of approaches,” noting that this was “before the term ‘antiracist’ came into common use.” As Benny commented, “The terms we used back then were multiculturalism and pluralism… and those were supposed to create a ‘big table’ to which everyone was invited.” And while the terms have continued to develop, Ambush saw those regional symposiums and a flurry of articles in American Theatre and other publications (some that he wrote) begin, “to make a little difference.” Ambush’s acknowledgement that the difference seemed “little” offers a telling reminder of the immense gaps in representation that have persisted throughout the trajectory of U.S. theatre. “We’ve been having this same conversation for twenty-five years,” observes award-winning playwright, librettist, screenwriter, and educator, Kristoffer Diaz , as he reflected on the conversations among arts organizations and educators about creating more compositionally diverse teams and broader representation in U.S. repertoires. For Diaz, it seems a simple idea that, “The more different kinds of voices you have, the better the work is going to be.” However, he acknowledges that this is where the “simple” aspect of the work ends. He reminds his students that representation onstage, in the repertoire, and in the academy has shifted over the past three decades. Yet, he also notes, “I'm working primarily in the Broadway world these days [and] I’m consistently shocked by how few of specific groups are represented, how few Latino artists are working in on Broadway. When was the last time that a Latino playwright had a play produced, or more than one in a season?” Diaz calls out the current season as unusual for featuring two stories that center Latinx voices and cautions those who see it as clear evidence of “progress.” As he argues, “There is so much that is undone or unfinished...There's room, there's room, there's stories to be heard,” beyond those one or two plays. Diaz does see the results of the work that so many artists and scholars have put into the field over the trajectory of his career, “I think that things have gotten better…as a writer feeling comfortable and confident that I can write the things that I want to write, and that I [will] have actors regardless of the character that I want to put on stage. I'm going to be able to find the actors to play those roles. I'm going to find directors who can understand or at least have the vocabulary to do [the work]. I feel great about that…[and] I feel really good about the opportunity that these shows will have…to find an audience.” The paradox of when the work might be “finished” still lingers, as he says, “At the same time I still feel that very real sense of the work not being done.” Like Diaz, Professor Emeritus Kim Marra looked back at generational change in the trajectory of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, sharing her perspective as a path-breaking scholar in LGBTQ+ performance history. From Marra’s perspective, “The visibility of trans advocacy and trans rights has been a major force in the last ten or twenty years.” She pointed to a number of rising scholars whose work explores “the queer unfinished” and what it means to “queer archives.” 1 Marra spotlighted not only the scholars who have been expanding on some of the conversations she helped to launch through her own work, but the earlier generations of scholars who helped to mold her early in her career. As she acknowledged, many of those community members might not have been able to openly express their identities forty or fifty years ago, but they made opportunities to encourage and support their students’ and mentees’ work. That encouragement helped to legitimize pursuing LGBTQ+ theatre as a research topic. Marra also shared the tremendous impact of two major Black theatre scholars who taught her during her undergraduate and graduate education, Errol Hill (Dartmouth) and Esther Merle Jackson (University of Wisconsin-Madison). Beyond the skills and knowledge they shared with her, for Marra, both of these individuals became role models, “for the battles [they] fought.” Their teachings came full circle in the year before her retirement, which witnessed the murder of George Floyd and the tremendous expansion of the Black Lives Matter movement. As she says, “I spent that summer trying to take my understanding of DEI and how my courses were honoring that mission to another level, because clearly whatever we had been doing was not sufficient. I'm grateful that I had that opportunity, that provocation to do that before I left.” Looking to the future, Marra says she hopes to continue mentoring new scholars—particularly in the areas of disability studies, eco studies, and animal studies (where much of her recent research has focused). As she observes, “The interconnectedness of species has become more and more pressing to understand, and performance can provide ways of doing that because of all of the unique potentials of performance and performance studies. My intersectional frame has expanded to include, along with race ethnicity, class gender, sexuality, gender identity, also to include species. Historically, as we know, animals have been used to denigrate people. Certain people have been seen as less human, more animalistic. So, I feel an urgency as a theater historian who has studied American theater in particular, to see how that works through those histories.” Harvey Young , Dean of the College of Fine Arts and Vice President for the Arts, ad interim , Boston University, described the transformations he witnessed as a scholar and administrator over the past decade. Young pointed to #BLM , “We See You White American Theatre,” “Stop Asian Hate,” #MeToo , and the other activist movements that have challenged American artists and spectators to “stand up and say, ‘Let’s listen to these stories. Let’s take a moment to hear a person share their experience.’” Young points to the work commissioned in the wake of so many tragedies as communities have grappled with the aftermath of multiple traumas or ongoing marginalization. He argues, “You can see the proliferation and growth of those previously unheard voices. These new plays, specifically post 2020, have helped Broadway evolve. The shifting demographics of voices featured in regional theaters are noticeable and related to the movements occurring over the past decade.” Young adds, “I often write about African American theater. My Cambridge Companion to African American Theater book, which came out in its first edition in 2012,” a moment Young describes as “the before times of Black Lives Matter at a national level.” He adds, “When the book was first published, there were not that many contemporary Black playwrights who had won the Pulitzer Prize and whose works were frequently appearing on Broadway and regional stages.” Like Diaz, Young sees positive change in whose stories are being told now and whose work is being recognized. However, also like Diaz, he acknowledges the significant distance yet to be traveled for the professional theatre to create equity in representation. How have the DEIJ initiatives you just talked about seeing shaped your career as an artist or scholar, or both? Bial describes the call to activist work that has shaped his career since the 1990s, watching people like Jill Dolan and Dwight Conquergood. As Bial says, they argued that “The work that we do in the theater and in theater education has to be engaged and active. Theater can't be just an aesthetic artistic thing that happens in a vacuum, or about the kind of conservation of the great cultural achievements of the past, but it has to be that the work we do is about shaping the world for the better, going forward about doing kind of cultural labor.” Bial has been drawn to that kind of craft throughout his career, but says that the diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice movement of the last decade, “has helped sharpen and focus,” his efforts. He adds, “It's helped me realize that this abstract call for theater to make people more empathetic or make people believe more in in the goodness of humanity… is not helping the people who need help.” For Bial, theatre adorned with platitudes does nothing to “really move the needle” on “the social conditions that we want to try to influence both within our institutions and beyond.” Marra’s current research on animal performance has challenged her to think about the ways that classifications around animal labor have translated into the Social Darwinist mentality that continues to plague U.S. culture. For her, studying animals also offers a window into the origins of some contemporary conversations about ableism and the ongoing question of, “What can a body do?” Marra underscored that her research into ableism and its links to animal performance lies outside the standard subjects familiar to scholars of U.S. theatre. For Marra, a commitment to inclusion and equity are key in identifying and pursuing overlooked subjects. And it returned her to the theme that several of the Roundtable participants echoed—the ways in which subjects acquire legitimacy through the work of artists and scholars documenting and validating their experiences. Diaz described some of the opportunities that had shaped his trajectory as an artist and educator. He notes, that “None of this was DEI at the time… but I come into this business through a lot of culturally specific programs.” For example, he pointed to the Hispanic Playwrights Project at the South Coast Repertory Theatre (1986-2004) as one of his first big professional moments ( Hispanic Playwrights Project History | South Coast Repertory ). He recalls, “At that time (2003) I had just gotten out of graduate school, and I was selected to develop my play, Welcome to Arroyo’s at South Coast. They brought out four playwrights… It was me Karen Zacarias, Carlos Murillo and Quiara Alegria Huides, which was just craziness. Amazing [to work with] Quiara right before she exploded on the scene. So that was a great game-changing opportunity for me.” For Diaz, the moment meant more than a platform for his work. It meant a chance to work in a community of other artists developing new work in Latinx theatre. He praises Zacarias, who, “took me under her wing in a very conscious way…and grounded me and hipped me to the game.” Through the SCR program Diaz connected with people who would become lifelong colleagues, including Michael John Garcés and Jaime Castañeda. Diaz was open about his anxieties of entering spaces being framed in certain ways, “I was hesitant of Latino spaces, because I don't speak Spanish. I'm very, very, very Americanized. I consider my cultural heritage to be New York City as much as I consider it to be anything else. So, I always have a little bit of that concern in those kinds of spaces. And what was really fantastic about the Hispanic Playwrights Project was, it made me understand that this community was supportive of everyone , from all different kinds of backgrounds.” For Diaz, the community at SCR focused on telling stories, rather than judging artists, and “I got over that fear and self- loathing that I have for never having learned Spanish.” In looking back over the network of relationships that have supported his work, Diaz muses, “I don’t know that it necessarily falls under the big picture sort of formalized DEI work, but it's been so fundamental to my success,” and to understanding, “how this business and how this community works.” Diaz added that his experiences have helped him to realize that it is in fact important to name the work as part of a commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice: “If you’re in the work, you have to name the work.” Looking back at the way DEIJ work has shaped his career, like Diaz, Ambush noted, “Back then, we didn’t call it DEI, but that’s essentially what it was.” Ambush described his efforts in the 1980s and 1990s to create more inclusive theatre spaces but pointed to the challenges he and other like-minded artists of color faced in the process, even among what he describes as “ethnically specific theatres.” It was a constant fight for legitimacy and recognition. When Eurocentric companies did do work related to Black experiences, he argues that they often resorted to the same small collection of “safe” well-known works, such as A Raisin in the Sun , To Kill a Mockingbird , Driving Miss Daisy, and works by Athol Fugard. Reflecting back on the DEI productions of the 1980s, Ambush said, “I'm going to talk about Black folks for a moment, but I also mean by, extension, all people of color: There are palatable, comfortable explorations of plays that have Black people in them that are for white people, and there are plays with Black people in them that speak to Black people.” And Ambush points to the crucial absences of productions from the repertoires of Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices. Like Ambush, Young pays attention to representation in the mainstream media and recognizable stages for artists of the global majority. He described the brief, post-2020 surge in the presence of Black playwrights on Broadway, even though, as he notes, many of those shows closed early because of audiences’ COVID-related reluctance to come back into performance spaces. Young also notes the ratio of Pulitzer Prizes for drama vs. Tony Awards over the past decade, arguing, “There’s a notable difference. The community of scholars and critics have been more likely to recognize the works of BIPOC artists than the theatre industry itself.” As a scholar of theatre, awards offer an important index for Young in tracking the kinds of voices and stories that institutions want to lift up (since 2016, the majority of the Pulitzer Prizes for Drama have been awarded to artists of color: https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/218 ). Have you encountered resistance to DEIJ work? How did you navigate it? What does this resistance to DEIJ cultivate for the field? Ambush reflected on his brief tenure with TheatreVirginia in Richmond, VA (LORT C). He says, “It was a short tenure only 18 months… I was teaching at California State University, Monterey Bay at the time, and living in California when I got the job. Richmond is the former capital of the Confederacy and that theater was about forty-seven years old then. I was still working in California when the newspapers announced that I was the new hire. They put my picture in the paper and before I showed up in town to begin my work, people started canceling their subscriptions, and when I physically arrived in town, there was hate mail waiting for me.” Ambush remembers, “I had a lot of people fearful that I would turn it into a ‘Black theater’ before I had even done anything.” He describes how he navigated the challenge, “I held a number of Town Hall meetings where I was trying to get to know my new community and vice versa, and to allay their fears.” He adds, “There was a lot of tension in the room during those meetings (two of them)…When I mentioned that among the few plays written by people of color that TheatreVirginia had ever done was A Raisin in the Sun , I had one white community member say, ‘Well, so what difference does that make?’” After that comment Ambush says, “I finally had one brave young woman say, “I'll tell you how my grandmother, who's not here, feels about it. She said she's afraid that because [Ambush] is here, that she will no longer be welcome as a white person.” Ambush responded, “So I told that woman, ‘Thank you for saying that, now we can get to work. Now I see where you're stuck. It's out in the open. Now I can address it’.” Coming into that environment, Ambush also remembers that he “inherited a season,” but that because of the controversy over his appointment, artists started to “bail” on the company. He made two changes to the season: canceling one play and substituting Lynn Nottage’s Crumbs from the Table of Joy for Rebecca Gilman’s Spinning Into Butter . The Virginia Chronicle described it as a “good choice” for Ambush’s debut with the company, noting that the “stunned audience was abuzz in the lobby” after Act One. The paper also pointed to Ambush as, “The first African-American to hold the post [of Producing Artistic Director] in the theatre’s 47-year history.” ( Richmond Free Press 28 February 2002 — Virginia Chronicle: Digital Newspaper Archive ). For Ambush, shifting representation onstage and among the audience at TheatreVirginia was a crucial part of his mission: “60% of the population of Richmond was Black, and they never felt invited at that theatre. So, I said, I'm changing that perception. I had people accuse me of an agenda. Almost any person of color that has taken any of these artistic leadership positions in historically white theaters faces this white fear projected on the difference-maker.” Despite his efforts, “The board shut the theater down 17 months after I took over and closed it. They hired me to make a difference. That was the whole point of me being there. I guess it wasn't the difference that they wanted.” Ambush also described another, more insidious resistance that he and other Black colleagues experience on a regular basis, “I'm a director, and I have freelanced off and on all my career. I often only hear from theatres for the Black History month show, and only for Black shows. The other eleven months of the year…crickets.” Ambush calls this the “ghettoizing” of Black artists and hails Jack O’Brien for bringing him to the Old Globe in San Diego multiple times to direct works that were not “Black shows.” Similarly, he pointed to Gloucester Stage in Massachusetts, where he had the opportunity to direct Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage and Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa . Yet, Ambush argues that his choices to direct shows outside the repertoire of Black authors sometimes drew criticism from both within and beyond the Black community. Some Black audiences, “questioned the degree of my Blackness,” while “white people [said] that I was confused and didn't know my own mind.” He recognizes that, “meanwhile my white artistic director counterparts down the road can do whatever they want and be celebrated for the breadth and depth of their vision.” As Ambush contends, “There always seems to be a double standard for historically disenfranchised artists and that includes women, anybody who's not of the dominant male, Christian, heterosexual, cisgendered population. You're less than, lower than, the collateral damage to white supremacy. White men are entitled to be in charge because they are seen to be divinely endowed with gifts superior to anybody else’s.” He adds, “That’s what we're seeing right now. What's happening in our country now is driven by that same impulse, we’re just using different terms.” Young’s observations echo Ambush’s as he described the challenge in perceptions around hiring artists from the global majority. He describes hearing friends, who are white artists, say that they “cannot” be hired for particular roles because there’s “great pressure to hire a person of color.” Young expressed concern with this phrasing, “Because the narrative of inclusion gets reframed as something being ‘taken away’ without acknowledging the biases that previously denied qualified artists of color opportunities.” For Young, this represents a misperception of what it means to bring diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice to U.S. society. It also points to a critical failure of imagination: the inability to recognize that absence of certain voices harms the greater community. As an educator, Young recognizes that there are a lot of talented artists of all backgrounds and that theatre companies should be “proactive in their outreach.” Theatre companies should not only wait until a member of a traditionally marginalized community “walks in the door.” Those individuals who claim that there “just aren’t any” artists of the global majority (for example), are “being willfully blind to the circumstances that created a condition of exclusion.” It is equally important for companies to be vocal in their desire to hire the best artists regardless of their backgrounds. Bial dissected the differences between big-picture resistance to DEIJ work (at the national or state level) vs. what individuals might experience in their home institutions, “I think that that big picture resistance is, in a sense much easier to deal with because the lines are clearly drawn and perhaps they're very nakedly partisan…The trickier ones, right are the resistance that presents itself as ‘reasonable’ or ‘necessary’.” For example, Bial cites pressure to develop theatrical repertoires with easy name recognition. In the process, “You are making assumptions about who your audience is, or who your audience is going to be.” He notes that kind of bias surfaces in season planning when people may contend that a certain play didn’t draw a large audience in the past, using that as a rationale for not doing another play by an artist of color, a woman, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, etc. And he talks about the need to be the person in the room to remind decision-makers that those kinds of generalizations don’t get applied to cis-gendered white male artists in the same way. “One flop of a play by a white man never scares a theatre company away from doing all plays by white men.” Bial also discussed the impact of prestige bias in hiring for U.S. theatre at both the professional and educational level, and the harm caused by the assumption that a candidate with a specific set of institutional credentials is automatically more qualified than another with possibly less well-known credentials. Bial adds, “I feel like I've been able to advocate in these very small rooms,” where he has had the opportunity to point out implicit or unconscious biases, “And to [people’s] credit, the resistance usually evaporates once you can take it out and put it on the table and name it. These aren't people who are cynically using these objections to advance a racist or transphobic agenda. These are people who simply haven't had the tools or the experience to see those blind spots.” Bial described pursuing training that has helped him navigate his own biases and develop the tools to call others into the work. Marra described first-hand experiences of bias and resistance in her scholarship on LGBTQ+ artists, “Well, certainly, when Bob Schanke and I started out with the idea for Passing Performances in the early 1990s we met a great deal of resistance.” In Marra’s case, colleagues with a vision for a more just and inclusive field helped to support her work, “The heroic LeAnn Fields was the editor we were working with at Michigan, and she not only supported our project, but she strategically navigated the system to help move it forward.” As Marra describes, “She set up a series called Triangulations in order to bring on Jill Dolan and David Román as editors, and have that layer of advocacy for the project” ( Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance (Series) . Dolan and Román helped with the pushback from the Board about “outing” American artists of the distant past. As Marra emphasizes, “We weren’t in people’s bedrooms… so we were trying to track networks of affiliation. Who people worked with, what the lifestyles were of these folks in terms of where they lived, who they lived with for any length of time, what they did for each other.” Marra points to what has now become a standard practice in contemporary theatre research, but which encountered resistance almost thirty years ago, “You begin to see patterns that allow you to argue that that certain desires were informing these connections and informing the aesthetics of the shows they sought to do.” Marra sees the resistance to the project as a reluctance to acknowledge the full diversity and intersectionality of U.S. theatre history and credits the imagination and determination of senior colleagues who advocated for that more honest history. A blurb from Oscar Brockett on the back jacket of Passing Performances when it was published in 1998 powerfully endorsed these pioneering efforts. Diaz suggests that DEIJ activism in theatre often meets with resistance when people fear that they’re “going to be told that their approach is wrong, or problematic, or hurtful.” He has seen that defensive mode emerge and understands that it can create obstacles in doing the work. He described his own experience of realizing that he lacked awareness in critical areas and acknowledging that he would never be able to know, see, or understand the experience of every marginalized community member. However, for him, this offered a prompt to focus on the critical questions that shape conversations around identity and help to build a shared vocabulary about the importance of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice as action items, rather than nouns. Can you name some individuals or institutions whose DEIJ work has served as a successful model for your career? Interestingly, Ambush focused on the organizations, “not necessarily looking for attention, but just doing the work in their communities and embracing them.” He hailed the theatre companies that imagined diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice as, “part of their mission, not as an attachment or an add-on when funding became available all of a sudden. This has been an issue in some of the theaters I've worked at.” Ambush expressed appreciation for the groups that lean into hyper-localized work. He clarified that while they may be flying under a national radar, they’re not “hiding” their mission. Instead of “boasting and bragging, they do … Those are my kind of people.” Ambush pointed to the Los Angeles Inner City Cultural Center ( image ), which he says, “from its inception was always about all of Los Angeles.” He also pointed to La MaMa and the work of Ellen Stewart for the pioneering work in welcoming so many voices into the community ( www.innercityculturalcenter.org/our-history.html and https://www.lamama.org/ ). He offered Mixed Blood and the San Francisco Mime Troupe as additional examples. Ambush also spoke movingly about the struggles to find a role model for the kind of work he wanted to do early in his career, “I went to my mentor, George Bass, in despair saying, I'm dreaming about these things (artistically lead a LORT theatre), but I don't see anybody out there that looks like me as a role model. Bass said, ‘You have to become a role model for other people and dare to be great,’ which is what I've been trying to do ever since. I might have felt better and more encouraged if I had seen other examples at least at the LORT level; there have always been artistic directors of color and of different races, cultures, genders and sexualities in other categories of theaters that were not LORT they've always been there. But at the LORT level, I didn’t see them.” As part of his mission to be a model for others, Ambush has contributed articles on non-traditional casting and has long been an activist in that arena. As he comments, “We didn't say DEI back then in the seventies or eighties, or even in the sixties. We had a Black Arts movement, and other human rights movements. All those movements were happening in the sixties and early seventies when I came of age—ERA, free speech, the American Indian movement, Black Power, anti-Viet Nam war protests, women’s liberation. It was a very active, vital, and violent time.” In describing his models for success, Young focused on individuals who have impressed him. For example, he pointed to Crystal Williams, the President of the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design ( https://www.risd.edu/about/leadership/about-crystal-williams ). As he commented, “She might be the most articulate person I've encountered who can talk persuasively about the work of equity and inclusion in manner that does not posit diversity as a bad word and thinks justice is part of a larger narrative of solutions to exclusion.” Young also saluted the Black theatre companies in Boston, Chicago, New York, DC, Philadelphia, and elsewhere that have labored to create and expand community of all backgrounds, even as he noted that many now face challenges to their survival due to funding cuts, lack of stable leadership, or post-COVID challenges. In looking at local arts organizations near his own institutional home of Boston University, he pointed to the award-winning Front Porch Arts Collective of Boston, which identifies as, “A black theatre company committed to advancing racial equity in Boston through theatre” ( https://www.frontporcharts.org/ ) In thinking about models for diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice throughout his career, Bial cited his training at NYU’s Performance Studies program in the 1990s because of the ways it encouraged scholars to explore performance cultures in Africa and Asia, cultivating what he described as a kind of “utopian interculturalism.” He appreciated the ways that a curriculum that didn’t focus on traditional works and knowledge created space for new kinds of knowing. And while Bial notes that the original work launched by Richard Schechner has been nuanced by the scholarship of the past thirty years, as Bial says, the original vision was “inspirational.” He also points to, “The important work on queer theater and performance art with Peggy Phelan and Fred Moten on the ways in which certain types of power structures are built into the university, and how we navigate those.” Bial adds, “I feel like really fortunate to have had different models . . . they were considered dangerously radical in 1995.” As Bial contends, he found it liberating to see, “the way they made space in the curriculum for all of these other voices that had previously been excluded in the conversation through the simple expedient of saying, ‘You know what? Who cares if we read Shaw? Who cares about the weight of the stones in the theater of Dionysus? We’re going to [explore] all this other stuff. And if we neglect Arthur Miller, well, it’ll be OK.” Bial also sees his non-traditional path into Theatre Studies as part of his penchant for thinking outside the box in curriculum development, “I've often found it very liberating that I don't actually have any degrees in theater. I have one in folklore and mythology, and two in performance studies, and therefore I am not tied down to any particular idea of what has to be in a theatre curriculum.” Bial credits his students with teaching him about how to put the values of DEIJ work into practice. He says, “My tenure track job was at University of New Mexico, which is a Title V Hispanic Serving Institution.” There he taught a compositionally-diverse community of Hispanic, Anglo, and Indigenous students. “Teaching in that environment made me much more aware of these issues of representation and made me much more up to speed on the kind of writers and performers who had that experience.” As Bial acknowledges, he also struggled with the challenge of not representing the majority identity positions of his students (nor did anyone else in his department at the time). But, he says, “I bonded with a lot of these students simply by virtue of being the one closest to them in age, and so that that was really very helpful.” He describes similar experiences at his current institution, KU, where, as he suggests, it’s easier to deal with DEIJ questions in some sense, “because as a public institution we explicitly have the mandate to serve everyone.” At the end of the day, Bial also argues that schools should, “not be premised on exclusivity, on how many people we turn down . . . That’s another way of freeing us up from some of those past biases or removing obstacles to doing the work you want to do.” And as theatre programs across the country labor to increase enrollments, creating inclusive environments will prove crucial to that process. Marra focused on the need to create and support opportunities for diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice at the local level—both on college campuses and in the communities that house them. She also spoke emotionally of the ways that senior colleagues can and should protect junior scholars whose careers might be more vulnerable based on their identities or their research. Marra’s “pay it forward” model of mentorship invites people to commit to their DEIJ service at the individual and daily level. She spoke from the perspective of putting together the 100-year anniversary history of her department, since, as she observed wryly, “I was here for a third of that time.” She pointed to the importance of creating an inclusive environment in the most literal sense—ensuring that students and junior colleagues see representation in the classrooms and halls they navigate on a daily basis. She described transforming the department at Iowa, which had, prior to 2021, been replete with headshots of past faculty and alums, and which, “was like a sea of white male dominance,” without any history of the department to give context. The department elected to create a digital gallery that will now have more space to support the stories of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ faculty and alums, as well as continuing to document the history of the program’s past, such as its longstanding connections with HBCUs that brought students to the Iowa MFA program ( https://theatre.uiowa.edu/alumni ). Perhaps not surprisingly, as a lifelong theatre historian, Marra understands the importance of drawing out the nuances of our histories. Diaz emphasized the need to model multiple kinds of storytelling and to cultivate a diversity of perspectives— particularly in academic settings. He observed, “In academia we do not see people across the political spectrum. That's just a fact. We just don't see it. I don't see a lot of people from certain parts of the country. We need to do a better job. The world needs to do a better job of understanding the diversity of the United States. The United States is so many things... So, I do think there's value in the interrogation about what we mean when we ask for diversity.” However, as Diaz argues, those questions need to be posed in good faith . And like Ambush and Bial, he raised the question of who is allowed to write, direct, or tell certain stories. For example, he described wanting to “just write the story about the family that gets together on the holidays and rehashes old shit. Not [to] talk about our immigration status. That may or may not be the thing that we have to talk about. But the primary thing I want to talk about is what the relationships are if the relationships are colored by those other things. That's great. But I don’t want to be pinned into that corner.” With that in mind, he admits, that he does get “nervous sometimes around the DEI work,” if it seems to be putting limits on the kinds of stories he can tell. As a role model for work in diversity, equity, and inclusion, he pointed to an experience with Minnesota’s Mixed Blood Theatre Company ( https://mixedblood.com/ ). They invited him to be part of a 2016 project called DJ Latinidad Big Latin Dance Party . A number of writers came to craft short plays and produce them over the course of a night. ( Image, DJ Latinidad ) Diaz recalls, “I didn’t know what to write. I had a 2-year-old son at that point, and I said to him, ‘Let's make something together.’ He gave me a bunch of random baby names for characters, and it was just nonsense and baby language, like the chaos of being a little kid. And I took that, and I wrote a short play about it, and it was called Lemon Jackson , and it had no ‘cultural’ anything in it. And we put it in the show. Artist-in-Residence, Mark Valdez was the person [coordinating the show] and Jack Reuler (Artistic Director) was still there at the time, and both of them said, ‘This is great, this is this is what we want’.” ( https://www.markevaldez.com/ and https://mixedblood.com/about/history/ ). But as Diaz remembers, “Some of the audience members were the people who asked, ‘Why is this in this show? You're not talking about language. You're not talking about immigration. You're not talking about Abuelita . You're not talking about food. You're not hitting any of those markers.’” Diaz appreciated the way that the theatre’s directors and the actors stood up for him, declaring, “It's a Latino story, because it was written by a Latino man and his half Latino son. And we get to tell those stories, too.” Diaz’s experience reminded him of the need to make sure that definitions of what constitutes “diversity” don’t become so narrowly focused that they ultimately exclude voices and stories. How do you envision the future of your DEIJ work in the US, and what can you do to help artists and scholars sustain equity and inclusion in the US cultural landscape? How do people in positions of power/influence sustain this work? Marra returned to her theme of genealogies, and the need to make the generational work of campaigning for diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice visible to younger artists and scholars. That visibility and sense of legacy can counter a sense of despair and isolation. It can also create a sense of momentum and agency. Speaking from her perspective as a historian focusing on LGBTQ+ narratives, Marra reminded scholars and artists to always query the archive for what it reveals and what it conceals. She described the ways in which narratives have often been “straightened,” another process that generates a sense of isolation in queer communities. As artists and scholars, we have opportunities to resist that impulse. As Marra says, “There are stories I want to share that moved me and moved the field and if we don't share them, how will this be known?” Bial commented candidly, “As a straight white guy, I have a ton of unearned privilege. What am I going to do with it?” In answer to his own question, he makes himself vulnerable to critique by building inclusive programming in his curriculum and by representing a compositionally diverse array of voices and experiences. With his characteristic humor, he notes, “That doesn’t make me Rosa Parks,” adding, “I've definitely made some mistakes, and that's where you trust the students to tell you if you've created a culture where they feel comfortable.” He also reminded educators that claiming a certain area was outside their comfort zone or expertise was a feeble excuse for not doing the work, “No one would ever come into a class and say, ‘I haven't really bothered to read any of the literature about this Shakespeare guy, but I got hold of this play last week, and I wanted to mix up the syllabus’.” And as unthinkable as that example sounds, he observes, “I have occasionally seen people do that with a ‘diversity’ play” as a way to sidestep their own insecurities about making “mistakes” in grappling with complicated material. Bial challenges himself with the reminder that, “Any of my discomfort is so trivial relative to living as a queer person or person of color under this sort of end-stage capitalism that we're in, that I should just shut up and do the thing.” Diaz questioned the concept of “merit” being substituted for diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice—as though the terms were somehow incompatible or functioned in opposition to each other. “Meritocracy sounds great in the arts.” But he pushes back against the concept that there can be an “objective” standard for art because that supposed impartiality elides the very structures and systems that have kept some stories relegated to the margins. As Diaz argues, “One of the things that I value when I read a new play is, have I seen this play before? Have I heard this voice before? Because what I'm interested in in new plays especially is someone giving me a perspective on the world that changes the way that I think about it. So, there is something fundamentally meritorious in that .” Diaz’s goals for the future included prompts for theatre companies to imagine seasons with more than one voice or one perspective on an identity. He points to the danger of having one season slot for Latinx artists, one slot for Indigenous artists, one slot for Black artists, etc., saying, “It's putting us in a position where we feel like we are in competition with each other.” Moving forward, Diaz hopes to see seasons that might feature multiple authors from a particular group in the global majority as a way to expand the range of stories told and voices represented. He imagined a space where artistic directors would have the confidence to program an entire season of (for example) Latinx artists. For Diaz, engaging with multiple voices from specific communities represents a kind of “intellectual and artistic honesty,” rather than imagining that one artist speaks for an entire community. He also challenges companies that don’t want to represent artists from the global majority or traditionally marginalized communities to be honest about it. This circles back to his theme of merit. Rather than pretending that a certain play isn’t as good as one by a canonical (white) author, “I think it is about being like honest about what it is that you do and what you believe. I wouldn't be shocked if over the next few years, we see some theater companies start to remove that language [DEIJ] and feel like they're freeing themselves from that.” He notes that “there is a very viable business plan that is not centered around diversity” in certain communities. Diaz adds, “If you want to do that, I encourage you to be brave and be upfront about what it is that you actually do. So that for the people for whom equity in representation is an issue, we know either, ‘Okay, we're not welcome here. I'm not going to bother submitting my plays to you’.” While that may offer an uncomfortable truth, for Diaz, honesty at least counters the fallacy of a meritocracy in the arts. In imagining how to sustain diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in U.S. theatre, Ambush declared, “Try not to be afraid. Try not to be cowed. Try not to self-censor. Try not to obey in advance. Try not to alter already.” Ambush reminds us, “Resistance is needed. Double down. Don't buy into fear. Stake your claim in the work you do and on your terms. Take back the definitions that were there to begin with. I'm at the age now where I’m not going to stop. I fought my whole life for legitimacy. The same kind of legitimacy that my white counterparts have had their whole lives. To have people now say, ‘Oh, we're bringing back the colorless society’—colorblindness never works. Don't tell me you don't see a black face. I've heard all my life, ‘Oh, Benny, when I see you, I don't see a Black person.’ Bullshit. Yes, you do.” Ambush demanded, “We have to go the other way, have to lean into it and proclaim proudly who we are in our difference, in our specificity, and insist upon an equal place at the table, a different paradigm that is horizontal, not vertical. It's a scary time right now. Personally, I'm not changing me. That may mean there'd be some projects I turn down. I've done that before. I can't live a lie, and I'm not hiding. I'm not going into anybody's closet. That's a decision that many organizations and individuals have to face now.” Ambush understands what a terrifying and uncertain moment people may be in right now, “How are you going to respond to this? I say, get courage by looking at what people who came before us did. They stood up and they fought. It's a shame that we still have to fight. But it's the same issues. The idea of America is a work in progress, and we may lose it. We're in the process of losing it right now. Can we survive it? And can we come back from it? I don't know. But right now, what's happening is how democracies die... and the dream of true equality without sacrificing difference or apologizing for difference is threatened.” Young echoed Ambush’s theme, “History should not be edited in such a way that the contributions of whole groups of people disappear. Structures and institutions should not be operated in a manner that denies the possibilities of a person's identity. How do you continue to advocate for a person being themselves especially in a climate in which just the fact of their own being is contested and threatened?” Young pointed to the “long history” of moments when societies move towards inclusion, “and then the rock rolls back down the hill.” And while he admits it can be heart-wrenching when you realize that “The pushing, the work, the labor needs to continue.” But, he added with hope, “In those moments you acknowledge that the progress you made is because there were some people who were there before carrying some of the burden.” Underscoring the generations of labor that have gone into the struggle for diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, he said, “Those people are tired now. Some will continue to push on. Some are no longer with us. And some just need a break.” And when the people who have been in the fight need to take a breath, others need to be ready to step forward. Young admits, “that’s the hard part.” As an educator, Young can’t let go of the fight for access to education and of the right for people to express their identities freely and without fear. And while he has seen academic discourse shift over time as terms such as “gender” and “diversity” continue to evolve, he warns against the wholesale erasure of words from our teaching vocabularies. “Words that are meant to be inclusive get redefined to be exclusive.” Or words that the society has valued suddenly acquire pejorative meanings or become weaponized like “woke” or “diversity” or “justice.” As Young observes, “That’s something that raises an eyebrow . . . But this is why the work we do matters.” And at the end of the day, for Young, artists and educators can use whatever words they need, “to carry on the work, because ultimately that work is not divisive. That work is just meant to bring more people to the table.” Conclusion The Roundtable participants spoke with passion, candor, and commitment. They see the struggle that lies ahead. As veterans of many earlier struggles, they shared their faith that artists and scholars can continue to do the transformative work of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice if we remember that we never have to be alone in the work, and that we can call on each other for support and courage along the way. References Footnotes [1] For more on "the queer unfinished," see Ryan Adelsheim, “Unfinished: Queer & Trans Identity Development on the American Stage,” PhD diss., Yale University, 2025. About The Author(s) BENNY SATO AMBUSH is a theatre director, educator, and Artistic Director of Venice Theatre in Florida. A member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, he has directed professionally at leading regional theatres including the Old Globe, American Conservatory Theater, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, South Coast Repertory, and Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Ambush has held major leadership and faculty positions at Emerson College, TheatreVirginia, Oakland Ensemble Theatre, Brown University, and NYU’s Graduate Acting Program. His extensive national service includes work with the National Endowment for the Arts, Theatre Communications Group, and the Kennedy Center. He holds an MFA in Directing from the University of California, San Diego, and a BA from Brown University. HENRY BIAL is Professor and Chair in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Kansas. He is a past President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and a Fellow of the Mid-America Theatre Conference. He is the author of Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen and Playing God: The Bible on the Broadway Stage , and the editor or co-editor of Brecht Sourcebook, Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions, The Great North American Stage Directors, Vol. 4: Abbott, Carroll, Prince, and The Performance Studies Reader , now in its fourth edition. KRISTOFFER DIAZ is a playwright, librettist, screenwriter, and educator whose work spans theatre, television, and musical adaptation. His play The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, and his adaptation of Disney’s Hercules premiered at the Public Theater in 2019 as part of the Public Works program. His plays have been produced and developed at major institutions including The Public Theater, Goodman Theatre, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Diaz has written for Netflix’s GLOW and developed pilots for HBO and FX. He teaches playwriting at New York University. JAVIER HURTADO is a playwright, director, and performance historian. He has served on editorial teams for the Journal of American Drama and Theatre and Drama’s Special Issue: Milestones in Black Theatre , the College of Fellows of the American Theatre’s Gazette, and the University of Iowa Press’ Studies in Theater, History, and Culture book series. Javier earned an MFA in Writing for Performance from the University of California, Riverside, a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies from Tufts University and is currently a faculty member in Saint Mary's College of California’s Department of Performing Arts. KIM MARRA is Professor Emeritus of Theatre Arts and American Studies at the University of Iowa. Her books include Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses in the American Theatre, 1865-1914 (2006; Callaway Prize winner) and the co-edited volumes Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History (1998), its sequel Staging Desire (2002), The Gay and Lesbian Theatrical Legacy (2005), and Showing Off, Showing Up: Studies of Hype, Heightened Performance, and Cultural Power (2017). Her interspecies scholarship comprises essays, performances, exhibits, and documentary film. Since 2017, she has co-directed the Animal Studies Summer Institute at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. HEATHER S. NATHANS is a professor in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and the Nathan and Alice Gantcher Professor in Judaic Studies. Her publications include: Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson (2003); Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787-1861 (2009); and Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans: Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American Stage (2017). Nathans has received the Barnard Hewitt Award (ASTR), the John W. Frick Award (ATDS), and the Betty Jean Jones Award (ATDS). In 2023 she was named as a member of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. Nathans serves as the Editor of the award-winning Studies in Theatre History and Culture series with the University of Iowa Press. HARVEY YOUNG is Dean of the College of Fine Arts and Interim Vice President for the Arts at Boston University, where he is Professor of English, Theatre Arts, and African American and Black Diaspora Studies. An author and editor of ten books, his most recent is Theatre and Human Flourishing (Oxford University Press, 2023). A nationally recognized scholar and arts leader, Young has appeared across major media outlets including CNN, NPR, and the New York Times . Former president of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, he serves on numerous arts boards and policy committees. Young holds a PhD from Cornell University and is a Fellow of the American Theatre. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue 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.

Natka Bianchini Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 1 Visit Journal Homepage Waiting for Triumph: Alan Schneider and the American Response to Waiting for Godot Natka Bianchini By Published on March 9, 2014 Download Article as PDF Alan Schneider, one of the most important American directors of the twentieth century, was know for being a "playwright's director." He believed it was his responsibility to interpret the script as a faithful representation of the playwright's intent. For this reason, so many major playwrights [ . . . ] [scribd id=211700074 key=key-171aa737vjlfcqtl6q57 mode=scroll height=930 width=600] 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 Between Blackface and Bondage: The Incompletely Forgotten Failure of The Underground Railroad's 1879 Midwestern Tour “One Live as Two, Two Live as One”: Bert Williams and the Uprooted Bamboo Tree Playwright as Publicity: Reexamining Jane Martin and the Legacy of the Humana Festival Feminist Periodization as a Structural Component of Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles Waiting for Triumph: Alan Schneider and the American Response to Waiting for Godot Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

Rahul K Gairola 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 Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Rahul K Gairola By Published on November 16, 2022 Download Article as PDF Ishtyle : Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Kareem Khubchandani’s Ishtyle is an innovative and refreshing critical survey of gay Indian nightlife cultures in diaspora that anchors its theoretical trajectory around the monograph’s title. The book’s originality is announced from its very start, when readers encounter the front matter. The Acknowledgments section is cleverly organized as a playlist of songs that correlate to those who have helped to shape the book’s contents, thus immediately positing readers into a nostalgic past wherein we ourselves used to make mix tapes for friends and lovers. In the Preface, Khubchandani proclaims, “I fucking love drag queens…Drag artists assemble cultural meanings of race, gender, and class on their bodies, relocating us to worlds beyond the club. They make apparent tools – dress, makeup, hairstyle, body modification, comportment, gesture, pose – we can use on and off the dance floor, in and out of the club, to reinvent ourselves, our worlds. Drag offers respite from the night, giving us instruction, emplacement, and orientation in the darkness and din” (xiii). He further details that, years later, in the geographical and untimely “absence of drag, I turned to social dance floors to examine danced styles, what I call ‘drag labor,’ that engendered the socialities described above” (xiv). These ruminations coalesce around the author’s diverse experiences and field work at the Desilicious dance parties in New York City as well as Bollywood cultures, and, as such, the book is an important mash-up between gay cultural studies and South Asian diasporic studies. Khubchandani then gets to the heart of his scholarly intentions: “I am eschewing identity politics, attending instead to aesthetics and performance, to ask: what styles are given value; what are the politics, histories, and circulations of these styles; how do people perform in line with and against dominant stylistic codes; what new forms of relation are made when performances grind against the dominant aesthetics of nightlife?” (xxiii). Khubchandani’s deviation from identity politics, a realm wherein hegemonic queer cultural studies wallow, is an exciting one as it seeks to empower practice over representation while also eschewing the racism, sexism, classism, and queerphobia that often attend, and unintentionally nourish, that critical realm. Rather, Khubchandani’s methodology presents an intersectional heuristic that demands attention to style and performance over appearance and dress, thus flinging the very real materiality of identity politics into kinetic moments that transform cultural meanings with every second. To this end, the author defines the meaning of “Ishtyle” as: “a playful and common South Asian (more particularly North Indian, and even more specifically Bombay) accenting of the English word ‘style’… I mobilize Ishtyle to work beyond its vernacular use and serve as shorthand for ‘accented style.’ Thinking broadly with accents allows me to analyze differences across borders and scales, but also to ask how brown bodies, regardless of cultural performance, are rendered accents” (6). Framing the embodied critical and political stakes of his research, he concludes, “I developed new intimacies with places I already called home, made new friends, and fell in love several times over. Nightlife, proximal to and imbricated in spaces of work, home, protest, and violence, feels present all the time” (27). To this end, the author organizes Ishtyle into three parts, which each contain two chapters. The first part’s two chapters take place and seize space in India’s tech hub, Bangalore. The first chapter, “BInaryC0des: Undoing Dichotomies at Heatwave, ” aims to demonstrate how attendees to Heatwave parties effectively resist binary identities that codify these parties in India’s “Silicon Valley.” Rather than defaulting to Western aesthetics (white, gay, cisgender, masculine, and middle-upper class), attendees resist, argues Khubchandani, corporatized gay culture in favor of accented stylistics of queer nightlife cultures. Its second chapter, “Dancing Against the Law: Critical Moves in Pub City,” focuses on legal restrictions of gay nightlife in Bangalore constellated around the postcolonial country’s notorious, Victorian-era Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. This chapter speaks to the ways in which women, trans people, and other queer folx practice ishtyle despite the city’s 2006-2014 ban on social dance – exploring how these ishtyle agents of queerness “dance” around the law. Part II’s two chapters: — “Desiring Desis: Race, Migration, and Markets in Boystown” and “Slumdogs and Big Chicks: Unsettling Orientations at Jai Ho! ” — shifts Khubchandani’s ruminations on ishtyle to the gay environs of Chicago in the United States. Chapter three thus examines the LGBTQI+ neighborhood of Boystown as a marketplace for desi bodies where white gay men view them as ornaments for homonormative whiteness. Leveraging compelling interviews and field research, Khubchandani apprises readers on how “(c)olonial legacies have affixed race, gender, sexuality, linking hyperfemininity and Asiannness, hypermasculinity and Blackness, and passion and Latinidad;” this brings the gay desi male’s “brown migrant body into a kind of good gay gender” (85). In the fourth chapter, the author demonstrates accented cultural elements of Trikone-Chicago (a nationwide, pro-LGBTQI+ South Asian organization), which hosts a quarterly Bollywood dance party called Jai Ho! that definitively challenges the overt orientalism and subtle white supremacy of commercial bars and clubs. Part III examines nightlife choreographies as global accentuations that undergird resistant practices Khubchandani described in Bangalore and Chicago earlier. Yet the author extends analysis by delving into fieldwork that centers, in Chapter five, interviewees’ memories of nightlife, childhood, and, cumulatively, different articulations of “home” and ishtyle as cultural strategies of homemaking. This homemaking occurs in the context of popular Bollywood song-and-dance numbers like those of Hindi film sirens Sridevi and Madhuri Dixit. Chapter six critically ruminates on ishtyle, analyzed through the intersectionality of class, caste, region, and, of course, gender and sexuality. Here, Khubchandani traces dappankoothu music and dance from Dalit communities, threading them through Tamil films and into a queer dance party called Koothnytz— wherein dappankoothu rejects both hetero and homonormative “respectability” by subverting propriety as another strategy of ishtyle. An award-winning volume, Ishtyle : Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife is as provocative as the cultural artifacts and films it analyses. The book is at once a glamourous explosion of queer critical cultural analysis that, like a pink-powdered Holi party, at the same time remains down to earth and exceptionally honest, based in Khubchandani’s painstaking field work and ethnographic recordings. Khubchandani has forged a fabulous, compelling comparative study of queer Indian subcultures that deploy ishtyle to subvert the normalized ways in which colonialist and white supremacist gay culture fetishizes Black and Brown bodies, as well as the English language, while lording over them in consumer cultures. While these consumer cultures are staged as celebratory steps towards gay visibility, Khubchandani convincingly urges readers to recognize that any study of non-white, contemporary queer culture is incomplete without a sober reckoning of ishtyle today. This study will be formative for students, teachers, cultural analysists, South Asianists, and general readers alike for the ways in which it encourages us to locate the inflected accents that reimagine ourselves and the daily environs that surround us. References Footnotes About The Author(s) RAHUL K GAIROLA Murdoch University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “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: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

George Potter Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 2 Visit Journal Homepage Alternative Transnationals: Naomi Wallace and Cross-Cultural Performances George Potter By Published on May 29, 2014 Download Article as PDF In summer 2002, the paths of war crisscrossed American public discourse. The war in Afghanistan had continued for over half a year, and the Bush Administration was beginning to lay the groundwork of lies and misinformation that would form the justification for invading Iraq. Meanwhile, Naomi Wallace led a group of six playwrights, along with Kia Corthron, Tony Kushner, Robert O’Hara, Lisa Schlesinger, and Betty Shamieh into occupied Palestine to meet with theater artists there and learn about the conditions under which Palestinian artists and people worked and lived during the Second Intifada. The following year, American Theatre published a series of responses from the playwrights, remarkable in the different ways in which they constructed the narratives of their contacts with occupied Palestine. Tony Kushner, for one, filtered the experience through an analysis of his Jewish American identity, with considerable attention to the copy of Gershom Scholem’s letters that he carried with him, concluding, “Because I went with a diverse group of people, I saw things I might have missed, and because I am a Jew I think I saw things others didn’t see.”1 Similarly, in a comparison of human rights abuses against Palestinians and his own African American experience, Robert O’Hara wrote the word “I” fifty-one times in responding to the conditions of Palestinians.2 And Palestinian American Betty Shamieh created parallel narratives between her own life growing up in America and the life she didn’t feel she would be strong enough to endure had her parents stayed in Ramallah.3 This is not to say that any of these are invalid responses. Personal responses to traumatic conditions are greatly varied in form and substance. However, they are a stark contrast to the closing narrative in the article, that by Naomi Wallace. She is the only one of the writers to use an Arabic word, referencing the debka, a traditional dance; the only one to draw from the literary heritage of Palestine, quoting now-deceased poet Mahmoud Darwish; and one of only two, alongside Lisa Schlesinger, to quote someone that the group encountered, providing the words of a twelve-year-old girl who told Wallace, “Yes, I throw stones at tanks. But I would rather play . . . When I grow up, I want to be a doctor.” Perhaps this is why Wallace wrote not only of her reaction as an American, but her obligation as an American: To visit the Occupied Territories, the West Bank and Gaza as theatre writers is not simply an exercise in forging links between ourselves and the Palestinians. Rather, it is to realize that we, as Americans, are, on an intensely intimate level, already fused, through the overt involvement of our government, with the history of these people . . . We are not, I thank the gods, only ourselves and our own personal experience. We are also what happens to one another.4 There is much to commend such a statement, both in its departure from the inward focused statements of Wallace’s fellow travelers—and the inward focused writing of much American theater—and in her commitment to making Americans aware of their role in perpetuating the occupation, and all of its itinerant conditions, of Palestine. Additionally, the idea that “We are also what happens to one another” would also seem like a modus operandi for the playwright, whose oeuvre stretches not just from performances around the world, but also to the American-Mexican border to the wars in Iraq and Palestine and to the struggle of union organizers. As such, Wallace’s work, particularly The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East—and the ideas that support it—serves as a strong example of what it means to be a meaningfully transnational artist. This analysis will thus begin with an examination of the deployment of the term “transnational,” as well as an exploration of how this concept is deployed in explorations of contemporary theater productions. This transnational frame will then illuminate how Wallace’s practice of theater moves beyond notions of international economic movement toward an argument for an intimate understanding of a diverse range of lives, and a personal contact—both in artistic and activist engagements—between those lives. In its most basic sense, the term “transnational” is not the subject of much debate. As Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden write, “the transnational can be understood as the global forces that link people or institutions across nations. Key to transnationalism is the recognition of the decline of national sovereignty as a regulatory force in global coexistence.”5 While this would imply that one aspect of transnationalism is the various multinational systems of economic, political, and communicative arrangements that make up the contemporary era, John Carlos Rowe also notes that the concept of transnationalism has come to include “a critical view of historically specific late modern or postmodern practices of globalizing production, marketing, distribution, and consumption for neocolonial ends.”6 Thus, the transnational consists of both the multinational influences on contemporary life and the multinational resistances to those influences. In the realm of the arts, much early scholarship on transnationalism came from the field of film studies, which existed at the intersection of both the economic and political debates over influences of transnationalism. As Ezra and Rowden write, “Cinema has from its inception been transnational, circulating more or less freely across borders and utilizing international personnel. This practice has continued from the era of Chaplin, Hitchcock, and Fritz Lang up to contemporary directors like Ang Lee, Mira Nair, and Alfonso Cuarón.”7 However, in the modern era, this movement of capital and labor has been expedited and expanded, and alongside it has developed an alternative cinema—by artists such as Ken Loach, Zhangke Zia, and Jafar Panahi—that explore the political, economic, and cultural impacts of such movements. Theater, however, as an embodied art form, does not transport with the expediency of a DVD, and discussions of transnationalism have taken on a different shape in theater studies, focusing more on the latter question of representational concerns. To the extent that structural elements have been discussed, they have tended to focus on international lines of influence on contemporary artists. The collection Not the Other Avant-Garde, for example, argues for a decentering of the avant-garde outside of the European experience, claiming that “the first- and second-wave avant-gardes (pre- and post-World War II) were always already a transnational phenomenon, and that the performative gestures of these avant-gardes were culturally hybrid forms that emanated simultaneously from a wide diversity of sources rather than from a European center.”8 In the same collection, Marvin Carlson advocates for the necessity of understanding the indigenous influence on Middle Eastern theater, rather than merely looking for European influences.9 All of this is, undoubtedly, important scholarship. However, none of it asks what it means to think across borders, rather than to merely be influenced by multiple traditions. There is, then, very little attempt to use theater, as Yan Haiping argues for in her discussion of Asian theater, to explore how “globalization dictated by capital can be traced and contextualized through the various social formations of the human lives that it changes and interconnects and how those specific social beings actively inhabit the present global change that not only conditions their functions but also threatens to overdetermine the very constitution of their existence and signification.”10 While there is some theater work that attempts to do this, the nature of live performance, and the economics of performance, often do not allow critiques of transnational economics to function transnationally. Thus, when the Young Vic staged Clare Bayley’s The Container, a play about refugees attempting to smuggle themselves into Britain, the performance occurred inside a shipping container on a street in London. However, while this content presented a critique of those abandoned by the international flow of capital, in form, the work still presented a British writer, theater, and cast discussing issues of British concern in front of a predominantly British audience.11 Meanwhile, many works that travel internationally with international casts often replicate the economic paradigms that The Container interrogates. Thus, most critical discussions of the transnational content of theater have tended to merely use the term as a means of discussing cross-border content. In this context, Sara L. Warner has discussed Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus as a transnational work because it deals with the cross-border transport—both past and present, alive and dead—of Saartjie Baartman’s (“The Hottentot Venus”) body.12 Similarly, Jerry Wasserman writes of the Canadian play Ali and Ali and the aXes of Evil as “transnational agitprop” because of the diasporic nature of the stars and its engagement with the American influence on Canadian culture.13 These works, of course, contain transnational content, as well as critiques of transnational exploitation, but there is nothing particularly transnational about their form or the audiences that they perform before, although Ali and Ali did at least go on the road, with a variable script. In the end, though, if critiques of local political and economic policies are to significantly involve the effects of those policies on distant peoples, there must be some way for theater to meaningfully contact the people discussed. This challenge returns this discussion to Naomi Wallace, an artist whose work has attempted to overcome physical and mental borders. Years before the previously discussed trip to Palestine, she crafted what remains her most famous play, In the Heart of America, the story of a white American and a Palestinian American soldier during the first Gulf War, which touches on issues of race, class, and sexuality not often mixed on American stages, where Palestinian bodies are rarely present in any form. However, this play remains within the bounds of those works discussed above that exist as transnational merely in their content. More recently, her play Twenty-One Positions, a Cartographic Dream of the Middle East involved working with Jewish and Palestinian artists to construct “a kind of Brechtian musical about the illegal Wall,” as Wallace explains it, thereby moving toward a more transnational process to match the content of the work.14 However, it is in a work between the two of these, the lesser known The Fever Chart, that Wallace has embodied the idea of critical transnationality in artistic production. In terms of content, The Fever Chart represents a true attempt to think across the fault lines of occupation in the Middle East. Consisting of three “visions,” the work has two short plays about Palestinian-Israeli relations, and one monologue by an Iraqi man about the devastation in his country. Thus, like In the Heart of America, it is a rare American work that juxtaposes Palestinian and Iraqi conditions of occupation. In fact, in this way its ideology—though not its representations of Israelis—stands much closer to theater found in the Arab world than North America, where Palestinian and Iraqi issues have historically been severed from one another. Perhaps this is why it is one of the few plays about the “war on terror” to have been performed in both Cairo and New York, as well as London. As such, the work, and the artist, who splits her time between America and Britain, and traveled to Egypt for the Cairo production, exemplifies the idea of a personalized transnational critique that knows the spaces in which those forgotten by occupation and globalization exist, and the production history of The Fever Chart demonstrates the challenges of trying to communicate such knowledge. One of the visions in The Fever Chart, “Between This Breath and You,” tells the seemingly impossible story of an Israeli woman that has been given the lungs of a Palestinian youth killed by an Israeli soldier. However, though Wallace’s play speaks to a seemingly impossible coming together of her characters, the play was based on an actual event, as Nehad Selaiha noted in her review of the Cairo performance. In fact, The Guardian, whose story on the event was projected between segments of the Cairo production, quoted the Arab family involved as stating “that peace and a desire to alleviate the suffering of others was uppermost in their minds. But looking exhausted and still stunned by the twin demands of Ahmed's death and the Israeli embrace, they also speak of their decision as an act of resistance.”15 [caption id="attachment_1128" align="alignleft" width="606"] Figure 1., Mourid (Basil Daoud) Sami (Hassan Kreidly), and Tanya (Amina Khalil) in Between this Breath and You at the AUC. Courtesy of Frank Bradley.[/caption] In Wallace’s play, however, the seemingly impossible moves to another level, when the father (Mourid) of the dead boy (Ahmed) meets the woman (Tanya) who has his son’s lungs inside her in the waiting room of a clinic in West Jerusalem. There, Mourid mysteriously unravels details of Ahmed’s life beside what he knows of Tanya’s life, asking her, “How often do you stay behind to lock up? To play with the stethoscope? To talk with a patient after hours, pretending you can be of service?”16 Mourid then explains that Israeli soldiers had made his son clean dirt from their tanks with a broom because children had been throwing dirt. Then, they shot him in the back of the head and the pelvis, saying Ahmed had been carrying a gun.17 There are many ways to write about the occupation of Palestine, and many plays have been written on the violence inherent in occupation. Few have shaped as intimate a metaphor as having an Israeli living through the air drawn through the lungs of a Palestinian killed by the Israeli military; few are willing to write that an Israeli lives through drawing breath from a Palestinian. Even fewer would have such a character look into the eyes of the father of him who gives her breath to live. However, this intimacy, the speaking of the child’s death, is broken when Mourid tries to explain to Tanya that his son’s lungs were transplanted inside of her, an idea that Tanya works hard to reject. Thus, Mourid explains to her the situation in detail: The donor organs had to be transplanted within six hours after being removed. While you were under general anesthesia, the surgeon made an incision across your chest, beneath the breast area and removed your lungs. Then the surgeon placed the new lungs into your empty chest cavity and connected the pulmonary artery of the new lungs into your vessels and airway. Drainage tubes were inserted to drain air, fluid and blood out of your chest for several days to allow the lungs to reexpand. With oxygen. Sweet, cold oxygen. And here you are, beautiful Tanya. (Beat) My son is inside you.18 Initially, Tanya responds to this story with outright denial, and, as Mourid continues to insist that it is Ahmed’s lungs inside Tanya, she turns to revulsion, spitting on him, and later telling him, “Had your son’s lungs been inside me, I am sure, absolutely sure, that I would have rejected them.”19 Finally, she attempts to disgust Mourid, declaring, “When I laugh, your son laughs. When I sing, your son sings . . . But that would also mean your son was present last night . . . I picked a stranger up after work. A sweet, eager young man. He fucked me so hard I thought he’d break me in half,” continuing on after Mourid tries to interrupt her, “Don’t worry. Things went smoothly. Your son gave me good air when I sucked cock. Good Jewish cock.”20 In this way, Tanya attempts to invert the intimacy expressed by Mourid, using the fact of Ahmed’s lungs not to show the closeness of their lives, but to try to sicken and repel Mourid. Just as the bullet from the Israeli soldier took the beauty of Ahmed’s life to try to stop Palestinian resistance, so too does Tanya try to use the beauty of the gift she was given to try to end Mourid’s words. In the end, though, just as the Israeli state has not been able to expel all the Palestinian bodies from its system, no matter how many have been killed, Tanya learns that she must also depend on Mourid to learn to breathe again after an asthma attack: [MOURID:] You must slow your breath down. Let it gather its force again. Like this. (Mourid breathes in a long, slow breath.) As though the air has become fluid and you are drinking it in. (Mourid breathes in again, demonstrating.) TANYA: I can’t. (Beat) I can’t. . . . TANYA: Mourid Kamal. Why do you want to help me? MOURID: Because you are. My son. (TANYA looks at Mourid. Mourid raises his head slightly; Tanya copies him. It is clear that he is leading this breathing lesson.)21 The remarkable aspect of the work is that Wallace understands at once the power dynamic in play in the Israeli occupation of Palestine,22 but, at the same time, that on either side of that dynamic are human beings intimately related to one another, at the most intrinsic of levels. Thus, while Tanya is dependent on Mourid in order to draw breaths, it is her choice—and for five years, she lived without any awareness of him. Mourid understands what is necessary for him and Tanya to live peacefully together, but Tanya alone is the one responsible for choosing to overcome her biases, to set her structured power aside, and to choose to allow Mourid to help her to breathe, to live.23 And until she chooses to risk her own self, she has no hope of healing herself. This sort of intimacy between the occupier and the occupied is at the heart of all the other visions within The Fever Chart. In “Retreating World,” an older piece from Wallace repackaged in the triptych, an Iraqi man delivers a monologue that weaves his love of books, his hobby of raising pigeons, and the devastation that war and sanctions—the play is set in 2000—have left behind in his nation. Thus, early on, his advice on raising pigeons dovetails into the state of Iraq after nearly a decade of sanctions: “Never name a pigeon after a member of your family or a dear friend. (Beat) For two reasons: pigeons have short lives—and when a pigeon named after an uncle dies, this can be disconcerting. And second: these times are dangerous for pigeons—they can be caught and eaten.”24 This style of mixing the intimacy of books and birds from his personal life, with the violence unleashed on an entire nation continues throughout the play, such as when Ali begins to speak of the Gulf War, saying, We hid in bunkers for most of those weeks. Cursing Saddam when our captain was out. Cursing the Brits and the Yanks the rest of the time. And I missed my birds. But birds were prohibited in the bunkers. Prohibited. Prohibited by the laws of nations as were the fuel-air explosive bombs, the napalm—Shhh!—the cluster and antipersonnel weapons. Prohibited, as were the BLU-82 bombs, a fifteen-thousand-pound device—Shut up!—capable of incinerating every living thing, flying or grounded, within hundreds of yards . . . And me, I missed my birds. The way they looked at me, their eyes little pieces of peace sailing my way.25 Similarly, after Ali eats part of one of his books, he declares, Books can also, in extreme times, be used as sustenance. But such eating makes for a parched throat. Many mornings I wake and I am thirsty. I turn on the taps but there is no running water. A once-modern city of three million people, with no running water for years now. The toilets are dry because we have no sanitation. Sewage pools in the street. When we wish to relieve ourselves, we squat beside the dogs. At night, we turn on the lights to read the books we have forgotten we have sold, but there is no electricity.26 [caption id="attachment_1127" align="alignnone" width="606"] Figure 2., Waleed Hamad as Ali in The Retreating World at the AUC. Courtesy of Frank Bradley.[/caption] What these passages reveal is how deep into the intimate corners of individual lives political and economic devastation can reach. The last section particularly underscores this idea, as Baghdad had once been one of the major centers of Middle Eastern arts and culture, with a remarkably high literacy rate, before the wars with the United States began.27 And though the sanctions regime and wars have weakened the Iraqi educational system, UNICEF still estimated total adult literacy between 2003 and 2008 at 74 percent.28 Thus, being forced to eat a book in a culture that values literature so much, and for a man who loves books so profoundly, becomes a stark marker of the degree to which Iraqi society, down to the most personal levels, had been undercut by the sanctions during the nineties. For Ali, the violence and devastation, and not the artifacts of a life he had once known, have become the normative structures. Perhaps this makes sense, as he continues to explain that when his unit of soldiers tried to surrender to the Americans in 1991, the U.S. unit fired an anti-tank missile at a single man, a friend of the narrator: “Out of hundreds, thousands in that week, a handful of us survived. I lived. Funny. That I am still here. The dead are dead. The living, we are the ghosts. We no longer say good-bye to one another. With the pencils we do not have we write our names so the future will know we were here. So that the past will know we are coming.”29 As Ali moves into the heart of his trauma, even the memories of the books and birds from better days disappear from his monologue, replaced only by violence and loss, by the devastation that has steadily pushed all other beauties out of his life, by the death of the man he had earlier described by saying, “If love is in pieces, then he was a piece of love.”30 A piece of love, turned to pieces of human devastation by the violence of war. Too often, discussions of war violence are separated from a direct understanding of what that violence entails. The number of bodies are given in an abstract frame, one that does not see the inability to feed or educate one’s children any longer, the inability to bring a glass of water to an ailing parent, the inability to walk down the road beside one’s lover, the inability to love. In “The Retreating World,” Wallace brings such personal details painfully close to her audience, staging the destruction brought by large weapons on the smallest, most private level. And the play also ends in a moment of intimacy, when Ali picks up a bucket and holds it up for the audience, declaring, “These are the bones of those who have died, from the avenue of palms, from the land of dates. I have come here to give them to you for safekeeping. (Beat) Catch them. If you can.”31 As he lifts the bucket out over the audience, they are not met with bones of dead Iraqis, but “hundreds of white feathers.”32 Thus, instead of fully horrifying an audience that helped construct Iraqi suffering, he, like Mourid, provides a gift of beauty, a moment to breathe and hope together, to know that the space between the lives of the oppressor and the oppressed is thinner than the space between feathers falling from the sky. And this also holds true in the third, and most dreamlike, vision in The Fever Chart, “A State of Innocence.” This final, though typically first performed, vision tells the story of an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian woman meeting in a zoo in Rafah, a city in the Gaza Strip, alongside the architect of the zoo. As with “Between This Breath and You,” “A State of Innocence” tells the story of a meeting between two intimately related people from either side of the Israeli occupation. And, once again, it begins with tension between the two parties, brought by their preconceptions of one another: YUVAL (Threatening): [ . . . ] Are you a terrorist? UM HISHAM (Playfully): Paletinorist. Terrestinian. Palerrorist. I was born in the country of Terrorist. I commit terrible acts of Palestinianism. I eat liberty from a bowl on the Wall. Fanatic. Security. Democracy. YUVAL: Don’t get playful with me. You want to throw me in the sea. UM HISHAM: I just might. But I can’t get to the sea. Seventeen and a half checkpoints keep me from it.33 [caption id="attachment_1126" align="alignnone" width="606"] Figure 3., Yuval (Ahmed Omar) crawling to Hisham (Amira Gabr) in A State of Innocence at the AUC. Courtesy of Frank Bradley.][/caption] Set in the middle of the Second Intifada, the play begins with the tension between the people on either side of the occupation, tensions that cause a young soldier to believe that even a middle-aged mother is a threat to him because she is Palestinian. However, the structure of occupied violence returns when Um Hisham explains to Yuval how she knows who he is, telling him that soldiers in his unit beat her husband because they could not find weapons in Um Hisham’s house. Yuval stopped the beating, and, to thank him, Um Hisham made him a cup of tea. However, as he put the cup of tea to his lips, a single bullet from a sniper pierced his head. When he dropped to his knees, he looked to Um Hisham and said, “Hold me,” which she did, telling him in the zoo, “Three minutes. It took you three minutes to die. Everything I have despised, for decades—the uniform, the power, the brutality, the inhumanity—and I held it in my arms. I held you, Yuval. (Beat) But it should have been your mother. We should hold our own children when they die.”34 Um Hisham continues to explain that because Yuval died in her house, the Israeli military bulldozed the house and arrested her husband, and that the zoo they are in is the one that lives on in their minds, where she can visit Yuval as she visits her daughter. This dream-like aspect was underscored in the Egyptian production, which used a minimalist set, with only a few stairs and wooden latticework behind the characters to emphasize the unreal world they were in, as well as the openness of the possibilities before them in such a space. In this way, “A State of Innocence” also explores the closeness between the occupier and the occupied, and how their lives, and deaths, are inextricably linked to one another and are even tied together after death. And, as with the other plays, it provides an image of the oppressed providing comfort to the oppressor, showing humanity in spite of the occupation; in this play, though, the Israeli soldier had also shown a moment of compassion to Um Hisham, a moment that would cost him his life, as crossing the borders of political divide, sadly, too often does. However, as Wallace writes, it is only in those moments of crossing, in the creative transgressions, in the most intimate forms of transnational community that a better world can be imagined, that that vision can exist, in the mind, on stage, or in life. The inverse of this is an idea that Wallace understands when she states, “What could be more intimate or personal than the fact that we get up in the morning, kiss our loved ones, go to work, come home, pay our taxes—and those taxes from our daily labor are used to kill you and you and you, and I never saw your face nor knew your name.”35 If the violence of occupation is formed from the product of our daily lives, the resistance to such violence needs to take an equally personal form. Unfortunately, writing such visions comes with its own cost as well. As Wallace has revealed about attempts to stage her collaborative work Twenty-One Positions, a Cartographic Dream of the Middle East, “before Lisa, Abed [the co-writers], and I had set foot in the Guthrie Theatre, the dramaturg there accused us of writing in a way that supported terrorism.” According to Wallace, “The conversation about Israel and Palestine is the most censored conversation in the U.S. today. And it’s not an easy conversation to have in Britain either.”36 Furthermore, The Jewish Chronicle, writing of the British production of The Fever Chart, ended with the note that “plays about this conflict have to deliver more than a depiction of mutual suffering.”37 And, as with the Guthrie’s decision to forego a production of Twenty-One Positions, most non-academic theaters avoid Wallace’s work, just as the American press largely chooses to ignore the few productions of her work that are mounted. However, it is not in the West alone that this conversation has met challenges. When The Fever Chart was first performed at the American University in Cairo, as Wallace and director Frank Bradley took the stage for the post-show QA, four of the actors in the play came to the front of the stage and rejected the play for, as they saw it, equating the oppressor with the oppressed and creating lives in a vacuum, finally stating “no coexistence without preceding existence.”38 Interestingly, the critical responses to the performance took a decidedly different tone. Joseph Fahim stated, “The four actors’ statement and the criticism Wallace was bombarded with reflects an intolerance for any work that portrays the ‘enemy’ in a non-barbaric light. The Israeli characters never appear sympathetic, and that’s one of the very few dramatic flaws of the play. Wallace doesn’t offer any kind of resolution, or ‘reconciliation,’ for her characters, which renders the actors’ statement all the more puzzling.”39 Meanwhile, Nehad Selaiha noted, “That some of the audience found it hard to swallow such a message is, perhaps, understandable and could be predicted. One wonders if there ever will come a time when such brave plays would be properly appreciated . . . They [Wallace, Bradley, and the AUC] gave me a taste of real political theatre as I understand it: challenging, disorienting and thought provoking.”40 It would also seem strange that, given the AUC’s upper-class demographic, the students did not have a problem with their university training the heirs to Egypt’s political and economic elite who remain complicit in the occupation. Ironically, though, equating the roles of occupier and occupied is how the one published Western critical response to Wallace’s play positions the work. In the article, “Enough! Women Playwrights Confront the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Amelia Howe Kritzer surveys female responses to Israeli occupation in the wake of the controversy over Caryl Churchill’s play Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza, and positions The Fever Chart as an alternative to “the tone of anger and impatience common to other plays about the conflict.”41 For Kritzer, the majority of plays about Palestine create a “pattern of emphasizing the viewpoint and experience of one side [that] limits their potential for bridging the deep divisions between Palestinians and Israelis,” while Wallace’s work “feature[s] a trio of characters, a choice that undermines the either/or pattern of the binary opposition between Palestinian and Israeli positions.”42 While I agree that Wallace’s work contains an uncommonly humanistic approach to the issue, assuming that Wallace does not take sides requires Kritzer to consistently erase Arab subject positions in her analysis. Thus, she does not note the disproportionate number of dead Palestinians versus dead Israelis, including two Palestinian children, in Wallace’s play, an imbalance that mirrors the actual occupation. Additionally, by focusing on Palestine and ignoring the Iraqi segment, Kritzer avoids Wallace’s implication of the structural and American-funded nature of violence and occupation in the Middle East, an erasure amplified by her consistent references to “conflict,” rather than the more accurate and specific terms “occupation,” “apartheid,” and “settler-colonialism.”43 Finally, she writes of British and American productions of Wallace’s work, ignoring that it played in Cairo before New York and ignoring the different resonances in the productions. In this way, she creates an argument for a “balanced” understanding of the “conflict” that obscures the reality of Wallace’s writing, how it has been performed, and Palestinian life under occupation. Instead of replicating similar rhetorical choices, The Fever Chart always maintains a clear structure of understanding the difference between occupier and occupied, while, at the same time, showing the intimate connections between human beings on either side of that line. True, this may be hard for many to view, but, at the same time, it is impossible to end oppressive political and economic structures without understanding that the ideological failures that create them are human. Just as suffering should not be disembodied, neither should the structures that create oppression. They are equally human, and must be understood as such. And this humanity must be understood in dialogues that move across borders both ideologically and physically. At one point in “Between This Breath and You,” Mourid tells Tanya, “Did you know, Tanya—may I call you Tanya?—that wind has no sound? What makes the sound are the things it touches—branch, cliff, roof. All that rushing is the contact between one thing and another. Without that meeting point between two worlds, the harshest wind is silent.”44 So too are abstract forms of political resistance, those that do not understand the intimate details of the lives they mean to help, equally voiceless. True, in the contact that creates voice, there is friction, and there are moments of tension. However, in the silencings of the Guthrie, of state and public censorship, of those who would not see those whom they oppose (or, in some cases, support) as human, there is also no chance for progress, for a better means of living together. It is only when transnational humanism risks the pain of intimacy and the burns of friction that it will have a voice, a hope, and a possibility for a better world. ------------ George Potter is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Valparaiso University. His research focuses on visual culture and national narratives in Jordan. A United States Fulbright grant and a Taft Dissertation Fellowship from the University of Cincinnati funded his study of theater about the “war on terror” in Cairo, London, and New York. His research and translations have appeared in a number of journals and edited collections, including Arizona Quarterly and Proteus: A Journal of Ideas ------------ [1] Kia Corthron, et. al., “On the Road to Palestine,” American Theatre (July/August 2003), 31. [2] Ibid. [3] Ibid., 71. [4] Ibid. [5] Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, eds., Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), 2. [6] Qtd. in James M. Harding and John Rouse, eds., Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundation of Avant-Garde Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 31. [7] Ezra and Rowden, Transnational Cinema, 2. [8] Harding and Rouse, Not the Other Avant-Garde, 15. [9] Marvin Carlson, “Avant Garde Drama in the Middle East,” in ibid., 125-44. [10]Yan Haiping. “Other Transnationals: An Introductory Essay,” Modern Drama 48, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 226. [11] Stephen Moss, “The Container’s Captive Audience,” The Guardian 7 July 2009. [12] Sara L. Warner, “Suzan-Lori Parks’s Drama of Disinternment: A Transnational Exploration of Venus,” Theatre Journal 60, no. 2 (May 2008):181. [13] Jerry Wasserman, “Bombing (on) the Border: Ali and Ali and the aXes of Evil as Transnational Agitprop,” Modern Drama 51, no.1 (Spring 2008): 126-44. [14] Naomi Wallace, “On Writing as Transgression,” American Theatre (January 2008), 100. [15] Qtd. in Nehad Selaiha. “Politics Centre-Stage,” Al-Ahram Weekly (20 Mar. 2008), http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/889/cu2.htm (accessed 5 May 2010). [16] Naomi Wallace, The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East (New York: TCG, 2009), 37. [17] Ibid. [18] Ibid., 45. [19] Ibid., 46. [20] Ibid., 50. [21] Ibid., 52-3. [22] A brief and accessible overview of the conditions in occupied Palestine can be found in the film Occupation 101 (Dir. Omeish, Abdallah, and Sufyan Omeish, DVD, YouTube, and Vimeo). [23] Similarly, Ali Abunimah has noted that economic exploitation was built into the Oslo process, which allows Israel to control Palestinian imports and exports and divert development into international industrial zones that export the profit. See Ali Abunimah, “Economic Exploitation of Palestinians Flourishes under Occupation,” Al-Jazeera English 13 September 2012, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/20129128052624254.html, (accessed 8 February 2014). [24] Wallace, Fever, 58. [25] Ibid., 61. [26] Ibid., 64. [27] “In 1989, school enrollment in Iraq was higher than the average rate for all developing countries.” (PBS. “Iraq—Truth and Lies in Baghdad. Facts and Stats,” Frontline World (November 2002), http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/iraq/facts.html, (accessed 3 September 2010). [28] Ibid. [29] Wallace, Fever, 66. [30] Ibid., 62. [31] Ibid., 67. [32] Ibid., 68. [33] Ibid., 9. [34] Ibid., 23. [35] Wallace, “On Writing,” 102. [36] The production would eventually be staged at Fordham University, instead of the Guthrie. Qtd. in Claire MacDonald, “Intimate Histories,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Arts 28, no. 3 (2006): 100. [37] John Nathan. “Review: The Fever Chart,” Rev., The Fever Chart, 18 March 2010, The Jewish Chronicle Online, http://www.thejc.com/arts/theatre-reviews/29596/review-the-fever-chart, (accessed 5 May 2010). [38] Frank Bradley, dir. The Fever Chart, writ. Naomi Wallace, perf. Falaki Theatre, American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt, 17 March 2008, Undistributed DVD. Also Personal Interview, 26 October 2008. [39] Joseph Fahim, “Visions of War, Loss and Humanity,” The Daily News Egypt (17 March 2008), http://www.dailystaregypt.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=12524 (accessed 5 May 2010). [40] Selaiha, “Politics Centre-Stage.” [41] Amelia Howe Kritzer, “Enough! Women Playwrights Confront the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Theatre Journal 62, no. 4 (December 2010): 624. [42] Ibid. [43] Part 2, Article 7, of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (2002) defines apartheid as inhumane acts of a character similar to crimes against humanity “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” Even a cursory knowledge of the Israeli occupation would make clear that this is a more appropriate term than “conflict,” which implies a balanced struggle. See “Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,” United Nations, 2002, http://legal.un.org/icc/statute/romefra.htm (accessed 7 August 2013). [44] Wallace, Fever, 34. ----------- The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2014) Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Guest Editor: Cheryl Black (University of Missouri) With the ATDS Editorial Board: Noreen C. Barnes (Virginia Commonwealth University), Nicole Berkin (CUNY Graduate Center), Johan Callens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Jonathan Chambers (Bowling Green State University), Dorothy Chansky (Texas Tech University), James Fisher (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), Anne Fletcher (Southern Illinois University), Felicia Londré (University of Missouri-Kansas City), Kim Marra (University of Iowa ), Judith A. Sebesta (The College for All Texans Foundation), Jonathan Shandell (Arcadia University), LaRonika Thomas (University of Maryland), Harvey Young (Northwestern University) Managing Editor: Ugoran Prasad Editorial Assistant: Andrew Goldberg Circulation Manager: Janet Werther Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director 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 The Border that Beckons and Mocks: Conrad, Failure, and Irony in O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon Alternative Transnationals: Naomi Wallace and Cross-Cultural Performances Transgenero Performance: Gender and Transformation in Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders Crossing Genre, Age and Gender: Judith Anderson as Hamlet YoungGiftedandFat: Performing Transweight Identities Hot Pursuit: Researching Across the Theatre/Film Border Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Raymond Saraceni 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 Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage Raymond Saraceni By Published on November 25, 2022 Download Article as PDF Introduction During the early decades of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia became besotted by its own reflection—a growing desire to perceive and to reflect upon itself is clearly manifested in the work of contemporaneous painters, novelists, and organizers of street pageants, as well as in the work of dramatists and theatre impresarios. Perhaps the bustling and industrializing metropolis that was in the process of supplanting the supposedly genteel Federalist city of the preceding century sought something reassuring in beholding itself. The federal government had decamped for the banks of the Potomac in 1800, while with each year the significance of Philadelphia as the birthplace of the nation was slipping further from the space of living memory; meanwhile, immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and even the French Caribbean further altered the deportment and civic culture of the city, as did blacks fleeing slavery in the American south. [1] Given such changes, the need to reflect upon and represent precisely what the city was and how it is signified in the present became increasingly important. Broadly speaking, representations of Philadelphia on canvas or in engravings took one of two forms: one emphasizing the city’s grand architecture and orderly thoroughfares, the other its often boisterous and irrepressible citizens. William Russell Birch, an English-born painter who published four editions of Philadelphia street scenes between 1800 and 1820, created elegant depictions of the city that called viewers’ attention to Philadelphia’s graceful Georgian buildings and its broad boulevards. His images of an orderly Philadelphia peopled by well-mannered and deferential citizens are notable too for a kind of antiseptic quality: the garbage and manure that would no doubt have been found throughout the city’s streets and byways are nowhere to be found. [2] John Lewis Krimmel, born in 1786 and a recent immigrant from Württemberg, was also a painter of Philadelphia street scenes, but his work is of a very different kind than Birch’s. While human figures are of marginal importance to the latter, they are Krimmel’s primary focus. Paintings such as Fourth of July in Center Square (1812) and Election Day at the State House (1815) call our attention not to those buildings that frame the action, but to the crowds themselves: swaggering, celebratory, combustible, and heterogeneous. The energy of his work is equal parts dynamism and hazard—despite the affability of certain of his human subjects, one could easily imagine being pushed aside, pick-pocketed or worse in the midst of such a swirling tumult of urban types. What we find in such aquatints and etchings we also find just a few years later upon the Philadelphia stage; the social energies unleashed as the city’s identity shifted from the eighteenth-century “Birthplace of the Nation” to the nineteenth-century “Workshop of the World,” were echoed, reified, challenged, and reconfigured in Philadelphia’s playhouses. By the end of the 1820s, Philadelphia was struggling to understand and represent the tumult and dislocation of its present in terms of what had already become for many an idealized past. As Gary B. Nash has argued, the “formative decade” of the 1820s was characterized by the construction of a “web of memory” in the Quaker City, a process that involved the founding of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in the wake of the Marquis de Lafayette’s visit in 1824, an institution whose very purpose was to collect those artifacts that might help “to preserve [a] memory of the past or use it to refurbish the present.” Such a process was, however, “made all the more complicated by the fact that Philadelphians, in their growing diversity, came to understand that memory-making was [not] a value-free and politically sanitized matter, [for] . . . as soon as people began to see that the shaping of Philadelphia’s past was a partisan activity, . . . the process of remembering Philadelphia became . . . contested . . . and has remained so ever since.” [3] Representing contemporary Philadelphia to Philadelphia audiences thus became aesthetically compelling at precisely the same moment that Nash considers as decisive in the city’s first serious encounter with shaping historical memory. Both processes were equally fraught. In the following pages, I wish to consider in particular Robert Montgomery Bird’s City Looking Glass , and the Walnut Street Theatre’s staging of both The Mail Robbers and Doctor Foster in Philadelphia . What did these entertainments signify for contemporary Philadelphians? How did audiences reflect upon these performances of self-reflection? When Bird and his contemporaries held a looking glass before the face of America’s First City, what did its audiences behold? These plays, I will argue, allow us to apprehend the formation of Philadelphian civic identity at an inflection point, with the stage itself at the heart of the city’s self-enactment. Indeed, it is not possible to understand this moment of civic identity formation and/or dissolution without working to grasp how it was experienced by those Philadelphians who attended and called upon the theatre to reflect, upend, or further reify the realities they felt themselves to inhabit at the beginning of the Jacksonian era, when the tensions touched upon in the works of Birch and Krimmel reached a kind of climax. Whereas scholars have long worked to situate Philadelphia performances of the antebellum period within the context of the development of American cultural identity, comparatively little attention has been given to the work of the Philadelphia stage relative to the development of Philadelphia civic culture itself. Bird’s Looking Glass , read alongside Mail Robbers and Doctor Foster , confirms a sense that when Philadelphians beheld their city at the end of the 1820s, they saw a place that was no longer the gentlemanly Quaker metropolis of William Penn and his heirs anymore than it was exclusively the eighteenth-century cradle of liberty and shrine of American independence. Instead, audiences beheld a heterogeneous and volatile, dangerous yet exuberant modern metropolis—one characterized by instability and menace as well as by a kind of phenomenologically liberating and disruptive knavery. In these plays, we will find that the exterior street scene becomes the primary space for contesting civic identity, just as it was in the work of painters and engravers like Birch and Krimmel. Bird’s Looking Glass In July of 1828 the ambivalent physician and aspiring dramatist, Robert Montgomery Bird, did something extraordinary: he held up a mirror to the city of Philadelphia. With the publication of his City Looking Glass , Bird invites audiences to look into his dramaturgical “mirror of the times . . . to see such knaves and asses / [a]s, we hope, can’t be seen in your own looking glasses.” [4] The comedy he presents offers us a comprehensive picture of Philadelphia types: wealthy merchants and their headstrong daughters, seedy procuresses and blackmailers, street-savvy rakes and pugnacious (if good-natured) sailors, as well as a promenading African American woman and a visiting Southern gentleman, not to mention servants, constables, and various “young bucks” reflecting various degrees of moral turpitude. On the one hand, the play appears as a somewhat conventional variation on a theme by Terence: sentimentality and mistaken identities abound, even as we encounter the familiar device of a long-lost child reunited with her aged, pining father. At the same time, however, the play’s rambunctious and youthful energy – its gleeful determination to consider the seedy underbelly of life in the Quaker City – mark Bird’s entertainment as being worlds away from what the European larmoyant tradition had formerly wrought of the same comic paradigm. Though apparently never brought to the stage, City Looking Glass may be read as heralding an emergent impulse on the part of Philadelphia to perceive and perform itself, as well as an impulse on the part of dramatists and theatre managers to contest the city’s established reputation as a place of congruity, regularity, and gentlemanly deportment. Bird extends and develops the metaphor of the looking glass throughout his prologue, hoping (or lamenting) that “when some pleasing liniment is shown, / . . . each might softly whisper, ‘That’s my own!’ / And where an uglier product of our labour [sic], / [w]ith the same readiness, say ‘That’s my neighbor!’” Seeking to present a timely, up-to-date urban comedy, Bird next promises his audience “certain tricks and capers / [s]uch as you look for daily in the papers.” [5] What is extraordinary here is not Bird’s deployment of the mirror as a metaphor so much as the way in which he does so, as well as the situation of his Looking Glass within the context of Philadelphia’s emergent obsession with seeing itself in the theatre. As Tim P. Vos has pointed out, the mirror was a popular signifier in the literature of the early American republic, but not necessarily a sign of “objectivity’s normative ascendance.” Instead, the looking glass was most often deployed as “a metaphor for the self-examination of one’s soul or character by holding up individuals either to be emulated or abhorred . . . the mirror was not simply a material article for returning light it received, it was a cultural artifact for returning enlightenment and judgment.” [6] In Bird’s comedy, the play itself is the looking glass—a looking glass absent in the material form but imagined instead as forcefully present in and as the act of performance. Indeed, Bird maintained a persistent fascination with images and reflections—with ways of constructing, refracting, and performing (or re-performing) phenomena of various kinds—throughout his life. In the 1840s and 50s, he famously experimented with an early photographic process called the Calotype, developing not only some of the first photographic images of Philadelphia but also developing an image of his own portrait, painted on canvas by his wife, Mary Mayer Bird. Thus, just as he would eventually reflect upon and replicate an image of his own image in light and shadow, with Looking Glass the dramatist may be understood as presenting us with the city itself as engaged perpetually in its own protean self-enactment—though here the subject is not an individual but a civic, corporate phenomenon. In his study of Philadelphia’s literary history, Samuel Otter argues that eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers in the Quaker City “shared a sense that Philadelphia was a place where, in concentrated form, a peculiarly American experiment was being conducted,” that the public sphere in Philadelphia developed in a unique way “through a series of violent episodes that were interpreted as tests of individual, racial, and civic character.” He goes on to say that “the border status of the city, its symbolic value and political history, its resilient African American population, and its circumstances of extremity provoked inquiries that unfolded in a range of texts over decades.” [7] Otter’s interest here is literary, so while he considers the work of Philadelphia authors like Charles Brockden Brown and George Lippard (both of whom sought to challenge the normative representation of Philadelphia as the refined and gentlemanly capital of Penn’s enlightened Commonwealth), his attention to drama and theatrical performance is slight. It thus should not surprise us that in considering the work of Robert Montgomery Bird, Otter almost entirely overlooks his plays in favor of his prose fiction. Nevertheless, there is much that is useful in Otter’s work relative to an understanding of Philadelphia drama and performance. During the early years of the nineteenth century, Otter writes, urban life in the Quaker City “seemed newly legible . . . as a limit outside the self that shaped identity, [as] . . . a felt excess that resisted such limits, and as a possibility for transformation.” [8] But if this was the moment that Philadelphia became legible, I argue that it is also the moment that Philadelphia become performable ; Otter claims that during the early years of the nineteenth century “Philadelphia came into fiction, and fiction became Philadelphian.” [9] So is this the case for drama and performance, particularly toward the end of the 1820s and most notably at first in Robert Montgomery Bird’s The City Looking Glass ? The play involves the machinations of two brothers who come to Philadelphia in order to make a fortune passing counterfeit bills; one of the brothers, Ravin, is also blackmailing a procuress named Mrs. Gall as he seeks to take possession of her ward: the beautiful and virtuous Emma. This same young woman has also won the heart of our hero, Mr. Roslin, a scion of a respectable family whose hopes for marriage are dashed when he learns that Emma is essentially being raised in a house of ill repute. Meanwhile, Roslin’s old school chum—a southern gentleman named Raleigh—has come to town to court Diana Headstrong, Roslin’s cousin. At first, Raleigh’s hopes for marriage are frustrated because of his being misidentified by Headstrong as a notorious swindler, a charge that brings the young man’s father, the elder Raleigh, to Philadelphia in defense of his son’s reputation (this despite the old man’s enduring heart-brokenness as a result of his young daughter’s disappearance many years before). At long last, however, all obstacles to marriage are removed when Emma is discovered to be Raleigh’s long-lost sister, and the villainous Ravin the very swindler that Headstrong (falling victim to Ravin’s manipulation) had earlier misidentified as Raleigh himself. By the end of the play Ravin’s brother, Ringfinger, has been compelled to give evidence against his brother and the two villains are hauled off to receive their just desserts. The play compels attention not so much for its intrigue, however, as for its disruptive depiction of the Quaker City as a disorderly and unruly space. It is as if Philadelphia were here reflected via a distorted funhouse mirror—a kind of giddy exercise in grotesquerie. Such an enterprise was not without precedent or progenitors, to be sure. Tom and Jerry, or Life in London (that episodic celebration of urban slumming, low-life milieux, and rakish misbehavior) had crossed the pond and debuted at Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theatre in April of 1823. Francis Wemyss, a leading actor who had himself recently arrived from Britain and who would serve as manager of several Philadelphia theatres over the decades, records that Tom and Jerry was so popular upon its first appearance in the city that it was picked up and performed by Cowell’s “circus corps” as soon as the Chestnut Street company disembarked for its sojourn to Baltimore and Washington, and was presented at the Walnut Street for the remainder of the season. [10] In his study of populist and underclass performance on the nineteenth-century American stage, Peter P. Reed explores the influence of Tom and Jerry ; he argues that theatres in the United States sought to ensure the continued popularity of the play “by tapping the urban lore of American cities” so that “[g]limpses of the distant metropole’s underworld gave way to representations of a newly localized urban culture, [as] Tom and Jerry helped constitute a specifically American urban public sphere built upon complex rituals of underclass performance and elite patronage.” [11] While The City Looking Glass is not a direct iteration of Tom and Jerry , the energies unleashed by the latter seem to play a role in Bird’s treatment of Philadelphia as a series of street scenes, dives, and the low performances associated with both—a local and particular manifestation of Americans’ increasing consciousness of and investment in “the entertainment value of their own urban low scenes [and their] fascination with stagey underclass characters” who continue to appear throughout the first half of the nineteenth century on the stage and in print. [12] Stagey, underclass characters abound in Bird’s play; they are far more memorable than the ladies and gentlemen, just as the action of the play’s street scenes and exteriors is more memorable than the goings-on in the parlors or drawing rooms of its respectable homes. For it is on the city’s byways and back lanes, as well as in the showboating of its volatile young “bucks” (characters like the sometime lawyer, Bolt, and his streetwise henchmen, Mossrose and Crossbar), that Philadelphia is meant to perceive most clearly its disfigured reflection, to experience most dramatically its contested character. Indeed, Philadelphia’s civic character was already long-understood as being manifest in its streets, specifically in its gridiron arrangement of thoroughfares intersecting at right angles and organized around a series of five open squares framing deep individual lots for houses and gardens — an arrangement proposed by William Penn and his surveyor, Thomas Holme, at the very founding of the colony. Philadelphia’s character as a planned settlement with broad, straight avenues as an alternative to the overcrowded, walled, medieval cities of Europe was an important aspect of what gave the place its initial cachet and self-image as a modern city founded on Enlightenment principles. Philadelphia, as Samuel Otter observes, sought to understand itself as defined by the “symmetry and discipline” of its orderly thoroughfares, as the “perpendicular array of streets and squares . . . were linked with the rectitude of its founder and its Quaker inhabitants.” [13] However, the sameness and regularity characteristic of its general appearance engendered, too, a quality of stultifying rigidity ripe for contestation and aesthetic sabotage. When visiting Philadelphia in the summer of 1830, Mrs. Trollope wrote that the city was “built with extreme and . . . wearisome regularity,” and that “all is even, straight, uniform, and uninteresting.” [14] Just three years later, the Scottish traveler Thomas Hamilton wrote similarly that Philadelphia represented “an infringement on the rights of individual eccentricity—a rigid and prosaic despotism of right angles and parallelograms.” [15] Local dramatists had gotten there even earlier. In his 1806 comedy, Tears and Smiles , James Nelson Barker gives us the character of Nathan Yank, domestic and runner-of-errands for the play’s romantic hero, who repeatedly loses his way amidst the wearisome sameness of Philadelphia’s streets, much to the consternation of his employer and the complication of the plot. While Barker’s sentimental comedy walks the streets of prosaic sameness rather than those of symmetry and rectitude, he is not so much interested in contesting the self-image of Philadelphia as he is in enjoying a good-natured jest with his knowing audience. Nor is the city as such at the center of Barker’s dramaturgy: the final acts of the play take us out of Philadelphia altogether, to a quiet country estate in Fairmount. Bird, by contrast, cannot imagine leaving the city behind, for what would his Looking Glass have to show us then? Otter has written about Benjamin Franklin’s autobiographical writings as, among other things, a guide “to crafting appearances that unsettled the relationship between character and performance,” deploying tales of his youthful progress in the city to “help create a public arena in which individuals were taught to be acutely conscious of their own social performances.” [16] Bird continues this work, albeit in a different key, with an early scene between his malefactor brothers where Ravin upbraids the less-assured Ringfinger over the latter’s persistent weakness for picking pockets. Picking pockets is, Ravin tells him, “a damned low vice” when set against the more refined criminal endeavor of counterfeiting. Refusing to aim higher has had a deleterious effect on Ringfinger, whose “gentility sits as clumsily upon [him] as new clothes.” Gentility and breeding, the sine qua non of the Philadelphia gentleman, are simply matters of wearing the costume well and of playing the role with confidence, for “character . . . is oftener established by conceit than by natural privilege.” [17] This troubling of the relationship between substance and “mere” appearance prefigures the promiscuous relationship in Bird’s Philadelphia between the gentleman and the scoundrel; nowhere is this more clear than in the character of Bolt, a good-for-nothing rogue whose ill-treatment at the hands of the brother villains leads to their demise. Roslin describes Bolt as indeed a “gentleman,” but one with a “black eye.” He expands upon this observation, noting that Bolt is the very “representative of a Philadelphia buck” one who has had opportunities of becoming a gentleman, [but] amends his gentility by the addition of certain accomplishments peculiar to the vulgar; that is, he has been half-educated at college and half bred at home; is seen sometimes at a lawyer’s office [but] … more frequently in the tavern with a terrapin under his nose and a wine bottle at his elbow: he fiddles a little and boxes to admiration; wears a costly coat; keeps a mistress, and sometimes a dog; above all can brag of having shot one grouse on the Jersey colings and one man on the Delaware lines. [18] Bolt is thus an apparently successful Philadelphia lawyer who hails from a supposedly well-bred Philadelphia family. Yet he is a man of halves: part genteel cavalier, part vulgar roughneck. Otter notes that in Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia, “a strategic display of enterprise might lead to worldly success [as] . . . habits of industry, discipline, and virtue” serve to “secure character.” [19] Bolt, however, particularly in Roslin’s representation of him, destabilizes character in his troubling of any distinction between high and low. Not simply a slumming gentleman, he appears to be downright dangerous: while Bolt engages in genteel pastimes like grouse hunting (albeit with limited success), his shooting a man “on the Delaware lines” might betoken either a refined duelist or an unstable sociopath. Indeed, Roslin’s servant, Nathan Nobody, observes that all aristocratic families of the city are most likely mere whited sepulchers, asserting to his master in the spirit of hearty “republicanism” that whenever he sees one of their coats of arms he can only conclude that “they have formerly . . . had in the family more arms than ears; that their titles are registered in a jail book; that their family house was a dunghill and their tree of genealogy a gallows.” The colorful and dexterous Nobody appears to have learned this sort of leveler’s vision at the theatre, where he also came to appreciate “how a wise man can climb on the shoulders of fools.” [20] In Bird’s variation on Abbott and Costello’s verbal monkeyshines, Nathan Nobody is a Somebody, while the aspirational aristocrats of Philadelphia are the real Nobodies. As mentioned above, it is largely upon the byways and back alleys of the city that Bird’s drama of contestation and shifting selves is played out. The “wearisome regularity,” of Philadelphia’s streets, the “symmetry and discipline” of its gridiron pattern of thoroughfares, are here reworked so as to prepare a common space for emergent and variable identity, the sort of undertaking which Elizabeth Maddock Dillon regards as “the shared terrain … of embodiment and representational force.” [21] Indeed, most of the decisive action of Looking Glass takes place out of doors on the city’s thoroughfares. In the course of the play’s five “street scenes” Roslin and Nathan agree on an undertaking that drives the early action, Bolt flirts indecorously with a series of ladies (bringing on the decisive intervention of the sailor, Tom Taffrail), Diana is rescued by Raleigh after she has taken flight from Bolt, Emma is rescued from Mrs. Gall and Ravin by Roslin, and finally, Nathan is delivered from Ravin’s clutches by Tom Taffrail (thus setting up the play’s concluding action). In the course of such intrigue, Philadelphia is transformed into an utterly unrecognizable landscape – or seascape – of protean, Bosh-like strangeness, perhaps best represented by Tom Taffrail’s indignant retort to Bolt that he is not the only man that has been run foul of by unlawful cruisers in this here cursedty [sic] deceitful town. There’s sharks and swordfish enough, though they keep their heads underwater, to nibble one’s eyes out of his head and run their snouts into one’s keel. I have seen a painted pirate run up into a gentle-man’s headquarters as naturally as into a Spanish West-India harbour [sic]. [22] The good citizens of Philadelphia are here reduced to sinister sea creatures or the keels of renegade corsairs (the latter identification pungent with sexual innuendo)—a comic but nevertheless disquieting depiction that conflates machine with man and beast. Nor is it an arbitrary choice to give these sentiments to Tom. “Seafarers and their families dominated certain parts of the Philadelphia cityscape,” Simon P. Newman reminds us, enjoying “a vibrant and highly visible culture.” While Philadelphia’s sailors “participated in the street politics of the early republic alongside laborers, mechanics, and other working men and women, more than any other group they had witnessed and experienced revolutionary transformations, and they participated in American politics within that context.” [23] A peculiar and pugnacious combination of rube and sea-dog, Tom is also the consummate street performer, belting out a spooky moritat about a murderous sailor and his mistress’ ghost as part of Nobody’s deliverance from Ravin’s clutches. Not only has Bird tapped into and deployed what Newman regards as the self-conscious display that characterized the behavior of Philadelphia’s seafarers, whose “scarred” and “tattooed” bodies vividly “proclaimed their profession,” [24] but he also allows the character who would have most closely been identified with the revolutionary energies of the Atlantic World the power to most memorably re-inscribe the streets of Philadelphia as unsettling sea-lanes of depravity, full of predatory creatures best policed by guileless sailors with powerful fists and strong singing voices. Indeed, fisticuffs are never far off in Bird’s Philadelphia. It is Tom who earlier thrashes Bolt and his cronies when the part-time lawyer assails Diana on a street corner; frightened and angry, she demands vengeance, insisting that her suitor, Mr. Raleigh, “come along and make ready to beat somebody.” “Isn’t this the City of Brotherly Love?” protests the Southern gentleman. [25] It would appear not. In her New World Drama , Elizabeth Maddock Dillon writes of how dramatic texts as well as theatrical performance engender “operations of representation” that oscillate between “riotous disorder and collective consent,” for drama and performance make visible “the possibility of consensus in the making as well as the possibility of . . . dissolving [a] collective sense of meaning . . . into one of noise and riot.” [26] I suggest that The City Looking Glass accomplishes precisely this work: dissolving a consensus image of “the City of Brotherly Love” as an ordered, gentlemanly, Federalist city while proposing another. Bird’s play offers us a Philadelphia at once less-familiar and more frightening—more volatile yet more exuberant—than the metropolis imagined by James Nelson Barker, a rendering that also seems to lure us away from the possibility of consensus. Indeed, the City of Brotherly Love has here become the space of rough-and-tumble and free-for-all, of disorderly “noise and riot.” If Bird’s looking glass may be apprehended in and as the act of performance, those reflections we do not see—or those performances we glimpse only fleetingly—are at least as significant as those that command our fuller attention. Though largely absent from the play, Bird would seem to deploy Philadelphia’s African American population as a further signification of disruption and dissensus at the performative heart of the city’s contested character. Samuel Otter has commented upon Bolt’s humiliation when one of the female passersby he seeks to accost turns out to be a finely-attired African American woman, arguing that staging such a “misalignment between costume and visage, and playing this exposure for shock and laughs” underlines a point of juncture between Bird’s treatment of African Americans in Looking Glass , and Edward W. Clay’s notorious print series, “Life in Philadelphia.” [27] Certainly this moment in the play performs work similar to Clay’s etchings, widely popular and first issued between 1828 and 1830: to mock social posturing amongst the city’s African American population. At the same time, Bird’s text is more multivalent here than we might think, very much as Clay’s print series also seems to have been. Otter reminds us that Clay’s African American caricatures represent “a mixture of class desire and African American satire, in ratios impossible to recover.” [28] This point is further clarified by Christian DuComb, who speaks of Clay’s aquatints as “lampooning the pretentious manners of both whites and blacks . . . [albeit] Clay’s mockery of affluent whites seem[s] comparatively mild.” [29] What is especially interesting about Bolt’s brief encounter with the black woman is that, though finely dressed, she is hardly displaying or performing herself in the way that Bolt and his cronies seem to be: indeed, what first attracts Bolt’s attention is that she “bends her head and walks fast” as she passes by, anxious (most likely) to avoid the attention of these white men. Douglas A. Jones, Jr. has explored the significance of self-display and parade for African Americans during the early years of the nineteenth century, arguing that such phenomena signified that “their (black nation within a) nation existed,” [30] such moments of self-enactment functioned in a sense “as rituals do, in that they aestheticized, formalized, and sustained structures of (national) feeling among their [African American] participants.” [31] Looking Glass may thus be said to undermine and/or deny such moments of efficacious self-display for/to Philadelphia’s African Americans. There is no such “national feeling” in evidence at such a hurried and apparently apprehensive moment. It is Bolt, in fact, whose swaggering self-performance is called to our attention—though such behavior hardly makes a favorable impression here, merely reinforcing (as one of his henchmen would have it) that Bolt “prides himself on being an ignoramus.” [32] Every bit as compelling is the utter absence of African American characters otherwise. The invisibility of the city’s African Americans in Bird’s Looking Glass may very well have been a function of their irreducible visibility in the cultural and political life of contemporary Philadelphia. By the decade of the 1820s, Philadelphia was “the most important center of free blacks in the country, [its] black churches, schools, and mutual aid associations . . . more numerous than any other American city’s.” [33] Such a reality unsettled white historians like John Fanning Watson, who in 1830 lamented that “the aspirings [sic] and little vanities” of contemporary black Philadelphians “have been rapidly growing,” and “while twenty to thirty years ago they were much humbler, [now] they show an overweening fondness for display and vainglory.” [34] The villainous Ravin seems especially perturbed by the city’s blacks, exhibiting a penchant for perceiving Philadelphia itself through the lens of its African American population (perhaps as a reminder of his hailing from less racially heterogenous New Hampshire). Outraged by the behavior of Raleigh, Ravin accuses him of possessing “more impudence than a Philadelphia negro.” [35] Later, in drunken exasperation, he laments to Mrs. Gall that “they allow no nuisances here, except negro class meetings, dogs, and church bells.” [36] Such class meetings did indeed signify to many of Philadelphia’s uniquely visible and influential African American population; ever since clergyman Richard Allen established the first such black communion in Philadelphia in 1786, such class meetings symbolized “equal privileges for blacks,” even as they engendered “recalcitrant white opposition” from the very beginning. [37] Interestingly, in his descriptions of Philadelphia’s blacks, Ravin uses the term “negro”—an appellation that John Fanning Watson reports was no longer favored by the city’s more-assured and self-conscious African Americans, who increasingly preferred to call themselves “coloured” [sic]. [38] It is hard to know whether Ravin’s turn of phrase signifies his own or Bird’s indifference to this preference (or indeed, whether or not Watson is even entirely correct). What is more certain, however, is that Bird’s Looking Glass reflects its author’s (and most likely white Philadelphia’s) ambivalence about its African American population, a population that is at once largely absent from the play as well as inseparable from all the “noise and chaos” inherent in the representation and signification of Philadelphia’s combustible, boisterous, and often-antagonistic urban character. Highway Robbery In City Looking Glass , Ravin arranges for an ersatz kidnapping of Diana so that he himself might “rescue” her from the clutches of his co-conspirator. The plot (which quickly unravels) is set to take place as Diana travels by coach along the Ridge Road. [39] The primary thoroughfare connecting Philadelphia and Reading, the Ridge Road had been in use since the early years of the eighteenth century; it was heavy with traffic in Bird’s day, offering weary travelers a number of inns and fashionable hotels where they might rest after a long day’s journey. It was a dangerous route as well, and in the year following the publication of City Looking Glass , a real incident took place on the Ridge Road that riveted the attention of all of Philadelphia. In the early morning hours of 6 December 1829, the Reading Mail Stage was set upon by three highwaymen named Porter, Poteet, and Wilson. According to contemporary accounts, these men were weavers residing in Northern Liberties, a district at the time that was just outside of the City of Philadelphia. Porter seems to have been the ringleader: he apparently organized the undertaking and it was he who robbed the passengers and rifled through the mailboxes while Wilson and Poteet guarded him with their pistols. [40] Eventually, the three were apprehended; Porter would be tried and executed upon Poteet’s testimony, while Wilson’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by President Jackson. These men belonged to Philadelphia’s growing population of Irish immigrants, many of whom resided in Kensington and the Northern Liberties, where they were often employed as semi-skilled handloom weavers. Indeed, tensions in the former neighborhood had already ignited into rioting in 1828, with immigrant Roman Catholic Irish weavers pitted against Protestant American Nativists. [41] Charles Durang speaks of the “unprecedented excitement” in Philadelphia “resulting from the trial and conviction of the three mail robbers” in the spring of 1830, going on to mention that “business at the Walnut Street Theatre had not been very brisk, and it struck [manager] Sam Chapman that to dramatize the subject of this excitement would prove a clever card to attract the audience who then patronized the house.” [42] Called The Mail Robbers , the play would premiere on 10 May of that year. Clearly, the crime struck a chord and Chapman aimed to capitalize. Mrs. Trollope herself notes the “great interest” shown by a number of Philadelphians in the case of “two criminals who had been convicted of robbing the Baltimore [sic] Mail, and who were lying under sentence of death.” She was told that “one of the prisoners [Wilson] was an American, and the other [Porter] an Irishman,” the former convinced that his sentence of death would be commuted. She goes on to report that several of her companions, “in canvassing the subject, declared that if one were hanged and the other spared, [Porter’s] hanging would be a murder and not a legal execution, [as] very nearly all the white men who had suffered death since the Declaration of Independence had been Irishmen.” [43] This sympathy for Porter is perhaps surprising, particularly given the fact that the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin had described him as a terrifying criminal, “the blackest and most fiendish we ever looked upon,” whose “very childhood exhibited symptoms of a bold, audacious and vindictively wicked disposition, which defied all advice and correction.” [44] The discussion described by Mrs. Trollope reminds us that the production at the Walnut Street was extremely attuned to the obsessions of Philadelphia. Indeed, the fates of Porter and Wilson had yet to be resolved at the time The Mail Robbers was presented; Porter would not be executed until 3 July 1830—about two months after the play’s premiere. While The Mail Robbers , along with Looking Glass , seeks to challenge, redefine, and reconfigure notions of what Philadelphia means and how the city signifies to/for its inhabitants, there is one especially important difference to consider here. The response to the former play is shaped in certain especially significant ways by its performance (the latter play, as mentioned above, seems never to have been staged). In both plays, Philadelphia (and particularly its hinterlands in the case of Mail Robbers ) is a place characterized by real danger, but that danger seems to have been more urgently and unambiguously presented in Mail Robbers— perhaps not surprisingly, given the episodes dramatized here were inspired by true events. As we will see, what is especially interesting is the way in which the real-life and enacted dramas seem to have been to some degree conflated by individuals like Charles Durang, whose History of the Philadelphia Stage provides us with a sense of the peculiar semiotic disruptions that Chapman and his play may have accomplished for audiences of the Quaker City. Once more, the locus for contesting the character of the city and its environs are the streets and byways of the region, as the venerable old Ridge Turnpike becomes a place of mayhem and crime. Federal Philadelphia may have built its primacy upon the port and docks that connected it to the wider Atlantic world; by the beginning of the 1830s, however, Philadelphia’s commercial supremacy as a shipping port was slipping badly, with New York and Baltimore on the rise. Even so, rich deposits of iron and anthracite extracted upstate began to transform Philadelphia into the nation’s primary center of manufacturing. [45] In Mail Robbers , the city’s focus is turned from the Delaware wharves toward the transshipment centers, factories, and coalfields of Schuylkill County and the Lehigh Valley. According to the Columbia Star , Porter was especially interested in setting upon the Reading Mail because it carried valuable goods and well-to-do travelers between Philadelphia and the increasingly-prosperous industrial hubs of Reading and Pottsville. [46] In turning the city toward its own backcountry, Chapman was also offering his audience a kind of anthropological night journey into the wastes of Philadelphia’s contemporary “urban wilderness.” In doing so, his drama would seem to have undermined the ways in which Philadelphia had long sought to deploy its urban and semi-urban green spaces not as signifiers of wastes and danger but as “carefully constructed rural ‘stages’ upon which to perform” itself. [47] Naomi J. Stubbs has argued that it was within and upon “stages” such as the gardens at Gray’s Ferry just across the Schuylkill River, and those located at Vauxhall at Broad and Chestnut streets, that a salubrious “oneness with nature” might be enacted; indeed, by “highlighting those features . . . most clearly conforming to the rural idyll, proprietors [of these sites] capitalized on ideas of rural innocence and its relationship to patriotism through” the enactments of those various entertainments offered at such locations. [48] The rural and semi-rural space that served as the locus for Mail Robbers was apparently reconfigured as savage and terrifying by Chapman and his creative team, however, presenting its audience with a picture of human beings, not as well-pruned cultivars, but as untamed and intractable prodigies of nature and liberty run amok. Yet here it is not simply urban or semi-rural spaces that function as sites of contestation: the actor-manager at the helm of the Walnut Street, the playmaker who had crafted The Mail Robbers, became himself the locus of contested viewings and interpretations. A playbill promoting the drama suggests that Chapman sought to sell the play as a bit of moral edification, for we read that the theatre managers “ever desirous to display vice in its true colors and to show the rising generation the inevitable consequences of crime, have embraced the leading features of the late atrocious mail robbery in forming the present drama.” [49] Durang reports that the play was repeated on the evening after its premiere to “a full pit and gallery,” despite the fact that “the boxes were thin.” [50] This would seem to suggest that responses to the play were divided along class lines, with more respectable and genteel theatregoers turning away from what more robust, populist viewers applauded. Such a conflicted response comes as no surprise when we consider the variety of ways in which Porter and his behavior were understood in Philadelphia, as well as the various ways of reading or viewing Chapman himself. Despite the depiction of Porter in the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin as little more than a savage, Mrs. Trollope’s companions clearly sympathized with him, as the city’s growing Irish population doubtless did as well. The American Sentinel and Mercantile Advertiser reported that “special constables,” as well as a corps of “Marines from the Navy Yard” were placed on alert the day that Porter met the hangman, as “many persons were apprehensive that [his execution] would be attended with riot,” most likely by Irish immigrants from Kensington and Northern Liberties. [51] Most compelling here, however, is Charles Durang’s response, for he seems to conflate Chapman and Porter while at the same time evaluating both men’s “performances” quite differently. He describes the latter as an Irishman (a stout, thickset man, with a very sinister countenance pitted with the smallpox) [who] seemed to give all the orders to his associates in villainy. He exhibited not only that quality which in an honorable cause would have been called chivalrous bravery, but also, in rifling the passengers, displayed much courtesy and politeness. [52] Durang goes on to report that Porter’s chivalry manifested itself most memorably in his refusal to take a silver watch given to one of the passengers by his mother and that he even went so far as to return a piece of tobacco. Clearly, we are encountering here what Peter P. Reed regards as a fundamental characteristic of the rogue protagonist upon the early American stage: the demonstration of “singular and spectacular outlaw charisma.” [53] What is especially interesting about Durang’s recollection of the crime is that no such behavior is attributed to Porter in the account of the robbery printed in the Columbia Star , where it is Poteet who is said to have returned a watch (supposedly a family heirloom) to one of the passengers, as well as half-dollar to another. Given that his description of the real Porter and the actual crime is offered in the context of a description of The Mail Robbers , one begins to feel that Durang’s recollection of the former may have been shaped by the latter. If so, does this supposed depiction of Porter and his behavior provide us with a rough sense of what Chapman’s Mail Robbers —and the performance of Porter—may have offered audiences? We can do little more than speculate here, but certainly, Durang is much less sanguine about Chapman’s portrayal than Porter’s self-enactment. He is especially critical of Chapman’s “false and trashy, melodramatic coloring,” for while conceding Chapman an “artist in that species of clap-trap drama, . . . the chaste and high behests of Melpomene” being absent from his craft, his acting was merely “pretentious and illusory,” his gifts sufficient only for dramatizing “local subjects of a startling and horrid nature.” [54] The conflation of Porter’s charismatic lowness with Chapman’s less-admirable low style would seem to present Chapman / Porter as what Reed might call “a contested site of cultural valuation,” part of that larger process whereby the stage “transforms the outcasts and conscripts of circum-Atlantic modernity into entertainment.” [55] Indeed, the conflation of Porter and Chapman seems itself to be a function of that “stagey low [which] emerges from and destabilizes the identity formations, collective affiliations, and disciplinary practices of Atlantic modernity.” [56] Further destabilizing rogue representations, however, is the contrast between Durang’s ungenerous assessment of Chapman’s capabilities and what we find elsewhere, particularly when we turn to the reminiscences of Francis C. Wemyss, the British theatre impresario who brought him from Covent Garden to the United States in 1827. [57] Wemyss writes that to his mind Chapman was “a man of varied talent, of much knowledge and a universal favorite,” going on to note that “had he lived, he would have produced an entire revolution in minor American drama.” [58] Unfortunately, Chapman met his demise soon after the premiere of The Mail Robbers —indeed, as a direct result of his staging the play, at least in Durang’s telling. “For the purpose of dramatizing this abhorrent event,” he writes, “Chapman, with his scene painter Wilkins or Harry Isherwood (we forget which) went on horseback to view the spot [where the robbery took place], so as to give an accurate description of its localities.” [59] While at the scene, Chapman was wounded in a fall from his horse; the wound was further infected when later that evening he donned his costume at the Walnut Street—including a brass armor breastplate which he wore against his skin. “Verdigris poisoned the wound,” Durang goes on to report, and Chapman died a few days later, on 16 May. [60] Reinforcing Reed’s sense that presenting the underclass on American stages represents a constant tension between “discipline and unruliness,” [61] it is not especially difficult to read Durang as celebrating Porter’s unruliness while also offering us a tale of stage sensationalism and hack melodrama justifiably disciplined: Chapman the “claptrap” performer is hoist with his own phenomenological petard, the enactment of his unseemly drama leading directly to his demise. However, the question remains, why is Chapman so obviously Durang’s bête noir ? Here we must turn again to the particulars of the Philadelphia stage. Reed writes of how, beginning in the 1820s, “the clubby, personal world of managers and actors who had produced the post-revolutionary generation of theatre had begun to disappear.” [62] In Philadelphia, a development which is sometimes understood as a gradual phenomenon happened with a bang, at a very particular moment. Though Philadelphia was “the emporium of all the regular dramatic talent of the United States” during the 1828–9 theatre season, according to Francis C. Wemyss, “this season was also the most disastrous one ever known; the actors being literally in a state of desperation.” [63] By the end of the season, the three principal theatres of the city (the Chestnut Street, the Arch Street, and the Walnut Street) had closed their doors. William Warren, manager of the venerable Chestnut Street and direct heir of its Federal Era founders, was obliged to surrender his responsibilities to a new management team, consisting of Wemyss himself and Mr. Pratt. William Wood, formerly Warren’s co-manager and himself struggling to helm the tottering Arch Street, wrote subsequently of this crisis as one brought about by over-competition between the three principal theatres, going on to say that the drama “was at sixes and sevens” during the tumultuous 1828-9 season. According to Wood, it is at this moment that the history of the Philadelphia theatre, “that is to say, any history of a continuous and regular management” now “comes to an end,” for there had been “a complete debacle, or breaking up of everything that had been.” [64] The new men who were left standing in the wake of this catastrophe were managers like Wemyss and performers like his protegee, Sam Chapman. Thus, we see how Chapman may have signified the inauguration of a cheaper, tawdrier, less-decorous chapter in the history of the Philadelphia theatre—at least for men like Durang—with Mail Robbers serving as the instrument of Chapman’s subsequent (and not wholly unwelcome) removal from the stage. The Devil and Dr. Foster However, to fully grasp Chapman’s signification upon the Philadelphia stage, we must also understand his role relative to the Walnut Street’s production of an 1830 pantomime entitled Doctor Foster in Philadelphia . As with Mail Robbers , actual events lie very much at the center of the play’s energy and signification: a tale of misrepresentation and theft and naked chutzpah. Here, however, the culprits are not banditti but the impresarios of the Walnut and Arch Street theatres themselves. Similar to what we saw in the Looking Glass , the most memorable episodes of Doctor Foster take place on the street, within the public sphere and the space of public action—though the resolution offered by Foster appears to have been pitched to a different key. If Looking Glass expresses a kind of troubled, admonitory pleasure in the shifting sense of what Philadelphia means, Foster seems all giddy delight as the action winds up – it is a coming out party of sorts in celebration of a civic identity just coming into its own. Likewise, if Mail Robbers allows us to appreciate how the conflation of performance with real event works for Durang and most likely for others to represent both the nobly wicked (Porter) and the opportunistic (Chapman) as receiving their just desserts, Doctor Foster’s resolution is zanier and more explosive. With one stroke, the restoration of order appears to have been presented here as both accomplished and unlikely—perhaps even unhoped for. Doctor Foster grew directly out of what William Wood regards as a self-destructive battle between the city’s primary theatres, in particular the Arch Street and the Walnut Street. Indeed, Doctor Foster was intended in part as an ironic response to rival productions of a pantomime entitled Doctor Faustus ; the Walnut Street’s staging opened on 12 December 1829, the Arch Street’s four days later. There was a bit of skullduggery involved, however, for Durang reports that “the Chapman dynasty” at the helm of the former playhouse infiltrated the Arch Street under the pretense of confraternal solicitude, only to highjack the particulars of that theatre’s much-anticipated production of Faustus and rush the Walnut Street’s staging onto the boards just prior to its rival’s. [65] Durang reports that “public opinion was much divided on the relative merits of the piece as brought out by the two theatres,” though it is clear that he disapproves of Chapman’s decision to “reciprocate those marks of civility” extended to him on the part of the Arch Street management by “literally uprooting” its staging of the pantomime and transposing it to the Walnut Street. [66] Clearly, this was not the sort of “regular” and gentlemanly management that was said to have long-characterized the Philadelphia theatre, and whose loss is so bemoaned by William Wood above. Unsurprisingly, Francis Wemyss represents Chapman’s actions quite differently, arguing that his protegee’s gambit “was a fair business rivalry for which S. Chapman deserves great credit,” for “he reaped, by promptitude, the reward that belonged to [Arch Street manager] Philips.” [67] Once more, we see the Philadelphia stage and its rival theatres at the heart of Philadelphia’s self-enactment, for it seems to have been impossible for audiences to view either staging of Faustus without also seeing the performance of the city’s leading cultural institutions as themselves being indissolubly part of the drama. This point becomes even more clear when we consider that the Walnut Street also presented, on the same evening as the eleventh performance of Faustus (25 th December), an historical melodrama entitled William Penn; or the Elm Tree . Durang seems to regard this staging of Philadelphia and its past as a kind of antidote to the unsavoriness of the Faustus affair (though Chapman appeared in the play as the Quaker, Hickory Old Bay), conflating its romantic evocation of a bygone age with nostalgia for his own youth. All the local scenes in and adjacent to our city wherein … Penn’s first interview with the Indians occurred were accurately taken and beautifully painted. The Great Elm Tree (under whose wide-spreading branches we have passed in our boyhood), the ship Welcome floating under the bank of the Delaware, reposing … under the shadows of the majestic elm, were all very beautifully depicted. [68] Durang subsequently goes on to argue that “the representation of such historical subjects … impresses the mind with a love of country and brings pleasant memories back to the mind of age,” even as the Philadelphia stage here becomes “a normal institution to impart moral lessons in relaxation.” [69] We thus see in those dramatic offerings presented at the Walnut Street on Christmas night of 1829 contested representations of what Philadelphia is, contested representations of the work accomplished by its cultural institutions. Once more, Otter’s characteristic “set of rhetorical instabilities” is reconfigured here as a set of performative instabilities, as Philadelphia’s “spatial complexities and local urgencies” compel its dramatists to present the city “as an event, [as] the place where . . . civic identity [was] forged while the country and a transatlantic audience watched.” [70] William Penn also seems to have something in common with one of Stubbs’s several pleasure gardens: spaces on the cusps of things where cultural identity, “being intrinsically tied to the rural idyll, [to] simplicity, and innocence” feels itself to be challenged and even “supplanted by increasingly urban and modern ideas.” [71] It is this tension between rural simplicity and urban modernity—not to mention a related tension between the idealizing mission of art and its more subversive, populist vitality—that is on full display when we consider the double bill of William Penn and Doctor Faustus relative to the staging a few months later, of Doctor Foster in Philadelphia . The latter, which opened on 23 rd March 1830, is described as a “local burlesque parody” [72] of the Faustus tale, and represents a celebratory fortissimo relative to the symphony of unfolding, disruptive, and insurgent energies that we have been exploring. Certainly, there was nothing new in a burlesque treatment of Faustus , nor in the resituating of the good doctor’s medieval career within a bustling, contemporary metropolis; such treatments were already familiar to London theatre-goers, who had seen their first Faustus harlequinade as early as 1723. [73] What is unique about the Walnut Street’s treatment, however, is its determination to deploy the form as a way of seeing and enacting Philadelphia itself, utilizing as it does the sudden transformations and visual sleights-of-hand so characteristic of pantomime to destabilize any representation of the city as the gentlemanly, “distressingly regular” metropolis so famously bemoaned by Charles Dickens about a decade later. [74] The action begins in an “old times suburban schoolhouse in the vicinity of Philadelphia,” where Dr. Foster (played by Sam Chapman’s brother, William) first raises Mephistopheles, quickly shifting to “a view of the old Hall of Independence” peopled with “political loafers and office seekers.” Here a parade of rowdies apparently spoofed a popular song, “March, March, March Along Chestnut Street,” the scene reducing to ridicule one of the city’s most solemn sites, especially once a huckster appears to hawk Swain’s Panacea to “ladies, negroes, cripples and . . . Siamese boys.” [75] It is fairly easy to understand such a “graphic and miraculous representation” of lowlifes and the urban hoi polloi as an instance of what Dillon describes as “the local and embodied nature of the performative commons,” an embodiment imparting to an otherwise-invisible populace the enduring force of “possibilities . . . that can be mobilized at the site of ontic and mimetic intersection . . . in scenes of dissensus and epistemic disruption.” [76] In fact, what Durang calls “the old Hall of Independence”—a kind of national “performative commons”—had only quite recently been awarded this illustrious sobriquet, for it was the Marquis de Lafayette’s visit to the site upon his grand tour of the United States in 1824 that helped to shape the Philadelphia public’s growing awareness of the city’s history. As Nicholas Wainwright has noted, Lafayette’s official reception in the East Room of the State House brought the building itself “which had hitherto been accorded little reverence,” to the attention of the guarantors of Philadelphia’s cultural patrimony. [77] On that day a parade very different from the one described in Durang’s account of Doctor Foster passed before the State House. Beneath a triumphal arch some 24 feet high marched Lafayette’s military escort: 4000 cavalrymen, infantrymen, artillerists, and riflemen, along with 150 veterans of the Revolutionary War and a number of floats carrying several hundred cord-winders, rope-makers, weavers, shipbuilders, butchers, and coopers. [78] While few in the audience would have experienced the events of 1776, Lafayette’s parade had taken place less than six years before Doctor Foster was presented and would have thus been very much alive in civic memory. The parade of loafers and office-seekers, of hucksters and mountebanks and cripples, thus conflates, undermines, and destabilizes several of the most celebrated moments in Philadelphia civic memory by reclaiming the “performative commons,” while at the same time deflating the aesthetic aspirations of the Doctors Faustus presented just a few months earlier. High culture and momentous history are here reduced to dispute and ridicule, even as such ridicule opens up a space for an irreverent, and impertinent present—a present (and a city) that increasingly prided itself on a refusal to stand on ceremony. A subsequent transformation then hurls Foster into the midst of what we have already discovered to function as a signifier of robust, “chaotic,” and decidedly contemporary Philadelphia: an African American scene—specifically a religious meeting quickly expanding into a euphoric, disorderly “general melee.” [79] While we have only Durang’s performance reconstruction to work from, it would seem rather easy here to apply the lens offered to us by Eric Lott when attempting to grasp the multivalent semiotics of such a moment. This church celebration presided over by a “sable gemman” [sic] invites the Walnut Street’s predominately white audience both to participation and derision, to “disavowal or ridicule of the Other” as well as to “an interracial identification with it” [80] —the “Other” in this case almost certainly white actors in blackface, further destabilizing any one definitive reading of this performative moment. Despite the difficulty of determining Durang’s particular attitude here (patronizing affection or ridicule are only two options), the deployment of what Douglas A. Jones, Jr. has called “linguistic incompetence” in his description of the religious meeting (“sable gemman”) would seem to reinforce the “belief that African Americans were inherently lacking as speaking subjects and therefore unqualified for full freedom in the increasingly modern world.” [81] As Jones, Jr. points out, in the absence of slavery, culture was deployed by white Northerners as a strategy for keeping African Americans captive in a realm of “existential indeterminacy.” [82] Given the relatively large size of Philadelphia’s African American population, not to mention the city’s proximity to the slave-owning Southern states (the city’s upper classes were dominated by Copperheads), [83] such a strategy was particularly and characteristically fraught in the Quaker City. In the midst of such a discussion, it is difficult not to think of Pavel Petrovich Svinin’s famous rendering of Philadelphia’s Black Methodists Holding a Prayer Meeting , executed in watercolor and pen and ink sometime around 1813. This outdoor scene is equal parts ebullience and chaos; its depiction of the celebrants in what would appear to be a contagious moment of communal spiritual ecstasy is equal parts ridicule and fascination – the artist both identifying with and determinedly distancing himself from his subjects. Svinin thus may be said to refract and to reiterate Jones, Jr.’s “existential indeterminacy” in this work. With much less to go on, Durang’s tone (as well as Doctor Foster’s ) may very well reflect a similar fluidity, accomplishing the work of the “captive stage” in the slippery space between ridicule and subversive high-spirits, between racist mimicry and patronizing fascination. In the following scene, after Foster has escaped from the Arch Street Prison (where he had been incarcerated for attacking a local politician), we find ourselves on Prune Street, “next to the old jail wall,” where Foster “appears as Colonel Pluck of the Bloody Eighty-Fourth Regiment.” [84] This is a particularly dense moment of the pantomime, one which we can only understand by situating it within the city’s particular past and present. The “old jail wall” on Prune Street where Foster finds himself doubtless belongs to what was known as the Walnut Street Penitentiary, a structure that extended from Walnut to Prune Street and from Fifth Street to Sixth. Established in 1773, the prison had been subsequently transformed “from a simple holding place for those awaiting trial . . . into a place and instrument of punishment and reformation in and of itself, wherein the minds and bodies of criminals might be attuned to responsible work.” [85] In new construction undertaken in the 1790s, it was specified that there be added cells “for separate and solitary confinement,” thus inaugurating what would become perhaps the most distinctive feature of the so-called Pennsylvania System of prison reform. [86] The Arch Street Prison from which Foster has escaped represented a subsequent (and failed) attempt at reform; inaugurated in 1823, it proved a notoriously disagreeable place whose inmates suffered from an outbreak of cholera just weeks after the prison was opened. Peter P. Reed has commented upon the ways in which theatrical forms, and pantomime in particular, were put to use in the early Republic, pointing out how such entertainments allowed the “stagey low” to emerge from and destabilize “identity formations” and “disciplinary practices of Atlantic modernity.” [87] Here Doctor Foster deploys the quick transitions and transformations characteristic of pantomime to destabilize the often-misplaced idealism and moral pretentiousness that compromised Pennsylvania penal reform in the fraught transition from theory to praxis. Neither the Arch Street nor the Walnut Street prisons can contain nor forestall the hijinks of the protean Dr. Foster (at once a Philadelphia schoolteacher, Doctor Faustus himself, and now Colonel Pluck) as the sheer performative gusto of the character makes him impervious to imprisonment and utterly resistant to the sort of “responsible work” that the penal system was supposed to engender in all those who were locked away. Instead of turning to thrift and industry, Foster turns to mock aria, belting out “It’s my Delight to Learn Them to Write in our City,” before the scene shifts “slap dash” to yet another exterior, where Foster raises visions of specters from steamy washtubs. [88] Disciplinary practices (and institutions) are not for him. Foster’s appearance as Colonel Pluck also situates the pantomime as an act of phenomenological vandalism carried out against Philadelphia’s decorous, gentlemanly self-image as propagated and circulated by the city’s elite. Since the passage of the Militia Act in 1792, Philadelphia workingmen had bristled at the requirement that all able-bodied white males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five serve with local, self-governing militia detachments. While elite volunteer units (disparagingly called “Silk Stocking Companies”) formed the upper tier of Pennsylvania’s militia during the first half of the nineteenth century, the public militia companies ranked far below these in civic esteem. All eligible men unable to afford private company membership were required to enroll in such public companies, where they could expect only the poorest sort of training, often at the hands of indifferent or incompetent officers. Taken from work without compensation and often fined for non-compliance, these men also had to equip themselves at their own expense. [89] The Northern Liberties 84 th Regiment was one such company, and in 1825 its members elected John Pluck, a hostler or perhaps a tavern keeper described in contemporary accounts as bow-legged and hunchbacked, as their colonel. On Muster Day, in an attempt to “irritate middlebrow spectators with a drawn-out parody of the militia system,” [90] Pluck led the men of the 84 th in what the Saturday Evening Post described as a “Grand Military Farce.” [91] He was “mounted on a spavined white nag, behatted with a huge chapeau-de-bras , [and] a . . . woman’s bonnet . . . burlap pants clinched up with a belt and enormous buckle [as well as] a giant sword parodying ceremonial military dress.” [92] Pluck quickly became a national celebrity, appearing on stages in New York, Boston, Providence, Albany, and Richmond before returning to Philadelphia and finding himself court-martialed. Sean DuComb tells us that the erstwhile Colonel’s “name and likeness circulated widely for more than a decade after his national tour,” though by 1832 Pluck would undergo a transformation from an “agent of parody” into “an object of contempt, [a] symbol of racialized disorder” conflated with African American organizers of annual parades anticipating (and later celebrating) the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. [93] Intriguingly, Doctor Foster seems to represent Colonel Pluck in mid-career, a parody of Philadelphia elite pretension and “Silk Stocking” affectedness rather than a burlesque of African American aspiration (indeed, the only musical number that is not explicitly identified as a parody in Durang’s description of Doctor Foster is a serenade performed on the Kent Bugle by Philadelphia’s celebrated African-American maestro, Frank Johnson). Here an 1825 Muster Day lampoon of proud militiamen on display is replicated onstage (rather in the manner of Richard Schechner’s “twice-behaved behavior”) to produce both a simulacrum of an earlier event as well as a further destabilization of aristocratic Philadelphia at the hands of the “stagey low.” In eighteenth-century afterpieces like The Necromancer , as John O’Brien points out, when Harlequin Faustus is at last taken to Hell, a convocation of pagan deities typically arrives for a concluding masque, the presence of the gods “a sign that order has been restored to a cosmos disrupted by [Faustus’] illicit magic.” [94] When Dr. Foster is carried off to the infernal regions, however, the effect and intention seem very different, the audience enjoying a grand and most sudden ingenious change of [Carter’s Livery Stables] into frying pandemonium. Chorus of fryers, bakers, brewers, bailers, roasters, stewards and broilers [crying] “Put him in the pot & make him hot. Hot pot, make him hot.” [95] The Walnut Street’s burlesque refuses us a sense of order restored from on high. For it is not the gods, but a combustible and uproarious gang of kitchen laborers who take the stage—managing to punish Foster while at the same time declining to resolve the silliness and visual anarchy of the evening into anything like regularity and order. We are left here in a space halfway between charivari and street party, a space where “anything can happen and it probably will”— Hellzapoppin’ on the streets of the Quaker City. Indeed, Durang’s closing remarks concerning the play point to the final transformation that Doctor Foster was able to accomplish. “This truly ridiculous burlesque upon the drama of ‘Faustus,’ the production of which had caused so much bitter rivalry between the Arch and the Walnut houses, to both of their detriment, now created much fun and laughter.” [96] The play reimagines Philadelphia itself as a kind of urban Cockaigne, a chaotic city of grotesque yet thoroughly delightful anarchic misrule and semiotic plenitude—exorcizing the specter of morally edifying (and financially ruinous) high drama from both the Arch Street and the Walnut Street houses, clearing a space on the Philadelphia stage for the delight of the masses rather than their moral edification. We are here a long way indeed from Penn’s Greene Country Town, from his Great Elm Tree, and from the good ship Welcome , just as we are a long way from the street scenes created by William Russell Birch—from a city characterized by nostalgia, genteel regularity, and a “prosaic despotism of right angles.” In the Philadelphia of Sam Chapman and Robert Montgomery Bird, a city that had only just begun to see and to perform itself as such, the angles are forever crooked and the conduct provocatively irregular. Conclusion When Philadelphia audiences of the early Jacksonian era beheld for the first time their (very contemporary) city reflected back to them from the stages of Philadelphia’s several playhouses, they encountered something deliberately other than the rural idyll of Penn’s Holy Experiment as well as something deliberately alternative to the eighteenth-century Shrine of Liberty. The civic culture of the Quaker City was at an inflection point, and Philadelphians went to the theatre in part to experience the reworking, the re-presentation, of that civic identity in performative time. What they found was a heterogenous and volatile, dangerous yet exuberantly modern metropolis—a place of “noise and riot” characterized by depravity and violence as well as by a raw and free-wheeling absurdity, by the grotesque as well as the gleeful. Indeed, plays like Mail Robbers and Doctor Foster in Philadelphia invited audiences to apprehend not just the “stagy low” but the theatres themselves as sites where contemporaneity was being constructed—with the playhouses and their managers often engaged in self-referential sleights-of-hand. Here the relationship between signified and signifier becomes a shifty and promiscuous one, whether deliberately (dueling Doctor Faustus productions become the singular travesty of Doctor Foster , with Philadelphia and her theatres themselves as protagonists), or by semiotic happenstance (an actor-manager suffers a mortal blow for the crime of bad taste, while the somehow nobler though more dangerous Porter who inspired his performance faces execution on the gallows). For its part, Robert Montgomery Bird’s City Looking Glass seems to have inaugurated the sort of semiotic rough-and-tumble characteristic of a thoroughly reimagined urban-cultural landscape. Here we find ourselves for the first time in a space where Quaker earnestness and solemnity dissolve into the outrageous and the preposterous, where street scenes reveal neither “wearisome regularity” nor patriot parades but instead crooked alleyways peopled by morally-misshapen lowlifes whose machinations drive the action of the play and who seem intent upon finishing off once and for all any lingering sense of Philadelphia propriety or the idealism that supposedly characterized the city’s founding. Consensus becomes dissensus, with Philadelphia placed on display as a site for the contestation of identities. The City of Brotherly Love had stepped through the looking glass, and the streets now firmly belonged neither to sober Square Toes nor to stalwart patriots, but to the rascals, the reprobates and the scoundrels. References [1] Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 124. [2] Ibid., 109. [3] Ibid., 8-9. [4] Bird, City Looking Glass (Philadelphia: 1828), 4. [5] Ibid. [6] “A Mirror of the Times: A History of the Mirror Metaphor in Journalism” Journalism Studies , vol. 12, no. 5 (2011): 578. [7] Samuel Otter, Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 8. [8] Ibid. [9] Ibid. [10] Francis Courtney. Wemyss, Twenty-Six Years of the Life of an Actor and Manager (New York: Burgess, Stringer and Co., 1847), 84–5. [11] Peter P. Reed, Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 133. [12] Ibid., 137. [13] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 11. [14] Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1949), 260–61. [15] Hamilton, Men and Manners in America (New York: Augustus M. Keeley, 1968), 337–38. [16] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 73. [17] Bird, City Looking Glass , 6. [18] Ibid., 66. [19] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 88. [20] Bird, City Looking Glass , 18. [21] Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649 – 1849 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 3. [22] Bird. City Looking Glass , 114. [23] Simon Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 122–3. [24] Ibid. [25] Bird, City Looking Glass , 48. [26] Ibid., 49. [27] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 105–6. [28] Ibid., 87. [29] Christian DuComb, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 60. [30] Douglas A. Jones, Jr., The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 34. [31] Ibid. [32] Bird, City Looking Glass , 45. [33] Nash, First City , 147. [34] John Fanning Watson, Annals of Philadelphia: Being a Collection of Memoirs, Anecdotes, and Incidents of the City and Its Inhabitants (Philadelphia: 1830), 479. [35] Bird, City Looking Glass , 30. [36] Ibid., 52. [37] Gayard Wilmore, ed., African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 7. [38] Watson, Annals of Philadelphia , 479. [39] Bird, City Looking Glass , 21. [40] Columbia Star and Christian Index (Philadelphia: 15 May 1830), 318. [41] Michael Feldberg, The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study of Ethnic Conflict (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975), 4, 13. [42] Charles Durang, The Philadelphia Stage from 1749 – 1850 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch, 1854-55), vol. III, 243. [43] Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans , 286. [44] Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin . INCOMPLETE CITATION, (Philadelphia: 15 May h , 1830). [45] Nash, First City , 157. [46] Columbia Star and Christian Index. INCOMPLETE CITATION, 318. [47] Naomi J. Stubbs, Cultivating National Identity through Performance: American Pleasure Gardens and Entertainment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 54. [48] Ibid. [49] Quoted in Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 275. [50] Ibid. [51] American Sentinel and Mercantile Advertiser (Philadelphia: 3 July 1830). [52] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 243. [53] Reed, Rogue Performances , 10. [54] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 243. [55] Reed, Rogue Performances , 5. [56] Ibid. [57] Oscar Weglin, Early American Plays, 1774 – 1830: A Compilation of the Titles of Plays and Dramatic Poems Written by Authors Born or Residing in North America Previous to 1830 (New York: The Literary Collector Press, 1905), 21. [58] Francis Courtney Wemyss, Theatrical Biography, or The Life of an Actor Manager (Glasgow: Griffin & Co., 1848), 160. [59] The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 243. [60] Ibid. [61] Reed. Rogue Performances , 186. [62] Ibid., 15. [63] Wemyss, Theatrical Biography , 153. [64] William Wood, Personal Recollections of the Stage (Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, 1855), 353. [65] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 266. [66] Ibid. [67] Wemyss, Theatrical Biography , 154. [68] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [69] Ibid. [70] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 14. [71] Stubbs, Cultivating National Identity through Performance , 59. [72] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [73] John O’Brien, Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1600 – 1760 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 110. [74] Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation , ed. Patricia Ingham (New York: Penguin, 2000), 104. [75] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [76] Dillon, New World Drama , 29–30. [77] Nicholas B. Wainwright, “The Age of Nicholas Biddle: 1825–1841” in Philadelphia: a 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982), 301. [78] Rosemarie K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America , 1825–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 14. [79] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [80] Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 124. [81] Jones, Jr., The Captive Stage , 49. [82] Ibid. [83] Nash., First City , 231. [84] The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [85] Newman, Embodied History , 10. [86] LeRoy B. DePuy, “The Walnut Street Prison: Pennsylvania’s First Penitentiary.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies . vol. 18, no. 2 (1951): 131. [87] Reed, Rogue Performances , 5. [88] Durang, Philadelphia Stage , vol III, 271. [89] Nash, First City , 201. [90] DuComb, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 90. [91] Saturday Evening Post . (Philadelphia: INCOMPLETE CITATION AND DATE FORMAT 21 May, 1825). [92] Susan G. Davis, “The Career of Colonel Pluck: Folk Drama and Public Protest in 19 th Century Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography , vol. 109 no. 2 (April 1985): 188. [93] Ducomb, Haunted City , 89–91. [94] O’Brien, Harlequin Britain , 110. [95] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [96] Ibid. Footnotes About The Author(s) RAYMOND SARACENI teaches in the Center for Liberal Education at Villanova University. He is a company member of Iron Age Theatre and holds a Ph.D. in drama from Tufts University. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “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:

Shane Strawbridge 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 A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Shane Strawbridge By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams . Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. The book opens with a quote from Tennessee Williams: “truth is something you need to deserve,” a statement that volume editor Katherine Weiss asserts “fl[ies] in the face of the imaginary worlds so many of his characters create” (1). From this nucleus emerges A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams , analysis of four plays that attempts to reconcile the contradiction between Williams’s “truth” and his characters’ fictions. The second release in Bloomsbury’s A Student Handbook to the Plays of… series, the text aims to provide a study guide to the most studied dramas from this celebrated American playwright. In her introduction, Weiss lays the dramaturgical framework from which the rest of the volume springs. She posits that the plays from the late 1960s and after lack “the tension and the need to express topics that were considered taboos,” leaving students and scholars to focus on Williams’s early works that explore topics such as “ageing, loneliness, and time’s devastation” (7). In the chapters that follow, scholars Stephen J. Bottoms, Patricia Hearn, Michael Hooper, Philip C. Kolin, and Weiss herself offer in-depth investigations of Tennessee Williams’s most produced and critically favored plays, The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). Following the introduction, the volume divides into four sections dedicated to plot, commentary, production history, and notes for each one of Williams’s major plays. The plot breakdowns vary in length from Streetcar ’s four-page summary to Glass Menagerie ’s eighteen-page dissection, divided scene by scene. The dramaturgical commentaries connect the plays to contextual history, culture, Williams’s biography, and contemporary playwrights and their works. These sections also offer insights into character arcs and specific actions in the plays’ pivotal moments. In addition, the scholars clarify their arguments by examining the dramatic structure and language of each play. Commentaries conclude with a history of significant productions and adaptations on stage and screen. The notes section for each play reads like a glossary of words and phrases that a layperson might find useful in understanding the plays, and that a theatre scholar or practitioner might use for closer study. Finally, a list of questions for further research opens up opportunities for more in-depth thinking. Stephen J. Bottoms, who specializes in contemporary theatre, probes The Glass Menagerie. Bottoms notes the usefulness of looking at Menagerie as “a series of inter-related paintings, each one of which presents a key component in a much bigger narrative, and which together build up to create an impression—but perhaps not a conclusive understanding—of that ‘whole story’” (19). As such, he breaks down each scene into multiple parts dealing with each character’s role in that scene, a specific hour, or a sub-title (such as Scene Five’s “Annunciation”), lending itself to the “impression” of the scene as a whole, a sort of pointillist view of the play. Bottoms suggests that had Menagerie not been the success that it was, Williams would never have achieved the sort of recognition that allowed study of him as one of the great American playwrights. Patricia Hern and Michael Hooper, who frequently collaborate on Williams scholarship, tackle A Streetcar Named Desire. The crux of their chapter lies in the “close connection between [Williams’s] writing and the circumstances of his own life” (89). For example, Hern and Hooper reference Williams’s need to hide from pain and sorrow while searching for contentment and happiness—no matter the cost to those around them—as a piece of Blanche DuBois’s “fall from grace” (92). Closely reading specific textual examples, they also link the works of Williams to playwrights such as Chekhov, Strindberg, Ibsen, and Miller, as well as authors Edgar Allan Poe and D. H. Lawrence. Author of several books about Tennessee Williams, Philip C. Kolin contributes to this volume commentary and notes on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof . His synopsis contains, like the play itself, act breaks, electing not to divide each act into sub-sections for readability. Two levels of history, “the long tradition of ante- and post-bellum (Southern) customs and their literary expression and the more recent history of the 1950s in American political life” (177) form the foundation of Kolin’s analysis. After glossing these two historical periods, he discusses the structure, drafts, and language of the play, though most of his work centers on the nuances of each character and how they “reveal various sides of Williams’s own personality,” from the “melancholy Brick” to the “sexually frustrated Maggie” (190). Kolin makes character comparisons across the Williams canon: he refers to Big Daddy as an “older Stanley Kowalski” (197), parallels Maggie’s demeanor with that of Serafina in The Rose Tattoo instead of with Amanda or Blanche, and aligns Brick’s “deliberate cruelty” (192) of rejecting Skipper with the behavior of Blanche. Sweet Bird of Youth falls to Weiss. Her summation adheres more to the model of Kolin in providing a broad overview of the events of the play as opposed to running commentary. Using examples from Williams’s play and extra-theatrical writings, Weiss addresses several themes including “The Catastrophe of Success,” “Preaching Hate,” and “The Korean War.” She evaluates the play’s structure, language, and style before analyzing the characters that Williams was “never quite satisfied with” (252). In her estimation, however, Weiss contends that they are “much more complicated than Williams realised [sic]” (253). The section ends with not only a glossary and questions for further consideration but also a list of additional resources. This handbook casts a wide net to capture all definitions of students, as per the title. If only the same wide net had been cast for the definition of “plays.” By limiting the evaluation to Williams’s four best-known and commercially successful plays, the volume leaves a desire for more study, particularly into those works that do not usually receive the same level of attention. Yet Weiss can hardly be faulted for not including the entirety of Williams’s extensive canon. Practicality and familiarity trump a comprehensive study, but one can hope that this will generate more investigation into his works. Although there are other studies of these texts available, what Weiss has done here is sculpt a text that, despite its limitations, provides an in-depth primer to one of the United States’ most decorated playwrights. Ultimately, A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams will be useful for students and professors who are searching for an easily navigable and digestible analysis of Williams and his early work. References Footnotes About The Author(s) SHANE STRAWBRIDGE Texas Tech University 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.

IT'S A PARTY!! presents Prelude 2024 Closing Party at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Prelude 2024 Closing Party IT'S A PARTY!! 9pm Sunday, October 20, 2024 The Tank, 312 West 36th Street RSVP Join us to celebrate Prelude with a closing party at The Tank! Additional details to be announced soon. LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on