Watch QUEENDOM by Agniia Galdanova at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. Like a young David Bowie from another planet, the whole world is one giant catwalk for intrepid 21-year-old queer artist Gena. She grew up in the far reaches of Russia, in a town built on top of an old gulag camp. Today, she stages her radical performances in supermarkets, metro stations and in the middle of Moscow streets in an alternative protest against the way LGBTQ+ people are treated in Putin’s extremely conservative Russia. People shout at her, and Gena calmly responds. With never-failing support from her grandmother, she acts out all the creatures that live inside her through her spectacular costumes, which she often makes out of tape and junk. Agniia Galdanova’s beautiful and atmospheric film is not so much a portrait as it is a direct cinematic extension of Gena’s inner universe. In other words, a film in the field between art and activism, between documentary and science fiction, and between an old and a young Russia. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents QUEENDOM At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Agniia Galdanova Documentary, Performance Art This film will be screened in-person on May 16th About The Film Country United States / France Language Russian, English Running Time 98 minutes Year of Release 2023 Like a young David Bowie from another planet, the whole world is one giant catwalk for intrepid 21-year-old queer artist Gena. She grew up in the far reaches of Russia, in a town built on top of an old gulag camp. Today, she stages her radical performances in supermarkets, metro stations and in the middle of Moscow streets in an alternative protest against the way LGBTQ+ people are treated in Putin’s extremely conservative Russia. People shout at her, and Gena calmly responds. With never-failing support from her grandmother, she acts out all the creatures that live inside her through her spectacular costumes, which she often makes out of tape and junk. Agniia Galdanova’s beautiful and atmospheric film is not so much a portrait as it is a direct cinematic extension of Gena’s inner universe. In other words, a film in the field between art and activism, between documentary and science fiction, and between an old and a young Russia. In press notes About The Artist(s) in press notes Get in touch with the artist(s) igormyakotin@gmail.com and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Bradley Stephenson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 2 Visit Journal Homepage Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter Bradley Stephenson By Published on April 23, 2015 Download Article as PDF From 1892 until 1954, Ellis Island was the gateway for immigrants seeking American citizenship. Over twelve million individuals passed through the federal immigration station, underwent rushed and haphazard examinations, and eventually entered the country. Many had their names changed and ethnicities homogenized. But many thousands more were rejected for various reasons, including the likelihood that an individual would become a public charge. Historian Kim Neilsen has argued that this clause “clearly assumed that bodies considered defective rendered them unable to perform wage-earning labor.” [1] Physical or cognitive differences were literally marked in chalk on people’s backs as they passed by the inspectors, and markings such as PH (physically handicapped), X (possible mental illness), and S (senility) were grounds for rejection and deportation. [2] Strong, able bodies capable of working independently and earning wages were considered crucial criteria for American citizenship. Such assumptions of ability and dependency in relation to American identity have permeated American culture and artistic cultural representations to the extent that they have developed to mythic proportions. However, many artists are beginning to challenge these cultural assumptions and the oppressive structures which undergird them. D.W. Gregory is a Washington D.C. based playwright who has written dozens of plays, many of which are set in rural and working-class America. She is a resident playwright at New Jersey Repertory Co. and a member of Playwrights Center in Minneapolis. Gregory is also a teaching artist and founding member of The Playwrights’ Gymnasium in D.C., and she has worked as a theatre critic for The Washington Post . Her plays have garnered numerous awards and have been developed and performed throughout the United States at theatres including New Jersey Repertory Co., Actors Theatre of Louisville, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Co., and others. She conducted an interview with Caridad Svich that was recently published in the collection 24 Gun Control Plays published by NoPassport theatre alliance. [3] Drawing upon her working class roots, her plays often explore “the disconnect between the dream and reality of American blue collar experience ,” and also “frequently present an unseen offstage character as well – the economic and political forces that shape the individuals on stage.” [4] In addition to predominantly female protagonists, disability is a powerful force that permeates her plays in unique ways that challenge traditional representations of disability in drama and can offer up new paradigms for representation, understanding, and inclusion of different forms of embodiment. D.W. Gregory’s 2003 play The Good Daughter , originally produced by New Jersey Rep and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, is a story of love and rebellion set in rural Missouri between 1916 and 1924. Critic Bob Rendell described the world premier as “a multifaceted, thought provoking traditional American play which stirs echoes of Eugene O’Neill;” others have noted similarities to William Inge’s Picnic . [5] The play also elicits echoes of King Lear as it tells “the story of Ned Owen, a pious Missouri farmer whose only hope is to see his daughters settled and his farm pass to the capable hands of one of their sons.” [6] Ned is a widower with three daughters, aged fourteen, nineteen, and twenty-one at the start of the play. The eldest daughter, Esther, survived childhood polio and now walks with a limp. Rudy Bird, a shy neighboring farmer, comes to the Owen estate to propose to Cassie, the beautiful middle daughter who has just fallen for Matt McCall, the dashing and worldly merchant trying to convince the locals to buy into a government-funded levee project to prevent floods in the Missouri River. Over the course of eight years and a great war, daughters leave home, shun suitors, get married, and get pregnant, yet nothing happens the way Ned wants it to. Highlighted with Brechtian super-titles, peppered with bible verses, and bookended by torrential floods, The Good Daughter is an epic yet intimate family tale of “a part of the country where change comes slowly, and at great price” (iii). [7] Ned’s desire for “capable” male heirs becomes a dominant trope in the play that influences how Ned treats his three daughters, their suitors, and the land itself, and also how those objects respond to their treatment and find new expressions of agency. This essay analyzes how D.W. Gregory explodes the myths of independence and the American Dream by subverting traditional dramatic representations of disability in The Good Daughter , exploring the intersections of gender, dependency, disability, and the environment. The notion of an American identity can be thought to have formally begun with the Declaration of Independence. This was the first formal, public statement about who Americans are as a collective people: we are independent. [8] As such, the notion of dependency has been anathema to American identity since the arrival of the pilgrims. The rags-to-riches characters of Horatio Alger earned their mythical status and their financial rewards by hard work and determination, not asking for help. Yet “dependency” itself, some would argue, is an ideological term that shapes social perspectives just as much as describing them. [9] Some political conservatives argue that government entitlement programs are equivalent to hand-outs and lead to a dependency that is detrimental and contrary to the spirit of America. [10] Historian and political scholar Rickie Solinger claims that dependency, as epitomized by welfare programs, “is the dirtiest word in the United States today.” [11] To be dependent on another person for survival or day-to-day functioning is a social embarrassment and a cultural flaw that needs to be eradicated, or at least hidden away from public sight. [12] Independent American thinking holds that dependent people have no need to be educated, either, since they have no chance of success in American life , so it is no surprise that people with disabilities generally received no education, were hidden from view (if the family was able to afford such institutionalization), and if they could not be medically “cured,” then they were kicked out and forced to be beggars. The result was a great cultural anxiety towards public disability. Disability scholar Alison Kafer explores some of these cultural anxieties surrounding disability in American culture, suggesting that disability (especially when coupled with female-ness) is viewed in the United States as “an unredeemable difference with no place in visions of the future.” [13] To be disabled, and especially to be a disabled woman, was to be disqualified from the American dream and its notions of progress, independence, and ability. This worldview was especially powerful during the early twentieth century, the age of immigration, and the time in which D.W. Gregory set her play. In The Good Daughter , Ned Owen’s obsession with hard work, moral purity, and traditional family hierarchy is representative of an American conservatism that relocates the American Dream into a more personalized vision of happiness and home. When James Truslow Adams coined the phrase “the American dream” in 1931, he explained it as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.” [14] This notion of physical and mental ability as prerequisite for opportunity also assumed maleness and whiteness and was, for the most part, unquestioned throughout most of American history. Douglas Baynton has observed how this primacy of ability has been central to the justification of inequality in American history. Accusations that women were incapable of being educated or that racial minorities had smaller, defective brains are based upon the assumption that the white, able-bodied, heterosexual male was both “normal” and ideal. [15] In most cases, Baynton explains, the defense against these injustices was to argue, for example, that women are strong enough to be educated or that racial diversity is not correlative with deficient brains. However, neither the oppressor nor the oppressed ever questioned the assumption that lack of disability is prerequisite for participation in civic life. The question was only who was or was not able enough to have social and political rights. Until the disability rights movements of the late twentieth century, lack of disability was always considered part and parcel to full citizenship in America. It is not surprising, then, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt would not be allowed to be seen publicly in his wheelchair. As Paul Longmore describes it, “The capacity to function as a true American, an independent moral agent, is predicated upon physical and economic self-sufficiency.” [16] The disabled were not invited. Although we still have room to grow, Americans have come a long way in terms of who gets to participate in civic life, but it is within this pre-civil rights cultural understanding of disability that Gregory sets her play. Painted on the “rich canvas of our [American] history,” Gregory’s characterizations in The Good Daughter have been described by critics as both complex and compelling. [17] Since losing his wife during the birth of their third daughter, Ned Owen stayed focused on his biblical Christian faith, tending his farm, and protecting his daughters the best way he knows how. He is a deeply flawed but loving man; he is no villain. Although Ned fits rather neatly into classical tragic constructions, his eldest daughter Esther, disabled by childhood polio, does not. Victoria Ann Lewis and other scholars have noted the use of disability in drama and literature as a character trait that immediately identifies a disabled character as either victim or villain. [18] These portrayals of disability – Tiny Tim, Captain Hook, Laura Wingfield, Darth Vader, Charlie Babbit, and many others – stem from a medicalized understanding whereby disability is a flaw to be cured, overcome, or eliminated. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder argue that the use of disability in this way in literature and drama as “an opportunistic metaphorical device” affects the way that people living with disability live and understand their lives. [19] Metaphorical representations of disability affirm and shape discriminatory attitudes from pity to euthanasia. According to Lewis, “the metaphor of disability has been so successful in the imaginative arena that it now functions as real.” [20] The modern cultural imagination now perceives disability in life the way it has been depicted in literature, that people with disabilities can either be heroic sufferers or bitter cripples, or perhaps objects of inspiration when they overcome their disability to succeed in life. D.W. Gregory, however, resists these traditional tropes in her portrayal of disability. While Esther’s polio has given her a limp, it has not reduced her to a metaphor within the play. In act one, during a dinner scene, Ned is overly protective of Esther, the oldest daughter, age twenty-one at the start of the play. Though Esther has prepared the meal on her own for the family with no assistance, Ned orders Cassie, the rebellious middle daughter, to fetch him and Esther a “cuppa water” so as not to over exert her older sister (19). Though Cassie makes backhanded comments suggesting that everyone in the family is more than able to get their own beverage or take care of their own business, Ned insists that Cassie rehearse her domestic activities, including ostensibly taking care of the weak, since he believes Cassie is shortly to become engaged. The subtle protectiveness towards Esther is a sign that Ned perceives her as weak and in need of special care, or rather, in need of his pity towards her. Scholars and historians like Paul Longmore and Joseph Shapiro have thoroughly described the role that pity has played in the charity-driven marginalization of people with disabilities. [21] Ned treats Cassie the toughest since he sees her as the most able to perform her role: marry and have children. Ned’s special treatment of Esther could be perceived as favoritism or privilege of the elder or favorite child, but eventually it becomes clear that Gregory is crafting his patriarchal, ableist behavior as motivated by fear and pity not only towards Esther’s disability, but also to all three of his daughters. In act two, seven years later, there is a similar dinner scene, but the relationships have shifted significantly. Esther is still living at home and tending the house, but she also holds down a part time job in a local store. Rachel, the youngest daughter, now twenty-one years old, is married and very pregnant. Ned now behaves overly protective towards his pregnant daughter rather than Esther. Since Cassie ran away seven years ago at the end of the first act, and Esther is still unfit for marriage in his opinion, Rachel is his last hope at fulfilling his American dream and having someone (male) to pass his farm on to when he dies. Yet it is not just an effort at protecting the unborn child. Rachel’s mother died in childbirth – a loss Ned has mourned for over twenty years – and he recognizes how potentially deadly a pregnancy can be. Gregory makes the subtle connection between Esther’s and Rachel’s disability in a brief exchange among all three sisters. Cassie comments to Rachel: CASSIE : Such a change in your life, havin’ a baby. Someone dependin’ on you for everythin’. And what if you ain’t fit for it? RACHEL : Who says I ain’t fit for it? CASSIE : I didn’t mean – ESTHER ( cutting her off ) Rachel is as fit as anybody I know. (76) Esther recognizes the perception that both she and her pregnant sister are unfit for independent living and quickly cuts off the accusation. The infantilization and pity inherent in dependency is part of the American perception towards disability as weakness and flaw. There is even some contemporary debate and controversy about the consideration that pregnancy might be considered a temporary disability for purposes of insurance claims, discrimination practices, and/or parking places. [22] In any case, whether or not pregnancy is legally or socially considered a disability, Rachel eventually lashes out at the all-consuming nature of the pregnancy: “The baby, the baby, that’s all I ever hear is the baby” (92); she feels as if her life has become the condition itself. Ned considers the pregnant Rachel to be unable to adequately care for herself, and as such she is in need of his charitable protection. Ned is exhibiting what Lewis calls a kind of “colonial missionary attitude toward the disabled subject” that is reflective of a “larger social pattern in which the non-disabled expert […] controls the life options of the disabled person.” [23] Ned feels that he knows best and must control the actions and behaviors all three of his daughters for their own good, since he sees them as impaired and unable to do so themselves. This behavior stems from the terrifying prospect raised by disability that humans might not be in control of their own destinies. As Longmore puts it, “Disability imperils the American myth of the sovereignty of the self.” [24] If the story stopped there, if the daughters capitulated to their father’s demands, Ned’s victimizing behavior would simply be another portrayal of ableist American colonialism and the use of disability as narrative metaphor to justify oppression masked as benevolence. But Gregory does not stop there. Cassie returns from her self-imposed exile and Rachel offers her some tea, but Ned objects, saying, “‘Rachel. Let Esther do that. Rachel.’ Rachel ignores him and brings the tea tray ” (65). In this brief act of defiance, Rachel momentarily reclaims her own subjectivity. It is a very subtle move, but in doing so Rachel defies the able-bodied expert, the doctors and telethon hosts who think they know what is best for disabled people and how to cure or protect them. However, a glass of tea does not a cultural revolution make; and the sexism of Ned expecting a woman to serve him tea still remains relatively unchallenged. These small acts of subjectivity, of asserting that being disabled is not the same as being useless, incapable, unfit, helpless, or voiceless, of claiming “nothing about us without us,” these small acts are the shifting of stones that can eventually lead to moving mountains. [25] In The Good Daughter , Ned believes deeply that independent capability (read ability) is at the heart of a Bible-based American life. He quotes liberally from the Christian Bible throughout the play and never strays from his able-bodied valuations of home, hearth, and hard work. Ned soon discovers that these abelist assumptions are not fully ingrained in his three daughters. Esther has taken over many of the homemaking responsibilities since her mother died fourteen years earlier. Though she has a mild flirtation with Rudy Bird, the neighboring tenant farmer, Ned assumes that Esther’s disability essentially renders her unfit for marriage or her own family: NED : Esther ain’t never gonna marry. You know that. CASSIE : She ain’t so bad lookin’ if she’d just smile once in a while. NED : No man gonna marry a crippled girl. Man wants a girl can give him a family. CASSIE : Not every man. NED : Any man worth havin’. Now, that’s a painful thing for her to accept. But it’s a hard, sad fact of this world. Just like it’s a hard, sad fact of this world that a girl who puts off settlin’ on one fella or another pretty soon ends up with no fella at all. (24) Cassie, the rebellious middle daughter, does not perceive Esther’s limp as a disqualifier for marriage, nor does Cassie think that marriage and childbearing are the only viable life options for a woman in the new century, but Ned takes the assumption that Disability historian Paul Longmore has critiqued, “that disability corrupts one’s capacity for responsible choices.” [26] Solinger agrees and argues that dependency, especially in women, is seen as “inconsistent with sensible choices.” [27] Ned is insistent on instilling his patriarchal version of common sense and teaching what he thinks are the truths of life: that every woman needs a man, and crippled girls can’t produce a family. Thus Cassie needs to settle down and start a family – since Esther cannot do so and the youngest daughter, Rachel, is still a little too young – so that Ned’s version of the American dream can be fulfilled and passed on to an able-bodied, male heir. Ned’s views and behavior represent the way ableist attitudes can establish and reinforce barriers that are disabling. This social model of disability – that regardless of impairments or physical difference, one only becomes disabled when social constructions or physical barriers (such as lack of curb cuts or accessible transportation) prevent one from equal participation – is a socially significant mode of understanding disability, one that provides an important corrective to more oppressive and problematic medical models. The social model serves to implicate society in the nature of disability, calling for reasonable accommodations so that everyone can engage with society independently regardless of differential embodiment. Many scholars, including Tobin Siebers, are critical of a purely social model, arguing that it does not pay enough attention to the lived realities of different bodies. [28] In The Good Daughter , the behavior of Ned’s daughters is a critique of a purely conceived social model (as well as moral or medical models) by bringing more attention to the reality of their interdependence without ignoring the power of ableist expectations to impede social agency. In this way, Gregory is perhaps resignifying independence in ways similar to Ed Roberts and the early disability rights activists of the 1970s, changing the definition of independence to mean what is possible for you with the right assistance. Gregory’s representations and explorations of disability in The Good Daughter can thus influence how we understand the nature of independence itself by challenging Ned’s ideology of ability. Ned’s assumption that disability makes Esther incapable of bearing children and having a family represents the desexualization of disability that is prominent in American culture. Many scholars have noted and explored the way people with disabilities have been desexualized throughout American history. [29] From the forced sterilization of people with cognitive and developmental disabilities and the eugenics movements of the early twentieth century to assumptions that young women paralyzed in a car crash will no longer need her birth control pills (since what “normal” guy would want to sleep with a paraplegic?), the relationship between sex and disability has been anxiously ignored at best and surgically outlawed at worst. [30] As recent as 2010, a young couple was married in New York state, but because they are living in a state-sanctioned group home and have mental disabilities, they are not allowed to share a bedroom (lawsuits by the couple’s parents are still pending). [31] Abby Wilkerson notes how “a group’s sexual status tends to reflect and reinforce its broader political and social status.” [32] Sexual agency is thus correlative with political agency and respectable social standing. In Ned’s perspective, Esther’s body has been physically and culturally pathologized by her polio. In the eyes of her father (who is representative of an ableist American culture), her marked body is inherently flawed and no longer fit for sexual participation in marriage, or, by extension, any subjective participation in American culture outside the protective enclave of her father’s home. Since Esther is viewed as unable to marry and have children, she also cannot fulfill what Ned believes is God’s plan for her gender. Ned’s deep faith contributes to his fears that his middle daughter, Cassie, might also become lost in the same stigmatized state of childlessness, so he forces her to read a Bible passage from 1 Timothy 2:14-15. “Adam was not deceived. But the woman bein’ deceived was in the transgression […] Notwithstandin’, she shall be saved by childbearin’, if they continue in faith, charity and holiness with sobriety” (25). Cassie is hesitant as she reads, yet she still submits to her father’s patriarchy at this early point in the play. This bible verse is Ned’s warning to Cassie that in order to avoid Esther’s tragic condition, Cassie must fall in line and submit to male authority, marry, and have children. Otherwise she cannot be saved, just like a desexualized and physically disabled Esther cannot be saved. Ned’s ableism has not only desexualized and pathologized Esther’s body, but it has also damned her to hell. In this regard, disability is both socially and morally constructed, and Ned sees Cassie’s rebelliousness and desire to reject marriage as equally disruptive as Esther’s polio. He couldn’t save Esther from her polio, but perhaps he can save Cassie from herself. This patriarchal and charity-driven attempt at control simultaneously desexualizes and strips agency from his daughters. Ned’s world, dominated by fear, patriarchal conservatism, and able-bodied privilege, is girded by an extremely oppressive power matrix in which his three daughters and their suitors must navigate. However, Gregory is not content to simply portray or exploit oppressive power structures in her play. She works subtly through her female characters and the ecological environment to radically explode these power structures from within. Esther could remain single and lonely and become a tragic or heroic sufferer, a common trope for disabled characters throughout literature. She could be rescued by a charitable man, like the neighbor Rudy Bird or the idealistic merchant Matt McCall, and try to fulfill her God-given calling as a procreative woman. These would be the traditional paths that disabled dramatic characters might follow. Gregory leads us down that path before radically reorienting our perception. At the end of act one, Ned has arranged for Rudy Bird to marry Cassie, whom he deeply loves, but Cassie is in love with Matt McCall. When she asks Matt to run away with her, he reveals that he is going off to fight in the war, so she runs away by herself. Seven years later, in act two, Cassie comes home to help Rachel with the end of her pregnancy, and Matt is now courting Esther. When Cassie reappears, however, Matt is still not fully over his heartbreak until (or perhaps even though) she brings him closure face to face and encourages him to do right by Esther. At dinner the next evening, after Matt and Esther had some alone time, everyone assumes Matt was going to propose to Esther, but when she returns alone, she begins to cry: NED : I knew it! RACHEL : Esther. What happened? NED ( to Rachel ): I’ll tell you what happened… He let her go! That’s what! CASSIE : He didn’t ask? NED : I knew he’d never ask. CASSIE : I thought sure he’d ask! ESTHER : HE DID ASK! He did ask! ( a beat ) I said no. CASSIE : You turned him down? RACHEL : Esther. What in the world. Why? ESTHER : I ain’t gonna be the one who’s settled on. I will not have a man who’d marry me out of duty. Or pity […] I ain’t gonna be no man’s second choice. (89-90) Like Cassie says to Rudy early in the play, Esther says “no.” She has the opportunity to be “rescued,” to get the happy ending and “overcome” her disability through marriage where she can become a wife and perhaps mother and pass as “normal” in her American culture. But she says no. She rejects pity. She defies her father’s assumptions about her, and she defies an American culture that defines her agency in terms of her womb and the symmetry of her appendages. In her cry of “no pity,” Esther makes a powerful and political action that asserts her own subjectivity in terms that she defines for herself. Ned’s reaction to Esther’s rejection of Matt’s proposal is particularly telling, especially if he is viewed as a representative of the ableist American cultural milieu. First, when Esther cries, he claims he knew that Matt would never propose, reiterating his previous claim that “no man gonna marry a crippled girl” (24). Then, he shifts and adopts an “I told you so” attitude to try to spin the situation back towards his culturally normative corner. Ned tries to regain control of the situation and solidify the dominance of his perspective, but Esther will have none of it: NED : Maybe this is for the best, Rachel. I worried how Esther’d take to marriage. RACHEL : She’d take just fine, Pa. NED : Marriage is a strain on a woman. Esther’s frail. ESTHER : Frail? NED : I know it’s a painful thing to accept, but Esther, maybe you ain’t really fit for marriage. ESTHER : Ain’t fit? I do a full day of work. Never ask nobody to do nothin’ for me. Every spring I put in that garden by myself. Clean this house top to bottom, carry half the furniture out into the yard. Don’t you tell me I’m too frail. Don’t you tell me I ain’t fit. Nobody knows what they’s fit for till they try it. (91) Ned tries to reshape the event to fit his previous explanation of reality, that Esther is dependent and thus unfit and unable to have cultural agency. Yet Esther claims she has never asked for help or needed help. In this moment, it appears as if Gregory is simply writing Esther to reject her own disability, to claim traditional independence, and to accept the vilification of dependency as anathema to American identity. This could be a highly problematic character twist and would indicate that Ned’s ableism has permeated deeper into Esther’s worldview than originally thought. But yet again, Gregory craftily subverts this easy and oppressive plot device. But this time, she uses an Act of God. Ned’s fears are part of a carefully constructed house of cards that Gregory has structured in the play. Ned is afraid of God’s punishment; he is afraid that his daughters will not produce an heir to his estate; he is afraid that Cassie will run off and abandon her womanly obligations; he is afraid Rachel might have the same pregnancy problems that took his wife; and he is afraid of the technological progress that is happening in the agricultural community within the play. Abby Wilkerson has said, “Beneath the moral stigmas attached to pathologized bodies lies fear: the fear of bodily alteration, and even death itself – and to the extent that the singular human body represents the body politic, the fear of social upheaval and chaos, the loss of all social order.” [33] This is the fear that undergirds Ned’s – and perhaps by extension, America’s – ableist attitudes and behaviors. Ability is understood as part of the American status quo; it is prerequisite for, and part of, stability. Gregory imagines this chaos and loss of social order through visions of the natural world, the farms, and the ecology of Missouri river. Critic Bob Rendell describes, “The entire play has a backdrop of drought, flood, the mechanization of agriculture and a growing ability to bend nature to our will.” [34] Matt McCall’s job is to convince the local farmers to support the construction of new levees to rein in flood waters. The biblical images of floods and rain are prominent constructions in the play which highlight notions of complete human impotence and complete ecological destruction. However, the relationship of these images to disability is somewhat less obvious. The notion of disability as personal catastrophe is a common trope in literature and drama, as well as in social situations. A person’s disability is seen as either something to be heroically overcome, or something that consumes her with bitterness, hence the victim and villain tropes described by Lewis and discussed earlier. Disability is seen as a personal tragedy, or perhaps, a kind of natural disaster that could befall a person. This understanding of disability as a kind of natural disaster permeates traditional dramatic literature, much contemporary thought, and Ned Owen’s world view. But Gregory subverts this traditional calamitous mode of understanding disability by juxtaposing it against literal images of natural disasters. For farmers like Ned, the Missouri river is the giver of life and the bringer of destruction. Independent human efforts to control it are unable to rein in its mighty power. The river can give, and the river can take away. And when the river floods, it becomes a natural disaster – like Ned’s view of disability – that can wash away all of our efforts of forging the American dream. This is how Gregory depicts Ned’s world view. He clings to his own power to outlast the flood by refusing help from his family to get to higher ground. If he accepts their help, he believes, he acknowledges his lack of independence and his unworthiness to have the American Dream, which for Ned is a bigger disaster than a deadly flood. The understanding of disability as natural disaster is related to the moral or religious model of disability depiction, “in which the physically different body is explained by an act of divine or demonic intervention.” [35] But in The Good Daughter , the divine intervention serves not to explain disability and by extension dependency, but rather the Act of God purges the rejection of disability and dependency, in a way that disavows the whole notion of independence itself as a fallacy. In the torrential floods that bookend the play, Ned comes face to face with a kind of natura ex machina that is the great equalizer to the exaltation of independence. As the waters rise, Ned stays put in the barn, refusing to accept the help of his family. As Longmore describes the denial of dependency in relation to disability, “Americans cling to visions of absolute personal autonomy and unlimited individual possibility while, it seems to many of them, their power over their individual lives evaporates like a mirage.” [36] Ned has survived many floods before, on his own, and he believes he will survive this one just the same. But in fact, the only way to survive is to accept his interdependence with those loved ones trying to help him make it to safety before the levees break. Esther realizes the value, necessity, and ubiquity of interdependence and makes it to safety with her family. Ultimately she is able to resist Ned’s world view. Clinging to his notions of independent moral superiority, the lights fade on Ned as the flood waters rise. With this Act of God, Gregory turns the tide on the myth of independence and claims the necessity of interdependence in life and death. Eva Feder Kittay acknowledges not only that independence is a fallacy, but it is contrary to the human condition, and refusing to acknowledge this fact is unjust and has damaging effects on people and relationships. She says, Independence, except in some particular actions and functions, is a fiction, regardless of our abilities or disabilities, and the pernicious effects of this fiction are encouraged when we hide the ways in which our needs are met in relations of dependencies. On the other hand, this fiction turns those whose dependence cannot be masked into pariahs, or makes them objects of disdain or pity. It causes us to refuse assistance when it is needed. It encourages us either to deny that assistance to others when they require it or to be givers of care because we fear having to receive care ourselves. In acknowledging dependency we respect the fact that as individuals our dependency relations are constitutive of who we are and that, as a society, we are inextricably dependent on one another. [37] We are all inextricably interdependent, and the notion that dependency is grounds for marginalization and evidence of loss of subjectivity is not only a fallacy, but a rejection of the reality of the human condition and a pernicious perspective that can hurt everyone. In The Good Daughter , Ned clings to his notions of independence that have splintered his family as the flood waters crash around him. His death is not tragic because he never has a realization or change of heart. His death is becomes heartbreaking because Cassie and her unborn child stay with him, refusing to accept the help of their family. In one sense, Cassie’s death could be read as a kind of self-sacrificial womanhood, refusing to let her father die alone, affirming our interdependence in life and in death. But it is also possible to read Cassie’s actions as being just as pitiable as Ned’s, in that they both so attached to traditional notions of independence that they reject the possibility of life (however messy it may be) in an interdependent community with their family. Just before the calamitous resolution of the play, Cassie and Rudy have a heart to heart about why she left and where their true feelings lie. Cassie confesses that her journey was one of self-discovery: CASSIE : I just had to see what was out there. RUDY : See where the river took you. CASSIE : This is as far as it went. RUDY : River took us all places we didn’t expect. (96-97) Her quest took her back home, back to her father, and she sits with him in the final moments, ready to die tragically with her father and her unborn child because she failed to find what she thought was true independence. Her quest for independence teaches us that the ecology of our American Dreams defy expectations. The disability rights movement has gone a long way in changing cultural perceptions of ability and redefining independence to included interdependence, but these cultural notions were decades away from being brought to the public eye during the time in which The Good Daughter was set. For Ned Owen, the perception of disability in his family – Esther’s limp, Cassie’s rebellion, Rachel’s pregnancy – became a damaging metaphor that caused him to doubt his own future and his own version of the American dream. However, Gregory ultimately reverses this paradigm and explodes Ned’s American dream from the inside out, exposing the fallacy of independence and reclaiming notions of interdependent subjectivity that are inherent and positive aspects of disability. Esther initially appears to be cast as the innocent victim, but she is not. She is a caretaker in the family as well as a care-receiver, she chastises her sisters for their misbehavior, and speaks up against her own mistreatment. Though her circumstances may conspire against her subjectivity, her quest for agency within her oppressive and pitying father’s worldview serves not as a metaphor but rather as an embrace of the lived realities of her culturally situated experiences with disability. Gregory’s subversion of literary tropes and dramatic constructions of disability are demonstrative of a subtle but tectonic shift that is happening in mainstream dramatic representations of disability, exploding the myth of independence within cultural ecologies of American identity. References [1] Kim E. Neilsen, A Disability History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 108. [2] Neilsen, A Disability History, 104. [3] D.W. Gregory, “The Artist as Activist – Take it to the Street or to the Stage?” in 24 Gun Control Plays , ed. Caridad Svich and Zac Cline (Southgate CA, NoPassport Press, 2013), n.p. The interview was originally written for her blog before being published in this collection. [4] http://www.dramaticpublishing.com/AuthorBio.php?titlelink=10106 accessed 8 May 2012. [5] Bob Rendell, “A Very Good Daughter World Premiers at New Jersey Repertory,” www.talkinbroadway.com , accessed 8 May 2013; and Robert L. Daniels, “Legit Review: The Good Daughter,” Daily Variety Gotham , November 12, 2003. [6] http://dwgregory.com/ . Accessed 8 May 2013. [7] D.W. Gregory, The Good Daughter, unpublished PDF manuscript (2003). Used by permission. All subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. [8] I use the first person pronoun “we” not to be exclusionary, patriotic, or culturally ego-centric, but simply because I am an American citizen and I can only write from my own perspective. Using third person descriptions of Americans seems inauthentic and unnecessarily distancing from my lived experience. [9] Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “A Genealogy of Dependency : Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State,” in The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency , edited by Eva Feder Kittay and Ellen K. Feder (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002), 15. [10] http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/11/the-2013-index-of-dependence-on-government accessed 7 July 2014. [11] Rickie Solinger, “Dependency and Choice: The Two Faces of Eve,” in The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency , edited by Eva Feder Kittay and Ellen K. Feder (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002), 61. Solinger argues that “dependency” is coupled with “choice” in ways that continue to keep women vulnerable to control and censure. [12] For more perspectives, analysis and unpacking of notions of dependency, care, and disability, see Eva Feder Kittay and Ellen K. Feder, eds., The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002). [13] Alison Kafer, “Debating Feminist Futures: Slippery Slopes, Cultural Anxiety, and the Case of the Deaf Lesbians,” in Feminist Disability Studies, ed. Kim Q. Hall, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 222. [14] James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1931), 404 (my emphasis). For a fascinating and nuanced analysis of the American dream in relation to dramatic criticism , see Cheryl Black, “‘Three Variations on a National Theme’: George O’Neil’s American Dream , 1933,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 22 no. 3 (2010), 69-91. [15] Douglas C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History” in The New Disability History, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umanski (New York: NYU Press, 2001), 33-57. [16] Paul K. Longmore, “Conspicuous Contribution and American Cultural Dilemmas: Telethon Rituals of Cleansing and Renewal,” in The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, ed. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 137. [17] Rendell, www.talkinbroadway.com . [18] Victoria Ann Lewis, ed., Beyond Victims and Villains: Contemporary Plays by Disabled Playwrights (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005). The portrayal of disability in cinema is more well documented than in theatre. See, for example, Christopher R. Smit and Anthony Elms, eds., Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability (New York: University of America Press, 2001); Martin Norden, Cinema of Isolation: a History of Physical Disability in the Movies (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994); and Sally Chivers and Nicole Markotić, eds., The Problem Body: Projecting Disability on Film (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010). [19] David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 47. [20] Victoria Ann Lewis, Beyond Victims and Villains, xxi. [21] Longmore, “Conspicuous Contribution.” Joseph Shapiro, No Pity: How the Disability Rights Movement is Changing America (New York: Times Books, 1993). [22] See, for example, Shawn Dean, “Accessible Parking for Pregnancy? Count Me Out,” EasyStand blog, www.blog.easystand.com , 11 April 2011, accessed 8 May 2013; and Stacie Lewis, “Do You Consider Pregnancy a Disability?” Baby Center Blog, www.blog.babycenter.com , 10 January 2012, accessed 8 May 2013. [23] Victoria Ann Lewis, Beyond Victims and Villains, xvii. [24] Longmore, “Conspicuous Contribution,” 153. [25] “Nothing about us without us” was another rally cry during the disability rights movement. [26] Longmore, “Conspicuous Contribution,” 152. [27] Solinger, “Dependency and Choice,” 75. [28] See Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). [29] See, for example, Margarit Shildrik, Dangerous Discourses ; Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); and Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States . [30] See Abby Wilkerson, “Disability, Sex Radicalism, and Political Agency,” in Feminist Disability Studies , ed. Kim Q. Hall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). [31] Frank Eltman, “Disabled Rights: Couple Fights for Right to Live Together at Group Home,” Associated Press, www.huffingtonpost.com , May 7, 2013. Accessed 9 May 2013. [32] Wilkerson, “Disability, Sex Radicalism, and Political Agency,” 195. [33] Wilkerson, “Disability, Sex Radicalism, and Political Agency,” 193. [34] Rendell, www.talkinbroadway.com . [35] Lewis, Beyond Victims and Villains, xxi. [36] Longmore, “Conspicuous Contribution,” 154. [37] Eva Feder Kittay, “When Caring is Just and Justice is Caring: Justice and Mental Retardation,” Public Culture 13 no. 3 (2001), 570. Footnotes About The Author(s) BRADLEY STEPHENSON earned his Ph.D. in theatre at the University of Missouri. He has also earned a Master of Divinity and a Masters in science education from Wake Forest University, as well as a Masters in theatre from Northwestern University. He has been published in journals such as Ecumenica , Studies in Musical Theatre , and Theatre Topics . His current scholarship explores the intersections of disability and identity in dramatic literature. Bradley is also a director, playwright, actor, husband, and father. Guest Editor: Jonathan Chambers Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee 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 (JADT 27.2, 2015) The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 19 Spring 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. By Marina Johnson Published: May 11, 2026 Download Article as PDF The clown paints his face to become someone else — to live in another reality. With white paint, a few colors, and a red nose, he can turn tragedy into comedy. He can walk into a hospital room, where someone lies dying, and turn him into a laughing child. He can enter a refugee camp and make it a festival .… He paints his face, puts on the nose — and for a moment, he’s allowed to dream again. [1] The Clown is a gripping one-man play that delivers far more than its simple title might suggest. At its center is Sobhi (Ezzat Al-Natsheh), a Palestinian clown performer whose painted smile conceals a churning inner world of joy, humiliation, pain, hope, and unrelenting self-doubt. The play follows Sobhi, who is haunted by the traumatic car crash that happened to him and his friend while they were driving to a birthday performance in the rain. Throughout the monologue, Sobhi argues with a second voice, “the Clown,” a manifestation of his inner critic, that alternately mocks, seduces, and confronts him about his lifelong need to please others, his humiliation and bullying, and his guilt over surviving when others did not. As Sobhi recounts memories of family violence, political repression, and the daily humiliations of life under occupation, the clown persona becomes both a survival strategy and a trap that feeds on others’ laughter while concealing his despair. By the end, Sobhi briefly removes the red nose in an attempt to reclaim himself, but ultimately puts it back on, acknowledging that the cycle of performance, masking pain with laughter, will continue. I first encountered this work in rehearsal on August 28, 2025, at El Hakawati Palestinian National Theatre while I was in Palestine. Two weeks later, on opening night, I was already back in the United States, so my friends helped me watch the performance via a WhatsApp video call, a surprisingly intimate way to witness the performance from afar. I could hear my friends laugh and cry throughout the performance as they sat in the red velvet seats of one of my favorite theatres, while I laughed and cried from my couch in the US. I was grateful for the solution that allowed me to witness a play I had been anxiously anticipating by a team I hold in high esteem. The play’s concept originates with Al-Natsheh himself and draws directly from his life story. He shared the material with Mariam Basha, who crafted the script and served as assistant director and choreographer alongside Kamel El Basha, who directed the production. I had previously collaborated with Al-Natsheh on El Manshiyyeh , which I co-directed with Samer Al-Saber, but I’ve also known him for years through his work with the famed Jerusalem clown duo Zaatar and Sim Sim (he is, of course, Sim Sim), as well as his collaborations with Red Noses Palestine. [2] A little-known fact about Al-Natsheh–he keeps a nose on him at all times because sometimes someone around him needs joy, and he is just the one to deliver it. Also, he is often recognized in public as Sim Sim, so the nose allows him to get in and stay in character with/for the kids who recognize him. Al-Natsheh is quick-witted, intellectually agile, and an extraordinarily funny performer. This piece, however, revealed a different register of his artistry. In the opening moments, he applies his makeup onstage, transforming himself into the clown before the audience’s eyes and setting the tone for the performance to come. The text of the play begins with Sobhi describing a fragmented memory of being in a car accident and the feeling of being trapped and unable to scream as the other person in the car dies. He asks: “Why was it me who stayed alive? … I’ll never know what he wanted to tell me.” [3] This tragic car accident serves as one of the play’s anchoring images, its rain-soaked violence symbolizing both literal and psychic rupture. Rain becomes a recurring motif that is at once cleansing and wounding, a metaphor for memory, endurance, and the cyclical nature of grief. Water washes over the narrative as Sobhi attempts to peel back the layers of performance that shield him from his own vulnerability. Interruptions are key to the play. Phone calls frequently interrupt the scenes with people calling Sobhi to offer clown jobs, and we see that he is constantly negotiating work under stressful conditions. In the series of phone conversations, the difficult circumstances of work as a clown are revealed: short notice, low pay, unsafe environments, and often unrealistically high expectations. Other memories also intrude, contributing to the play's fragmented nature. For instance, Sobhi recalls being eleven years old and living with his grandfather, who burned his belongings and constantly insulted him. This bullying carried over to other facets of his life, as he remembers being bullied by his peers for his height and appearance. Image 1: Ezzat Al-Natsheh on stage at El Hakawati Theatre in Jerusalem. Photo credit: Mohammad Basha. The crux of the play lies in the interruptions where Sobhi speaks with “the Clown,” a figure who interjects, comments, argues, and mocks him. They volley between dark humor, confession, and near-prayer, their exchanges revealing a fractured sense of self shaped by personal trauma and the suffocating pressures of social and political life. The Clown criticizes Sobhi for being too kind, for letting people walk over him, and for depending on others’ approval. Sobhi tries to defend himself, but the dialogue shows how entangled they are. At times, the Clown sounds like a bully; at other times, he praises Sobhi and even becomes affectionate. Their battlesome relationship is at the center of the play, and it was what I, as an audience member, wanted to know more about. In a quieter scene that reveals his inner turmoil, Sobhi prays aloud, asking God for relief and strength (Image 1). As he speaks, he reflects on what a clown can do, such as bringing laughter to hospitals and refugee camps, offering brief moments of joy amid hardship. These reflections frame the emotional spine of the play: memories of childhood humiliation, emotional neglect, and constant belittlement for failing to embody the expectations of masculinity. Those wounds follow him into the present, where he struggles as a clown who barely makes ends meet, trapped in a society that relies on him for laughter yet mocks the very profession that sustains him. The Clown, both tormentor and truth-teller, relentlessly probes Sobhi’s insecurities, accusing him of cowardice, failure, and complicity in his own suffering. Their confrontation builds toward the play’s central question: whether Sobhi’s clowning is an act of degradation or a source of purpose. Near the end, the Clown urges Sobhi to “take off the nose.” Sobhi removes it, and the Clown insists that without it, he cannot exist. Sobhi resists, declaring that he is “done performing,” and attempts to walk away. Yet in the moment of refusal, Sobhi recognizes what gives his life meaning. He chooses to put the red nose back on—not as submission, but as an affirmation of the role he has claimed for himself. Without this… who am I? Without the laughter… who remembers me? Maybe the clown is the only part of me that’s still alive. The stage’s visual composition echoes the play's themes. The scenography was deceptively minimal. At the center of the stage lay a patterned carpet that served as a grounding place for the story. Upstage right sat a mound of pastel balloons, eight or more in various soft colors, an oddly cheerful counterpoint to the psychological terrain of the piece. On the opposite side rested a wooden chair draped with a ukulele, topped with a rubber chicken, and accompanied by a red-and-blue striped stand for a computer. The center was left open, allowing the dueling figures, Sobhi and the Clown, ample room to spar, circle one another, and, in Sobhi’s case, to dance. Al-Natsheh transitioned between the two characters simply by sharply turning; when he faced stage right, we knew the Clown was talking in his aggressive and often belittling voice. When he faced stage left, Al-Natsheh was the one in the lead, responding and reasoning with the Clown. The production extended this sense of divided identity into the costume itself. The costume design sharpened the performance’s tonal dissonance: a one-piece clown suit with light blue sleeves and hip pockets, bisected into pink on one side and yellow on the other, its bowtie reversing the colors so that pink and yellow contrasted each other. The result was both whimsical and faintly disquieting, perfectly attuned to the play’s oscillation between humor and unease. Kamel El Basha’s direction provides a steady hand throughout the production, while Mariam Basha’s choreography introduces dances that offer moments of levity and deepen the play’s emotional texture. Al-Natsheh’s acting is remarkably agile, shifting seamlessly between characters—signaled subtly by whether his hair is tied back in a ponytail or left down. What makes The Clown so resonant as a production is the intimate character study at its core. Laughter emerges as both lifeline and trap: an act of resistance against despair, yet also a performance demanded by others that gradually erodes the self. Through the protagonist’s exchanges, the play exposes the gendered and political dimensions of his pain, revealing how patriarchal expectations of strength, the violence of occupation, and the indignities of precarity conspire to “castrate” him emotionally and spiritually. Ultimately, The Clown becomes a haunting meditation on what it means to continue performing joy in a world that constantly humiliates and silences. Blending absurdist comedy with piercing confession and poetic repetition, the play offers a powerful and unsettling portrait of identity under pressure—an unforgettable image of a man struggling to endure, create, and hope while caught between the demands of the world and the echoing chambers of his own mind. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes [1] My translation, from Mariam Basha’s script. [2] Red Noses Palestine is a branch of Red Noses International, which employs local clown-doctors to perform in hospitals for sick patients. [3] My translation, from Mariam Basha’s script References About The Author(s) Marina Johnson ( Marina-Johnson.com ) is a PhD candidate in TAPS with PhD minors in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and the Certificate in Critical Consciousness and Anti-Oppressive Praxis. Prior to arriving at Stanford, Johnson received her MFA in Directing and taught at Beloit College for three years. Johnson continues to work as a director and dramaturg while also co-hosting Kunafa and Shay , a MENA/SWANA theatre podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons. During her most recent fieldwork, she directed several productions with Al Harah Theatre and taught directing workshops at ASHTAR Theatre. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. Performance Review: DODI AND DIANA, by Kareem Fahmy. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Mosaic Theater, DC. September 23, 2025. Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. Book Review: Samer Al-Saber. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theatre (Stanford University Press, 2025). Pp. 328. Hardcover, Paperback, E-book. Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Wo/我 by Jiemin Yang at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. In this biographical short dance film, follow the emotional journey of a queer Chinese American immigrant dance artist as he navigates the complexities of identity and belonging in New York City. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Wo/我 At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Jiemin Yang Dance This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, as well as screened in-person on May 20th. About The Film Country United States Language English Running Time 11 minutes Year of Release 2020 In this biographical short dance film, follow the emotional journey of a queer Chinese American immigrant dance artist as he navigates the complexities of identity and belonging in New York City. Jiemin Yang (director, choreographer, performer), Ellen Maynard (Director of Photography & Camera, Lighting, Editing) James Acampora (Composer), Jacob Psenicka (Audio Engineer), Doug Beacon (Music Consultant), Script: Jordan Barsky, Ellen Maynard, Jiemin Yang. This project Wo/我 is made possible (in part) by the Queens Council on the Arts with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. About The Artist(s) Jiemin, a Chinese-American choreographer based in Queens, holds a MA in contemporary dance from London Contemporary Dance School and a BS in graphic design and dance from Macaulay Honors College at Queens College. As a resident artist with CUNY Dance Initiative from 2020-2022, he's received numerous grants from Queens Council on the Arts. His dance film "Wo/我" earned the Outstanding Dance Film Award at Queens World Film Festival ’22 and the Best Short Narrative Award at DisOrient Asian American Film Festival of Oregon ’22. He was recognized as Artist of Exceptional Merit ’22 by Asian American Arts Alliance. Jiemin has showcased his works at AAPI Dance Festival at APAP 2024, 42nd Battery Dance Festival 2023, Museum of Chinese in America, Queens Botanical Garden, The Mark O’Donnell Theatre, and Auditório do Parque da Devessa in Portugal. Additionally, he's been selected for the Redtail Artist Residency 2023. Get in touch with the artist(s) Jiemin Yang and follow them on social media https://www.instagram.com/jiemin.art/?hl=en, https://www.jieminyang.art/, Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

By Daniel Gerould, Marvin Carlson | A collection of dramas from French theatre director and playwright René-Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Pixérécourt: Four Melodramas Daniel Gerould, Marvin Carlson Download PDF Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould and Marvin Carlson This volume contains four of Pixérécourt's most important melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon, or Jafar and Zaida; The Dog of Montargis, or The Forest of Bondy; Christopher Columbus, or the Discovery of the New World; and Alice, or The Scottish Gravediggers. Also included is Charles Nodier 's introduction to the 1843 Collected Edition of Pixérécourt's plays and two theoretical essays by the playwright, "Melodrama," and "Final Reflections on Melodrama." “Pixérécourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with its most stunning effects, and brought the classic situations of fairground comedy up-to-date. He determined the structure of a popular theatre which was to last through the 19th century… Pixérécourt determined that scenery, music, dance, lighting and the very movements of his actors should no longer be left to chance but made integral parts of his plays.” -Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 21, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF by Kalina Stefanova Image Credits: Article “Thank you!” as a Theme, “Thank you!” as a Code (highlights of the International Theatre Festival of Sibiu and its 32 nd edition) “Let’s say “thank you” to God, to our friends, parents, children, to everyone, that we are alive, that we can smile, that we can love, that we can share; let us thank all those who help us make this festival happen…. this huge and spectacular family that wants goodness and beauty on earth.” This is how Constantin Chiriac, the founder, president and, in effect, main engine of the Festival since 1993, ends his address in the catalogue this year. The phrase “Thank you”, though, was not only a theme of the 32 nd edition. It is a code to the essence of the Festival in principle, an explanation, at least partial, of its transformation over the years into a phenomenon of a world scale – so far the third largest one, after those in Edinburgh and Avignon. In the same address Chiriac pinpoints the main reasons for the theme’s choice, yet one of them stands out: “… in a time of heightened conflict, when war and hatred bring so much destruction,” what was sought out was “… a theme that would make us more open, more thoughtful, and more beautiful…” – “a magic word” that can tame even “those who do us no good…” This is an excellent encapsulation of the broad-minded manner in which the Festival has been cut out from its very start. It is with the same broad-mindedness and extraordinary panache that its editions continue to be created over the years. It is the Festival that transformed Sibiu – the 15 th in size city in Romania, with a population of 134000 – into a very sought-out destination, with over 100000 visitors arriving there especially for the event. At the same time, despite the throngs of people and the numerous new, glossy buildings, Sibiu hasn’t lost its authentic atmosphere and spirit. And this too the city owes to the Festival, to its distinct respect for tradition – respect that characterizes many of its accompanying undertakings. Like the Walk of Fame. There are other such Walks around the world, yet what distinguishes the one in Sibiu – containing already 77 stars of stars – is its special whereabouts. It connects the place of the oldest theatre in Romania (built in 1788) with the place where the future new building of the National Theatre “Radu Stanca” – the organizer of the Festival – will stand. Yet, among the numerous such undertakings marked with the Festival’s “hats-off” to tradition and its focus on building bridges between the past, present and future, what stands out most is the main rubric in its program, entitled Heritage Performances . Initiated back in 2005, it presents emblematic productions of “Radu Stanca” Theatre. Importantly, the “set” selected for each year does not necessarily differ in full with the one of the previous Festival edition. There are shows which could be in the selection for many years. Such is the case with the famed and spectacular Faust of Silviu Purkarete, created back in 2007, which was the very first show in the rubric this year too; or another long-running Purkarete’s production – The Scarlet Princess, staged in 2018, which also featured there. 20 years after the start of the rubric, these heritage performances could be viewed as forming a special collection – something like a live theatre museum . Notably: a museum not only of the output of “Radu Stanca” Theatre and, thus, of Romanian theatre, but of world theatre as well. For, I dare say, these productions have changed the face of theatre at large. It has to be underlined that they are live shows, part of the repertoire of “Radu Stance”, not revived especially for the Festival. There are many theatre museums around the world – with important expositions of photos, set-designs, costumes, recreated offices of prominent playwrights, directors, and artists, with arrays of artifacts from emblematic productions, etc. Yet, the special “collection” formed by the heritage performances of the Sibiu Festival is reminiscent only of the Asian “living national treasures” – artists or genres. Here, though, the scale is different – it concerns a whole art form. And an art form in development at that! For, as the time goes by the heritage performances develop, improve; the very chance for the viewers to make a live comparison between them over the years also gets enriched. This gives the “collection” a special educational added value too, transforms it into a one-of-a-kind spiritual institution in the whole theatre world. Mind you: there is no bombastic title of this unique undertaking; it’s been unfolding to no fanfare. Simply, with the Heritage Performances rubric the Festival says a most humble and yet most inspired “Thank you!” to the Theatre and serves it with an astonishing devotion and dedication. With the this unofficial live museum of theatre Festival creates for the audience, the artists and the students alike a direct access to the assets of an idiosyncratic theatrical spiritual bank which get incessantly enriched and renewed. Among the shows included in the rubric this year, the one that stood out for me was Games, Words, Crickets… directed by Purkarete . Maybe because it reminded me of another face of Purcarete’s talent, so different from the one manifested in the monumental Faust and in the colorful The Scarlet Princess . Or simply because under this talkative title – seemingly very concrete, yet as though decided to not disclose what the show is about – there is so special gem of a production. It has already been separately covered for this magazine after its premiere in the illuminating review by the esteemed scholar and critic Ion Tomas. (vol. 18, 2023) Yet, I believe it deserves to be placed again and again under our spotlight for more readers to find out about it. The main character in Games, Words, Crickets… is the poetic word, the word with God’s sparkle in it – the word as a beginning, as a gift from above gathering heaven and earth, flesh and spirit, all in one, united by beauty, by love, by life. Poetry in this show is high and elevating, childish and jumpy, playful and full of joie-de-vivre. A hymn, a prayer, a fable, a story in white verse… A praise for poetry itself, a praise for the Holy Mother, a praise for the plum brandy as a gift sent to the man for help and for joy, a praise for the invincible Balkan spirit… In brief: a praise to God and all His creations… By Nazim Hikmet, Paul Verlaine, Shakepeare, Sergey Esenin, Radu Stanca, Mihai Eminescu, Marin Sorescu… As if all the world and all human life from days of yore till now, as it has been seen by the poets, is now gathered in the palm of one human being who presents it to us with such rapture, such joy, such trepidation as though he himself creates every word, every line, every image, every nuance before us and for each and everyone of us. Constantin Chiriac is the astonishing actor who savors the joy of sharing with us as if the very birth of all that poetry. I have seen him in many roles and have always wondered if there is any one he can not handle. Now I know the answer. For, this role is much more difficult than all the rest. Here there is no one person to impersonate so organically as if you are that very person. There is no one face, body, soul, behavior to enliven on stage and yet to remain your own self intact. Great poetry is to hand your soul to the others without leaving anything just for yourself so that you can find a shelter there. Great poetry is to give your eyes to the others so that they could see the world through them, to reach out to them as a small child, without fear and trust them with anything to hide. So that you could share the joy of the spring’s advent, the mystery of moon, the sky’s tenderness, the elusiveness of dream, the joy of the crickets’ song, love, happiness, gratitude to God, to nature, to life, the exaltation of dance … During this show one gets to live though all this in its pure form. Chiriac wakens all these feelings in us not only through the poets’ words but also through his own attitude to everything these words have to say, cry out, cover, shy away from, hide… At one point, he is as if a pure spirit, lost in nature’s beauty, in another, he gluttonously eats a piece of water melon while the juice flows freely down his arm; immediately afterwards, already on his knees and with head resting on the back of his hand – surely the only part of it not sticky then – he prays… And in all that he is so organic, not a hint of falseness cracking the air of full truthfulness he exudes. In his aforementioned address Chiriac recalls how when his parents made him happy and he didn’t know how to thank them, they would caress his head. Later on, he would regularly say “thank you” “with so much truth in my voice that it brought tears to their eyes.” In this shared memory, I believe, is the key to his acting approach in Games, Words, Crickets… as well as one more explanation of all he does for the Festival and the theatre in principle. Even in an address of just three paragraphs he needs the “anchor” of a concrete story – something that he has felt with his own heart; a need for enveloping the spirit in a body, for making the common feel personal, so that it doesn’t sound empty, so that it could touch, convince, feel true. This show does not narrate a single story, as it usually happens in theatre, or one big story, as it usually happens in the theatre of Purcarete. In it every poem is a story in its own right, shared as a first-hand experience, and at first glance these stories may seem small but it is exactly they that form the big story of our life. The very choice of the poems as well as the concrete collage of them makes this even more palpable. Exactly as it is said in one of them, “Words have their time. You can’t just throw them around when you want.” At times Chiriac steps aside, so that he could look at the words and everything they have to say from “the outside” – to see them together with us, the audience. For instance, when the air in the theatre hall is charged with rapture – our rapture with one of the poems – he looks at us and says, “Paul Verlain!” in such a manner as if asking, “How splendid it is, isn’t it?” At the same time, as if a conductor summoning the sound at the end of a rapturous music piece, he puts an exclamation mark instead of a dot. Chiriac’s masterpiece of acting in this show is not at all an unexpected tour de force. He has started his career with poetic recitals – a popular genre at that time in Romania – and has a formidable experience in this field. I myself have witnessed many a time how his speeches at international forums, where he’s in his capacity as a Festival head, all of a sudden soar into poetry, or he takes everyone by surprise reciting a famous monologue by Shakespeare, for instance. The hall then gets so quiet, as if people hold their breath, and the respective event immediately gets uplifted to another level. Even in such cases his poetical detours are not simply reciting of a beautiful text, they are an expression of his joy that this text exists and that he can share it with us. And again, at the end, when he tells us what the poem is, the way he pronounces the title and the poet’s name imply the same, “How splendid it is, isn’t it?”, unuttered with words but expressed with eyes, which accompanies the poetry in Games, Words, Crickets… Although it may not seem so from all already said Games, Words, Crickets… is a one-man show. Yes, it is only Chiriac who has the floor throughout it, yet he is not alone on stage. There are 17 more actors there and part of them are there quite before he makes his entrance. Clad in white shirts and light beige mid trousers, as if giant children, in the beginning they are snowmen, with just hinted most characteristic features; then, with the advent of spring, they “melt down”. Then they build crystal pyramids from transparent wine glasses – pyramids which start slowly gliding on a thin transparent belt horizontally on stage, at the background of sounds of water created before us with of a bucket and small plastic bottles. Further on, one of them would hold a long stick with a lantern and an etude about the moon follows. Then all of them grab umbrellas, wind blows, and it’s already autumn. Then they grab pillows and snuggle, and the night falls…. Not simply do these “grown up” children become the background of poetry on stage, Purcarete transforms them into the very atmosphere of the poetic images and feelings – an unusual Chorus who “comments” and “reacts” on behalf of nature. “What’s going on?”, Chiriac asks them at one point, when the night starts falling down, and they respond with the usual sounds of dusk. This is a dialogue with nature as a Chorus and, naturally, the answers do not come back in words. And again as a Chorus, these “grown-up” children, together with us, are also audience of all the poetry Chiriac endows us with – as it were our extension on stage. It would be so easy for a director to use multimedia instead as a background of such a show. But would even the most technically modern multimedia be able to substitute all these live eyes and hearts, all the different frequencies exuded by these 18 human bodies and souls? And would it be able to achieve such depth of the communion between the man and the world, such diversity of the nuances of this communion, as it happens in Games, Words, Crickets… ? It does great credit to Purcarete that he has chosen to achieve all this and, most importantly, to create the impalpable via the most authentically theatrical and yet most difficult way. Towards the end of the show, during something like a dance, while Chiriac, standing slightly aside, shares with us the n’th portion of beauty, suddenly it turns out that among the dancers there are two other Chiriacs – puppets of his size, attire, face and manners, each one of them led by several puppeteers. The three of them sit at a table: he en face to us, his doubles at the two sides. The doubles start repeating each gesture of his, each mimic, and the feeling gets to be surreal. Exactly as the watermelon minutes before that, or the ode to the brandy wouldn’t let the show stay on just one lyrical wave, and do balance it instead, now the two counterparts endow it with an additional dimension and make it even livelier. After the “talk” of the three (with a voice-over of Chiriac), another dance follows – the Zorba’s sirtaki. All 17 actors dance, including the doubles, only Chiriac, again aside, sets the rhythm with a bell and starts the last poem: “Oh, stay and sip from one more cup at the old crossroads of old rivers, for when it comes to love and wine all men become most joyous givers…” As he continues with the marvelous lyrics of Kazantzakis and other poets, he joins the dance and, although the lights soon go off, the music and his words keep on resounding – as a hymn of life – life that goes on even when the actors on its stage have already stepped down and new ones are soon to make their entrance there… “Poet of the stage, that’s how Silviu Purcarete was defined by Georges Banu, the late brilliant Romanian-French critic. Adriana Mocca, a Romanian actress, in turn, called him “a collector of beauty”. To me, Games, Words, Crickets… is a hymn of life exactly as poetry and beauty – life as it could be and as it is created to be. There is nothing ugly in it. The ugly and the evil are not invited there. Only the games, the words, the crickets, and everything the dots that follow in the title imply. To me this show is much more difficult and complex an endeavor than the mega-productions, like Metamorphoses, Faust, and The Scarlet Princess . Of course, they require a mighty directorial talent few others possess – a type of talent that has deservedly earned Purcarete a world-wide recognition as a master of exuberantly rich theatricality (if I may take the liberty to paraphrase another esteemed Romanian critic and scholar Octavian Saiu). Yet, to be able to create such an inseparable entity of poetry and beauty, as he does in Games, Words, Crickets… , and, moreover, to manage preserve its fine frequency vibrations for a whole hour and twenty minutes so that its integrity doesn’t fall apart is an even more extraordinary achievement. The fact that Purcarete is equally good at both the breath-taking spectacular and the intangible that makes one holds one’s breath, lest the spell gets broken, places him among the very few contemporary directors of such a strikingly wide diapason. Electra – a production by another revered Romanian director, Michai Manuitiu – was included in the Heritage performances too and stood out with its special status. Created back in 2005, it gained a cult status over the following years. In the beginning of 2025 it was revived in its fully original shape and even with some of its original actors. Of course, now, some of the young actors of “Radu Stanca” Theatre share the stage with them. It is exactly this passing of the acting torch before the audience’s eyes that not only makes the production unique but further underlines the importance of the rubric as a live spiritual territory. For, with Electra in the Heritage “collection”, this unique live theatre museum goes one step further: it manifests the possibility for organic upgrading of the theatre art within one and the same production in a “time lapse” of two decades. Notably too, Manuitiu’s Electra could serve as a point of reference, an idiosyncratic mirror in which major differences between theatre of 20 years ago and theatre of today stand out, alas, not always in favor of the latter. For instance, the distinct asceticism in terms of the material, like set-design, costumes, etc. stands in stark contrast with the many-ness that tends to overwhelm the nowadays stages. Also, Electra looks and feels like a stylized ritual and, with very few exceptions, doesn’t get into the literal illustrativeness when it comes to the elements of violence in the plot, unlike contemporary theatre which seems nearly obsessed with direct displays of violence. That is why Electra doesn’t look like a B-rated movie focused on close-ups of the very destruction of the human flesh’s integrity but feels rather like a dance or a painting. As for the regular theatre program, among the main accents was No Yogurt for the Dead , written and directed by Tiago Rodriguez, a production of the NTGent, Belgium (co-produced by Culturgest, Lisbon, Weiner Festwochen and Picollo Teatro di Milano – Teatro D’Europa). This show, to me, is like an unusual diary of a contemporary Scheherazade. A first-hand narrative, most of the time directly en-face to the audience, is the main approach for building the story. Importantly, again no multimedia interferes here – i.e. we are not being offered “to go to the movies” in the theatre, as often is the case these days. Moreover, theatre is especially emphasized. The audience is introduced to the story by one of the characters – a nurse. She is played by the only one of the three actresses in the show who plays just one role from the beginning to the end. The other two actresses assign themselves the roles of a father and a son, as well as two fake beards that will help us distinguish them – long and short (as their characters will be called, respectively – Long Beard and Short Beard). In the course of the action, they will not only openly exchange these roles, but will also get to play others, yet from the moment they “get into” all these roles, they are completely truthful, nearly without any detachment. This dance of realism and overt theatricality is a very good balancer for the story, as it doesn’t let it become merely documentary, although it is a true one, nor does it let it trespass into the territory of the sentimental and succumb to pain, although it is about the death of a dearest person. The story is about (and of) the director’s father – a respected journalist who writes his last reportage in the form of a diary in the hospital during his last days before his death. It is this diary which is the basic material for building the action – it is something like a magnet which draws together the fragmentary pieces of the story. However, it is not an ordinary diary but, exactly like Scheherazade, it sort of manages to win back from death another day and another day, and another day… And, like Scheherazade, this diary has its own secret: in the end, it turns out that in it there are only inarticulate scribbles – dashes and dots. Most of the action takes place around and in a hospital bed on the left of the stage. On the right, an uneven and fragmented hill rises, made of what looks like pieces of pressed cardboard with visible cracks between them, like in a glacier. There is another hospital bed on it – with a patient. However, he is most of the time in a half-back position or sitting sideways to us. So we don’t get to see him well, but we hear him almost all the time. For, his role is to “provide” the main musical background of the story – on a guitar. The major musical accents in the show, though, are the songs sang by the two actresses who play the father and the son. And their singing is remarkable, I dare say, it’s truly unforgettable! These songs, like the diary, are not ordinary ones. They too are like a magnet, even a stronger one than the diary. For, it is exactly they that gather the crumbling world of the dying man and restore not only the contours but as it were the very flesh of his slipping life. They are like the flickering of a fire which is about to go out, but, when it flares up again, it burns for a little while as if it was never about to die. Flare-ups that are sort of mirages, as if death is not coming and there is still plenty of time left for memories here, in this world, with those closest to us. These songs are the major strength of the show. Not only because of the way they are performed, but also because of the very choice of time and space, when the action should stop its horizontal course and fly up (or downwards, if that’s how we imagine the past). Most often this happens unexpectedly, as if out of the blue. Yet it is always exactly “on time”, when the story has fallen apart into too many pieces – because of the playing with roles and wigs, because of the strange use of two languages at the same time (the nurse speaks in Flemish, the father and son in Portuguese), because of the very fragmentary montage of the separate pieces… And then – then a song bursts forth and immediately brings everything together. And just as until then the characters (and even the story itself) have “acted like men” – iron, strong and cold-blooded – now they all of a sudden give way to their feelings and let their tears flow. The theatre at this moment is pushed aside and it is the human being in principle who remains on stage – the human being with everything that is a symbol of the heart – love, longing, tenderness, pain… The human being, like one big heart, fills the stage, the theatre, us. These songs decipher the dashes and dots in the father’s diary. They transform them into meaning, that is, into life. It is through them that death not only gets postponed, they make death pointless, even when the son finds his father’s bed already empty – waiting for the next patient. It is these songs that “make” the show. They contain the key to Tiago Rodrigues’ directorial talent: his fееl for the innermost human and his skill to fill the stage, the theatre, and us with this so elusive a “substance”; and, importantly, his ability to do so not the usual way, through familiar theatrical means, and, yet, paradoxically, to manage to achieve the oldest thing in the theatre – to move you to the bottom of your heart. I intended to write about the shortcomings of the show too. About its numerous endings, some of which it could easily do without. About the fact that some details of the story border on clichés, like the pen the son keeps forgetting to bring to his father and when he does so, he is already gone. Or that some contemporary performative clichés could have easily been avoided, like serving tea to the audience during the funeral, as if the viewers too are attending it… However, now, when time has passed since I saw the show in Sibiu, I find that the flows have faded and lost significance; that, when I think of this unique diary-reportage in songs, it grabs me by the throat as if it were my personal piece of memory. A memory of something the significance of which we find out much later after it happened, when time has erased the unnecessary little details. A memory which as if lifts us up, moves us away from the usual time-track, and extends our life each time when we remember it… I also think now what an amazing gesture of a son to his father’s memory this show is! The other production from the regular theatre program of the International Theatre Festival of Sibiu that struck me most was Jonah , at that time the newest directorial work of Silviu Purkarete . A co-production of the Romanian “Radu Stanca” National Theatre in Sibiu and the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, it steps on a Romanian play (by Marin Sorescu) which is, in turn, based on the famed Biblical story. The main performer is Asian (the Japanese star Kuranosuke Sasaki) and there are three speechless characters played by Romanians. “Why do people waste their time on things that are useless after death?” – wonders Jonah, the main character of the play, created back in 1968. This question, so topical in the nowadays world of excesses, is like a pitchfork both for the play and the production. The focus of both aligns according to this question. I.e. Jonah , as a play and as a production alike, is about all the rest: “… the spiritual communion that brings us closer to the primal energies of nature in which divinity manifests itself,” if I may take the liberty to quote the excellent description of the show in the Festival catalogue. Jonah , the show, is like a revelation. It is wise in a Biblical manner and luminous in a New Testament way. The first feature is a contribution of the playwright, the second – of the director. The play is a 26-page monologue, which I strongly recommend for reading – it brings a true literary joy. Jonah, like his namesake in the Bible, is in a big fish, but here the fish is in another, even bigger one, which in turn is in a third. However, notably, the direction of the “opening” of these, so to speak, Matryoshka type of fishes is the opposite of the way we do open Matryoshka dolls in reality, as here Jonah goes from the smaller fish to a bigger one and then to an even bigger one. I.e. the direction is vice versa. None of these fishes appear to be familiar with one of the main laws of life formulate by Jonah: “There should be a grid at the entrance of every soul. So no one can get inside it [armed] with a knife.” (He reaches this conclusion as a result of his personal observation after having managed to cut his way from fish 1 to fish 2.) I can’t help sharing yet another of Sorescu wisdoms presented as Jonah’s lines: “In the life of the world, I think, there must be a moment when all people think about their mother, even the dead. The daughter about the mother, the mother of her mother, the grandmother of her mother… until you arrive at the first mother great and good… What stillness then must be in the world! In that moment, if someone cried for help, he’s be heard by the whole earth.” Another unforgettable image is the dream Jonah has of building “a wooden bench in the middle of the sea. A grand construction of planed oak, so that the more cowardly seagulls could rest on it during a storm. … the wind to settle there from time to time [too], and, thinking of me, say, ‘He never made anything worthwhile in his life apart from this wooden bench, putting the sea all round it.’ I’ve given it a lot of thought, and that is what I’d really like to do. Oh, what a sanctuary, to sit head in hands, in the middle of the soul.” The so profound and so beautifully put insights Jonah comes up with do not make the play abstract. The poetical streak that goes through it intertwines with a splendid sense of humour and with the extraordinary ingenuity of the character in his attempt to talk with the world inside and outside of the fishes. For, “like any very lonely man, Jonah talks aloud to himself”, as Sorescu describes him in the beginning of the play. “He asks questions and gives answers, behaving all the time as if there were two characters on stage. He ‘splits’ and then ‘contracts’ himself back according to his inner life and stage demands.” This distinct dialogical nature of Jonah’s monologue – both as contents and as a manner of expression – is also a substantial strength of the text, as it doesn’t let the viewers’ attention get distracted from the stage for a single second. At one moment, two other fishermen enter the stage – they too have been swallowed by the fish – but they serve as just another spring-board for Jonah’s imagination. To handle the role of Jonah is a big challenge, indeed, since, apart from the concrete man, the actor has to be play as it were the whole world – the sea, the fishes, his wife, the wives of the other two fishermen in there, his mother, the cloud, whose shadow weighs in the fisherman’s net…. Sorescu very well knew this and he even suggested, “if the role is too difficult, another actor may play the last two scenes.” Purcarete’s decision to invite an Asian actor to perform Jonah further enhances the role, and considerably at that! In the first place, the main character, “his” world and “his” life, which at their very core are Romanian and, thus, also bear the distinct characteristics and mentality of the Balkans, get to be seen “from the outside” – through the eyes of a totally different culture in general – and get to be explored via a totally different sensitivity. Apart from that large cultural new viewpoint, there is also the personal new point of view of the actor himself. In interviews Sasaki mentions that before his work on the role he was not familiar with the Biblical story about Jonah and the whale, so he plays the role as the story of an ordinary fisherman. This, of course, doesn’t mean that the viewers familiar with the story would entirely forego searching for allegorical layers in the play. On the contrary! And this, in turn, adds yet another parallel viewpoint. Finally, the very organic disassociation of Sasaki from the Biblical story can be perceived as type of an estrangement in handling the character, adding one more perspective. This perspective might be perceived as a hint at the typical estrangement in the traditional Asian theatre. The effect of all that is very similar to the Matryoshka effect of the fishes in the play and on stage, each one opening up new perspectives towards Janah and the world. Sasaki is impressively economic in his choice of acting means of expression. During a considerable part of the time he sits or squats in the middle of the proscenium, and in the second case his hands are embracing his legs. This outside ascetics is coupled with the special inner finesse that humility and wisdom result in. This combination helps every detail of the text to stand out. So none of the words he utters, nor anything in-between the lines, gets lost en route to the audience; everything resonates with crystal clarity. In the beginning of the play Sorescu underlines that the role requires “great flexibility and simplicity”. This is exactly what Sasaki brings to it. Sorescu defines his play as “a tragedy in four scenes”. Indeed, in the original text, after Jonah manages to get out of fist 1 and then out of fish 2, and again doesn’t see the sun, at the very end, he gets out his knife again and “cuts open his own stomach”, pronouncing at the same time the final words, “Somehow we’ll find our way to the light.” Having decided not to follow these instructions and to cut the end and the final line of Jonah, Purkarete in effect changes the genre of the play and, thus, allows both the main character and respectively the whole show to dwell in the sphere of light – both literally and figuratively. He doesn’t follow Sorescu’s instruction for the set either. While in the original the milieu is predominantly naturalistic – inside the fishes, thus, very dark, the set-design in Purkarete’s Jonah is mainly in light, pastel tones. During the first part of the action, a large, slightly wrinkled, paper curtain in off-white plays the role of a back-wing of the proscenium, leaving the rest of the stage off-sight. It is right in front of it where Jonah sits with only a small aquarium with a red fish in it next to him. Then this curtain gets torn from behind at only several places, so that Jonah, already behind it, appears to be like a giant – with hands and legs far apart. Afterwards he cuts all of it, when he gets into the bigger fish. The overall feeling this curtain brings, together with most of the rest of the set, yes, could be of a vast water space, but could also easily be of a vast sky. For, Jonah and his whole world feel like being imbued and enveloped by that tenderness which exists only in the sky. Maybe he actually floats on a cloud, like in an Asian fairy-tale? And maybe this cloud is in another cloud, and it, in turn, is in another one…. In its colours – pastel in both literal and figurative sense, and in its inner light, Jonah resembles Games, Words, Crickets… The semblances continue in that both are one-man shows, yet there are other actors on stage – here, apart from the other two fishermen, we also get to see the actress who sings a beautiful melody as a music background. At the same time, the roles of the three speechless actors are not really big, unlike the role/s of the 17 actors in Games, Words, Crickets… To me, Jonah is even more difficult as a directing task than Games, Words, Crickets… On the one hand, it is very chamber-like. I first saw it during its visit to Sofia before the Sibiu Festival and the size of the National Theatre’s big stage and hall suddenly ceased to matter. Jonah managed to turn them into the most intimate chamber theatre – in terms of impact. At the same time, the production is monumental in a special way – so to speak, monumental from the inside – because of the revelatory feeling it evokes. I guess Jonah is a future “exhibit” in the Festival’s Heritage “collection”. A remarkable demonstration of how cultures could hug and understand each other on the stage, and how together they could hug, understand and love the human being. In other words, Jonah is another opportunity for the International Theatre Festival of Sibiu to say “Thank you!” to the theatre and to the audience . References References About the author(s) Professor Kalina Stefanova is an author or editor of sixteen books: fourteen books on theatre, and two narratives. She was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the New York University and has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cape Town (South Africa), Meiji University (Japan), and at the Shanghai Theatre Academy (China), among others. In 2016, she was appointed the Visiting Distinguished Professor of the Arts School of Wuhan University, China, as well as Distinguished Researcher of the Chinese Arts Criticism Foundation of Wuhan University. She served as IATC’s vice-president for 5 years (2001-2006) and as its Director of Symposia (2006-2010). In 2007, she was the dramaturg of the highly acclaimed production of Pentecost by David Edgar, directed by Mladen Kiselov, at the Stratford Festival in Canada. Since 2001, she has regularly served as an evaluation expert for cultural and educational programs of the European Commission. Currently she teaches at the National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts in Sofia. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Summer 2025 in London, England The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Report from Berlin Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green By Published on April 29, 2021 Download Article as PDF “ Ògún Yè Mo Yè !” Ògún lives! I live. E ku Ọsẹ̀ Ògún! At the time of this writing, it is a day to venerate the Òrìṣà of iron, mystic vision, destruction and creation. Ògún, the adaptable, force of will, and road-opening energy, commits to doing difficult but necessary work to bring about transformation. Ògún pursues justice, fairness, and equity in the distribution of resources. As Ògún opens the way, options, opportunity, and expansion becomes possible. Wole Soyinka describes Ògún as “the truth of destructiveness and creativity in acting man;” the one who surmounts “annihilation.” [1] Practitioners of Ìṣẹ̀ṣẹ̀ L’agba are known to venerate Ògún and empower themselves through a call and response invocation of “ Ògún Yè! Mo Yè !” Ògún lives! I live! Through this potent force, a way will be made. Ògún—the metaphysical power and display of heart—has seen me through the forge that historically white universities (HWUs) can be for Black faculty. This past decade of my career has been shaped by hard work, trailblazing, radical changes, and indefatigable attempts to make pedagogical and production interventions in the face of systemic and cultural challenges within the Department of Theatre, Speech and Dance (TSD) at William & Mary (W&M). Like Ògún, I have been a tireless proponent for operationalizing the possibilities for Black Theater pedagogy and production informed by the highest possible standards in pedagogy, practice, and spirit. As I reflect on the oríkì epigraph above, Ògún becomes a theory for thinking through and characterizing the means and circumstances through which milestones in Black Theater pedagogy and production have occurred at W&M, as well as a meditation for considering how to chart pathways for Black Theater through systemic challenges in similar settings. In Yorùbá creation stories it is the strength and dedication of Ògún’s pioneerism which enabled the gods to subsequently travel across the abyss of transition and reunite with humanity. Thus, Ògún is the force and energetic link which bridges the distance between effort and accomplishment. My W&M career has been marked by achievements. I am the first African American to be tenured and promoted in Theatre. Despite systemic challenges I have earned some of W&M’s highest awards for my teaching, research, and service activities and I now serve on the College of Arts & Sciences, Arts Visioning Committee at the invitation of my dean. Pioneerism highlights milestones, but also requires illuminating the context from which the landmarks emerge, and in this case, the labor of predecessors who dared to establish visions of excellence for the successful pedagogy and production of Black Theater. W&M was founded by James Blair in 1693 with profits of slave labor. [2] It is the second-oldest university in America and boasts several firsts, theatre related and otherwise. In 1702, W&M students performed a “pastoral colloquy” for the Royal Governor, the first recorded theatrical performance in America. Adjacent to campus, the first theatre in America—the Play House—was constructed in Williamsburg in 1716, and on the campus proper, the Bray School—the oldest standing schoolhouse in America—educated free and enslaved Black children from 1760-1774. In 1926, W&M became the first liberal arts college in Virginia to offer a “Play Production” course under the instruction of Ms. Althea Hunt, also credited with incepting the dramatic program. [3] 1964 was the earliest attempt to include Black students in mainstage productions. [4] Howard Scammon, directing Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life , cast Oscar Blayton, the first Black undergraduate admitted to the college. Blayton returned to the mainstage, under Scammon’s direction, as the Third Madman in Websters’ The Duchess of Malfi . However, although admitted to the university for study, segregation laws prevented Blayton from residing on campus. Disenchanted, he withdrew in his sophomore year and enrolled in the University of Maryland. While the college supported extracurricular Black Theater performances in the ‘80s ( Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1980), For Colored Girls (1981), the next two decades would see focused attempts by Theatre faculty to draw Black students to the Theatre department as well as the advent of curricular milestones. During his term as department chair Richard Palmer hired Omi Osun Joni L. Jones in 1982. Black Theater, as an institution at W&M, began under her leadership as she “successfully established and directed the [department sponsored] Black Thespian Society.” [5] It was “birthed from the will of the students” and her “desire to build Black institutions.” [6] One of their major public performances included The Harlem Renaissance Revisited , performed before Gwendolyn Brooks. [7] However, Jones left for Howard after just one year where “discussions of Africa and the African Diaspora” were “just a natural part of everyday talk.” [8] Jones also worked with Bruce McConachie on an adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin , called Goin’ Home to Freedom. But “he did not like what he saw,” said Jones. [9] Due to creative differences, McConachie completed the adaptation. In the Colonial Echo, Fitzgerald writes, “ Goin’ Home to Freedom proved to be an all too rare opportunity to appreciate the wealth of black thespian talent at William and Mary.” [10] From 1995-1996, McConachie collaborated with the Grass Roots Theatre Project and Hermine Pinson to collect oral narratives and write Walk Together Children ; the play explored race relations in Williamsburg during the Civil Rights Movement. Pinson, a creative writer in the English department, would be the first Black book writer produced on the mainstage. Pinson joined professors Susan Chast and Jacquelyne McLendon, in developing and co-teaching African American Theatre History and Performance. When I took the course as an undergraduate in 1996, I was inspired to attend graduate school for theatre rather than law school as planned. This ideation was further cemented by my participation in DeVeaux’s The Tapestry: A Play Woven in Two , in my senior year. The Tapestry became the first Black play on the mainstage. While meeting with the cast on opening night, DeVeaux told us, “You need to be doing what you know in your heart you need to do. In not doing so, you dishonor all of those who came before and showed the way which made it possible for you to choose.” DeVeaux affirmed what my own Orí spoke and intuitively introduced me to what would later become the ritual, ancestral, and aesthetic elements in my research to come. I returned to the “Alma Mater of the Nation” in 2010 as the seventh Black faculty member hired by the department since 1982. In diasporic formations of Ìṣẹ̀ṣẹ̀ L’agba, seven holds significance for Ògún. For example, in Candomblé, seven symbolizes the “multiplication of àshe ” in the iron tools found in Ògún’s cauldron, as well as in oríkì such as, “seven iron signs of the god of iron.” [11] As “the seventh iron,” I returned to my undergraduate kiln with the expressed goal of revitalizing and more importantly, sustaining Black Theater pedagogy and production so it could be engaged on its own terms. The African American Theatre History and Performance course was offered sporadically, not at all, or aspects of it were included in other courses (e.g. Multicultural Theatre, Feminist Theatre, and Theatre and Society in the twentieth Century America). Several Black faculties with varying teaching appointments had come, labored, and left the university: Femi Euba, Martin Fonkijom Fusi, Marvin McAllister, and Jasmin Lambert. Some of these colleagues were former professors and colleagues and I knew some of the circumstances surrounding their departures. Yet, when I opened the doors of Phi Beta Kappa Memorial Hall, I was determined not to be disturbed by ghosts and experiences I had yet to encounter. And though challenges came, based on my curricular interventions, the TSD curriculum has expanded radically. In collaboration with Africana Studies, the department now offers courses on single author playwrights such as Katori Hall, August Wilson, Black Approaches to Acting, survey courses in Post-Racial Theatre, African American Theatre, Black Drama, and a course on theatre and community engagement called Reimagining Communities. Two or three of these courses have been in operation every academic year since 2016. However, the milestones in Black Theater production have been a much taller mountain to scale. By the time COVID-19 interrupted formal mainstage production, W&M had produced 366 shows since the founding of the program in 1926. Nine (less than 2.5%) of these shows came from the genre or methodological praxis of African American or Black Theater, respectively. I directed five of these shows, including Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean , the last production of the pre-COVID season. Gem represented the first time in the producing history of William & Mary Theatre that a collective of Black and award-winning leadership sat at the helm of a mainstage production. Our Scenographer was Patrice Andrew Davidson, the Scenic Charge Artist was Christopher Cumberbatch (who brought two Black professional scenic painters with him, Charles Mickens and Angel Smith), the Sound Designer was Mahmoud Khan, and the Stage Manager was Shawanna Hall. Overcoming the challenges of mounting this production demonstrate Ògún’s leadership and capacity to gather the forces in service of hewing passages through chaos. [12] The first audition pool for Gem was shallow despite my efforts to cast a wide net. Five women showed up for two roles and no men auditioned. As a result, the Director of Theatre advised the producer to cancel the show. Subsequently, I proposed an alternative work (for which we could not get the rights). However, although a limited number of Black students initially auditioned, the threatened cancelation of the show caused a stir among them. An Africana Studies major, Ashley Casey, through a cell phone—a modern science of Ògún—spearheaded a casting campaign via a social media app for Black students at William & Mary. One of the messages distributed read: The theater department already doesn’t believe this can be pulled off because it’s basically an all-black cast of men which hasn’t been done since 2012. We can’t allow this play not to be shown, this is significant to our community and changing the way black theater and approaches to acting are respected here at W&M. Casey’s leadership encapsulates the dual capacity of Ògún’s destructive/constructiveness. A (true) statement which could negatively impact the department’s reputation, became a productive intervention which inspired more student participation. What originally was meant to be a cast of seven became twelve, because I cast every student who responded to Casey’s advocacy and political labor, and because despite the departments’ priority in limiting production opportunities and resources to William & Mary undergraduates, my chair, Laurie Wolf, was willing to extend production opportunities to students of other universities and the community. Thus, I cast a Black alum and a Black theatre major from Christopher Newport University, looking for production opportunities in Black Theater. As a priest, I cannot help but think that ancestors and Òrìṣà, convened and interceded to ensure that a production on the verge of complete “annihilation”—one centered on themes of citizenship, self-rediscovery, and ancestral reconnection—could be reassembled. As a scholar, I recall of Harry Elam’s critical assertion that “the spirit of Ogun . . . suffuses and infuses the world of August Wilson.” [13] Thus, I am not surprised that at the height of my own enervation “in the face of forces inimical to individual assertion,” [14] Ògún, interceded, demonstrating that pathways for Black Theater education and production in historically white universities can occur within a humanizing and supportive structural arrangement. I do not advocate a ritualized manipulation of Ògún energy by non-practitioners of Ìṣẹ̀ṣẹ̀ L’agba. [15] However, Ògún as a philosophical concept—the idea of concerted will towards carving a path towards justice, equity, and inclusion—can dismantle “diversity regimes” or “meaning and practices” that fail to “make fundamental changes.” [16] A pathway to institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production cannot be singlehandedly carved by Black faculty, nor can it be done without systemic shifts and resources. While educational theatres reimagine the possibilities for the field and simultaneously determine where to begin in actively and thoughtfully doing the work of equity and inclusion, HWUs looking to engage in sustainable Black Theater pedagogy and production, might reflect on how to create pathways through: Barriers to student participation : Sometimes Black students are anxious about being singled out (as Black) in historically white settings. Their exhaustion with being the “representative” in their classes extends to their involvement in the production season. The nature of the play risks labeling the student as political or puts them in the position of having to educate white faculty and students about Blackness. Black students also fear that auditioning is a waste of time as they will be limited to servants and sidekicks and/or will be cast “blindly” with no regard for their race or ethnic status. Barriers created by how new hires in Black Theater are conceived within the curriculum : Is the plan to position them primarily at the center of existing courses in the major? Or, will Black Theater courses be featured among major requirements and integrated throughout other classes? Barriers created through lack of understanding : There is a difference between African American Theatre and Black Theater (see Dominic Taylor’s “Don’t Call African American Theatre Black Theatre: It’s Like Calling a Dog a Cat” as a starting place: http://massreview.org/node/7537). Distinguishing between the two means differences in show selection, production methodology, and student learning outcomes. White faculty and students must surrender their tendency to locate and define African American Theatre and Black Theater within their understanding of whiteness and colorism. Barriers created by show placement within the season: Forgo limiting Black Theater production to the pressure points of the season (e.g. when the rehearsal period is five weeks or less and/or ghettoizing it within Black History month). First, this is a sure way to earn the distrust of the students the department hopes to attract as this is an obvious diversity act, unattached to any sustainable effort to institutionalize Black Theater making. Second, if underserved populations are new to the department, more time may be needed for acculturation into departmental practices. Third, in February, the entire campus is ablaze with Black programming and casting may be nearly impossible as students are busy being ambassadors for Blackness. Barriers created by isolation and a limited talent pool : Cultivating relationships with theatre departments at HWUs and any nearby HBCUs to leverage resources and talent can prove a productive strategy. Many HWUs suffer from the same maladies: a dearth of Black students, and an even smaller population of those interested in theatre (HBCUs have neither of these challenges). How might universities build pathways that cross among one another in mutually beneficial ways, towards institutionalizing Black Theater and engaging new stakeholders? Theatre educators limit the range of stories we tell as well as our artistic reach if our student population is not diverse, if our pedagogy and production is obligatory to upholding whiteness, and if our systemic praxis creates barriers to equity and inclusion. May Ògún support our efforts of systemic transformation. Ògún Yè! Ògún lives! May Black Theater pedagogy and production in historically white institutions live too. Àṣẹ. References [1] Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 28. [2] Ibram X Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 64. [3] Althea Hunt, The William & Mary Theatre: A Chronicle (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1968), xvi. [4] Howard Scammon, The William & Mary Theatre (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1978), np. [5] Ronald L. Jackson and Sonja M. Givens Brown, Black Pioneers in Communication Research (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2006), 195. [6] Joni L. Jones, Personal Interview, Zoom, 17 March 2021. [7] Jones, Personal Interview, Zoom, 17 March 2021 [8] Ronald L. Jackson and Sonja M. Givens Brown, Black Pioneers in Communication Research (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2006), 195. [9] Jones, Personal Interview, Zoom, 17 March, 2021. [10] William & Mary, Colonial Echo 1986 Yearbook , Swem Special Collections (Williamsburg: Graduating Class of 1986, 1986), 88. [11] Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 57. [12] Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 27. [13] Harry Elam, Jr., The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 172. [14] Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 33. [15] For further reading on Ògún see, Barnes, Sandra, Africa’s Ogun: Old World and New (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). [16] James M. Thomas, “Diversity Regimes and Racial Inequality: A Case Study of Diversity University,” Social Currents 5:2 (2018): 140–56. ISNN 2376-4236 Footnotes About The Author(s) OMIY Ẹ MI (ARTISIA) GREEN is a director, dramaturg, and Professor of Theatre and Africana Studies at William & Mary. She is published in Continuum , the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society Journal Peer Review Section, the August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays (McFarland), A frican American Culture: An Encyclopedia of People, Traditions, and Customs (Greenwood), and FIRE!!! The Multimedia Journal of Black Studies. Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf ISNN 2376-4236 Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Genocide and Movements by Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. The setting up of a solo performance, the outbreak of revolt, the collective clamor of the marches. Art, organization and rage against the genocide of black people. An audiovisual manifesto recorded between 2008 and 2016, in the two cities with the greatest black presence in Brazil The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Genocide and Movements At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Discussion, Documentary, Performance Art This film will be screened in-person on May 17th. About The Film Country Brazil Language Portuguese Running Time 60 minutes Year of Release 2021 The setting up of a solo performance, the outbreak of revolt, the collective clamor of the marches. Art, organization and rage against the genocide of black people. An audiovisual manifesto recorded between 2008 and 2016, in the two cities with the greatest black presence in Brazil CAST/PEOPLE INTERVIEWED: Gustavo Melo Cerqueira Ágatha Oliveira Rodrigo dos Santos Luis Carlos de Alencar Hilton Cobra Joel Zito Araújo Val Da Mata Lio Nzumbi Hamilton Borges dos Santos Angelo Flávio Vilma Reis Onisajé Syrup Jesiel Oliveira Fred Aganju Caroline Amanda Borges Andreia Beatriz dos Santos Christen A. Smith Antonio Borgens /// Directors: Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Solo performance: Gustavo Melo Cerqueira Screenplay: Luis Carlos de Alencar and Ricardo Gomes Production: Couro de Rato Executive producer: Vladimir Seixas Photography: Marcel Gonnet Wainmayer Camera: Igor Caiê do Amaral Consulting: Lena Azevedo and Sandra Carvalho Editing: Ricardo Gomes Direct sound: Couro de Rato Assistant director: Aline Frey, Gláucia Marinho and Patrícia Freitas Graphic arts and videography: Couro de Rato Poster art: Maia Moon Sound design, mixing and original soundtrack: Thiago Sobral Original music: film REAJA - DJ GUG Declamation: Cíntia Guedes Artistic supervision: Marcel Gonnet Wainmayer Body Preparation: Agatha Oliveira Collaboration: Rodrigo de Odé, Hilton Cobra and Joel Zito Araújo Spaces: Ngoma School of Capoeira Angola, Theater of the Oppressed Center and Vila Velha Theater About The Artist(s) ANDREIA BEATRIZ: - Debuting Director, Doctor at Lemos Brito Penitentiary, in Bahia, Specialist in Family and Community Medicine, Master in Public Health. Coordinator of the Political Organization React or Be Dead, Co-founder of the Winnie Mandela Quilombist Community School. Author of the book “Olhar por entre grares, lives in poems”, published by Reaja Editora (2020) of which she is co-founder. HAMILTON BORGES: Hamilton Borges - Debuting Director. Born and raised in Curuzu, Salvador City in Bahia. His knowledge comes from his black wrestling and emotional interaction with the women in his family, especially his paternal grandmother. He conceived and integrates the “React or it will be dead” and the Winnie Mandela School. Writer of “General Theory of Failure”, “Salvador, tomb city”, “Ariel's black book” and “Libido, oil palm and melanin”. Luis Carlos de Alencar IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3439398/ Director, screenwriter, researcher. Partner of the production company Couro de Rato. Directed by the short Homem Invisíveis, Best International Doc at the Trans Stellar Film Festival-Detroit/USA; award at the Mix Brasil Festival; best direction - DIGO - International Film Festival of Sexual and Gender Diversity - GO and Festival de Inhapim - MG; Best Documentary - Festival Cine Tamoio and Festival de Jaraguá do Sul; Best Regional Short at the Rio LGBTQIA+ Film Festival. Directed Contagem Regressiva, Best Doc and Best Soundtrack at Rio WF 2016; directed the doc Bombadeira, taken to more than 30 national and foreign festivals, RedeTrans award - 10 years of Bombadeira, for the contribution of the work to the transsexual community. Director, with Vladimir Seixas, of the series Corpos Periféricos (6 episodes), shown by ESPN. As Assistant Director, he acted in 21 works, including feature documentaries, telefilms and 6 TV series. Post-Graduate in Cinema and Audiovisual at M_EIA, Cape Verde Institute of Art; Postgraduate in Communication and Image at PUC-Rio; Graduated in Law from UFBA. Get in touch with the artist(s) lcfdaf@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://www.instagram.com/reajaouseramorta/ https://reajanasruas.blogspot.com/ https://www.instagram.com/couroderato/ http://couroderato.com.br/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

By Valeria Orani, Frank Hentschker | A collection of contemporary Italian plays presented in English. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu New Plays from Italy Volume 3 Valeria Orani, Frank Hentschker Download PDF Italian and American Playwrights Project is curated by Umanism’s Artistic Director Valeria Orani in collaboration with The Martin E. Segal’s Director Frank Hentschker. The project brought together some of the brightest, innovative, and most engaging Italian contemporary playwrights, developing their pieces through translation into English. Italian Playwrights Project restarted an artistic dialogue between Italy and US adding continuity to what had been an on-off relationship between the two countries for the last decades. This book has been translated thanks to a grant by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. ELISA CASSERI - EVENT ORIZON (TRANSLATED BY ADRIANA ROSSETTO) Olga is stuck in a studio apartment, she cannot figure out what has happened, she only knows that she cannot escape. When she tries to open one of the doors on the wall, she immediately comes back from another one and continues to stay there. Marco is her boyfriend but sometimes he isn’t, her father is alive but later dead, her mother left when she was a little girl but she is suddenly back. Olga struggles to understand and does not know what reality is and what she can do to change what happened and what didn’t happen. She cannot surrender to the real time, to past events, to those journeys into a grief which is too true to be science fiction. GIULIANA MUSSO - MY HERO (TRANSLATED BY PATRICIA GABORIK) My Hero is made up of three distinct monologues. Three mothers of as many Italian soldiers who took part in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission in Afghanistan during the years 2008-2010. The three women are very different from each other for social extraction, geographic origin, cultural level and personality, but they share the experience of having a soldier's son. Characters are inspired by existing people and real-life events ARMANDO PIROZZI - A NOTEBOOK FOR WINTER (TRANSLATED BY ADRIANA ROSSETTO) A Notebook for Winter is a two-actor-piece which in three acts and tells the story of an introvert professor of literature who finds a burglar on his way back home. The knife-wielding burglar wants something unexpected from him: it is a question of life or death. FABRIZIO SINISI- THE GREAT WALK (TRANSLATED BY THOMAS SIMPSON ) The president of the International Monetary Fund, Frederic Jean-Paul, is arrested and kept in an anonymous New York police station: he’s accused of sexual violence inflicted on a waitress. His two bizarre jailers, Donald and Frank, have been ordered to guard the prisoner until the following morning, when he will be brought to a safer location. However, things don’t go as planned EDITED BY FRANK HENTSCHKERWITH VALERIA ORANI Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 22, 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Robert Wilson Beneath a Cabbage Leaf: 7 Solitudes at the Nacionalinis Kauno Dramos Teatras Published: July 15, 2026 Download Article as PDF By Tomasz Domagała Image Credits: Article The second part of the performance, set in a breathtaking chandelier-and-cypress space, ends with an old Lithuanian "Tale of the Cat," narrated by two Spirits (Agnieszka Ravdo and Martyna Gedvilaitė). Let us look at it closely, because it provides an ideal point of departure for understanding the production as a whole. One day, while a cat was hunting mice in a cabbage field, a large leaf suddenly fell onto his tail. Terrified, he concluded that the sky was falling and bolted. Along the way he met a hare, who believed him without question and ran beside him. Soon a fox and a wolf joined them, each accepting the alarming news without a moment's hesitation. Only a bear decided to investigate the source of the rumor. Questioning the animals one by one, he eventually reached the cat and discovered that the cause of all the commotion was nothing more than an ordinary cabbage leaf. Realizing their mistake, the animals quietly returned home. In the tale, everything begins with a misreading of reality. The cat feels the leaf strike him and immediately mistakes it for the end of the world. He does not verify what has happened. He acts out of fear. That fear spreads from one animal to the next until a collective panic, built entirely on illusion, takes hold. Only the bear interrupts the mechanism and restores reality: the sky has not fallen—it was only a cabbage leaf. Look closely at the production's central character, the Poet, and his path toward self-knowledge follows precisely the same trajectory. It begins, theatrically, in complete darkness, from which only the Poet's head (Dainius Svobonas) emerges. It is difficult to resist the feeling that we meet him at the moment described by Dante in the opening of The Divine Comedy : "Midway upon the journey of our life," when the pilgrim, "having lost the path that does not stray," finds himself in a dark forest. The association matters because it establishes the temporal frame of the entire production—the stretch between maturity and death. Everything begins with an act of painful self-recognition. The hero becomes aware of where he stands, who he has become, and what balance his life has achieved. This realization propels him toward what follows: a peculiar journey. It is peculiar because it unfolds simultaneously in waking life and in dreams, within the realm of art that is the Poet's natural home and beyond it, in reality itself. The embodiment of this magical duality is the guide fate assigns him: Don Juan (Gytis Laskovas). Don Juan, however, is himself divided—between the legendary seducer created by cultural history and the historical Miguel Mañara, the man of flesh and blood. The allusion is deliberate. Don Juan was one of the central figures in the imagination of Oskar Milosz, whose alter ego the Poet appears to be. The Poet therefore receives, perhaps only half-consciously, the task that matters most: to examine his own life in what amounts to a double mirror, seeking its structure and its meaning, trying to understand where it is all leading. Narratively, he embarks on a journey through memory, imagination, and experience. Encountering Don Juan and his servant Sganarelle (Kęstutis Jakštas), women, shadows of the dead, and fragments of his own past, he confronts loneliness, unfulfillment, love, death, and the collapse of illusion. Following a suicide attempt and the experience of profound grief, he undergoes a spiritual transformation. He comes to understand—and we understand with him—that none of the traumatic experiences of human life is truly the end of the world. Each is only a cabbage leaf falling naturally onto a cat's tail. This gradual reconciliation with the order and mechanism of existence possesses another formal elegance. The production moves steadily from darkness into light, until, bathed in illumination at the finale, the Poet experiences an inner enlightenment. Wilson and Chemin's way of presenting the Poet's life simultaneously "five feet above the ground" and firmly on it causes his dilemmas to appear, almost of their own accord, gently exaggerated—and gently mocked. They achieve this through a series of carefully chosen interruptions that puncture the solemn, romantic, occasionally self-important discourse of the suffering artist. Among them are the actresses' running commentary throughout what often resembles an operetta (and, indeed, this production occasionally carries the scent of operetta); Kęstutis Jakštas's wonderfully physical slapstick performance as Sganarelle; and the unexpected radio dialogue that abruptly interrupts the Poet's earnest attempt to transform his own life into theatre while he remains absorbed in his spiritual introspection. Each interruption belongs to a different theatrical convention. These are among the production's finest moments. They create breathing room within the dense poetic language of Oskar Milosz, allowing the audience to meet the Poet's thoughts and Wilson's extraordinary stage images without suffocation. They suspend dramatic time and open a space for contemplation. Returning to the tale of the cat, the quarrel between the two actresses over how the story should be performed immediately introduces the theme of theatre within the theatre. In doing so, it connects the story of an artist "midway through life's journey" with the fate of the production's creator, Robert Wilson, who died during its creation. Even without these self-reflexive passages, it would be almost impossible not to see the Poet as Wilson's alter ego. His journey becomes, inevitably, a parable of Wilson's own life—a destiny that, whether comic or terrifying, could only ultimately be fulfilled in solitude. Seen from this perspective, the title 7 Solitudes needs no explanation. As many people, as many solitudes. There are seven actors; there are seven forms of loneliness. The production itself is magnificent, as are the performances. Every member of the ensemble deserves recognition: Martyna Gedvilaitė, Kęstutis Jakštas, Gytis Laskovas, Miglė Navasaitytė, Agnieszka Ravdo, Dainius Svobonas, and Vladimiras Šerstabojevas. The creative team is equally outstanding: Hans-Jörn Brandenburg (music), Stephanie Engeln (set design), Marcello Lumaca (lighting), Flavia Ruggeri (costumes), Manu Halligan (make-up and hair), and Tomasz Jeziorski (video). The production was conceived and designed by Robert Wilson and Charles Chemin but realized without the watchful eye of the American master. Even so, it remains unmistakably a Robert Wilson production—his theatrical language is present in every image. What is perhaps most moving is that Wilson, much like the Poet he helped create, seems to continue spinning the thread of his narrative from beyond the grave, with complete serenity, because for him death is nothing more than the fall of a cabbage leaf. Meanwhile, Charles Chemin's Sganarelle quietly points toward this truth with the subtlest of gestures, reminding us that 7 Solitudes is also, unmistakably, a performance about Robert Wilson himself. Once that realization arrives, emotion catches in the throat almost instantly. References References About the author(s) A theatre critic, member and essayist of the Polish section of the AICT-IATC International Association of Theatre Critics, author of DOMAGAŁAsięKULTURY blog and “W pierwszym rzędzie” theatre cycle at RMF Classic radio, selector for the Boska Komedia / Divine Comedy International Theatre Festival and for the Paszport Awards from Polityka weekly. Works with key Polish theatre festivals. In 2019–21 he was a curator of the New Theatre Festival in Rzeszów and in 2018–20 he worked for the Polish Radio. He has been a contributor to Teatr, Rzeczpospolita, Tygodnik Powszechny, Gazeta Wyborcza, and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, and since 2014, he has regularly published reviews and interviews with theatre artists on his website. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Review of 'In The Heights' at the Teatro Variedades Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Spring in Europe – Beyond the Theatertreffen Power, Shame, Vanity and Opportunism – Productions of the 63rd Berliner Theatertreffen “The more I give to thee, the more I have…” 15th edition of the International Shakespeare Festival in Craiova Finding Lear’s Shadow: Compagnia de' Colombari's King Lear at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival Robert Wilson Beneath a Cabbage Leaf: 7 Solitudes at the Nacionalinis Kauno Dramos Teatras NE:BITEF 2025: The Festival that Refused to Disappear Displacing the Orient: Postcolonial Negotiations in Purcărete's Adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights Staging Tradition, Testing Form: The Second Showcase of the National Theatre of Sofia Poetics of the Unfulfilled: The Seagull at the Jordan Hadji Konstantinov-Dzhinot Theatre, Veles, North Macedonia Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

S T A R R BUSBY presents Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part II at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part II S T A R R BUSBY 4-4:50 pm Saturday, October 19, 2024 The Segal Theatre RSVP Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering is an experience in support of community building and collective liberation that explores the question 'How can we center connection and care in a rapidly changing world?’ A Communal Offering, Part II will provide audience members a space to relax, listen deeply, and recharge. The performance will be followed by a conversation with River Ramirez. Please also join us for Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part I on Thursday, October 17, 6-8 pm in the Elebash Recital Hall Lobby. Visitors are invited to arrive at Elebash Lobby at any time from 6-8 pm for this event. Working Up A Surrender: Collective Healing Experiments was first produced at JACK with the support of a NYSCA Grant 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). S T A R R busby (they/she/he/we - all pronouns said with respect) is a Black experimental artist who sings, acts, composes, educates, and is committed to the liberation of all people. A recent recipient of a NYSCA grant, S T A R R leads a music project under their name which will release a debut project in 2024 - Working Up A Surrender . She is also the lead singer of dance&b band People's Champs (www.peopleschampsnyc.com ) which released their latest project, Show Up, in the Fall of 2023. S T A R R has also supported and collaborated with artists such as The Gorillaz, Esperanza Spalding, Son Lux, X Ambassadors, Kimbra, Alice Smith, and Quelle Chris. Selected credits: If You Unfolded Us (Sable Elyse Smith, MoMA); Rest Within the Wake (James Allister Sprang, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Featured Soloist); (pray) (Ars Nova and National Black Theatre, A Singer, Composer, and Music Director)*Lucille Lortel Award Winner; The Beautiful Lady (La Mama, Boris); On Sugarland (NYTW, co-composer); Octet (Signature Theatre, Paula) *Drama Desk Award Winner; Mikrokosmos, Sterischer Herbst (Graz), Nottingham Contemporary; The Girl with the Incredible Feeling , Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi. All music available via Bandcamp and all streaming services. Love, gratitude and ashé to my blessed honorable ancestors, especially MME. linktr.ee/S_T_A_R_R Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

Watch Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater by Christoph Rüter at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. Hans-Thies Lehmann - Postdramatic Theater a co-production of Akademie der Künste Berlin and Christoph Rüter Filmproduktion, 43 min., 2019 with: Nele Hertling, Frank Hentschker, Hans-Werner Kroesinger, René Pollesch, Tom Stromberg On the occasion of the symposium "Postdramatic Theater Worldwide" at the Akademie der Künste Berlin 2019, the above-mentioned film was commissioned by the AdK. 20 years after the publication of Hans-Thies Lehmann's groundbreaking book Postdramatic Theater, the Akademie der Künste Berlin held a two-day symposium to discuss international resonances and perspectives of postdramatic theater in academia and the arts. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Christoph Rüter Theater This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country Germany Language German Running Time 43 minutes Year of Release 2019 Hans-Thies Lehmann - Postdramatic Theater a co-production of Akademie der Künste Berlin and Christoph Rüter Filmproduktion, 43 min., 2019 with: Nele Hertling, Frank Hentschker, Hans-Werner Kroesinger, René Pollesch, Tom Stromberg On the occasion of the symposium "Postdramatic Theater Worldwide" at the Akademie der Künste Berlin 2019, the above-mentioned film was commissioned by the AdK. 20 years after the publication of Hans-Thies Lehmann's groundbreaking book Postdramatic Theater, the Akademie der Künste Berlin held a two-day symposium to discuss international resonances and perspectives of postdramatic theater in academia and the arts. a film by Christoph Rüter, Camera: Patrick Popow, Frederik Walker About The Artist(s) Christoph Rüter - Filmography Born Jan. 1st 1957, in Gelsenkirchen, Germany 1976, A-levels in Münster (Westphalia), studied dramatics, philosophy and psychology in Munich and Berlin 1985 - 89, dramatic adviser at Freie Volksbühne Berlin; cooperation with Hans Neuenfels, Christof Nel, Thomas Brasch, Bob Wilson, Heiner Müller and many more The Time is out of Joint/Die Zeit ist aus den Fugen - WDR/own production, 1989-91, 100’ Inter City Express/Zwischen Städten Schnell - WDR/ZDF/Arte, 1993, 30’ Neugier & Risiko/ Curiosity & Risk – SFB/Arte, 60’ Nach Vollzug/Comprehension – 1998, 3sat, 1997, 60’ L'Homme de Passage – The director Klaus Michael Grüber, Arte/WDR, 1999, 75’ Klaus Kinski – Ich bin kein Schauspieler/I am not an actor - Arte/WDR, 2000, 45’ Ulrich Wildgruber – Um das Leben spielen/Play for life - 3sat/NDR, 2000, 50’ Curt Bois – Charakterkomiker Character Comedian - 3sat/RBB, , 2001, 45’ Ute Lemper – There is no Paradise - Arte/WDR, 2002, 60’ Klaus Kammer – Er spielte seinen Schatten mit/He played his shadow with (as producer) – by Andreas Lewin, 2003, RBB/Christoph Rüter Film production, 75’ Angela Winkler – Einfach und stolz/Simple and proud – Arte/WDR/3sat, 2004, 85’ Thomas Brasch – 3sat, 2005, 30’ Jörg Fauser – Rohstoff/Raw Material – 3sat, 2006, 45’ Ulrich Mühe - Jetzt bin ich allein/Now I am alone – 3sat/Arte, 2008, 60’ Heiner Müller – ICH WILL NICHT WISSEN, WER ICH BIN/I D'ONT WANT TO KNOW WHERE I AM, Co-Author Thomas Irmer, 3sat/Arte, 2009, 60’ Thomas Brasch – BRASCH – DAS WÜNSCHEN UND DAS FÜRCHTEN/ WORDS OF WANT, WORDS OF FEAR – Cinema-Coproduction with TAG/TRAUM together with Christoph Rüter Filmproduction, with funding from 3sat, Filmstiftung NRW, Medienboard Berlin, BKM, 2011, 92’ KRIMIS UND DAS DRITTE REICH/ CRIME NOVELS AND THE THIRD REICH - a Documentation about the Crime-Writer Philip Kerr, Volker Kutscher & Dominique Manotti, Arte/ZDF, 53’, 2016 HANS BLUMENBERG – The invisible Philosopher - Cinema-Coproduction with TAG/TRAUM together with Kinescope and Christoph Rüter Filmproduction, with funding from BKM, Filmstiftung NRW, Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein, Possehl Stiftung Lübeck, 2018, 102' Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater – a Co-Produktion with Akademie der Künste, Berlin and Christoph Rüter Filmproduktion, 43 Min., 2019 Get in touch with the artist(s) christophrueter@t-online.de and follow them on social media https://www.christoph-rueter-filmproduktion.de https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrcUGOpC1qexSNYjkUazUEw/videos Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

TINA SATTER / HALF STRADDLE presents PETRA at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 PETRA TINA SATTER / HALF STRADDLE 8-9 pm Thursday, October 17, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall RSVP Early excerpts of a work-in-progress. With Emily Davis, Elizabeth DeMent, Emma Haeri, Lucy Taylor, Danusia Trevino, Nicole Villamil Directed by Tina Satter Thank you to Chloe Claudel, Claire Davison, Eleanor Hutchins, Marianna McClennan, Susannah Perkins, Clarice Reiner, Maya Rubio, Susie Sokol, and Oscar Peña and the Park Avenue Armory. 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). TINA SATTER/HALF STRADDLE is a performance company from New York City that has been making theater, music, and videos since 2008. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

By David Willinger | This anthology captures the tendencies of contemporary European playwriting at the beginning of the new millennium. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Four Millennial Plays From Belgium David Willinger Download PDF This anthology captures the tendencies of contemporary European playwriting at the beginning of the new millennium — focusing on race, inter-continental marriage, the privileges allowed society’s leaders, the resurgence of the Extreme Right, and creative ways of juggling love relationships — presented in a variety of accessible styles. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

By Marvin Carlson | Four French Comedies of the 17th and 18th Centuries < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu The Heirs of Molière Marvin Carlson Download PDF Four French Comedies of the 17th and 18th Centuries Translated in a poetic form that seeks to capture the wit and spirit of the originals, these four plays suggest something of the range of the Molière inheritance, from comedy of character through the highly popular sentimental comedy of the mid eighteenth century, to comedy that employs the Molière tradition for more contemporary political ends. In addition to their humor these comedies provide fascinating social documents that show changing ideas about such perennial social concerns as class, gender, and politics through the turbulent century that ended in the revolutions that gave birth to the modern era. Translated and Edited by Marvin Carlson. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 22, 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Review of 'In The Heights' at the Teatro Variedades Published: July 15, 2026 Download Article as PDF By Timothy Koch Image Credits: Article The Portuguese premiere of In the Heights by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes played to well-earned full houses at Lisbon’s Teatro Variedades, March 25th through May 3rd, 2026. Music Theater Lisbon’s courageous vision, spearheaded by Executive Producer Martim Galamba and Stage Director Sissi Martins (both are company founders), should advance the needle of expectation for what is possible in this world-class city of great art, where musical theater may have just glimpsed its potential for international stature. In the words of Lin-Manuel Miranda, who expressed to the company his love for Portugal and the new Portuguese In the Heights translation: “I believe we all yearn for music that reflects the world we live in, and that’s true in Lisbon, in Washington Heights, and all over the world.” Every member of MTL’s quintessential ensemble cast contributed in an integral way. Each ensemble member presented a multi-dimensional character that helped to propel the drama at various points. All principals fully embraced their challenges, several in extraordinary ways. Gonçalo Rosales set a high bar as the first Portuguese-Dominican-American Usnavi, the wistful bodega owner with an inherent yearning for his Dominican homeland. Rosales excelled as a rapper, dancer, and singer, and his acting revealed sophisticated depth, as his character shifted subtly to reflect the variety of close relationships he shared with so many other characters. Rosales was an instant audience favorite, and we cheered for him, silently and overtly, throughout. Margarida Silva played an electric Vanessa. She was strong, honest, vulnerable, and a sensational dancer, alternately commanding the full attention of the theatre and surrendering her role to dramatic moment. Silva can play, dance, and sing Vanessa on any stage. The character creations of Miranda and Hudes capture a full cross-section of Upper Manhattan color and the Portuguese cast embodied all of it and then some. Ludy Guimarães, as Nina, realistically conveyed both sides of her Heights-Latino and stressed Stanford college girl conflict. Luisa Cruz, a well-known Portuguese actress, personified Abuela Claudia, the beloved matriarch of the neighborhood. Pedro Nuno simultaneously assimilated and reached for more as Benny, the only non-Latino in the neighborhood. Marta Mota gave healthy servings of tough love to the younger characters like the oldest sister in a big family, and Tiago Retrê, as the Piragua Guy and perhaps the cast’s best singer, stole big laughs with perfect comedic timing. Notably, Galamba invited former American Ambassador to Portugal for the Biden administration, Randi Charno Levine, to the stage after final bows on April 19th to recognize her for major support of Music Theater Lisbon. As ambassador, Levine, a well-known arts advocate (board member - Roundabout Theatre Company, Anna Wintour Costume Center, National Portrait Gallery, New Museum), emphasized cultural diplomacy as one means to strengthen U.S.-Portugal relations. Levine continues to maintain a presence in Portugal and remains active as an advocate for music theater and the arts. It felt appropriate to return for a second look at this powerful production on the 25th of April ( 25 de Abril ), Portugal's most important national holiday. The observance, also known as Dia da Liberdade honors the 1974 Carnation Revolution, a peaceful military coup that overthrew a 48-year-old dictatorship, restoring democracy to the people. Teatro Variedades stands only a few meters from Avenida de Liberdade, where the country’s largest liberty parade overlapped the playing time of that day’s Heights matinee. As the robust chorus of Carnaval del Barrio soared through the theater, a palpable connection materialized between the historic “Carnaval del Barrio Libertad” celebrations of Argentina, Uruguay, and Washington Heights and Portugal’s “Dia de Liberdade,” celebrated just outside the theater’s doors. Portuguese pride was enhanced, curtain to curtain, by the quality and energy presented by this cast and crew. The full spectrum of theatrical elements was on display and worthy of praise for MTL’s In the Heig hts. The cast communicated directly to the audience in a Portuguese translation by João Sá Coelho, augmented by committed singing (Carlos Meireles, coach), spectacular dance (Marco Mercier, choreographer), stunning lighting (Francisco Alves, designer), brilliant instrumental accompaniment (Tom Neiva, music director), clear and balanced sound (Daniel Fernandes, designer), and sets and costumes that transported everyone straight to 181 st Street and Broadway, NYC (Pedro Morim, designer). Founded by Martim Galamba, Sissi Martins and Rúben Madureira, Music Theater Portugal is an organization dedicated to the development of Musical Theatre in Portugal, having created a bridge between Broadway and the country. Parabens (Congratulations) to Galamba and Martins, et al. for ushering musical theater forward in Portugal. References References About the author(s) Timothy Koch, D.M.A., is a retired American conductor living in Lisbon, Portugal. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Review of 'In The Heights' at the Teatro Variedades Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Spring in Europe – Beyond the Theatertreffen Power, Shame, Vanity and Opportunism – Productions of the 63rd Berliner Theatertreffen “The more I give to thee, the more I have…” 15th edition of the International Shakespeare Festival in Craiova Finding Lear’s Shadow: Compagnia de' Colombari's King Lear at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival Robert Wilson Beneath a Cabbage Leaf: 7 Solitudes at the Nacionalinis Kauno Dramos Teatras NE:BITEF 2025: The Festival that Refused to Disappear Displacing the Orient: Postcolonial Negotiations in Purcărete's Adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights Staging Tradition, Testing Form: The Second Showcase of the National Theatre of Sofia Poetics of the Unfulfilled: The Seagull at the Jordan Hadji Konstantinov-Dzhinot Theatre, Veles, North Macedonia Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Rosa Schneider Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Rosa Schneider By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF A hush falls over the previously raucous crowd as the image projected across the wall of Theatre for a New Audience and onto the bodies of the actors on stage suddenly becomes clear. The famous photograph of the August 7, 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana, fills the space. Shipp and Smith hang from a tree in the background, while in the foreground a huge crowd of white spectators smile, point at the bodies, and make eye contact with the photographer. As the audience watches in mute horror, the projection is manipulated so that Smith and Shipp’s bodies appear to sway in the trees, bringing immediacy to a decades-old event. It is within and against this backdrop that BJJ, Playwright, and Assistant, the three most versatile characters in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014), attempt to stage a lynch trial on the docks of a Louisiana town for Wahnotee, a Native American accused of murdering a black child. The photograph of this particularly brutal twentieth-century lynching deepens the action on stage, occurring in the 1850s of the original play. These innovations force the audience to become complicit in the trial and its bloody aftermath and simultaneously bring the audience as close to a sensation of death as possible without burning the theatre down around them. [1] This eye-catching and difficult scene, which I call reconstruction, is a key part of Jacobs-Jenkins’ compilation of theatrical techniques. Collectively, these techniques teach Jacobs-Jenkins’s twenty-first-century audience to respond both on a theatrical and a racial level in order to work in a manner they would not have been able to otherwise. Jacobs-Jenkins manipulates melodramatic structures— such as the sensation scene, tableau, and what in this article I term melodrama’s gaze—that play upon and reimagine the history of melodrama in the United States. These changes not only alter the way slavery’s violence is portrayed on stage but make melodrama comprehensible to a twenty-first-century audience unused to the genre’s demands. These reconstructions allow Jacobs-Jenkins to transform Dion Boucicault’s wildly influential melodrama The Octoroon into his own version, An Octoroon . The two plays follow essentially the same plot, but Jacobs-Jenkins makes crucial changes to the universe of The Octoroon, particularly to the characters. Jacobs-Jenkins removes many of the white characters, notably the majority of Boucicault’s plantation owners, while consolidating those he keeps. George Peyton, the new owner of Terrebonne (the plantation on which both plays take place), is merged with Salem Scudder, the well-meaning but destructive Northern overseer of Boucicault’s original, who feels particularly protective of Zoe, the eponymous octoroon. [2] George inherits Scudder’s interest in technology, particularly photography, maintaining an important plot point and gateway to the sensation scene. [3] Cuts such as these are logical, as the removed figures emphasize previously established power structures. However, these changes then create a lack of economic diversity, as the white characters who remain all belong to the upper echelons of slave-owning society. That separation makes even starker the divisions between the enslaved and laboring African-American characters and the white leisure class. Further, the elimination of characters like Scudder, Judge Caillou, and Jules Thibodeaux narrows the universe of the melodrama. Rather than showing “life in Louisiana,” which is Boucicault’s subtitle, with Terrebonne as one of a network of plantations, Jacobs-Jenkins’ edits make the plantation a world unto itself. As we shall explore at greater length below, Jacobs-Jenkins also makes significant changes to the ending of The Octoroon . Thus, with changes to character, plot, and form, Jacobs-Jenkins walks a fine line in An Octoroon between rewriting a singular play and reconstructing an entire genre. It is difficult to overstate the importance of melodrama as a theatrical form in the nineteenth-century American landscape. Between 1820 and 1870, melodrama was ubiquitous in American culture, attracting diverse audiences “from elite males to urban workers and business- class women, by the time of the Civil War.” [4] Cutting across class and racial lines, melodrama served as a location for audiences to project their hopes and assuage their fears of a rapidly changing society. The theatres and the plots explored therein served as a training ground for business-class audiences to “acquire, rehearse, and perfect the manners of polite society.” [5] Knowing this history helps us to understand the effect of Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstructions. As part of this reconstruction, Jacobs-Jenkins chooses several tools that are essential to melodrama, including the sensation scene, the tableau, acting styles, and staging methods, and then fundamentally changes their core by altering melodrama’s gaze. “Melodrama’s gaze” refers to what could be included on stage in these productions: the plotlines that were of interest to the consumers and creators, the characters who could embody those stories, as well as the tools and techniques used to actualize these narratives. Jacobs-Jenkins’s changes allow him to represent subjects—slaves and slavery—that nineteenth-century melodrama’s toward which practitioners were often happy to gesture but with which they refused to engage in any depth. Slavery was long a topic on the melodramatic stage in both England and the United States, as is evident from the multiple versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin playing simultaneously during the nineteenth century. As Linda Williams argues in Playing the Race Card , melodrama is “the fundamental mode by which American mass culture has ‘talked to itself’ about the enduring moral dilemma of race.” [6] The subjects of the stories and the stories themselves that the genre told, however, were not as capacious as one might expect. An example of this exclusionary effect is the way Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was adapted into melodrama, stripping away the agency of many of its female characters. While these plotlines were partly cut for time, as only so many plots and characters from a novel can be translated onto the stage, there is also a specific set of generic conventions that Stowe’s characters like Mrs. Shelby or Mrs. Bird could not fulfill. In discussing George L. Aiken and Henry J. Conway’s adaptations, Bruce McConachie explains that: both playwrights were necessarily drawing on production practices and theatrical conventions ill-suited to realizing Stowe’s matrifocal ideals in production. Strong-willed mothers rarely appeared on the antebellum stage; most stock companies would have been hard pressed to cast several such roles since companies generally contained two to three times as many male as female actors. [7] We can thus see melodrama’s gaze at work. While Stowe’s original included a character like Mrs. Shelby, who decried the slave system from a matrifocal, anti-capitalist point of view, the melodramatic form could not accommodate such a character. There is thus a space for Jacobs-Jenkins to expand the audience’s understanding of and experience with slavery. Jacobs-Jenkins’s weaving together of theatrical techniques from different eras creates a new genre, one that incorporates elements of performance styles from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries alongside each other rather than prioritizing one century’s vision over another. Through these techniques Jacobs-Jenkins reconstructs the violence of slavery, bringing it onto the stage in a manner that marks a significant departure from the ways the institution had been represented previously, which often emphasized and lingered on physical and sexual violence. Excessive violence is often depicted to evoke sympathy for its victims. However, the spectacle can have the opposite effect: not only leaving the audience with an uncomfortable sense of voyeurism but habituating them to the sight of a black body in pain. [8] On the other hand, just as reprehensible as overemphasizing the violence of slavery is pretending that violence didn’t exist or attempting to make it palatable. Jacobs-Jenkins takes a third route, and his reconstruction of certain elements of melodrama helps the audience see the institution’s violence in a new light. Jacobs-Jenkins’s interest in form is apparent in the way he mixes elements from the American and British versions of The Octoroon . In the American version, distraught over her inability to be with George and her fear of M’Closky, Zoe commits suicide, and the play ends with her death. In the British version, M’Closky is stopped by George, and the owner of Terrebonne marries Zoe. The British audiences were outraged at the separation of the lovers, which Mark Mullen, in “The Work of the Public Mind,” reads as a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of slavery. The audience in London didn’t understand why the Peytons could not just move to a state where the law forbidding George to marry Zoe did not apply. [9] As part of his amalgamation, however, Jacobs-Jenkins includes the onstage stabbing of M’Closky, an addition in the British production, but concludes An Octoroon with the bleaker ending of Zoe’s desire to kill herself rather than become M’Closky’s property, an element of the original American version. This blended production then concludes with Jacobs-Jenkins’s own interpolation into the narrative, giving the last words and emotional beats to the female slaves Dido and Minnie, who emerge as the real heart of the play. These various endings drastically change the impact of the play, as it is significantly different, for example, if Zoe is sold but then redeemed by her white lover than if she kills herself to avoid becoming property. His reconstruction of melodrama’s gaze through his elevation of the three female slaves, Dido, Grace, and Minnie, to the center of the play, is Jacobs-Jenkins’s most extensive and provocative alteration to Boucicault’s original. These women are reconstructed as desiring agents with distinct backgrounds and personalities, who challenge the melodramatic conventions regarding the representation of slaves, especially the violence of slavery. Dido, Minnie, and Grace’s conversations educate the audience about the emotional, familial, societal, and violent cost of slavery for its victims. They actively mold the performance of their enslavement, rather than functioning as passive signifiers of slave life as they do in Boucicault’s original. This shaping occurs not only at the verbal level, through their self-conscious commentary on their positions, but also through a physical level, as Dido and Minnie are the only characters who work. They sweep cotton in the opening moments of the play, as well as serve breakfast and clean up the messes left by the white characters. While An Octoroon does include male enslaved characters (an older slave named Pete, and his grandson, Paul, both played by the Assistant in blackface), Jacobs-Jenkins’s most significant generic reconstructions occur with the enslaved women. Jacobs-Jenkins’s focus on Minnie, Grace, and Dido is also a significant departure from the genre’s customary depiction of the institution and the people trapped within it. Typically, the “stage Negro” fulfilled the low-comedy stereotype, whose comedic value was derived from “his odd dialect and his misuse of words. His special characteristic was inflated pride in badges of rank.” [10] While The Octoroon partly broke this tradition by placing Terrebonne’s slaves at the forefront of the play and turning them into a constant visual presence, [11] it did use these slaves as comic relief, with Peter, Solon, and Grace performing minstrel-like routines. [12] Boucicault’s slaves also adhere to many of the character tropes proliferated by minstrel depictions of black life. Minnie, Grace, and Pete are happy and loyal to their masters and do not run away, as most slaves at Terrebonne do in Jacobs-Jenkins’s version. The slaves are so secure within the system that the oldest slave, Pete, corrects a neighboring planter and Captain Ratts regarding how much his grandson was worth before he died, monetizing Paul even as he is mourning him: “What, Sar! You p’tend to be sorry for Paul, and prize him like dat. Five hundred dollars!—Tousand dollars, Massa Thibodeaux.” [13] The genre’s traditional refusal to engage with slavery is surprising, as melodrama would seem perfectly poised to stage the sights of slavery as a method of critique. However, while melodrama frequently depicted the institution of slavery onstage, either as sensational material or for abolitionist purposes, the scenes had to fit into larger established narratives so that the story could achieve legibility, [14] and the genre used the institution as a “mere resting point in the rush to affirm order at the play’s close.” [15] Additionally, melodrama by necessity was reactionary rather than revolutionary: the structure of the form is generally an arc that describes a fall from, and restoration to, innocence. [16] This compulsion to return to stasis has a wide-ranging effect not only on the genre’s sensibilities but on its portrait of American society, which was by definition conservative. Jeffrey Mason writes that melodrama was ever in pursuit of “the restoration of a condition that had, unexpectedly, inexplicably, and unfortunately been altered . . . culture is constantly in the process of attempting to come full circle and return to its point of origin.” [17] This originary impulse undercuts any great social change the melodrama might show, such as a successful slave rebellion or abolitionist appeal. However, Jacobs-Jenkins directly opposes the generic conventions and representations discussed above, by means of the characters that actively participate in the plot through their speech and commentary upon the action. His reconstruction centers on Dido and Minnie and occurs on multiple levels, but it is particularly noticeable in the unexpected way the two house slaves, and to a lesser extent, the field hand Grace, speak when they are in private, as well as what they say. When the three women are not observed by the white characters, they use contemporary slang and jargon, and demonstrate modern opinions regarding the division between labor and self, encapsulated in Minnie’s advice to Dido: “I know we slaves and evurthang, but you are not your job. You gotta take time out of your day to live life for you.” [18] Essentially, these women speak their own language. While it is true that BJJ and Assistant use a similar elastic vocabulary, their speech appears less out of place, as it is primarily bracketed off in the metatheatrical scenes, such as the prologue or the introduction to the sensation scene. In both cases, BJJ brings the audience out of 1859 into a significantly more contemporary space. Thus, what is crucial about Dido and Minnie’s language is that there is a meaningful disconnect between their surroundings, the 1859 plantation of The Octoroon , and their dialogue. The intention behind this change is explained in the script, as a note at the very beginning of the melodrama section. Jacobs-Jenkins writes: “I’m just going to say this right now so we can get it over with: I don’t know what a real slave sounded like. And neither do you.” [19] What emerges from this ignorance is a language that rejects the stereotyped “black voice” accent most commonly associated with slavery in the popular media. In An Octoroo n this language particularly emerges when Dido and Minnie escape from the panoptic gaze of the white characters. Dido, Minnie, and Grace’s manipulation of language gains additional significance when we consider the history of the representation of slavery in the theatre and other genres, such as prose. In slaveholding societies like the United States and England, there was a long tradition of employing slave narratives to publicize and garner support for abolition. While some of these narratives were written by the subjects themselves, they were often channeled through white interlocutors, who changed events and attitudes to appeal to wider audiences and in the process monetized the slaves’ stories. Sometimes the attempt to include more authentic elements, such as the reproduction of accents recorded in the Slave Narrative Project conducted by the W.P.A. in the 1930s, resulted in more obstruction than illumination and reinforced the damaging stereotypes they aimed to combat. This heavy-handed imitation obscured any deep engagement with the personal lives of the enslaved. [20] The impact and importance of Dido, Grace, and Minnie’s modern language is especially apparent when these women interact with the white characters. When they are back under the disciplinary gaze of George and Dora, the daughter of the neighboring plantation owner, Dido and Minnie use the same black-voice accent as Pete and Paul, emphasizing deference and obedience: DIDO : Bless’ee here it be. Here’s a dish of hoecakes—jess taste, Masr George—and here’s fried bananas; jess smell ’em. [21] The artificiality of this devoted and obsequious slave is glaringly obvious especially when we consider Dido and Minnie’s introduction. At the beginning of the play, Minnie chats with Dido about their work, while Dido reluctantly sweeps cotton about the stage: DIDO and MINNIE are discovered. DIDO is sweeping laboriously. MINNIE is just sort of lying down somewhere, fanning herself. MINNIE ( eventually ): Do you need help or…? DIDO : Naw, girl, I got it. Beat, while DIDO sweeps. MINNIE : You know, if you sweep on a diagonal with lighter, faster strokes, it’s a little more efficient. DIDO : Girl, what are you talking about? [22] From this brief exchange, we learn that Minnie thinks critically about how to make her job easier, and that Minnie and Dido address each other with familiarity, even if that familiarity is tinged with annoyance. It is leagues away from the style of speaking reproduced above. From examining the form of their conversations, we now turn to the content, analyzing what they say. At the end of the show, Dido speaks to Zoe with the same obsequiousness that she showed with George. When Zoe steals away to visit Dido in the slave quarters to obtain some poison to kill herself so that she doesn’t fall into M’Closky’s hands, Dido delays Zoe with an exaggerated black voice accent: “Missey Zoe! Why are you out in de swamp dis time ob night? And you is all wet! Missey Zoe, you catch de fever for sure!” [23] Dido and Minnie’s self-conscious performance while under the panoptic gaze of the slave-owners is not surprising. What is surprising is that, as we can see, they reproduce those behaviors when in conversation with Zoe, who is not white, but is a member of the plantation aristocracy. Dido and Minnie’s interactions with authority figures, as well as their descriptions of their quotidian lives, is made possible by Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction of melodrama’s gaze. Dido and Minnie frankly discuss how various forms of slavery’s violence impact them, and this discussion is underlined with a specific brand of humor. In an interview with the Village Voice , Jacobs-Jenkins asserted that the goal of his writing is to make the audience “laugh and then you have to think about your laughter for a second.” [24] Jacobs-Jenkins achieves this goal, as the moments that are most distressing are also the most humorous, reaching a crescendo when the two women discuss the physical violence that plagues their lives. While Pete, Paul, and Wahnotee exchange threats of perpetuating physical attacks, [25] Dido and Minnie are subject to threats of sexual violence. Within the first few moments of their introduction, they discuss the reality of plantation life, and the constant threat of assault: MINNIE : You ever had to fuck him? DIDO : Who? MINNIE : Mas’r/Peyton DIDO : Oh, naw! You? MINNIE : Naw, he only like lightskinnded girls. But Renee, you know, who was fuckin’ him all the time . . . MINNIE : Would you fuck him [George]? DIDO : No, Minnie! Damn. Would you? [Beat] MINNIE : Maybe. DIDO : Yeah, well, I get the feeling you don’t get a say in the matter. [26] This exchange turns on a subtle humor, more understated than Dido and Minnie’s other revelations, such as their acknowledgment of forced illiteracy [27] or their reluctance to run away. [28] However, this discussion regarding the implicit and constant presence of sexual violence raises disturbing questions. It seems to endow Minnie and Dido with a measure of agency and suggests that they and Renee had a choice in whether or not to sleep with George. The implications of this conversation spiral outward quickly, asking the audience to consider who Zoe’s mother was; though Zoe is treated well by the Peyton family, she was most likely the product of some measure of sexual violence. This awareness of unspoken sexual violence in the punch line is the closest the play comes to using the word “rape.” The agency that the modern dialect seems to ascribe to Minnie and Dido reveals itself to be fleeting, and it is clear that they exist within a violent system. While Jacobs-Jenkins recognizes and represents the violence inherent in the system, Minnie and Dido’s conversation is an important departure from the method by which melodrama staged slavery’s violence. In his version of the seminal melodrama Uncle Tom’s Cabin , George Aiken greatly increased and stylized the brutality of Tom’s cruel owner, Simon Legree, against Tom. He brought onto the stage “an aestheticized paraphernalia of cruelty (long whips, cuffs, and chains),” [29] which were put to great affective use. However, this display of physical violence was not a condemnation of the institution of slavery, but a demonstration of the wickedness of Legree, certifying his status as a villain of melodrama. Indeed, all of Legree’s added violence and wickedness became attributable to his personality, in fulfilling his role as an “anti-man-of-principle.” [30] Because the focus of the melodrama was on character, and not the institution, Uncle Tom’s Cabin “presents not a dialectic of class and economics, but specific interactions between villains and victims.” [31] This collapsing of focus can also be seen in The Octoroon , as the abuses on the plantation can be attributed to M’Closky and the mismanagement of Northern interlopers, rather than the systemic corruption of an unfair practice. Abolitionist melodramas also relied on violence in an attempt to make the horrors of slavery real for an audience who may not have understood them. However, as Douglas Jones writes, this attempt to bring the brutality of slavery closer to the white audience depended on an empathy that “readily occludes the inimitability of the captive’s suffering as a means to confirm the onlooker’s freedom; as a result, it promotes stasis and erases the magnitude of the nation’s ordinary sin.” [32] The brutality of these representations was thus more about the effect they created in the white onlookers than the subjects of that violence. The saturation and highlighting of the black body in both physical and emotional torment was the most common path through which ex-slaves could claim humanity. [33] A secondary but no less important element of the reconstruction of melodrama’s gaze is that it shifts the representative world, exploring and acknowledging multiple types of violence beyond the physical and sexual. Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction highlights the institutional demands that the enslaved see themselves as property and participate in their own dehumanization. In conversations that are hidden from their masters but are heard by the audience, Dido tells Minnie that she “grew up at the Sunnyside place on the other side of the hills. Mas’r Peyton won me in a poker game like ten years ago.” [34] Dido’s blithe story of how she came to Terrebonne is startling, as is her disregard for the destruction of familial relationships that this narrative implies. But what is most unexpected is the casualness with which she describes a complicity that is revealed to be widespread: DIDO : And this one time, Solon was like, “Girl let me borrow your baby for a second?” And so Rebecca’s dumb ass like gave him the baby and then that nigga turnt around and fucking sold the baby. MINNIE : What? DIDO : Yes, girl. Apparently Massa was about to sell Solon and Grace’s baby, but then Solon switched Rebecca’s baby out for they baby at the last minute and Massa didn’t know the difference so he just sold Rebecca’s dumb-ass baby. [35] The humor carrying this exchange is complex. On one level, it is funny because there is an asymmetrical relationship between the form and the content: what Dido and Grace say and how they say it. This exchange is also comic because it is a rare moment of triumph: Solon and Grace are able to take advantage of Judge Peyton’s stupidity. However, Dido and Minnie’s discussion simultaneously gestures to a darker point: a Peyton family inability to see African-Americans as individuals. Zoe can’t distinguish between an older and a younger black woman, and her father, Judge Peyton, also thought that African-Americans were interchangeable. [36] While this exchange reflects badly on the Peytons, it also reveals Dido and Minnie’s complicity with and active participation in perpetuating this system. This willingness is apparent again when Dido and Minnie learn that they are to be sold to help pay the debts on the plantation. Rather than run away, they participate in the sale, manipulating the process so that they will be purchased by Captain Ratts rather than Jacob M’Closky, who has a reputation for beating his slaves. [37] Dido and Minnie dress in their best “slave tunics” to convince Captain Ratts, whom they “seduce,” into buying them. [38] Minnie describes living on his boat as though it were a vacation: Imagine: if we lived on a steamboat, coasting up and down the river, looking fly, wind whipping at our hair and our slave tunics and shit and we surrounded by all these fine, muscle-y boat niggas who ain’t been wit a woman in years? [39] For both Dido, who thinks that the situation still sounds dangerous, [40] and Minnie, this is a chance at a better life, although this new life still seems fraught with the potential for sexual assault. Minnie and Dido’s attitudes run counter to modern cultural expectations, which would have them run away for the possibility of a better life rather than accepting the confines of slavery. However, in the world of An Octoroon, this is one of the only opportunities Minnie and Dido have to take control of their situation and make decisions regarding their bodily autonomy. While the ending is played for laughs, when Minnie wonders if “something were to happen that somewhere rendered these last twelve hours totally moot,” it is an indication of the effect of Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction that the audience really feels for Minnie and Dido and their lost autonomy. [41] In An Octoroon, Dido, Minnie, and to a lesser extent, Grace, are not the objects of the jokes, and the audience does not laugh at them or their situation. Rather, Jacobs-Jenkins manipulates the humor found in the distance between Dido and Minnie’s modern vocabulary and performance style and their nineteenth-century conversational topics. He makes their situation strange and unfamiliar at the same time as they sound as though they are standing on a street corner in twenty-first-century Brooklyn. [42] Instead of relying on overly familiar tropes, An Octoroon shows us anew the horrors of slavery, forcing us to consider the depth and diversity of the institution’s brutality. Jacobs-Jenkins continues to represent the diversity of the institution’s brutality in his next revision of melodrama’s gaze with his treatment of Zoe. While the majority of her dialogue emerges from The Octoroon , [43] Jacobs-Jenkins uses Zoe to juxtapose melodramatic convention with a modern understanding of racial performance. As we have seen, Zoe enthusiastically participates in the hierarchical structures of the plantation, holding herself above the house and field slaves alike. She insults Dido and kicks Pete, ordering him to “Wake up you, silly Nigger! Where’s breakfast?” [44] Not only does she place herself above the field hands and participate in the casual violence of her peers, but she also does no work aside from showing George the plantation. It is thus clear that Zoe is afforded freedoms as the daughter of Terrebonne’s owner. However, Jacobs-Jenkins indicates that despite her real privileges, Zoe’s status as an octoroon requires that she suffer within an institution that surrounds her and is responsible for her birth. Indeed, Jules Zanger argues that in the North, an octoroon “represented not merely the product of the incidental sin of the individual sinner, but rather what might be called the result of cumulative institutional sin, since the octoroon was the product of four generations of illicit, enforced miscegenation made possible by the slavery system.” [45] In fact, Zoe’s entire presence in the play, especially her heritage, reminds the audience of the reality of interracial desire and an uneven balance of power. [46] This attitude then helps us to understand Zoe’s response when she is forced to reveal herself as mixed race. When George confesses his love to her, Zoe racializes herself and teaches an unbelieving George how to recognize the signs of her African heritage. This scene is a crucial demonstration that, despite all her other advantages, she is still trapped within a system that is interested in controlling its victims’ minds as well as their bodies. [47] In a scene that is taken in its entirety from The Octoroon , Zoe shows George the signs of her African heritage, transforming her body into “an artifact of racial hybridity” [48] : ZOE : George, do you see that hand you hold? Look at these fingers; do you see the nails are of a . . . bluish tinge? GEORGE : Yes, near the quick there is a faint blue mark. ZOE : Look in my eyes; is not the same color in the white? GEORGE : It is their beauty. ZOE : No! That—that is the dark, fatal mark and curse of Cain. Of the blood that feeds my heart, one drop in eight is black—bright red as the rest may be, that one drop poisons all the rest. [49] George’s examination of Zoe’s physical features for signs that the audience cannot see is a deeply tragic image. Zoe reveals not only her self-hatred—she calls herself “an unclean thing” [50] —but also the extent to which she is trapped within the system of chattel slavery. Anyone who is able to read Zoe’s body will know how to classify her, thus endangering not only her body, but her education, upbringing, and social class. Zoe is trapped within a disciplinary system that limits her choices and her happiness and curtails her options. While this scene is remarkably affecting, there remains a significant disconnect between written text and what is seen, a discord not present in Boucicault’s original, and the potent emotion and danger behind Zoe’s confession seems misplaced. This disconnect is deliberately designed, as Jacobs-Jenkins stipulates that Zoe’s role be played by “an octoroon actress, a white actress, quadroon actress, biracial actress, multi-racial actress, or an actress of color who can pass as an octoroon.” [51] Jacobs-Jenkins thus seems to undercut the reveal of this scene: if the audience can read Zoe as mixed-race already, there’s no need for her to confess. However, I would argue, that these casting specifications demonstrate the insidious nature of racializing thoughts, which ascribe negative qualities to physical minutiae, rather than the revelation of Zoe as an octoroon. Because Zoe’s opinions on race and self-worth are directly imported from the melodrama, they are in direct contrast to the play’s other explorations of race. [52] Jacobs-Jenkins builds on his reconstruction of melodrama’s gaze with a re-engagement with elements of nineteenth-century melodrama: the tableau and the sensation scene, discussed below. The tableau manipulates several artistic practices, operating simultaneously on a visual, emotional, and auditory level. The technique allows the audience to pause, read, and absorb the emotional impact of a scene, much as one would do with a painting. Peter Brooks describes tableau as providing a “visual summary of the emotional situation” of a scene, in the process fulfilling “melodrama’s primordial concern to make its signs clear, unambiguous, and impressive.” [53] In nineteenth-century melodrama, the tableau appears in moments of crisis, wherein speech and narrative fail and the emotion of the scenes can only be understood through images. Typically, it works as a punctuation mark to a particular plotline, occurs at the end of a scene, and inspires an affective response. Jacobs-Jenkins primarily follows its usual placement as a punctuation mark at particularly emotionally-charged moments. The ends of the first three acts of each melodrama section includes a tableau: Jacob M’Closky triumphing at the end of Act One, Wahnotee mourning over Paul’s body at the end of Act Two, and Zoe’s auction at the end of Act Three. However, BJJ also draws particular attention to the extraordinary nature of this theatrical feature, engaging and exploiting it. As Act One nears its end, Jacob M’Closky sets in motion his plot to ruin the Peyton family and purchase Zoe. As he revels in his expected outcome, he dives into his tableau. The stage directions describe the scene: M’CLOSKY stands with his hand extended toward the house. Music. An attempt at a TABLEAU. He holds the TABLEAU for a while before DIDO walks in with a washing bucket and some laundry. [54] We see BJJ, the character-as-playwright, rewriting melodrama in real time as M’Closky poses uncomfortably on stage. M’Closky fulfills all the requirements for a tableau: he stops the action, allowing the audience to read his posture, establishing him as the villain. Rather than serving as a punctuation mark, or creating a moment of overwhelming emotion, however, M’Closky’s overtly performative pose never quite lands, and the life of the plantation quickly resumes around the frozen overseer. This change is signaled through a return to the constant, underlying musical accompaniment. [55] Furthermore, the reassertion of the quotidian is signaled by Dido’s entrance with the laundry, which startles M’Closky, and resets the scene to a normal theatrical time. However, a moment later, the tableau is attempted again, but this time it emerges from a moment of real violence: [M’CLOSKY re-enters, stalks over to DIDO] DIDO : Hi, Mas’r M’Cl— [M’CLOSKY strikes her violently] M’CLOSKY : And don’t you ever fuckin’ sneak up on me like that again, you nigger bitch! [An actual TABLEAU.] [56] The legibility inherent in this image is why the tableau works: because the audience can quickly grasp the power dynamics of a white-presenting man physically threatening a black woman, allowing the audience to read and understand an essential power dynamic of slavery, without lingering on Dido’s pain. This tableau also reveals how much is left up to the director in An Octoroon . The stage directions only suggest that a tableau occurs, but in performance, we see that M’Closky strikes Dido, then remains standing over her. Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction of the tableau forces us to re-evaluate the genre’s ability to produce and manipulate our emotions. The tableau only works when it is connected to real emotion, rather than to the conventions of the drama. Jacobs-Jenkins’ reconstruction of the tableau helps the audience see anew the violence of slavery. Like the sensation scene, tableau insists on the audience’s attention. This demand for awareness is reiterated in Act Two’s tableau, which finds Wahnotee, in an expression of grief, bending over the body of the slain boy Paul: To his horror, WAHNOTEE finds him dead, expresses great grief, raises his eyes. They fall upon the camera. He rises with a savage growl, he seizes tomahawk and smashes camera to pieces, then goes to Paul, expresses grief, sorrow, and fondness. Maybe he starts to make a grave—sobbing and digging his hands? I don’t know. In any case, there’s a TABLEAU. [57] The violence against black bodies is an essential part of slavery, and the incidental way in which Paul is murdered, mentioned in the stage directions, but not noted in the dialogue, mirrors the Peytons’ inattention to the details of their slaves’ lives: “ M’CLOSKY strikes PAUL on the head. PAUL falls dead. During the following, a large pool of blood begins to gather around PAUL’S body and M’CLOSKY’S feet. ” [58] This tableau provides the audience with a rare moment of unbridled pathos that isn’t undercut by an attempt at humor. Indeed, this is a moment that deeply humanizes Wahnotee, who is otherwise, even in Jacobs-Jenkins’s version, a thinly drawn stereotype, addicted to rum, speaking a mishmash of various languages, and prone to violence. This tableau also defies stereotypes of Native Americans that were familiar from the so-called Indian plays of the early nineteenth century, where Native American characters often played upon racial fears, threatening white characters with the possibility of sexual and physical violence. But in this tableau, Wahnotee is given space to grieve. Although M’Closky may not take notice of Paul’s death, Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction of Wahnotee’s tableau requires the audience to realize that these characters are not disposable. Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction of the first two tableaux links these highly performative moments more closely with the text of An Octoroon . These scenes join together emotion and the violence against black bodies on stage. The final tableau, appearing at the end of Act Three, continues this work, as it punctuates the auction of Terrebonne and Zoe’s sale to M’Closky. The slave driver’s interruption of the auction adds a layer of drama to an already spectacular venture, which “materializes the most intense of symbolic transactions . . . money transforms flesh into property; property transforms flesh into money; flesh transforms money into property.” [59] The practice of staging slave auctions has a long history as a method of creating pathos for the enslaved. Henry Ward Beecher, the famed Northern abolitionist preacher, raised money to liberate young biracial girls from slavery by transforming the pulpit of his Brooklyn church into an auction yard to “heighten the emotional power of his rhetorical appeal as he evoked . . . a form of ‘spectatorial sympathy’ to play upon the affective responses in his audiences.” [60] It was converted into a specifically theatrical spectacle, however, when in The Octoroon Boucicault represented it onstage for the first time. [61] Like its first-act cousin, the tableau that emerges from An Octoroon’s auction scene also results from a theatrical failure. The sale of Terrebonne is, as Lafouche the auctioneer describes it, “a shitshow,” [62] as the majority of the Terrebonne slaves have run away, and those that are left are either old and infirm like Pete, or three women, not nearly enough to save the plantation. The scene, which should be one of high tragedy, is turned uncomfortably comic, as Dido and Minnie request to be sold together, and spend time preening to attract the attention of Captain Ratts. Lafouche reports, “the, uh, the property has requested that it be sold along with another piece of property? . . . can it do that?” [63] While not part of the reconstruction of the tableau specifically, Jacobs-Jenkins’s modern intervention into the scene emphasizes the auctioneer’s dehumanizing language, turning what should be a moment for consternation into comedy. The momentum of the scene is further derailed by the spectacle of George and M’Closky, played by the same actor, fighting each other. While double casting is a cause for humor in this scene, it is part of a larger historical argument and an important feature of Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction of melodrama. These two types that George and M’Closky embody, the kind slave owner hero and the evil, scheming overseer villain, were common roles in American melodrama, and come with expected behaviors and performance histories. But because these characters are here contained in one body, all of their actions are collapsed into a single, interchangeable entity. The only differences between them are a broad accent and M’Closky’s mustache and hat: easily removable costume pieces. Jacobs-Jenkins thus erases any difference between these historical touchstones, suggesting that the authority figures in plantation culture were exactly the same. Lisa Merrill and Theresa Saxon, in their article “Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon,” also note that “by having one actor play both of these white male characters, An Octoroon illustrates the uncomfortable similarity between a desire to own, master, or marry the mixed-race heroine, Zoe, and the implicit similarity in both endings.” [64] Merrill and Saxon acknowledge that George’s desire to possess Zoe, while dressed in slightly kinder clothing, mirrors M’Closky’s. As the bidding war over Zoe escalates, and the other powerful members of the plantation class, including Captain Ratts and Dora Sunnyside, attempt to trump the slave driver’s bid, M’Closky and George’s animosity erupts in violence: “ GEORGE rushes M’CLOSKY, slash himself, who draws his knife .” [65] After a measure of order is restored by Lafouche, M’Closky exalts over the members of the established plantation class, and goes into his pose: “ M’CLOSKY jumps on up on his chair, throws money in the air, and makes it rain.” [66] M’Closky’s purchase of Zoe, and his subsequent flaunting of his wealth, results in a tableau that whiplashes the audience into a realization that Zoe has been commodified and dehumanized even more pervasively than when she identified her African features to George. Similar to the tableau in Act One, this frozen image quickly transmogrifies the humor of the scene to tragedy. Thus in this tableau, Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction operates on two significant levels: first, the tableau’s sudden shift in tone draws attention to its violence, and second, it breathes new life into a nineteenth-century theatrical element. In both cases, Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction of the tableau forces the audience to absorb the quotidian violence of slavery, working through legible images and sensations rather than overwhelming scenes of physical violence. Just as the tableau operates through easily graspable images, so does the sensation scene. These two devices work on multiple levels of signification beyond the spoken word, revealing an unspeakable truth to the characters and audience. There are similarities between the way the tableau forces the audience to confront the ordinary violence of slavery and the operation of Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstructed sensation scene. After a long, metatheatrical prologue, where BJJ, Playwright, and Assistant explain and walk the audience through the meaning and history of the sensation scene, they end up reciting the whole scene, with interjections and commentary. [67] As they approach the end of the scene, BJJ announces that he “tried to figure out the next best thing, something actually related to the plot. I hope it isn’t too disappointing.” [68] The actors give themselves a shake and dive right back into the scene. George delivers an impassioned condemnation of lynch law, attempting to persuade the surrounding crowd of angry sailors not to rush to judgment, with one crucial change: he stands in front of, and among, Shipp and Smith’s swaying bodies. [69] George’s plea catalyzes a series of revelations that culminate in the exposure of An Octoroon’s villain: the dastardly slave-driver Jacob M’Closky. The sensation scene unfolds as the villain is revealed, and the boat carrying the last shipment of cotton from Terrebonne plantation explodes, represented in this version by an expulsion of cotton into the audience. Due to casting restrictions that are enumerated at the top of the show, BJJ, the playwright of the frame narrative, confesses that he “grossly underestimated the amount of white men I actually would need here,” [70] and the mob that surrounds the action and heightens the stakes is played by the audience rather than actors. George’s commentary on justice and lynch law spills beyond the confines of the stage, and into the twenty-first-century crowd. Audience members were unsettled by George’s speech, made clearly uncomfortable with their sudden involvement in the story. This discomfort expressed itself in many ways: from strained and nervous laughter, to gasps and murmurs, growing stronger as they sat with the image that seemed to expand as the photograph extended beyond its frame and onto the bodies of the actors. The face of a man staring at the audience and pointing proudly at the bodies that hang in the trees was newly embodied as it was projected directly onto George’s shirt. It is through this alchemy of dialogue and image that George’s body, ambiguously raced to begin with as he is played by a black actor in whiteface make-up, becomes the medium for bringing the violence of the Shipp and Smith lynching onto the stage without exploiting it. As George and M’Closky debate Wahnotee’s innocence or guilt, the projection remains, hanging over the action. The photograph is not given any context and the actors do not refer to it, except when it needs to come down. [71] By projecting the image of the Shipp and Smith lynching above this fictional debate, Jacobs-Jenkins summons a sharper sense of danger to M’Closky and George’s argument, reminding the audience that the discussion of lynching taking place had real-life consequences. The use of this photograph, and the diverse feelings it provoked in the audience as it remained projected on the back wall, are crucial elements of Jacobs-Jenkins reconstruction of the sensation scene. In its original context, the sensation scene mixed pathos and action, often overwhelming the audience. These scenes were produced by “extraordinary theatrical effects, often featuring disasters such as shipwrecks, avalanches, volcano explosions and so forth.” [72] The scenes were exciting in their own right, but the nineteenth-century audience particularly marveled at “the technical feat involved in replicating aspects of life that seemed beyond the resources of the stage.” [73] These technical feats created perceptible physical reactions in the audience, forging a community out of the spectators. Lynn M. Voskuil describes the construction of this feeling community: what mattered most was not merely that spectators felt such responses, but that they believed they felt them in common . . . intrinsic to their play-going experience was not only the bodily sense of nervous shudders and quivers but also the sagacity both to cultivate and manage them. [Sensation theatre required] a sophisticated spectator, one practiced at decoding spectacle and awake to its mechanisms and bodily effects. [74] While the photograph of the Shipp and Smith lynching produced these feeling communities (and the most memorable moment of the play), the projection had other consequences. The maintenance of the photograph requires the stage to be darkened to appreciate the full effect, which in turns requires an unnatural cessation of movement by the actors, as well as plot. The action can only proceed to the point at which the three frame characters, BJJ, Playwright, and Assistant, described it in the metatheatrical prologue of the scene. [75] The photograph transfixes the actors and the audience, holding both in place and preventing them from looking away, either from the lynching that has already occurred or the threat of the lynching that is possibly to come. However, the focus on the Shipp and Smith lynching literally blocks out and overwhelms the situation on stage. The audience cares less about the trial of Wahnotee when its attention is focused on the Shipp and Smith photo. Thus, like the tableau, which can only be held for a short period of time, the sensation scene sets the stage, but needs to be removed for the plot to continue forward. However, once the photo is taken down and M’Closky is revealed as a villain, Jacobs-Jenkins offers us one more complicated result of his reconstruction of the sensation scene, as he stages M’Closky’s murder. Examining this moment in terms of the characters, we see a Native American planning to kill a white man in retaliation for the murder of a black child. But when we look at the bodies of the actors, a different image emerges: We see a white man dragging a bleeding black man off to be lynched, choking and screaming, “Help! Help! Help!” The stage directions note that the violence in this moment—Wahnotee and M’Closky’s fight, Wahnotee’s stabbing of the slave driver, and Wahnotee’s clear desire to lynch M’Closky—should seem “ incredibly real .” [76] The violence of the Shipp and Smith lynching, projected and overwhelming the debate on how to move forward, is repeated and recreated, as Jacobs-Jenkins wraps up the recreation of the sensation scene. After the emotional intensity of the sensation scene, Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstruction ends on a deadpan note. Once Wahnotee drags a screaming M’Closky offstage and the audience is pelted with explosive cotton balls, Assistant is the only actor left on stage. He turns to the audience, and recounts the action: “And then the boat explodes ( beat) . Sensation.” [77] This impassive delivery undermines the traditional forms of the genre, as it points the way to new methods of representation and emotion. Jacobs-Jenkins’s subversion of the sensation scene is part of An Octoroon’ s larger effort to reconstruct the formal aspects of the genre so that it becomes increasingly capacious in its representation of slavery. It accomplishes this first by shifting melodrama’s gaze so that the play not only foregrounds characters Boucicault’s original treats as punch lines, but elevates them so that these two dark-skinned black women are the heart of An Octoroon . [78] By interjecting and juxtaposing modern dialogue and character development with dialogue that casually confirms the horrors of their quotidian existence, Jacobs-Jenkins makes slavery’s violence understandable in new ways. The changes in melodrama’s gaze also alter the way that we understand the damage slavery has done to Zoe, who, although she is privileged in some ways, is still bound both by the self-hatred and racialization that leads to her suicide. This article also argues that Jacobs-Jenkins takes on more traditional elements of melodrama, such as the sensation scene and the tableau. In both cases, his reconstructions allow a twenty-first-century audience to feel some of the same effects as their nineteenth-century counterparts. By using comprehensible images, the tableau and sensation scene insist on the audience’s attention. Simultaneously, Jacobs-Jenkins’s reconstructions rocket between emotional states: from comedy to tragedy, from overwhelming sensation to blunt statement of fact, reinventing before our eyes a core American theatrical tradition. And in the process, he provides new ways of viewing and understanding slavery. References [1] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon (New York: Onstage Press, 2014), 121. This article uses the published version of An Octoroon , as well as the recording of a performance of the Sarah Benson-directed production, recorded June 6, 2014, and housed at the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at the New York Public Library. I will also refer to instances from the Theatre for A New Audience production of the same play. TFANA and Soho Rep’s productions were both directed by Sarah Benson, the artistic director of Soho Rep. BJJ: So for a while I was thinking maybe I could actually just set this place on fire with You inside— PLAYWRIGHT: bring you as close to death as possible. BJJ/PLAYWRIGHT: That would be amazing. BJJ: And then, of course, rescue each of you one by one, PLAYWRIGHT: And then perform the rest of the show out on the street. BJJ: But that would be crazy PLAYWRIGHT: And Soho Rep. doesn’t need that. BJJ: And also I would only be able to do this show once. [2] While the omission of Salem Scudder lessens the number of characters that Jacobs-Jenkins had to account for, his dismissal had other consequences, particularly that Zoe is less universally cared for. In An Octoroon , Zoe is beloved of the Hero and the Villain, but in The Octoroon , with Scudder’s feelings of protectiveness toward her, there is a greater sense that she is a desirable commodity. Scudder’s presence in Boucicault’s original, as a well-meaning, but ultimately harmful presence on the plantation—partly to blame for Peyton’s financial woes—is an indication of the “paternalistic, racist myth of a genteel plantation culture, threatened more by a villainous Yankee than by its own inherent injustices.” Harley Erdman, “Caught in the ‘Eye of the Eternal’: Justice, Race, and the Camera, from The Octoroon to Rodney King.” Theatre Journal 45, no. 3 (October 1993): 335. This kind of specific regional nuance is of less importance in Jacobs-Jenkins’ worldview. [3] Although The Octoroon’s plot hangs on photographic evidence that Scudder’s camera provides, BJJ and Playwright point out that twenty-first-century audiences are no longer impressed or even swayed by this type of evidentiary material. BJJ explains that “we’ve gotten so used to photographs and moving images that we basically have learned how to fake photographs, so the kind of justice around which this whole thing hangs its actually kind of dated.” (Jacobs-Jenkins, 120.) While we can still be shocked by the photograph of the Shipp and Smith lynching, the audience is less impressed by the evidence the photograph of M’Closky provides. [4] Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre & Society, 1820-1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), ix. This monograph includes an excellent history of the American engagement with the melodramatic form. [5] Ibid., 228. [6] Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), xiv. [7] Bruce A McConachie, “Out of the Kitchen and Into the Marketplace: Normalizing ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ for the Antebellum Stage,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 3, no. 1 (1991): 11. [8] Saidiya Hartman begins her seminal work, Scenes of Subjection, with a similar observation. Viewing the consequences of a slave’s body, ravaged by violence, she writes that “Rather than inciting indignation, too often they immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity—the oft-repeated or restored character of these accounts and our distance from them are signaled by the theatrical language usually resorted to in describing these instances–and especially because they reinforce the spectacular character of black suffering.” Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3. [9] Mark Mullen, “The Work of the Public Mind,” Nineteenth Century Theatre 27, no. 2 (Winter 1999), 100. [10] David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater & Culture: 1800-1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 190-1. [11] Mullen argues that the very visibility of the slaves was Bouicault’s nod to an anti-slavery position, “The Work of the Public Mind,” 98. [12] Dana Van Kooy and Jeffrey N. Cox. “Melodramatic Slaves,” Modern Drama 55, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 470. [13] Dion Boucicault, “The Octoroon.” In Early American Drama , edited by Jeffrey H. Richards (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 471. [14] Douglas A Jones, The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 140. [15] Van Cooey and Cox, “Melodramatic Slaves,” 462. [16] Ibid., 462. [17] Jeffrey D. Mason, “Staging the Myth of America,” in Melodrama and the Myth of America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 15. [18] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon , 137. [19] Ibid., 43. [20] For an excellent discussion of the difficulties of slave narratives and their staging, see Jones, Captive Stage , 139-141. [21] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon , 57. [22] Ibid., 45. [23] Ibid., 131. [24] Tom Sellar, “Pay No Attention to the Man in the Bunny Suit.” Village Voice . 28 September 2015. http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/pay-no-attention-to-the-man-in-the-bunny-suit-7189537 . [25] Pete threatens Minnie: “Drop dat banana fo’ I murdah you!” and “It’s dis black-trash, new Mas’r George; day’s getting too numerous round; when I gets time, I’m gonna have to murdah some of ’em fo’ sure!” (Jacobs-Jenkins., An Octoroon , 51, 52), while Paul threatens to “gib it to” Wahnotee if the boy finds the Indian drinking rum (ibid., 60), while Wahnotee destroys George’s camera and drags M’Closky offstage (ibid., 81, 128). [26] Ibid., 47-9. [27] Ibid., 83. Minnie: I couldn’t read that sign out front, because I can’t read. Dido: I can’t read it either. You know it’s illegal for us to read. Minnie: Yee-uh, but I was hopin’ you wuz one of them secret reading niggas. You know, like Rhonda. Dido: Rhonda can read?! Minnie: Shh, girl! It’s a secret! [28] Ibid., 50. Minnie: Haven’t she heard these slave catchers got these new dogs nowadays that can fly and who are trained to fuckin drag yo’ ass out of trees and carry you back? And then, even if you can outsmart these flying dogs, once you free, what you gonna do once you free? You just gonna walk up in somebody house and be like, “Hey. I’m a slave. Help me.” That kind of naiveté is how niggas get kilt. [29] Sarah Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2005), 119. [30] McConachie, “Out of the Kitchen and Into the Marketplace,” 15. [31] Mason, “Staging the Myth of America,” 119. [32] Jones, The Captive Stage, 141. [33] Ibid., 142. [34] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, 46. [35] Ibid, 66. [36] When Zoe approaches Dido to ask her for poison at the end of the play, she clearly doesn’t recognize Dido, whom she calls “Aunty” and “Mammy.” Zoe invents an entire history between them: “my own dear Mammy, who so often hushed me to sleep when I was a child” (Ibid., 133), although Dido did not grow up on the Peyton plantation, and is in fact the same age as Zoe (Ibid., 134). Zoe cannot see Dido as an individual, but purely as a stereotype. In Minnie’s eyes, this ignorance arises from Zoe’s choice to align herself with the white characters, in her words “hang out wit all these damn white people all the damn time” (Ibid., 134). [37] Ibid., 100. [38] Ibid., 106. [39] Ibid., 102. [40] Ibid., 102. [41] Ibid., 138. [42] While this article focuses on Dido and Minnie’s ability to transverse the generic conventions of melodrama, the male characters also engage in temporal crossing. BJJ/Assistant/Playwright, in their various cross-racial guises, step out of character and transition seamlessly between the play and the frame. [43] Dora Sunnyside, the daughter of the neighboring plantation owner and Zoe’s friend (and rival), also does not move between the framing device and the main story. While this article is primarily focused on race rather than class, it might be worthwhile to consider how these two characters are united in class status. [44] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon , 56. [45] Jules Zanger, “The ‘Tragic Octoroon’ In Pre-Civil War Fiction.” American Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1966): 66. [46] Merrill and Saxon, “Replaying and Rediscovering,” 131. [47] Mullen, “The Work of the Public Mind,” 110. [48] Lisa Merrill and Theresa Saxon. “Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon.” Theatre Journal 69, no. 2 (June 2017): 130. [49] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon, 76-7. [50] Ibid., 77. [51] Ibid., 25. This type of open-ended yet specific stipulation is used for all of the actors and characters of color. It is also odd that the only explicitly mixed race character is asked to own and represent her identity in a way that no other character, including those who put on cross-racial make-up technologies, are asked to. [52] For the male characters, race is significantly more fluid. Although BJJ suffers as a “Black Playwright” — as his work is prejudged as a reflection of current racial issues or a retelling of African folktales, a situation he describes in the metatheatrical prologue “The Art of Dramatic Composition” — he is able to put on whiteface make-up and “become” white and much more socially mobile. While Assistant’s use of blackface, or Playwright’s use of redface do not afford them privileges (Paul is killed, while Wahnotee is nearly lynched), the two actors do not seem bothered by their transformations. [53] Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 48. [54] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon , 64. [55] The music for the TFANA production was composed by César Alvarez and played by the onstage cellist, Lester St. Louis. While the Soho Rep and Theatre for a New Audience productions had constant musical accompaniment as well as a particularly evocative closing song, no specific musical directions are mentioned in the script. There is often a stark division between what is described in the stage directions and what appears on stage in Jacobs-Jenkins’ plays. We find this intentional vagueness throughout An Octoroon , including, as we shall see, Jacobs-Jenkins’ descriptions of his tableau: “Maybe he starts to make a grave—sobbing and digging his hands? I don’t know ” (ibid., 81). However, this desire to leave the creation of the theatrical world up to the director is also included in his 2010 debut, Neighbors , at the Public Theater. Neighbors grapples with theatre history in much the same way as An Octoroon , re-engaging with the minstrel tradition rather than melodrama. Particularly fascinating are the stage directions in Neighbors that describe minstrel interludes, including many traditional characters like Sambo, Zip Coon, Topsy, and Mammy. These interludes are drawn in excruciating detail, describing outlandish physical and sexual situations. Sambo’s interlude, for example, includes an insanely large penis, which ropes a watermelon, and which he chews through. Jacobs-Jenkins, Neighbors , 358. Neighbors ’ stage directions are incredibly detailed, while those of An Octoroon are more suggestive. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, “Neighbors.” In Reimagining A Raisin in the Sun, edited by Rebecca Ann Rugg and Harvey Young (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 307–403. [56] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon , 67. [57] Ibid., 81. [58] Ibid., 80. [59] Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 215. [60] Lisa Merrill, “‘May She Read Liberty in Your Eyes?’: Beecher, Boucicault and the Representation and Display of Antebellum Women’s Racially Indeterminate Bodies,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 26, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 133. [61] Mullen, “The Work of The Public Mind,” 104. For further information on the performance history of slave auctions, see Jason Stupp, “Slavery and the Theatre of History: Ritual Performance on the Auction Block.” Theatre Journal 63, no. 1 (March 2011): 61-84. [62] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon , 106. [63] Ibid., 106. [64] Merrill and Saxon, “Replaying and Rediscovering,” 151. [65] Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon , 110. In the Theatre for a New Audience production, this conflict became an extended scene, and a display of physical skill and comedic timing from Austin Smith, the actor who played BJJ/George/M’Closky. Smith rolled around on the ground before the auction block—where Zoe stood, gasping in horror—fighting himself. The characters shouted encouragement, and at one point, Dora kicked over George’s knife, which had gotten lost in the scuffle. The severe emotional shift, from a side-splitting scene to one of extreme pathos, was felt extensively in the audience, and carefully cultivated. [66] Ibid., 111. [67] Interjections with phrases such as: “Playwright: Anway, Pete’s like,” and commentary such as “This is actually a hole in Boucicault’s plot. Not mine.” Ibid., 119. [68] Ibid., 122. [69] Ibid., 122. [70] Ibid., 113. [71] The actors’ choice not to acknowledge the photograph is echoed in the stage directions. While Jacobs-Jenkins requires a lynching photograph, he does not specify an incident, or even a date range, that the production should employ, Ibid., 222. He leaves the choice to the director and designers. [72] Matthew Wilson Smith, “Victorian Railway Accident and the Melodramatic Imagination,” Modern Drama 55, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 508. [73] Michael Diamond, Victorian Sensation: Or, the Spectacular, the Shocking, and the Scandalous in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Anthem Press, 2003), 219. [74] Lynn M. Voskuil, “Feeling Public: Sensation Theater, Commodity Culture, and the Victorian Public Sphere,” Victorian Studies 44, no.2 (2002): 250. [75] Ibid., 115-120. [76] Ibid., 128. [77] Ibid., 128. [78] Although approaching this scene from a different argument, Merrill and Saxon also pay close attention to Dido and Minnie’s final exchange, noting that it allows the audience to “refocus their attention on the material conditions and lives of ordinary black women rather than the eponymous octoroon.” Merrill and Saxon, “Replaying and Rediscovering,” 152. Footnotes About The Author(s) ROSA SCHNEIDER is a doctoral candidate in the Subcommittee on Theatre within the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia UnXiversity. Her research focuses on the performance of history, race, and cultural memory, on American and Caribbean stages. She has presented work at ASTR, where she serves as a member of Executive Committee of the Graduate Student Caucus, and she is also the resident dramaturge and co-artistic director of Strange Harbor, an experimental theatre company in Brooklyn. Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. 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Watch Ewa – The Last Lesson by Andrea Mura / Federico Savonitto at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. After sixty years of theatrical and performative research, Ewa Benesz decides to leave Italy and return to Lublin, the city she fled in the 1980s during Polish martial law. The advancement of age forces her to discontinue her workshops, which involve people from all over the world. Ewa Benesz must say goodbye to her students, some of whom have maintained a relationship with her that has lasted for decades. Ewa's theatrical practice and research draw from a tradition and methodology that can only be transmitted personally, so there is a strong risk that her knowledge will be lost forever. In her return to Poland, Ewa confronts the silent weight of a life spent away from home, in a journey that is simultaneously an ending and a return to her origins. Polish actress, holds a BA from the University of Lublin and a diploma of the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Warsaw. She worked in the Instytut Aktora -Teatr Laboratorium managed by Jerzy Grotowski in Poland and she met Peter Brook. After fled the country due to the Martial Laws she collaborated with Rena Mirecka in the paratheatrical projects until 1996 – carried out in Europe, Israel and America. Since 1997 she has conducted her peculiar paratheatrical and theatrical workshops. She lives in the Sardinian mountains, where she conducts a practical research inspired by the ancient Sanskrit Vedic texts and cosmogonist myths. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Ewa – The Last Lesson Andrea Mura / Federico Savonitto At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on June 1, at 5:30 PM, at The Segal Theatre Center RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. Country Italy, Poland Language Italian, Polish Running Time 67 minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film After sixty years of theatrical and performative research, Ewa Benesz decides to leave Italy and return to Lublin, the city she fled in the 1980s during Polish martial law. The advancement of age forces her to discontinue her workshops, which involve people from all over the world. Ewa Benesz must say goodbye to her students, some of whom have maintained a relationship with her that has lasted for decades. Ewa's theatrical practice and research draw from a tradition and methodology that can only be transmitted personally, so there is a strong risk that her knowledge will be lost forever. In her return to Poland, Ewa confronts the silent weight of a life spent away from home, in a journey that is simultaneously an ending and a return to her origins. Polish actress, holds a BA from the University of Lublin and a diploma of the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Warsaw. She worked in the Instytut Aktora -Teatr Laboratorium managed by Jerzy Grotowski in Poland and she met Peter Brook. After fled the country due to the Martial Laws she collaborated with Rena Mirecka in the paratheatrical projects until 1996 – carried out in Europe, Israel and America. Since 1997 she has conducted her peculiar paratheatrical and theatrical workshops. She lives in the Sardinian mountains, where she conducts a practical research inspired by the ancient Sanskrit Vedic texts and cosmogonist myths. With Ewa Benesz Directed by Andrea Mura, Federico Savonitto Produced by Chiara Andrich, Andrea Mura, Federico Savonitto Cinematography Andrea Mura, Federico Savonitto, Chiara Andrich Editing Jacopo Quadri, Nicolò Tettamanti Sound engineer Camilla Iannetti Camera operator Camilla Iannetti Sound design and Music Francesco De Marco Color correction Giada Di Fonzo About The Artist(s) Andrea Mura Italian director and producer with a background in Philosophy and a diploma from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. His documentary work, with works such as “Nodas” (2015) and “Transumanze” (2021), explores the dialogue between memory, popular traditions and contemporaneity. His films have gained recognition at numerous international festivals, including RAI Film Festival (Bristol), Primed (Marseille), See You Sound (Turin), Visioni Italiane (Bologna) and DocuMed (Tunis). As a producer, he has collaborated on Ginko Film projects, including François Xavier Destors and Alfonso Pinto's “Toxicily” (France-Italy, 2023) and Giulia Camba's “Oplà” (Italy, 2024). Since 2014, he has shared the artistic direction of the Sole Luna Doc Film Festival in Palermo with Chiara Andrich. Federico Savonitto Documentary director. A graduate of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, he has long held the position of teaching tutor at the CSC - Sede Sicilia, taught filmmaking, and made several documentaries such as La fine che non ho fatto (2011), La città sconosciuta (2013), Pellegrino (2017), In un futuro aprile (2019), Not Available - It's about Yann Keller (2022), An Invisible Enemy (2022) The Secret Plan (2024) that participated and won awards at several international festivals, such as Biografilm Festival, Giornate degli Autori, DOK Leipzig, Locarno Film Festival, Listapad, DOC- Cévennes, Festival dei Popoli, Trieste Film Festival, Trento Film Festival, Ortigia Film Festival, Asolo Art Film Festival. Get in touch with the artist(s) info@ginkofilm.it and follow them on social media https://www.ginkofilm.it/en/film/the-last-lesson/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Ariel Nereson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. Ariel Nereson By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting . Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. Amy Cook’s Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting argues that casting, as artistic practice and necessary strategy for everyday life, is a performative act related to human cognitive tendencies to organize a large number of stimuli into characters. Our understanding of characters happens within categories that shape assumptions about a character type’s behavior and desires. Cook claims, “The process by which we build a character from the inputs of context, memory, text, and the physical properties of the body playing that character is far more powerful than has been acknowledged” (6). Because she works with a contemporary understanding of situated (also called “embodied”) cognition, inputs like context, memory, and text are just as connected to the experiential embodiment as are the physical properties of the body. Cook uses second generation cognitive science in her theoretical matrix, and I would argue that this text is part of another second generation, that of the cognitive turn in the humanities. Cook’s overall goal is a back-and-forth conversation between cognitive science and theatre studies wherein “a cognitive approach to theatrical character” and “a theatrical understanding of a central component of cognition – characterization” are analyzed together under the term of casting (15). Cognitive humanities scholarship can be easily critiqued as simply slapping cognitive science onto an analytical object and allowing scientific conclusions to become primarily prescriptive, thus circumscribing the scholar’s interpretive work. Cook foregrounds a more difficult, subtle, and ultimately useful process here whereby epistemological models from theatre studies help elucidate cognitive scientific findings, not solely the other way around. Building Character is structured pedagogically (though not pedantically). Chapter one, “Building Titus,” introduces concepts that continue to deepen and pay off in each subsequent chapter. “Building Titus” focuses on the cognitive processes of compression. Cook argues that character building is a process of stimuli compression; characters exist only as “we create them to make sense of our perceptions” (38). Chapter two, “Building Characters,” focuses on how and why “[S]ome bodies…do not seem to disappear as easily as others into their parts” and includes a compelling engagement with celebrity studies (32). Cook takes up the work of Eve Ensler and Anna Deavere Smith in the third chapter, “Multicasting,” exploring the dynamic and embedded nature of building characters. Chapter four moves Cook’s observations about casting into the roles of our everyday lives, including the casting process involved in Barack Obama’s presidency. Cook ends her book with a necessary gesture toward the implications of her argument and the cognitive scientific research upon which it rests for social change. The final chapter, “Counter Casting,” contends that because the cognitive processes behind casting undergird both theatrical and everyday phenomena, their “creativity…suggests ways we might reimagine our selves and our ecosystems” (33). Cook’s array of examples is appropriately capacious given that her thesis depends upon the omnipresence of casting as a tool for sense-making. She examines film trailers, rap music lyrics, advertising, and senate debates; her analysis is particularly strong when the object is dramatic performance. Chapter three includes several illuminating readings of much-discussed material, such as The Taming of the Shrew , the creative methods of Anna Deveare Smith, and Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More . Throughout the text, Cook responsibly owns her positionality and her “casting” by the world, which, as in cognitive scientific studies, both increases precision (her analysis of Shrew ) and limits findings (her account of listening to Dr. Dre’s 1992 album The Chronic ). When she turns her attention to dramatic examples, she clarifies her participation in disciplinary stakes; Cook effectively critiques the Method school of acting as reliant upon outdated models of psychology that prize the unconscious over more current understandings of networked consciousness and cognition, a theatre-based example of a larger critique throughout the cognitive humanities of psychoanalytic theory. The cognitive turn in the humanities can result in difficult prose; accounting for the specificities of scientific studies and the many caveats of their conclusions can often read as watering down the humanities scholar’s argument and muddying their writing. Cook’s writing suffers no such fate. She is remarkably clear in her descriptions of cognitive scientific concepts and their application to cultural phenomena. She also attends to the dynamics of live performance as a making or becoming process, simpatico with cognition as a set of situated processes. Consider Cook’s compelling analysis of Katherine’s final speech in Act Five as staged in Phyllida Lloyd’s 2016 production of Taming of the Shrew : “the all-female casting disrupts our protocols of character interpretation because we cannot find the categories of sex and gender the play insists on and thus the ensemble stages a character breakdown” (108, italics in the original). As an example of clear humanities writing within the cognitive turn, Cook’s text is a welcome addition to graduate and advanced undergraduate classrooms, as well as her peers’ bookshelves. Cook attempts an urgently necessary task if the cognitive turn is to become a flexible theoretical tool in our field, namely, the responsible synthesis of implications from this research with theoretical frames that share an investment in embodiment as epistemology, such as critical race theory, queer theory, and feminist theory. Cook’s claim, supported by second generation cognitive science, that “We do not just think differently because of the bodies we have, we think with and through the bodies we have” is an arrival at the same destination but by an alternate route from many theoretical models found in the traditions listed above (29). Cook models such a synthesis in her engagement with the work of Angela Pao and Brandi Wilkins Catanese. As Cook states, this book is a starting point. It serves as a useful tool for further investigation of, in particular, non-normative bodies and their possibilities in everyday life and on stage and screen. Indeed, claims of normativity, as Cook shows, partially result from cognitive “processes by which we jump to powerful conclusions that it is our duty to challenge” (33). Investigating the relationship between normative brain structures and neural processes that may be cross-cultural and transhistorical as well as social norms of gender, class, race, and sexuality remains a critical need. I would like to see future work engaging with the cognitive turn do more to interrogate and historicize its own theoretical frame. The selection of research areas, funding, and subjects within scientific study is hardly a neutral enterprise. Cook’s text demonstrates the value of engaging with these theories in sharpening our analytical precision using empirical evidence; yet scientific theories are still theories, and they deserve the same rigorous investigation of their cultural commitments and values that we now apply, de rigeur, to other theoretical tools. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ARIEL NERESON University at Buffalo, State University of New York Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. 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European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 19, Fall, 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL … SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF By Kalina Stefanova Image Credits: Article A Story of Will and Love of Will (Shakespeare) Yes, We Will was the motto of the International Shakespeare Festival in Craiova this year. It could well have been the same one 30 years ago, in 1994, when the Festival took off to a daring start. The incredible will to make Craiova a city of Shakespeare – on an international scale at that! – belonged then, as well as ever since, to Emil Boroghina – the irresistibly charismatic actor, director and manager of the Craiova National Theatre, who exudes the special aura of modesty characteristic only of the truly wise. Importantly, in the beginning of the 1990’s, it was in Craiova and at its National Theatre “Marin Sorescu,” where the Romanian theatre at large could dream big and could turn its dreams into reality. It was there and then, where the director Silviu Purcarete, now an artist of highest world renown, started his career. His second show, Ubu Rex with Scenes from Macbeth (1990), got invited to the Edinburgh Festival, in 1991, and became such a hit there that was immediately invited to Japan, Germany and Israel. “All of a sudden, Purcarete’s name became known, respected, sought after,” as the critic and scholar Octavian Saiu notes his essay on the director in the 2021 collection 20 Ground-Breaking Directors of Eastern Europe. Purcarete’s next productions – Titus Andronicus (1992) and Phaedra (1994) – followed suit, bringing high acclaim to him, to the Craiova National Theatre, and to the Romanian theatre alike, both at home and around the world. It was exactly during the tour of that Titus Andronicus in Tokyo, in 1992, where Emil Boroghina first shared in public, and on the international arena, the ambitious goal that the Craiova National Theatre had set up for itself: to organize an international festival devoted to Shakespeare. Very symbolically, this announcement transpired in no other place but the local Globe theatre. Mind you, this was a time, when nearly everywhere in Eastern Europe theatre was losing ground. On multiple levels at that: in terms of its audiences, status, repertoire, and, most importantly, main focus. It was in search for a new face – a process which took, in some countries, nearly half a decade to be completed. The Craiova National Theatre obviously stood out as a glaring exception in this overall rather bleak picture and, thus, presented the most propitious conditions for putting into practice Boroghina’s conviction, as stated in the 1994 Festival Program, that “as actors test their mettle by doing Shakespeare, so do theatres.” As You Like It. Photo © John Haynes The first edition of the Festival was rather cautious: it consisted of six productions only, of which just one was foreign. However, the latter was no other but the all-male As You Like It of the British Cheek by Jowl Theatre – one of the hottest shows of the time which was in a process of traveling and introducing to the audiences around the world the typical finesse and inconspicuousness of Declan Donnellan’s directing signature style. It was not going to be a one-off visit of Donnellan and his Cheek by Jowl in Craiova. He remained truly involved with the International Shakespeare Festival there throughout the next decades. In 2006, he brought to Craiova his ephemerally beautiful Twelfth Night , done as a co-production between Cheek by Jowl and the Moscow International Chekhov Festival. The 2008 edition featured his Troilus and Cressida and the 2018 one – his Measure for Measure , another co-production between Cheek by Jowl and a Russian theatre institution, this time the Pushkin Theatre. And now, the Festival’s jubilee 30th year had as one of its highlights his Hamlet , done especially for the occasion with the cast of the very host – the Craiova National Theatre. Meanwhile, in 2014, one of the productions included in the “Shakespeare’s Contemporaries” line of the Festival was Donnellan’s too: ‘ Tis a Pity She’s a Whore , by John Ford. In 2008, the Festival cracked its door open for exceptional fully non-Shakespearean productions, not related to his time either. And the two exceptions then were, indeed, exceptional: Peter Brook’s The Grand Inquisitor , after Dostoyevsky’s novel (with Bouffes de Nord Theatre), and Robert Wilson’s Lady from the Sea , by Ibsen (with the Berliner Ensemble). Appropriately, the edition was entitled Great Shows, Great Directors. The brilliant late Romanian-French critic George Banu had remarked earlier that the Craiova Festival was “extremely courageous and extremely radical” and suggested that “if the festival in Sibiu were one of opening, the one in Craiova was one of focus.” The two aforementioned “detours” did not at all mean that the Festival had betrayed its focus. They rather indicated that there was already a two-way focus phenomenon: i.e. in five editions only, the Craiova Festival had managed to draw the attention of the biggest names in the world theatre. In the next editions, Robert Lepage, the Quebec director- extraordinaire, was the other rare exception in the program: with his Needles and Opium , in 2018, and with his stunning one-man show 887 , in 2022. The 2008 edition introduced yet another novelty: the International Shakespeare Festival Prize. Unsurprisingly, it went first to Declan Donnellan, and then, over the next years, has gone to the directors Silviu Purcarete (in 2010), Eimuntas Nekrosius (in 2012), Krzysztof Warlikowski (in 2018) and Robert Lepage (in 2022). So far the only non-directors among the Prize recipients have been Sir Stanley Wells (2014), the Shakespearean scholar and Honorary President of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and Michael Dobson (2020), director of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-on-Avon. These choices are not surprising either. For, the Festival is not only an artistic endeavor but is also a platform for critical and scholarly discourse, focused, naturally, on Shakespeare. The high-level conferences, gathering Shakespearean scholars from around the world in Craiova, have become a part of the Festival’s trademark and have acquired the patronage of the UNESCO chair of the International Theatre Institute (ITI). In 2010, the Shakespeare in Performance Seminar was launched there and later on it got the aegis of the European Shakespeare Research Association (ESRA). In addition to all that, in 2010, the Festival became a co-founder of the European Shakespeare Festivals Network whose meetings regularly take place there. And, in 2016, its high-level international status was further asserted by the fact that the one week of events accompanying the Europe Theatre Prize, the most important theatre award on the whole continent, was organized in the framework of the 10th Festival edition. Given all these developments, high-end additions, and already fully cemented reputation as a the atre institution of world-wide clout, a question naturally arises: could the Craiova International Shakespeare Festival get possibly further enriched in terms of content and format? The 2024 jubilee edition provided a firmly positive answer. 2024: New Entries in the Festival’s Profile The Festival celebrated its jubilee with several substantial innovations which – notably! – were organically intertwined. In the first place, it acquired a new co-organizer: The National University of Theatre and Film Arts (UNACT) “I. L. Caragiale” (based in Bucharest), in addition to the Shakespeare Theatre Foundation, established by Boroghina in 1994. This enforcement of the organizers’ ranks has brought a whole new strand to the program, so far routinely consisting mainly of indoor and outdoor parts: UNITER performances and events. Their number was, indeed, startling: 106 altogether, ranging from theatre to film, to installations, research workshops, exhibitions, etc., and mounted in 22 alternative spaces throughout Craiova. An interesting detail of the jubilee Festival edition was that some of the participating students were accommodated in a camping place, especially created for them in the biggest park of the city. This was not an ordinary camping place per se but part of another major new development of the Festival: the Shakespeare Village. Built as a traditional Elizabethan-era village, it was an alternative place for performances, workshops, children’s activities during the day, and concerts and parties during the night; with overall 70 events happening there during the 11 festival days. In turn, the Shakespeare village was not just a new entry in the jubilee program. It was a part of the most important change of the Festival that transpired already on a conceptual level. Namely, the very scope of the Festival’s audiences, or rather addressees, was substantially expanded to encompass not just the spectators of the invited shows but, in an equal measure, the local communities of Craiova. As Vlad Dragulescu, the person to whom Boroghina has meanwhile handed the baton – the current director of the Festival – put it in the catalogue: “This time, perhaps more than ever, we will understand that most of all, Shakespeare is not about theatre, but about people. A Shakespeare for everyone.” Lady from the Sea. Photo © A.J. Weissbard The emphasis on the local communities’ involvement and on the two-way relations between the festival and the people outside of the theatre halls was best reflected in the Pop-Up Shakespeare strand of the program. “Festival Communities Build the Festival” was its motto. Together with the Outdoor strand, they involved 50 locations in the city, where shows and improvisations took place. As the catalogue described it, “Our actors have the mission, at this edition, to talk to the people who live there and to involve them with the actual production. With a ladle, with a pot, with a chair, with a table, with a hanger. This year, the whole of Craiova is a stage and all the people are actors.” In brief, the aim was to transform Craiova from a city with a festival to a full-scale fes tival city. The new, communities-oriented, concept was actually put into practice long before the Festival started, in something like a prelude to it, with the so- called Shakespeare caravan. It brought for the first time The Complete Works of Shakespeare (in the shape of a 45-minute open-air show) to 30 cities in Romania and drew over 1200000 spectators. After all this, how could one not eagerly anticipate what the Craiova Festival had prepared for the audience for its jubilee? The 2024 Highlights Out of the overall more than 300 events and nearly 30 main indoor shows, the Festival organizers had taken out of the brackets several names: Peter Brook, Robert Wilson, Declan Donnellan, Robert Lepage, Andrei Serban. It was with Wilson’s Tempest , a production of the National Theatre “Ivan Vazov” of Bulgaria, the jubilee edition took off. The show met the expectations of all the incorrigible fans of the famed director’s oeuvre. It is a manifestation of impressive moving images, created with impeccable taste, in terms of colors and composition, and animated via stylized acting, where actors are more like puppets, clad in correspondingly imposing costumes and bringing in a pinch of a special humor – somewhat from a distance and, to be frank, not readable to everyone. In brief, beauty as from another planet, to a la rge extent warmth-free, and humor that is rather a form of a shield lest we dare try to penetrate underneath the striking surface of all we see on stage in search for something else there. While Wilson’s show could not be considered a surprise either for better or for worse, Donnellan’s Hamlet with the Craiova National Theatre was, for me, a true disappointment. Although I was in fact somewhat prepared by his Spanish Life Is a Dream , which visited Sofia a year ago and which was not a sample of his best directorial work. The springboard concept of Donellan’s Hamlet is actually very worthy. The action takes place in a very intimate environment. The spectators are seated on two parallel amphitheatre constructions on the big stage itself. The space for the actors’ movement is further narrowed by placing of several sorts of cubes between them and the audience. It is on one of these cubes where Hamlet’s Father sits throughout the action, thus, becoming a witness of everything. The other characters who meanwhile pass away, sit then on the other “chairs,” forming altogether a special territory in-between the living in the real world – the viewers – and the living in the play. i.e. there is a two-layer audience of what transpires in this Hamlet . Importantly too, the living in th e real world are at an arm’s length from both the alive and the dead of the characters. Yet, it is this very closeness that proves to be a double-edged weapon, as most of the acting is, alas, very superficial, which could hardly be hidden at such a short distance. So, most of the time, the characters seem like computer-generated, i.e. without true emotions, trepidations, development. That applies especially to Hamlet himself who gets mad rather abruptly, almost within a second, and the expression of his madness is via a quite worn-out cliché – he puts on red high-heel shoes and bright red lipstick, and stays like that nearly throughout the action. The madness of Ophelia is not very persuasive either: she bangs with a spade on the metal wall on the side of the back wings. Polonius, in turn, inexplicably is played by an actress in a tremendously padded man’s suit and with a moustache. All of this doesn’t mean that Donnellan’s Hamlet doesn’t have its concrete excellent moments too. Such is the genuinely moving first encounter of Hamlet with the ghost: he touches his hands, shoulders, head, in an attempt to find out if his father is real, and then, being happiness itself, he embraces him. Gertrude slapping Hamlet is also in a very truthful scene which, alas, gets spoiled quickly by the manner in which he gets mad. Then, his smelling of the poison on the tip of the sword and in the wine is an interesting detail. There are other powerful moments, yet, on the whole, as the case with the bulk of conceptual theatre, this show gets exhausted quite early on, since it is not persuasive on the level of human presence, relationships, and emotions. So, in the end, I didn’t feel touched or transformed by it. Much more integral was Twelfth Night , created by the Romanian director of world fame Andrei Serban with the actors of the State Theatre of Constansa, Romania. It was a sample of a fully organic mix of an unobtrusive, yet very clever and elegant, directing style and a very functional set-design (a small and narrow stage, turned into a shiny box by the fringe curtain that surrounded it). Talking about the Romanian highlights of the Festival, I will take the liberty to include among them a book that was launched there and that is dedicated to the National Theatre of Craiova, to Boroghina and Purcarete. These three names form its title, while the subtitle tells the rest: Pilgrims of the Great Theatre of the World. Created by Ljudmila Patlanjoglu, the doyen of the Romanian theatre critics and scholars, this book was the best present to the Festival for its jubilee. An equally awesome and elegant volume, it contains all the important data about the main developments of this remarkable institution as well as splendid large photos of the main productions, events, and the champions of the Festival. The Romanian connection was also to be traced as far as to one of the highly acclaimed Asian entries in the main indoor program: a non-verbal King Lear of Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio from Hong Kong, with a mixed local and Romanian cast, which, alas, I didn’t get to see. From among the shows I did see, I was most struck by The Tempest Project of Peter Brook and Marie-Helene Estienne, the Spanish Hamlet, the Dance of the Melancholic of the Jesus Herrera Flamenco Ballet, and The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark , staged as a ballet by Robert Lepage and Guillaume Cote. They were actually more than merely distinctive. They were rather the most spectacular and unforgettable theatre fireworks in tribute to the Festival’s jubilee. Moreover, they rather complemented each other as an overall effect bringing out three aspects of Shakespeare’s oeuvre: its profound spirituality, its visceral side, and its strong potential for visual expressiveness. The Tempest Project of Peter Brook and Marie-Helene Estienne or When Theatre Transcends Theatre The thrill of expecting an encounter with the extraordinary charged the air around the National Theatre of Craiova already before the show. The building was as if under siege: there were more than twice as many people in front of it as there were seats inside its main hall. And, as the routine practice is in this part of the world, all students and ardent theatre aficionados, who hadn’t managed to get hold of a ticket, were let in and allowed to sit on the steps of the rather large and steep staircase-aisles on the two sides of the seats. In the end, the hall was literally full to the brim. Still, at the moment the lights started to go down, an extraordinary silence fell over the packed theatre, as if all these people, like one, held their breath in awe of the greatest theatre maestro of our time, humbled by the privilege to see his last work. When the lights were fully dimmed, the silence became even more special, as the stage responded in the same language of quiet – like an echo that can not be heard but can be felt with both body and soul. Prospero, standing on a Persian carpet on the proscenium, started slowly to twist and turn in his hands a big wooden stick, slightly curved at one of its ends, like a shepherd’s crook. In full quiet. It was as if time slowed down and stopped. Our time, the time we know, that is. And the space too started to change. As if, with every move of this crook, the very air around it, around Prospero, and around us, was changing: like its invisible molecules were getting rearranged and, at the end of the next several fully quiet minutes, the hustle, the vanity, the pettiness of our life not simply disappeared, but rather got cleaned up, as mere spots get cleaned up, and everything around us and even in us became crystal and clear, and full of tranquil joy. And this purity felt so natural as though we were back to normal, back to where we belong. The next hour and twenty minutes of this unique theatre piece transpired in this other, yet so naturally ours time and space. No matter that speech makes its appearance too, soon after the beginning. The atmosphere on and off stage retain that extraordinary blissful charge of peace and harmony – the feeling of becoming freed from the ordinary and of recognizing the extraordinary as our natural home. Importantly, the arrival of speech was not followed by any special effects, already so inseparable from theatre today. Until the end of The Tempest Project, on stage there are only several more carpets and several more sticks – only smaller than that in Prospero’s hands and some of them being in small piles on the floor. Magic carpets and magic wands? This thought may cross one’s mind, but only briefly. To me, they were much more than that. And this became crystal clear in a scene that was a stroke of genius. Ferdinand takes several of the small sticks and lays them out on the floor, forming a line – a path – between himself and Miranda. Then he carefully puts one stick on her head and one on his own, and they start treading the path towards each other very carefully, lest the sticks fall down. So, maybe the carpets and the wooden crook in Prospero’s hand are, indeed, the well known symbols of the fairy tales. We are humans, after all, and are in need of familiar vehicles for our imagination to take off. Yet, here the “flight” is not to somewhere distant else but it is rather the “flight” of a revelation – of getting to see through about the essence of here and now, and realize how different this here and now is, in effect, from our usual perception of it. And that it takes only one thing for our eyes to get open for this other reality: to get to follow the paths set up for us and enshrined within us. Which is to say: to see the here and now with “the eyes of the heart.” From that scene with the path outlined with the sticks on, I couldn’t stop thinking about several lines from Psalm 25 of the Book of Psalms : “Show me your ways, Lord, teach me your paths.” (Psalm 25: 4) And then: “All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth.” (Psalm 25:10) Of course, minimalism in terms of stage means of expression is not at all a surprise in Brook’s theatre. I will never forget The Valley of Astonishment , again created by him and Marie-Helene Estienne. It had the effect of a drawing by a genius painter, made on a napkin – just few strokes and the essence of a face, person, relations… is there. Yet, in The Tempest Project this utmost simplicity that zeroes in on the quintessential is on a much deeper level: about our communion with the other world – the invisible one which resides both outside and inside us, and which, for centuries already, has been sneered at and entirely dismissed as non-existent. No wonder Brook went back exactly to The Tempest (for a third time) when the end of his life was approaching. “There is a word that chimes through the play: free”, he wrote about the play. “…As always in Shakespeare, the meaning is never pinned. It's always suggested like in an echo chamber. Each echo amplifies and nourishes its sound. Caliban wants his freedom. Ariel wants his freedom, but it's not the same freedom. For Prospero, freedom is undefinable. It is what he is looking for throughout the play. The young Prospero, plunged into his books, searching for the occult, was a prisoner of his dreams. On the island, we may think he became free because he had acquired all the magical powers a man can acquire. But a magician plays with powers that do not belong to humanity. It is not for a man to darken the midday sun, nor to bring the dead out of their graves.” With The Tempest Project Brook dispenses nearly fully from the material, from nearly everything that constitutes what we accept now as ordinary, both in life and in theatre. As a result, we can fully concentrate on the nature of freedom as the first and foremost prerequisite for our communion with the invisible – the world of the Spirit. The show italicized in my mind yet another line of the sacred texts which, paraphrased, reads like this: all the taking care of the material life has chased us from paradise. The Tempest Project also reminded me of something another great director of our time, the late Eimuntas Nekrosius of Lithuania, said, “We have empty years, empty days and empty months alike in our lives. We only have a handful of real life. Almost everything is wasted time. However, we all imitate that we are in a hurry, that we do not have time, and that we are and will be very busy for a few years ahead. This is not true. This is how we deceive ourselves and others.” The Tempest Project of Brook and Estienne is, to me, exactly about that “handful of real life” – life that is free from the material, from the imitation of substance via its so contemporary substitutes – the haste, the cult for adrenalin, and the ubiquity of many-ness. In brief, life that is sync with the Spirit, and is, thus, harmony and peace itself. A distant serene song resounds from one point on in The Tempes t Project – coming and going, as if in waves; a song, which at times seems as simply part of the air. The people on stage – and I deliberately don’t say actors, lest I ruin the wonder – are somewhat like that song: at times they talk, at times they are simply there, yet, apart from the rare funny scenes, they too feel like a part of the air. You can probably say that Brook and Estienne have managed to bring us as closest as possible to one of the core themes of the play: “We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on, and our little life/ Is rounded with a sleep.” I dare say again that The Tempest Project is much more than that: it rather makes us feel like in heaven, or, even more to the point, in what heaven could feel like here on Earth – during the “handful of real life.” Actually, Nekrosius himself tried to create Paradise on stage, in his adaptation of Dante’s Divine Comedy at his Meno Fortas Theatre in Vilnius, Lithuania. And he did manage to a large extent. Yet there were some illustrative moments there which grounded the overall effect of the show. While seeing The Tempest Project is truly like experiencing a life-changing revelation. Joe Martin begins his essay on Peter Brook “The Invisible Made Visible” in the 2015 SUFI “Peter Brook's life work for theatre constitutes a journey on a path upon which the spiritual traveler's quest is inseparable from that of the artist.” Indeed, experiencing The Tempest Project is equally an eye- opening experience in terms of theatre too, i.e. of what theatre could be like. In the 2023 program of the Hong Kong Arts Festival, Peter Brook wrote, in reference to the Tempest Project: “Today, Western actors have all the qualities necessary to explore in Shakespeare's plays; all that concerns anger, political violence, sexuality, introspection. But for them it is almost impossible to touch the invisible world. To play a character who is not real, for a Western actor, requires real acrobatics. For the actor who has been raised in a world of ceremonies and rituals, the way that leads to the invisible is often direct and natural . The Tempest is an enigma. It is a fable in which nothing can be taken literally, because if we stay on the surface of the play, its inner quality escapes us. For the actors as well as for the audience, it is a play that reveals itself by playing it. It's like music.” In The Tempest Project the actors not only do manage to touch the invisible. They manage to become humble mediums between it and us, willfully dispensing from everything acting is usually associated with. The whole Tempest Project feels like being set free from everything ordinary theatre is associated with. It is a genuinely extraordinary piece – a piece of theatre that transcends theatre. It is as if, with this last show of his, Brook nods us from heaven and, by letting us experience a feel of it, reminds us that both life and theatre could be indeed holy. Hamlet “Translated” into the Language of Flamenco Another extraordinary prism for viewing, or rather feeling, Hamlet in Craiova was offered by the Spanish Jesus Herera Flamenco Ballet. Entitled Hamlet, the Dance of the Melancholic , this show is, to a large extent, at the other end of the pure spirituality of The Tempest Project: it dwells in the territory of the visceral, having simply skipped the one of the merely physical. All the same, it is an equally unforgettable and truly unique experience, as the work of Brook and Estienne. Indeed, as the Festival catalogue assured us, “For the first time ever, one of Shakespeare’s most iconic tragic plays is being turned into a Flamenco production.” The very logical motivation for this so unlikely undertaking was immediately pointed out there: “Hamlet is a tale of family, revenge, power and murder – and it is these aspects that make the story perfect for a Flamenco adaptation with their intensity and passion.” Importantly, in Hamlet, the Dance of the Melancholic , the passion of the Flamenco language is not limited to the well-known ingredients – the dancing, the singing, the live music (here provided by a guitar,drums, flute and sax) and the rhythm of hands-clapping and feet-tapping. On stage, there are also a piano with a piano-player and a six-person choir. The choristers are in cloaks with hooks and with painted white faces, as if with masks. All the participants in the show are all the time on stage but, in effect, we rarely do see them altogether. Because of the light – another major partner in this stunning dance of passion: it brings in and out of the action not only the concrete characters and musicians, but also the choir. So it is a surprise when we first get to see it and it continues to be so further on in the action. The choir not only adds the might of an oratorio type of a recital to the whole sound texture of the show but it does dance too – with the main dancer and artistic director of the company Jesus Herrera. Herrera’s performance is literally a tour-de-force. An unlikely Hamlet – very tall and solid – he manages to transform his body into a whirl of passion. So it is not anymore human flesh but the very energy of all the extreme emotions that take hold of the character – and human beings at that matter. Interestingly, but at once rather appropriately to the language of the show, the familiar plot is not followed in its entirety. Rather than that only separate lines unfold and not so much in an intertwined manner but one after another until each one exhausts itself. Thus, Hamlet’s mother (as Gertrude is billed) – the mesmerizing Lola Jaramillo – when taking center stage, plays the part from the beginning to the end, with the poisonous wine, before, for instance, Ophelia’s plot line starts unfolding. It is a part played at one gulp – one impossible gulp, that is– and one holds one’s breath, amazed by the energy of the passion Jaramillo exudes and also, from one point on, by how she doesn’t drop down fully exhausted. Although of a lesser overall might, the performance of Ophelia – Begona Arce – is also very persuasive. Only her drowning in a small pool is rather illustrative and, to me, unnecessary. Her dance there right before that, making the flying splashes of water become part of the show’s rhythm and dense texture, would have been a much more impressive end of her plot line. The figure of The Death – Hugo Sanchez – most of the time literally in the shadows or in a hook, charges the three-dimensional darkness on stage with sinister vibrations and, thus, with another layer of figurative blackness, and makes one palpably feel the threat for light to be overwhelmed. “The culmination of any dancer, of any performer, is when they know that choreography is no longer necessary,” the catalogue quotes Juan Vergillos. This fully applies to the whole stunning piece too. It takes a few minutes at the beginning, so that the viewer stops being preoccupied with the ingenuity and precision of the movement itself, with the overall dance of the bodies, light, shadows, melodies, and rhythm. Then, I dare say, all this becomes one entity – a bigger pulsation of the air in the theatre – and we, the spectators, get drawn into it and transformed into a part of it. This pulsation has nothing to do with the one experienced at contemporary concerts or anything of the kind. It doesn’t “erase” your ability to think. On the contrary, while your body and feet move in rhythm, in an inexplicable way, with your cells vibrating, you get not only to experience the exaltation of passions but you also realize what they mean in terms of temptations, downfall, disaster… This Hamlet causes an unlikely catharsis reverberating in the spectators long afterwards. There was yet another surprise show in Craiova that Shakespeare’s main masterpiece had inspired, an unexpected and surprising contribution by Robert Lepage: a ballet version of Hamlet . Lepage has created for himself a reputation of a stage sorcerer who mixes with ease theatre genres and forms, traditional means of expression and new technologies, but – more importantly! – manages to always subject all this amalgam to a truthful and emotional storytelling having at its core the human being. I have been following his oeuvre, since his first international break-through with Seven Streams of the River Ota back in the mid 1990’s, and as a critic I’ve never stopped being amazed by Lepage’s impeccable professionalism and ingenuity. Again more importantly, though, I’ve never felt failed by him in my capacity as a human being. Not only hasn’t he succumbed to the ills of our time theatre wise, like letting multimedia overwhelm and dehumanize his shows, but he’s never let the ubiquity of egocentrism take over his stage stories. An excellent example of the latter is his solo piece 887 which I have had the delight to see many a time. Although formally devoted to his growing up, it is, in effect, the least about his own persona. He acquaints the audience with a diverse range of people who inhabit his childhood and teenage years, as well as his nowadays. We get to know his relatives, his neighbors – the world around himself, what the society in Quebec experienced over the years he grew up, while he retains the position of a witness-narrator who, despite being all the time there, is rarely in the limelight. This stands out so much at the background of all the one-actor shows which are usually predominantly about their creators. In Craiova, however, I have to admit, I was initially rather disappointed, as The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark , staged by Lepage and Guillaume Cote, was more or less just a ballet and, to a large extent, illustrative at that. Namely, it was by and large following the plot and the canon for the characters, without ingenious “tricks” that would cast a new light on some familiar details and relations, and, thus, inspire startling insights. It looked like an abridged and illustrated Hamlet with no words but few sparse surtitles, as if in a silent movie, just announcing the main scenes that would follow by indicating who of the main characters is about to enter. Only in the very beginning and few times later on, the surtitles were more complex and formed ingenious pans, when the places of words or letters got to be written and changed in front of us. In the same vein, the ballet dancing seemed to be only slightly enhanced by a pinch of modern dance elements. All in all: nothing to do with the Lepage who has changed the face of world theatre with his panache, inventiveness and so fine and profound understanding of the human nature. However, more and more time has been passing since I saw this Hamlet, I’ve come to realize I can’t stop thinking of it. Moreover, it has very often been coming to my mind during other shows, where deliberate ugliness and/or repugnancy is being manifested on stage – a rather strong trend on the festival circuit and on main European stages too for the last several seasons. So not only have I changed my initial opinion of Lepage’s and Cote’s Hamlet, but it has become like a life-belt for me, charging me with its beauty as a shield against the arrogant march of physiology against spirituality on stage. There are three scenes in this Hamlet which are at once paragons of beauty, of profundity of the meaning and of ingenuity embedded in simplicity. The first one is of the very process of Ophelia’s getting mad – something which we rarely do get to see anyway in the interpretations of the play. Lepage and Cote place her in front of three mirrors, where she starts getting confused by seeing herself threefold. The rest of the characters too are around her and around the mirrors, and the feeling of her losing touch with reality becomes truly palpable: the integrity of her mind and her body starts falling apart in all these pieces of her in the mirrors, she tries hard to keep herself whole, but soon stops being in control altogether. And the next scene, right afterwards: her drowning. A blue curtain falls down and whirls and curls around her, moved by the other characters. She dances towards it, “diving” in and then managing to get out, and taking a breath, and then back into it, and again “to the surface”, and then again, until the vertical blue waters engulf her. The third scene is the duel at the end of the play: the swords of Hamlet and Laertes end with long, red and white ribbons respectively, like those of the gymnasts. So the fight becomes like a beautiful 3D painting, drawn and changing in front of us. These ribbons reminded me of the long sleeves of the characters in traditional Chinese operas that fly away and draw curved strokes in the air, creating an ephemeral feeling, as if the action takes place between the earth and the sky. So, has Craiova, with the 30th anniversary of its main theatre event over, been definitely transformed from a city with a festival into a festival city, and a city of Shakespeare at that? Here is a true story instead of an answer: With Spectators Like That… (a true story) At the Lepage show, the staircases were again packed with students and theatre-lovers, who were not among the lucky ones with tickets but were magnanimously allowed inside the theatre. When the show was about to begin, the seat next to me was miraculously still empty. One of the men standing on the staircase parallel to my row made a sign to me, asking if I was still expecting someone there. I nodded negatively and, as the lights started to dim, made a sign back to him to quickly get in and sit there. After the show I realized that I had spotted his face either in the audiences or among those eagerly waiting to get in despite the tickets were sold-out. I told him so and he answered that, yes, indeed, he was trying to make sure he wouldn’t miss a show. Naturally, I asked him if he was connected with the theatre by his profession. “Not at all,” he answered and told me he’s a math’s teacher but he’s infatuated with Shakespeare. He went on to share with me that, some years ago, when he unexpectedly got some inheritance money, he went to London and spent most of it for some very old editions of the Bard’s plays, which later on he lent to the Festival for a special books exhibition. I expressed my amazement and admiration, to which he responded that this was simply normal – why would I go from my country and as far as from Sofia, at that, to Craiova if it were not worth it?! With spectators like that and with the genuine respect and interest among the world-wide theatre brethren, it is then no surprise that the International Shakespeare Festival in Craiova, that took off as a triennale and went on to be a biennale for a while, will start its fourth decade in a new, denser rhythm: it will become an annual event from 2025. Moreover, another anniversary is approaching exactly then: the National Theatre of Craiova will celebrate 175 years of its opening - on the 29th of June 1850. So we don’t have to wait for a long time for our next helping of this truly special Shakespearean theatre feast – only till next June. References References About the author(s) Kalina Stefanova , PhD, is author/editor of 14 books (12 books on theatre, four of which in English, launched in New York, London and Wroclaw; and two fiction ones, published in nine countries, in two editions in China). She has been a Visiting Scholar/Lecturer world-wide. In 2016 she had the privilege to be appointed as Visiting Distinguished Professor of the Arts School of Wuhan University as well as a Distinguished Researcher of the Chinese Arts Criticism Foundation of Wuhan University. She served as IATC’s Vice President for two mandates (2001/2006) and as its Director Symposia for two mandates (2006-2010). Since 2001 she has been regularly serving as an evaluation expert for cultural and educational programs of the European Commission. Currently she is Full Professor of Theatre and Criticism at NATFA, Sofia. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus (W)here comes the sun? Avignon 78, 2024. Imagining Possible Worlds and Celebrating Multiple Languages and Cultures Report from Basel International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL … SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW Fine art in confined spaces 2024 Report from London and Berlin Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. A Problematic Classic: Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, at Home and Abroad Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back European Stages Volume 19, Fall, 2024 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Duncan Wheeler A Problematic Classic: Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, at Home and Abroad Tamás Jászay (W)here comes the sun? Philippa Wehle Avignon 78, 2024. Imagining Possible Worlds and Celebrating Multiple Languages and Cultures Kalina Stefanova SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL … SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW Klára Madunická International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society Gergana Traikova Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Marvin Carlson Report from Basel Steve Earnest Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. Aljoscha Begrich and Christian Tschirner Fine art in confined spaces Dan Poston 2024 Report from London and Berlin Cindy Sibilsky Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus European Stages European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. ISSN Number: 1050-199 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Visit Journal Homepage